I've been thinking a lot about vanity publishing and how that pejorative term really only applies to the literary marketplace. Everywhere else it's called self-distribution. As many independent film distributors (Fine Line, ThinkFilm, etc) dissolve, the self-distribution of independent films is becoming more and more viable. Indeed, one of Sundance's big winners this year, BALLAST, rejected a traditional distribution deal with IFC Films, opting instead to self-distribute.
Traditionally, self-distribution (like vanity publishing) was seen as a last resort for filmmakers who had no other options. But the idea that a Sundance winner would find the self-distribution model PREFERABLE, is intriguing. I also heard a recent podcast with Ondi Timoner, director of DIG!, who said that in spite of huge international sales and a long shelf life, she hasn't seen a penny beyond her initial advance. She is looking to self-distribute her newest film.
In music there is some fooling around with this as well. Radiohead self-distributed their last album, as did Nine Inch Nails, and others. Aimee Mann went off and formed her own label a couple of years ago.
So when will the literary world come on board? Or is it happening already? Why won't these superstar authors just self-publish and rake it in? They can charge $10 for a digital download and keep it all, instead of getting the $1 per book that they might be making in a normal publishing deal (I just pulled these figures out of the air, in case you didn't notice).
Why is there such an entrenched disdain for literary self-publishing? Well, obviously because this model has provided decades of poopy, poorly edited content, no doubt--these are all books that couldn't get published elsewhere. But it doesn't have to be that way; what if quality writers self-published and self-marketed by choice? I mean, even if you go through a traditional publisher you are still going to have to do all of your own marketing....
Publishers do serve a vetting and culling function, sure, they're the gatekeepers, they're the ones who ensure that quality is going to be up to a certain standard (at least editorially), but who is to say that one can't create his own book, put it up on Amazon, do a guerilla grass roots marketing campaign, and then sell a thousand copies or so through his own effort? Can't this model co-exist legitimately with the old model?
My prediction is that in the next 10 years the film industry will divide into two halves. There will be studio-driven big-budget features and then there will be everyone else, and everyone else will self-distribute.
I wonder if publishing won't also go in this direction.
But look at all the crap you'd be inviting into the world, right? Do we really need more vanity romances and religious tracts and bad World War 2 histories? No we don't. But this is what people objected to about YouTube. Sure, 98% of the stuff on YouTube is a disaster, but 2% of it is sheer genius. And the market does the culling for me. It's not as if I go to You Tube and start watching clips at random. Usually there's a link, or a recommendation, or some viral reason to go there. I don't have to wade through the great unwashed mass of clips that live there.
That wonderful 2% just floats to the surface. And I'm glad there is a surface to float to.
2 comments:
Actually I think self distribution is making a strong showing in literature, given that many sci folks and graphic novel authors are going that way and finding some success. The problem with literature, I think, is that the reading audience is, sadly, so small and picky that they still demand an imprimatur of some sort.
It would be interesting to revisit the beginnings of the literary industry as we know it and trace how it has developed into what it is today. The early folks (you know in 16th/17th century Europe were pretty much all self-distributed with the help of a wealthy (and aristocratic) patron. Only in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries did publishing houses come into their own. Early on they were publishing a lot of "popular" stuff and people like Pope or Dryden looked down their very long and pointy noses at them (even though they benefited from the innovation themselves.) The halcyon days of the publishing houses, of course, was in the 19th century when you had authors like Dickens scrapping it out for copyright protection. They won, in the end, only to have that victory turned on its head by the usurpation of copyright by the publishing houses. (Why, for example, is Scribner's or his (mostly) ne'er-do-well descendants still making money off Hemmingway?)
In any case, several Modernist writers got their start self distributing. Pound, Joyce, Elliot, Woolf are but a few examples. They were fighting the tedium that had cropped up in the publishing houses. They created, however, their own audience; they made their writing "cool." They had a posse, in other words.
We are in another transitional time, I think. It would be very possible for a good writer to hock his wares on his own (and some do). Cory Doctorow comes to mind, along with all the other BoingBoing crew. I think that has publishers running scared. They have to create the mythos of the imprimatur, therefore, and the "accepted" literature. They loved, for example, the New Critics who resurrected several popularly failed 19th Century authors (i.e. Melville) and made them a mint because with no copyright, they could publish Melville's works ad naseum.
I hope that self distribution ascends, and fast--I like your analysis and comparison with other kinds of cultural production. Given the teeny, teeny audience for poetry, I would especially like self-distribution to take over poetry publication--hard.
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