Self-publishing: the snake that just keeps eating itself.
How I spent three years embedded in the self-publishing community and what I learned; or how I realised that the reputation of the self-publishing industry is 100% justified.
According to Bowker, in 2015 alone, 727,000 ISBNs were registered to self-publishing authors in the USA. When one considers, according to the same source, that we might expect 400,000 books to be traditionally published each year (of which around 100,000 are fiction), the steady increase in self-publishing publication is staggering. The figures suggest that self-publishing is a vast and continually growing industry of independent authors. However, there is much the figures don’t reveal: the lack of quality control, the number of publications with each ISBN, the over-saturation of the market, and the conduct of the community as a whole — to name only a few.
Earlier this year*, I posited that the self-publishing industry had a catastrophic design problem that was developing a very obvious gulf between it and traditional publishing; a problem, as it happens, it didn’t seem keen to fix. I was right. I was also right to lay the responsibility for this at the feet of arrogant and entitled independent authors who took it upon themselves to design their books and aggressively reject advice and assistance from professionals. However, I also made the design industry complicit in the issues, suggesting a lack of accessibility, both financially and in how we interact with low-budget clients, was turning independent authors off the idea of engaging professionals. This was unfair of me; not only to the design industry, but also to myself.
For the past three years or so, I have been embedded in the self-publishing community. I entered into this weird residency with the wrong attitude — that the reputation of the self-publishing industry had developed as a low-quality marketplace was unfair; just traditional publishing sticking its nose up at the independent sector — and the best of, albeit naïve, intentions. Through forums and subreddits, I attempted to offer advice to self-publishers, with a mind to affecting a positive change in the industry, however minor. If I could secure a few low-budget jobs along the way, I wasn’t going to complain.
Fast-forward three years and 2018 has seen me withdraw my support from the self-publishing community, cancel all the accounts I created for the endeavour, and stop selling products catering to independent authors. This only a year after excitedly announcing the opening of Geoffrey Bunting Graphic Design’s online story for ready-to-publish book covers. So, what happened to cause such a drastic change of heart?
It’s important to point out that the design issues in the self-publishing industry are actually part of a wider image problem. I realised, as many have before me, this image problem existed because the criticisms frequently levelled at the self-publishing community are not only true but deserved. What’s perhaps most worrying, however, is that the community just doesn’t seem to care.
In an ideal world, self-publishing could be a great tool. Much as a sports team may employ an A and B team, self-publishing could be the plucky 2nd XI of publishing: not quite on a level with traditional publishing, but still of quality and always aspiring and improving. It could also be a viable alternative for the under-represented genres of horror, sci-fi, and fantasy, as well as a platform more accessible to women — who are still sorely underrepresented in traditional publishing, despite the fact that the majority of agents are women.
Instead, the self-publishing industry has become proliferated with unedited, over-priced manuscripts that flood online marketplaces. Not only is the design unprofessional, but so too the writing. Independent authors often release new “novels” every month or every week, and the results are unsurprisingly rushed and unreadable. The development of a DIY culture in self-publishing, which excludes professional editors and proofreaders, artists, and designers, has made the self-publishing industry into a mire of ugly, poorly-written books.
This DIY culture may have initially developed from a genuine need — often through budget constraints — to do everything yourself, but now self-publishers seem like they want to do it; they want to layout their books and design their covers, and appear to genuinely believe they’re capable of doing so despite no demonstrable skill or understanding of book design. Afterward, they congregate online and pat each other on the back, completely oblivious that they work they’re producing is terrible.
Ros Barber, in her piece on why she would never consider self-publishing, highlights the importance of professional input into manuscripts:
Good writers need even better editors. They need brilliant cover designers. They need imaginative marketers and well-connected publicists. All these things are provided by a traditional publisher, and what’s more, it doesn’t cost you a penny. They pay you! If a self-published author wants to avoid looking like an amateur, they’d better be prepared to shell out some serious dosh to get professional help in all the areas they don’t excel. And I mean serious. Paying some bugger in the Philippines a fiver, of bunging £50 to your PhotoShopping nephew will not results in a distinctive, professional looking cover.
The problem is, self-publishers don’t appear to believe that in taking on tasks they’re not qualified for, they are coming across as amateur. Rather, they foster the belief that they are genuinely talented at cover design, publicity and marketing, and editing while they all enable one another through empty praise online. In the years I’ve been active in the community, it has become obvious that forum threads like “Feedback on my cover” and “Advice and suggestions on X” are mistitled and are instead requests for reinforcement of the idea that what they’ve produced is great.
Members of the self-publishing community are highly-resistant to professional help and advice, often aggressively so. Genuine and sincere assistance is rejected in favour of the long-standing circle-jerk culture among independent authors. And the thing about circles is that they tend to remain closed, especially if you’re not willing to play the game.
It is one thing to be protective and precious about your creations — though, as advice like “kill your darlings” suggests, that is not a healthy stance to take in the publishing industry — but the pervasive attitude of independent authors goes well beyond that. There’s a conflict of cultures here. Designers develop through a system in which we learn that different viewpoints are additive rather than competitive, but the self-publishing community seems not only oblivious to this lesson, but unwilling to learn it. This is not unique, many businesses fail due to rejecting failure and the diversity of ideas, but when a group allows itself to become toxic for the sake of sameness and close-mindedness, something is going horribly wrong.
Edwin Catmull is an ardent proponent of diverse thinking and embracing failure. He cites the “stop the line” business model as part of Pixar’s success. Developed by Taiichi Ohno, it dissolves the most useless aspects of rigid hierarchy by giving everyone in the system the ability to stop the assembly line to identify and solve issues. The idea being that fixing deficiencies as they arise, rather than producing a defective product and fixing it later, is, in fact, more efficient. Unhappily, self-publishers tend to be unaware of the problems they create in their work and community. As such, they open the line up only to inappropriate input; input without value that only reinforces their ignorant ideas.
Returning to what self-publishing could be, the function of the online community could be to stop the line. Stopping over-enthusiastic authors and highlighting the deficiencies both in their writing and presentation. Instead, it is a platform in which independent authors can falsely congratulate one another. Beyond the flat rejection of outside voices, we also see the online community rife with the kind of lofty, arrogant voices that parade as sages of the industry, informing newer members of how to market, lay out, design, use typography — the problem is, none of the information they provide is correct.
With the industry’s self-congratulatory overtones and a complete lack of quality control, authors are able to develop delusions over not only the quality and worth of their own work but also the eminence of their expertise.
We can return to Ros Barber for an excellent analogy:
Imagine you are a cabinet-maker. You look at a few cabinets, you read a few books about how to make a cabinet, you practice the technicalities of things like dovetail joints. Then, with hope in your heart and breakfast in your sawing arm, you grab some wood and set to work. But because you are new at this, your tools are a starter set. In your ignorance, you chose wood that wasn’t properly seasoned. Wow, those dovetail joints take some precision, don’t they? This cabinet-making thing is hard! Nevertheless, with persistence and effort you complete your cabinet. It wobbles a bit. The drawers stick. The finish isn’t perfect. But hey, it’s a cabinet.
Like most crafts, writing takes years of apprenticeship and practice. In order to be published, authors often have to endure plenty of rejections and rewrites to even stand a chance of making it through the quality control measures of literary agents and publishers. It’s dispiriting and not particularly lucrative work that we undertake because of intense passion. Independent authors appear unable to recognise that they are still in their apprenticeship, rushing ahead instead to publication, keen to make a buck and add “published author” to their Twitter bio. To run with Barber’s analogy, problems arise when you allow yourself to believe your unremarkable cabinet is the exact opposite. Further problems emerge when, despite making consistently unremarkable work, you begin to tell others how to do it.
In a digital age in which any information is readily available and digestible in bitesize chunks that can be assimilated in minutes, it is increasingly easy for people to convince themselves they know more than they do. Armed with just enough superficial information from sites with titles like “10 things you need to know about laying out a book” they can easily mistake their ignorance for expertise.
Most of us are capable of accepting that there are things we will never know how to do. I don’t know how to install plumbing, for example. If you asked me to transplant a kidney, replace a transmission, or argue a case in court; I would have to admit that I can’t. We recognise that there are certain topics which we know very little about — physics, maths, medicine, law — unless we are trained in those fields. Most of us.
Unfortunately, the majority of people don’t understand the importance of design in business. For some reason, many people view design as easy and defined only by its tools, rather than a set of skills. As a result, many people have the idea that they can do it themselves. This is especially true in the self-publishing industry, where such is the level of arrogance and ignorance surrounding book design that there is genuinely no place for real professionals. It’s the equivalent to me coming round your house and claiming I could fit a plumbing system because I’ve seen some pipes before.
This is because success, even modest success — even perceived success! — can convince us that we’re heading in the correct direction. There’s nothing better at shutting down alternative viewpoints than being convinced your right. The truth is, human beings — especially those that self-publish — love to lie to themselves. But when the fantasy becomes to real, it can be hard to adjust someone’s viewpoint to see that what they’ve thought to be the right direction is, in fact, wrong. Many clients view the idea that their success could be increased by paying better attention to design as a criticism of their own practices rather than an effort to help. And this can be understood to a point: after all, rocking the boat isn’t the most attractive concept when it’s only for speculative gains.
That such a concentrated and insidious version of this pervades self-publishing, however, is less about the typical challenges of client outreach and communication and more about arrogance and the delusions we create for ourselves when we’re unable to admit we don’t know. Typically, a client and designer can communicate because both parties recognise their need for the other. In self-publishing, arrogance and a closed-minded attitude lead independent authors to believe they are doing a designer a favour in engaging them, fuelled by the idea they could do the job themselves anyway.
An aside: a brief case study
In the kind of unhealthy relationship mentioned above, when differing viewpoints — be it on price, needs, or actual design — converge, the client expects the designer to make all the concessions. During my years in self-publishing, I was approached many times with design projects. Most of these played out in a very similar way, much like this example:
A woman approached me to design a logo and magazine for her — her budget was $50 (approximately £37). For such a large job, this was obviously low-budget. I offered to create a set of lock-ups that would assist her in developing the magazine herself and contribute to continuing consistency (whether she brought in designers or not), as well as creating a simple wordmark to function as logo and title for $150. I explained that a logo, even by itself, would typically cost $400 at the very least and that magazine layout could be variable.
According to her, this was “outrageous” and she told me she would “never consider paying more than $50 for a logo.” A designer friend of hers — who curiously wasn’t attending to the design of her magazine — had apparently informed her that $50 was the maximum anyone would charge for a logo. Many cheap clients invent these imaginary friends to try and manipulate designers. When offered genuine help for a reasonable cost, she rejected the idea as an insult. This attitude, unfortunately, wasn’t an outlier.
With the wealth of unprofessional options that offer cheap and disastrous work, as well as their own view that they can do it themselves, independent authors have cultivated the community’s unfavourable reputation themselves. Previously, when giving the industry the benefit of the doubt, I might have suggested this was just inexperience with professionals — and a few engagements in which clients have seemed genuinely unsure of how to commission artwork bear this out — but now I can recognise it as what it is: simple conceit.
I’m not saying that fixing the design culture in self-publishing will salvage the industry’s reputation. After all, even if the whole community began to recognise the value of design, 90% of the work would still be unedited, insincere writing offered by un-dedicated authors. But in so many industries, prioritising design has seen vastly improved returns. One need only look at the aesthetic turnaround of Barclay’s Bank and their increased business, or the figures presented in studies like The Value of Design Fact-finder, Design Delivers for Business, and Leading Business by Design.
It would be unfair to suggest there aren’t some authors trying to use the self-publishing model sincerely — and it should not be forgotten how much they suffer from the reputation others have built — or that, at some point, the industry was made up of sincere writers on low-budgets. But poison has a way of seeping into online communities, and now the majority of the community is just the same old shysters peddling the literary equivalent of snake oil.
The real shame, and what offends me most as a writer as well as a designer, is that the reputation that the industry has well-and-truly earned could have been avoided if the community actually cared, even a little. It’s all well-and-good for the community to reject opinions opining the bad impression that self-publishing gives, but reputations are rarely without founding. If the community members could actually take responsibility for what they’ve built and the improvement thereof, we might, in time, see a different and more salubrious self-publishing sector. “Unless,” as the Lorax says. “Someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing’s going to get better. It’s not.”
I don’t believe — or rather, I don’t like to believe — that any endeavour, however small or large, sets out with mediocrity in mind. I don’t think that any company wants to stagnate. But the truth is that conservatism and success go hand-in-hand, it’s just that the best industries reject that conservatism and focus on how to better themselves. Often, and I say this from what I’ve been able to observe of reluctant clients, stagnation and mediocrity arise from fear. Specifically, fear of not being able to go back to even the most modest success; that making changes, however positive, might destroy everything. This is understandable, but it can also be overcome. But when conservatism and inertia are cultivated by misdirected ego; when people choose the wrong course and travel in circles but assert it’s forward motion, that’s when things become harder to change.
At present, the self-publishing community is wasting its potential for the sake of chasing its own tail; devouring itself. And while modest success on a large scale is driving it, the culture that has developed is overwhelmingly toxic and one of failure. Eventually, barring some drastic changes — and hopefully a mass reboot of the concept — it will collapse under its own weight. The funny thing, no one — and I mean no one — will take responsibility when it does. And no one will really miss it.
*This piece no longer exists on this blog. This was an update, and even this piece has been updated on YouTube for another project.
Cover image source: mythologian.net
