Indie Publishing as
Cyclic History
Countless blogs trumpet
indie writers and self-publishing as new and unprecedented, a
revolution in publishing. It is and it isn’t. What’s new is that
writers are selling their books directly to the public through a
licensed online bookstore instead of to a publisher. In many other
respects indie ebook publishing is surprisingly similar to past
formats for mass market publishing.
Through the second half
of the 19th century and early 20th century the
“dime novel” genres provided affordable reading for budget
conscious readers with a taste for adventure. The serialized British
equivalent, the “penny dreadful,” often targeted male adolescents. Although it has gone
out of fashion, the term “dime novel” became a pejorative to
describe hastily produced potboilers with no literary value. Nowadays
indie publishing conveys similar connotations for people espousing
traditional literary values.
The paper bound dime
novel was the forerunner of modern paperbacks, introduced,
successfully, just before the Second World War: Penguin to the
English-speaking world in 1935, and Pocket Books to America in
1938/1939. Both companies acquired the paperback rights to hardcover
books, ordered large runs to keep costs and prices low, and marketed
their paperback editions to mass audiences through non-traditional
markets. Penguin’s first success was with the department store
Woolworths, and Pocket Books tapped in the distribution network for
newspapers and magazines. Penguin and Pocket Books became almost
synonymous with paperbacks, but many other companies entered the
market. After early experiments, the Canadian publisher Harlequin
became one of the largest publishers in the world by specializing in
inexpensive romances, for a predominantly female audience.
Penguin’s association
with paperbacks may explain the angry tirades on the internet in 2010
when it announced it had reached an agreement with Apple to charge
higher prices for ebooks than paperbacks. The general consensus of
the market was that ebooks should be cheaper because the cost of
printing is eliminated. At the time, some online retailers required
publishers to set ebook prices lower than print editions as a
condition for listing in their catalogues. Some of those retailers
also sold print editions and they wanted to use cheaper ebooks to
attract new customers rather than compete with print editions. Both
arguments are valid. As the price of paperbacks rose higher and
higher, many customers, myself included, stopped buying books or
curtailed their purchases. Eliminating printing costs, which are
maybe 30% of the total, should be reflected in the end price, and
lower prices could encourage people to read again, or buy more books.
But that is just my opinion.
The essential point is
that for the first time writers set their own prices. They can even
give their books away free of charge, if they want to. The price of
indie ebooks is typically lower than the price of ebooks from
traditional publishers. The reasons for that are complex, but it is
generally accepted by even the most successful and talented indie
writers, and the rapidly evolving trends in the pricing of indie
ebooks hasn’t really affected that basic fact. In that sense, the
indie writer at the bottom of the pricing spectrum is the modern
equivalent of the dime novel publisher or paperback publisher.
For the most part the
production of indie writers has largely been genre novels and the
books are often potboilers, to use that old term. One indie writer
called them “throwaway novels.” (I suspect that term would also
apply to erotica, which has become a popular ebook genre.)
Literary writers still
tend to prefer the traditional publishing route, although that is
gradually changing, and some traditionally published writers are now
using both traditional publishing and self-publishing some of their
own titles (the hybrid model).
Indie writers often
produce more than one novel a year; they have to in order to earn a
living, but some genre writers have always been prolific producers.
Both have often been accused of producing hastily written novels,
with the implication being that they were poorly written. The same
criticism is often made about other aspects of the final product such
as editing and proofreading, and the indie writer is responsible for
those whether they attempt to do it all themselves or hire
professional editors, proofreaders, and cover designers. When a
reader sees poorly constructed sentences and typos in traditionally
published book it reflects on the publisher almost as much as it does
the writer, but in an indie novel there is only one person to blame
for any defects: the author. Indie publishing has enabled thousands
of inexperienced writers (me included) to publish stories, and the
quality of that output has been variable, let’s say. Which may
explain why cost versus value discussions within indie publishing
more often revolve around the quality of editing and proofreading
than storylines, and why some book buyers won’t purchase cheap
indie novels or say indie publishing has a bad reputation. Similar complaints were made about dime novels, in their day.
Some things haven’t
changed much in the last 150 years regardless of changing formats. It
has never been easy to make a living by writing fiction, and indie
writers must contend with many of the same challenges and literary
prejudices as writers of dime novels or paperback novels for
specialist genre publishers.
One thing has changed,
though: female writers have a better chance of being successful than
male writers. And that is one helluva a big change over earlier eras.
