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Publishing has changed irrevocably since the advent of the World Wide Web. The tech revolution suggested that all we need is a computer and an Internet connection, and our writing would be published, and read by millions.
But of course a computer does not make anyone a writer, the same way that a camcorder does not make a movie director or Guitar Hero make a rock star. Eventually, it turned out publishing on the Web wasn't quite as thrilling as we wanted to believe.
Instead, technology is leading us back to our roots: The Web is now jammed with sites that offer to turn your manuscripts into books at little cost.
This trend suggests that Web-based publication has become a noisy agora of dubious quality that has cheapened good content. Of course, some people still regard books as having more prestige than online text — it seems politicians running for higher office need books to add heft to their reputations.
A screenshot of WWAOW's home page. The site helps users self-publish books and company reports and charges its customers $79 for the service, which includes five copies of the book.
As a lure, some self-publishing companies are pushing the notion that book publishers are a parasitical bunch, so they emphasize writers have “total control” over the finished product, filled as they may be with flaws, inconsistencies or grammatical blunders. (My favourite example comes from a self-publishing evangelist who writes, “Basically anything that you right is at the mercy of the publishing editor when you go the traditional route.”)
But demonizing publishers is a red herring; a reputable publisher invests in a manuscript and brings into the deal a small army of experienced professionals who will evaluate the manuscript's potential and then edit, design, market and distribute it.
Going the self-publication route, however, means you have to do all that stuff yourself — dealing with legal problems, hounding bookstores to carry your tome and booking yourself on the author circuit for TV and newspaper interviews.
That's a lot of work.
It's also pricey and not a game for amateurs.
Two of the websites I've been looking at — Lulu.com and WWAOW.com — follow the same basic principles: Writers do all the writing, editing, cover and type design, and upload the finished products. Then books will be printed on demand — only when an order comes in.
Then comes a subtle difference: Lulu charges nothing for a basic book (it charges for “premium” services); WWAOW (it's pronounced “wow” and stands for World Wide Association of Writers), restricts itself to books and company reports and charges its customers $79 for the service, which includes five copies of the book.
These operations have online stores that sell the books its customers have created. How they differentiate themselves is by the number of extra services they offer.
There are so many different self-publishing sites it's difficult to decide among them. One factor is distribution — Lulu.com, the grand-daddy of Web-based self-publishing (it was founded in 2002 by Canadian Bob Young, one of the founders of Red Hat Linux and now the owner of the CFL's Hamilton Tiger-Cats football team) has contracts with companies around the world that can print the books. On the other hand, WWAOW (it opened shop in March and is owned by Peleman Industries Inc. of Belgium, a long-standing printing company) makes no promises about delivery.
Lulu handles the transactions and order fulfillments, and tracks royalties. Authors can check on sales online. Although authors can set whatever price they want for their books, Lulu takes a commission 20 per cent of the total profit of each item sold. WWAOW authors choose their royalty percentage of up to 20 per cent of a book's retail value, a calculation based upon the book's number of pages and the type of cover that the author chooses.
Lulu expanded its services last year, and is beginning to look like a traditional publisher, except that you're now buying from a smorgasbord of premium services. Writers can pay $80 and get a professional designer to handle the images, blurbs, and photos the author provides, or they can pay $1,000 to hire a professional graphic designer to create a cover from scratch.
You can also buy a package that gives you such tools as a press release and promotional merchandise, as well as $100 toward a Google Adwords campaign; Lulu does all the heavy lifting to figure out the Google search terms for the book.
Other new services added by Lulu since its redesign last fall include more book formats and projects. It publishes novels, comic books, photo books, calendars, e-books, CDs and DVDs. It has also expanded its acceptable upload formats to Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Works, Corel WordPerfect and OpenOffice as well as Adobe PDF. You can also have Lulu get you an ISBN number (International Standard Book Numbers), which will submit your book in the catalogues used by Amazon.com and bookstores, and a bar code for the back cover.
Lulu has also expanded its book templates, which are an excellent way to help budding author-publishers make their product look good.
For its part, WWAOW's ambitions are, at the moment, much more modest than Lulu's. In trying to concentrate more on being a print-on-demand operation, it offers no extra services, but what it does offer is more international in scope — its prices are listed in euros, pounds, U.S. dollars and yen.
This sudden boom in self-publication was created by the arrival of xerographic machines that inhale PDF files at one end and spit out finished books at the other. These machines are good for small print runs; large runs must be done on an offset printing press, which is expensive. These new machines have essentially created this whole new approach to publishing, which has eliminated the need for warehousing and inventory control, shipping or invoicing.
For aspiring authors, self-publication offers a fast lane to getting a book published, but it is also a good way to learn how much more there is to becoming a known writer. For instance, it's not merely a matter of talking nicely to a bookstore to get your book displayed; shelf space is expensive, and books that don't sell get removed pronto. Then authors learn about something else they likely never knew: the odd book industry practice in which bookstores sell unsold stock back to the publisher for a full refund. A self-published author will have to be prepared to buy back unsold stock, and to fill out the necessary paperwork and pay shipping charges.
That is, if the bookstore even agrees to carry it. Book publishing is based on reputation and track records. Stores tend to favour large book publishers and known writers because they know these books are likely to sell well; they're not in the business of delivering shelf space to bright-eyed unknowns awash with sincerity and hope.
All this means is that self-publishing is not the route to take to become an established author. Yes, a lot of sites offer lists of famous authors who have published themselves — starting with Margaret Atwood and working their way through William Blake, Lord Byron, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound to Virginia Woolf. But that means nothing if you don't already have a reputation (Ferlinghetti, for instance, was a co-founder of City Lights Booksellers and Publishers in San Francisco, which became a Mecca for Beat poets and provided him with enough of a living from selling other books.) But self-publishing is good for things such as company reports, local historical lore or cookbooks, and books of interest to very small markets, such as families.
Both Lulu.com and WWAOW.com are reputable self-publishing houses, but wise authors should read the websites very carefully, and understand what the rules are and what they're not offering. Lulu has a major advantage in having a community that seems well developed and willing to help out new writers. You can also sign up for an e-mail list that offers tips and news.
The boom in self-publishing begs the question of whether it will fall into the same pit that publishing on the Web did: too many books. This is a serious question — long before the Web came along, bookstores were already complaining that there were too many books being published. The average life span of a book on a shelf had been whittled down from six months to six weeks in the publishers' desire to find the book with the right profit margin.
The lesson? Don't get into the self-publishing game with any intention of being sold in Chapters Indigo or Barnes and Noble, unless you're willing to spend an awful lot of money and hire a marketing company.
By all means use Lulu.com or WWAOW.com for tiny or niche audiences. And that can still be a lot of fun.
