Post by Jason Whittle on Mar 15, 2013 13:38:48 GMT 1
The staff magazine was going around my office yesterday, and yet again the 'notice board' page featured someone plugging their self-published novel. At least it wasn't as bad as last time when some idiot described himself as 'the new James Patterson', but it still prompted me to write this. It's just my depressing opinion, and yours may differ.
The Horror Author’s Fear of the Self-Publisher
During a panel at FantasyCon 2011, Simon Marshall-Jones of Spectral Press said, “People who shouldn’t be writing are self-publishing and calling themselves authors”. The remark drew a round of applause, but I myself wasn’t too happy to hear it; at the time I found it snobby and elitist. Was I one of the people who shouldn’t be writing? Were my friends? And even if not, surely there are worse things for people to do than write books?
If this was the start of the war against self-published authors, it was continued by Frank Lee (I know not if this is his real name) on his blog ‘Bring Out Your Dead (Bad Books), in which he ridicules the blurbs and/or covers of self-published horror books. To be fair, most of them are ripe for a piss take, but when other people start joining in with their own comments on the social media, it gets like a pack of hounds on a fox, and is the sort of bullying that goes against our values.
So far, so superior for the established crowd, but what’s their motivation to take time out from their own writing to pick on the self-published? Fear. Fear that this phenomenon will diminish, if not ruin, the chances of those and others making any sort of living from writing horror, let alone a lucrative long-term one.
They’re right to be afraid; the people who are self-publishing now are the ones who were doing all the buying a few years ago, and now for the first time we seem to have more writers than readers. Forums that used to be about an exchange of writing tips and appreciation of new releases and genre classics have now become nothing but a spamming board, used by authors who seem to think that if they do nothing other than plug their e-book to the same people day after day, eventually everyone will buy it and love it as much as they do.
Meanwhile, the ever-dwindling band of people, the remaining few who still read for pleasure and have no desire to write, have more choice than ever before. Conversely, the overall quality is lower than ever before, and it would be a brave punter who spends their money on something they might not like when there are free alternatives available. Some of them will turn to piracy, and that’s another issue for another time, and others will fill up their Kindle with titles from the Amazon freebies list. Although we’d rather they were paying money for our books, let us all hope that they like at least some of what they find there; if not then after starting and abandoning a succession of terrible novels, they may well give up on this genre altogether.
So who is winning this war? Not the self-published authors: I know some who describe themselves as successful, but unless they are incredibly lucky I suspect they are either exaggerating or setting their targets very low, and even the occasional good novel is likely to be swept away in the deluge of mediocrity. Nor the traditionally published authors, who may have dreamt of that publishing deal changing their lives, only to find that they couldn’t afford to go part-time, let alone give up the day job. The agents and publishers might enjoy the fact that their slush piles of unsolicited crap are less mountainous than they might otherwise be, but I doubt that this in itself compensates for the lost sales of their authors.
No, as far as I can tell the only people benefitting from this are the vanity publishers who prey on those less talented but more deluded, and the tax-exempt corporate giant that is Amazon, who let’s face it, are going to rule the whole world soon enough anyway. Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated.
The Horror Author’s Fear of the Self-Publisher
During a panel at FantasyCon 2011, Simon Marshall-Jones of Spectral Press said, “People who shouldn’t be writing are self-publishing and calling themselves authors”. The remark drew a round of applause, but I myself wasn’t too happy to hear it; at the time I found it snobby and elitist. Was I one of the people who shouldn’t be writing? Were my friends? And even if not, surely there are worse things for people to do than write books?
If this was the start of the war against self-published authors, it was continued by Frank Lee (I know not if this is his real name) on his blog ‘Bring Out Your Dead (Bad Books), in which he ridicules the blurbs and/or covers of self-published horror books. To be fair, most of them are ripe for a piss take, but when other people start joining in with their own comments on the social media, it gets like a pack of hounds on a fox, and is the sort of bullying that goes against our values.
So far, so superior for the established crowd, but what’s their motivation to take time out from their own writing to pick on the self-published? Fear. Fear that this phenomenon will diminish, if not ruin, the chances of those and others making any sort of living from writing horror, let alone a lucrative long-term one.
They’re right to be afraid; the people who are self-publishing now are the ones who were doing all the buying a few years ago, and now for the first time we seem to have more writers than readers. Forums that used to be about an exchange of writing tips and appreciation of new releases and genre classics have now become nothing but a spamming board, used by authors who seem to think that if they do nothing other than plug their e-book to the same people day after day, eventually everyone will buy it and love it as much as they do.
Meanwhile, the ever-dwindling band of people, the remaining few who still read for pleasure and have no desire to write, have more choice than ever before. Conversely, the overall quality is lower than ever before, and it would be a brave punter who spends their money on something they might not like when there are free alternatives available. Some of them will turn to piracy, and that’s another issue for another time, and others will fill up their Kindle with titles from the Amazon freebies list. Although we’d rather they were paying money for our books, let us all hope that they like at least some of what they find there; if not then after starting and abandoning a succession of terrible novels, they may well give up on this genre altogether.
So who is winning this war? Not the self-published authors: I know some who describe themselves as successful, but unless they are incredibly lucky I suspect they are either exaggerating or setting their targets very low, and even the occasional good novel is likely to be swept away in the deluge of mediocrity. Nor the traditionally published authors, who may have dreamt of that publishing deal changing their lives, only to find that they couldn’t afford to go part-time, let alone give up the day job. The agents and publishers might enjoy the fact that their slush piles of unsolicited crap are less mountainous than they might otherwise be, but I doubt that this in itself compensates for the lost sales of their authors.
No, as far as I can tell the only people benefitting from this are the vanity publishers who prey on those less talented but more deluded, and the tax-exempt corporate giant that is Amazon, who let’s face it, are going to rule the whole world soon enough anyway. Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated.
