How’s that for a sexy title?
We’ve all seen firsthand how technological advances change the way we do things. I haven’t made a phone call since the Internet was invented. (Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but in my perfect world, I wouldn’t make anymore phone calls.) Publishing is an old and established profession, but it’s not immune to technology’s advances. I wrote an earlier post about electronic forms of books and whether their future is brighter (so to speak) than print. But there are other ways that technology is changing the publishing world.
Recently, I was in New York and discussing my first book with someone in the publishing industry. My first novel had a different publisher than my others and hadn’t sold very well (except oddly in France), so I was saying that I should try to get the rights back from the publisher and see if anyone might be interested in re-issuing it. That was a possibility, the insider conceded, but, she added, these days the whole idea of a book’s being out of print has gotten a little fuzzy.
The cause? The ability to “print to order” which is becoming more and more widespread. Kim discussed this in a previous post, focusing on how it might work for booksellers–at some point in the future, rather than having books in stock, a bookstore might have the capability to print a book when it’s ordered, thus sparing the owner the risk of ordering (and paying for) a book he might not sell.
Of course, that means that the book never officially goes out of print: any book could limp along for decades, still “listed” even if rarely ordered. (This is true even if it’s the publishers and not the booksellers who are doing the printing, an ability that already exists today.) That’s good if you want a copy of it, bad if you’re the author and want the rights back. At the very least, it blurs things a bit.
The same technology that allows printing to order makes self-publishing cheaper and more available than ever before. In a recent New York Times article, Motoko Rich discusses the boom in the self-publishing industry. Print to order technology means self-publishing authors no longer have to spend a fortune having a large initial run of their books made (often to languish unsold in boxes in their basements). Instead, they can spend less money upfront, only printing as many copies as they can sell. Online bookselling sites like Amazon offer a forum for self-published books that didn’t exist in previous eras.
One of the very first posts I wrote for my own blog was about how it feels like everyone out there in cyber space is writing–but was anyone reading what we were all writing? Rich touches on the same point in her article: everyone wants to write books, but that doesn’t mean there’s an audience for all these extra books. Even with the new technology, self-publishing probably works best for books you simply want to give to your friends and family; without a publishing house behind you, buying you table space and getting your books on the shelves in nationwide bookstores, it’s awfully hard to find readers. (It’s been done–there are some notable exceptions, self-published books that have been huge hits. But they’re rare exceptions.)
Of course, on some level, self-publishing is what Kim and I do every time we hit the “publish” button on a new post. There’s something wonderfully liberating about writing whatever you want and putting it out there without any editorial interference or correction. (And avoiding the whole “rejection letter” part of any process helps keep your ego healthy.)
According to Rich, an author can upload a manuscript and for as little as 3 dollars, have a book of it printed up.
The question seems to be: then what?
Or maybe the deeper question is: what makes a book a book? The binding? The quality of the words inside? Whether it’s sold at your favorite independent bookstore?
These are questions we’ll have to ask ourselves more and more now as technology makes it easier to print books–and our lifestyles and economy make it harder to sell them.
I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts about all this.
Tags: publishing, self-publishing
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i am taking tutorial about self-publishing because it is also a good way of making money.:*`
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self publishing is one way of earning money specially if you got a best seller,~*
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self publishing is kind of difficult at first, but you can easily learn the tricks of the trade -.*
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