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Down from the ivory tower: has self-publishing come of age?
By Felicity Wood

With the rise of print-on-demand technology it seems the saying "Everyone has a book in them" is rapidly coming true. The number of self-publishers has risen dramatically in the past few years. Despite some in the industry dismissing them outright as vanity publishers, the sheer number of companies is making this one area of the industry that it is increasingly difficult to ignore.

One player at the heart of Britain’s self-publishing boom is AuthorHouse UK, which was founded in 2004 and distributes books on a p.o.d. basis through Lightning Source. It aims to sign up 1,600 new authors this year, up from 1,200 in 2008. Having come from a traditional publishing background, m.d. Tim Davies understands the natural suspicions of the trade: "I am very familiar with the mindset of traditional publishers, but self-publishers can’t be ignored. We’re here, we’ve arrived, and we are not going to go away."

In defence against the "vanity publisher" tag, Davies suggests that the term is just an unfortunate hangover from a time when there were more disreputable companies that didn’t offer a full range of services to authors. He explains that even AuthorHouse’s most basic package, which costs £645, comes with complete integration into the supply chain. He adds: "Vanity publishers just acted as printers, they didn’t even assign ISBN numbers. The old, dark side of vanity publishing has been superseded by reputable businesses."AuthorHouse also offers a "Borders Package", from £849, which ensures that three copies of the author’s finished work have guaranteed shelf space in one of the chain’s five participating stores for 10 weeks. Borders can then place repeat orders at its own discretion. The partnership has proved successful for Authorhouse, and Davies is hoping to do more with the retailer.

Stepping stone
The development of p.o.d. technology means that the days when wannabe authors had to pay vanity publishers up front for thousands of copies that might never be sold are over. For Andrew Lownie, who set up his eponymous literary agency in 1988, self-publishers play an important part in the future of the industry.

He himself turned to self-publishing when he realised that his three-part collection of John Buchan’s work was not a commercial proposition for most publishers. He set up Thistle Publications in 1996, and produced 1,000 copies of each volume at a unit cost of £4 a book. Following adverts in the Spectator and some decent press coverage Lownie sold the complete run, making five or six pounds profit for each copy. He says: "It is even easier nowadays with the internet, you can set up a website and sell your book straight to readers with PayPal."

Lownie views self-publishing as the most attractive option for books such as regional works or biographies of lesser-known subjects, which may be beautifully written, but will only have a small but dedicated market. Larger publishers might not be interested, but "with a self-publisher the appropriate level of commercial success can be achieved". Davies readily admits, however, that even with AuthorHouse’s Borders Package, it is unlikely that huge commercial success can be achieved solely through a self-publisher. "I don’t see us as competition," he says. "I see us as complementary to traditional publishers. More and more of our authors are using us as a stepping-stone to traditional publishers."
For many authors self-publishing has become a fantastic marketing tool to garner attention from the industry’s big players. By proving that they are both ambitious and serious, and have sales figures to boot, self-publishing gives new authors even more ammunition; their work stops being just an unsolicited manuscript on a slushpile and becomes instead a viable product with its own CV.

Digital slushpile
One self-publishing venture backed by a major player is the HarperCollins social networking site authonomy.com. Set up in September 2008, authonomy lets unpublished and self-published authors post their manuscripts on its site, where they are ranked by fellow users. The most highly ranked manuscripts are then considered for publication by the publishers’ editors.

Clive Malcher, digital publisher, explains that authonomy was set up because HarperCollins didn’t want to miss out on slushpile gems. Since its launch last year three authors have been signed up to various HarperCollins imprints and Malcher describes the site as tremendously successful: "Three authors in a few months is considerably more than most publishers would find out of a slushpile in a year." He adds: "We want to keep that publishing momentum going. We are trying to provide a platform for people to showcase their books; the whole idea of the site was to sign up authors."

Interestingly, Steve Dunne, one of the authors to be signed up by HC had self-published his novel The Reaper before he put it on authonomy. Malcher explains: "I think he had sold several thousand copies, and although we wouldn’t have spotted him if he wasn’t on the site, once we found him we thought, ‘what else backs this investment up’, and his self publishing sales did."

Whether it be through self-publishing or social networking, digital publishing and the internet will clearly play a huge part in the future of publishing. With p.o.d. technology available to all, writing a manuscript and sending it out with fingers crossed to an agent may no longer be the best course of action for a potential mid-list author. Sites such as authonomy.com are ensuring that things are slowly becoming more democratic. People power is changing the slushpile, and as Lownie, who has recently signed up authors from authonmy, explains: "It might be time for us to step down from the ivory tower and listen to the people."

Self-publishing successes

By Felicity Wood

Wannabe author Vineet Bhala has caused a stir on authonomy.com. More commonly known as the blogger Klazart on the gaming website Starcraft, Bhala has used his 8,000 loyal subscribers to push his novel Lesser Sins to the top of Authonomy’s charts. Bhala posted a tutorial video on YouTube instructing his fans on how to vote for his novel and his digital self-marketing efforts have helped him get into the website’s top five.

Regular users, whose own ranking has been adversely affected, are outraged by Bhala’s actions—which they regard as cheating. Other authonomy success stories include Coffee at Kowalski’s by Miranda Dickson and The Reaper by Steve Dunne. Dickson and Dunne signed three and two-book deals respectively with Avon, HarperCollins’ mass market imprint in January. Publisher Carole Tonkinson also bought Never Say Die by Lynne Barrett-Lee for real-lives imprint HarperTrue.

In 2006, Jill Bolte Taylor sold almost 4,000 copies of her self-published memoir My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey through Lulu.com, and the book was subsequently acquired by Viking US. The title has been a huge hit in the US—boosted by Bolte Taylor’s turn on Oprah’s couch—where it has sold just almost 170,000 copies in all editions since Viking re-published it last year.

G P Taylor originally self-published Shadowmancer, which was snapped up by Faber in 2003 for a reported seven-figure multiple-book deal. His books have been translated into more than 40 languages. Luke Rhinehart’s cult novel The Dice Man was first published in 1971, but the author has chosen to self-publish his latest novel. Jesus Invades George: An Alternative History was published by AuthorHouseUK in April 2008, and another three Rhinehart novels, Whim, Naked Before the World and White Wind, Black Rider, are also available through p.o.d. on the site.

After numerous rejections from agents Daniel Suarez set up publishing firm Verdugo Press in 2006, and began producing copies of his novel Daemon through Lightning Source. After a successful print run and some rave reviews, Dutton, an imprint of Penguin US, published Deamon in January, where it has gone on to sell nearly 13,000 copies according to Nielsen BookScan. Deamon will be published in the UK by Quercus this April.

Power to the people

By Simon Creasey
When it came to publishing the UK edition of American author Jeff Howe’s non-fiction début, he wanted a jacket design that reflected the tone of the book’s thought-provoking content. Rather than just turning to the publisher’s inhouse design team, Howe, along with Random House and design magazine Creative Review, set the whole of the UK design community the challenge of creating the jacket of his book. Anyone could enter and the best designs would be selected to form a shortlist from which a panel—including the author—would select their favourite. The chosen jacket design would then be printed on all UK editions of Howe’s book.

What Howe was doing is known as crowdsourcing—an act that he defines as "taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call". The outcome of the design competition graced the cover of Howe’s non-fiction tome Crowdsourcing: How the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business. Howe, a contributing editor to Wired magazine, says that the winning design, which featured a long line of worker ants on a minimalist white background, "worked great" and he believes that the publishing industry stands to enjoy enormous gains if it can dream up equally creative ways of harnessing the power of crowdsourcing.

Diamonds in the rough
Some publishers have already dabbled in the rapidly growing phenomenon with mixed results. Howe cites the example of authonomy, the HarperCollins community website for writers, readers and publishers that was conceived and developed by the publisher’s editors.
Aspiring writers can submit 10,000-word minimum manuscripts at authonomy.com and each manuscript is then voted on by authonomy’s 10,000 users. The manuscript that receives the highest number of votes each month is guaranteed to be read by a HarperCollins editor. To date more than 2,000 manuscripts have been submitted since the site launched in September last year. However, the crowd isn’t always foolproof. "Just as editors miss diamonds in the rough so will the crowd," says Howe, who is sceptical about using crowds to write novels.

It is something that has been attempted before with disastrous results. In February 2007 Penguin Books and De Montfort University launched A Million Penguins‚ a collaborative novel to be created on MediaWiki (the same software as Wikipedia), that would be written by anyone who wanted to contribute.

The project was the first to pose the question of whether or not a community can write a novel, and in this particular instance the answer was an unequivocal no. "It turned into this 4,000 page turgid, meandering, incoherent mess," says Howe. Penguin agreed. At the time John Makinson, the chief executive of Penguin described A Million Penguins‚ as "not the most read, but possibly the most written novel in history". What this particular project lacked, according to Howe, was "the phenomenon of the sole auteur". He adds: "A work of culture eventually needs a benevolent dictator—somebody who calls the shots and decides what goes in. Even if you are editing by committee you still need somebody who makes the final decision."

Could thriller writer James Patterson be that "benevolent dictator"? Random House believes so. In conjunction with Patterson and Borders, RH is currently overseeing a "chain thriller" writing project in Australia called AirBorne, which is being published online on a chapter-by-chapter basis. Patterson wrote the first chapter and he will also write the 30th and final chapter, but the 28 chapters in between will be penned by aspiring writers who were chosen from 2,500 entries during a two-week call for submissions. The chain thriller has almost reached its half way point—an IT professional called Alan Donaldson has recently posted chapter 14—and Patterson declares himself "happy with how the story is shaping up so far".
As for the risks entailed with putting his name on a work over which he would ultimately have little control, Patterson has no regrets. "I think it’s important to push the boundaries and not be scared of trying new ways of writing and engaging with the audience," he explains. "I’ve had my share of criticism from the critics in the past who often dislike what they see as the commercialism of my books but to me it’s all about telling great stories. I tell great stories and my readers keep turning the pages and enjoying the experience. Getting my fans involved in writing a thriller is just a new and exciting way of continuing that work."

Pandora’s box
Patterson believes that crowdsourcing is a good way of unearthing new talent and it looks likely that in the future more ventures will be launched to tap into this literary talent pool, such as WEbook.

The idea for WEbook came from Itai Kohavi, the company’s founder and c.e.o., who, after completing a novel that was ultimately published in Israel, was struck by how lonely the writing process was. He hit on the idea of establishing an online writing community that could provide both literal and figurative support to writers and work collaboratively to produce novels.

In March 2008, WEbook published its first novel, Pandora. Created by 34 writers, including Kohavi, the thriller became the "incubator project" for the larger idea behind WEbook, according to John Meils, WEbook m.d. "During the making of Pandora it became very clear to both the writers and the WEbook team that an online collaborative writing environment would be appealing to a much larger swathe of would-be and established writers," he says.

Two further titles have been printed by WEbook since the release of Pandora, and Meils feels that the site is providing a great way for aspiring authors to "find their voice" and get noticed. "As a would-be writer it’s not easy to hone your writing chops in a bubble, then burst onto the scene with a fully mature, book-length work," explains Meils. "In that sense I think the crowdsourcing model—especially in the way that WEbook employs it—provides a comfortable environment for writers to develop and be spotted even earlier than before."
But given some of the problems highlighted by Howe (and experienced by Penguin), can a crowdsourced novel ever be any good? Patterson doesn’t see why not. "This [crowdsourcing] is obviously different from how we traditionally see novels being published but there is nothing to say that this kind of project couldn’t be a success," he says. "I think that certain genres like crime thrillers lend themselves to the process more than others. As to whether they could sell in large volumes, only time will tell."

标签：self-publishing, AuthorHouse, HarperCollins, WEbook