---

---

Publishing’s New Gospel

Not even the Angel of the Lord said “I bring you tid­ings that are the best ever.”

There he was, doing break­ing news about the whole pro­gram going down in Beth­le­hem, with the glory of the Lord shin­ing ’round about him, backed up by the Mul­ti­tude of the Heav­enly Host. And yet, he got the job done with the dig­ni­fied “good tid­ings of great joy.”

I’m guess­ing that within hours, that show was com­ing out in somebody’s list: Top 10 Pas­ture Pageants of Year Zero.

Did you know that TIME has 55 of them? Fifty-five lists. In Top 10 Every­thing of 2012,   And boy, are they help­ful. They cover such things as “fleet­ing celebri­ties,” “worst dressed,” and “cam­paign gaffes.”

I’m guess­ing that the top three entries in every one of those 55 lists are the Fifty Shades of Grey books.

And when it comes to get­ting through this annual Val­ley of the Shadow of Top 10 lists, my advice: Take along some­body smart like Michael Cader at Pub­lish­ers Lunch.

The good Cader is a Twit­ter refusenik, by the way, that’s why I never link his name for you, I’m not being mean. And he’s handy with the lists.

For exam­ple, in Amazon’s Many 2012 Best­seller Lists this week, he writes, “Leav­ing aside E.L. James” (there’s a relief):

By our count the top 100 Kin­dle list [of books pub­lished in 2012] includes 16 titles that were orig­i­nally self-published. But only five of those books are still self-published.

Got that? For unto us a new route to pub­li­ca­tion is made straight in the desert.

How­ever glibly self-publishing authors might trash-talk “the damned pub­lish­ers” and crow about how “all my money comes to me, no mid­dle­men,” lo, the same gate­keep­ers those authors just tried to run down in the park­ing lot sure look like wise men when they turn up bear­ing contracts.

“All is for­given,” pa-rum-pa-pum pum.

So per­haps in the com­ing year, the self-publishing com­mu­nity can make tem­per­ing the anti-industry rhetoric one of its Top 10 Things To Work On.

What won’t be a sur­prise is the dis­ap­point­ment fac­tor: As we saw with Amanda Hock­ing (remem­ber her?), not all that many angels can dance on the head of this pin.

And you can bet your Prime mem­ber­ship that all the scribes and phar­isees this week think they’re Hugh Howey.

 

One thing is cer­tain: after the big, noisy exit so many self-publishers made from the Egypt of Oppres­sive Pub­lish­ers, the last thing some observers expected to see was a camel path lead­ing directly around to the back door. But self-publishing is begin­ning to look like more than the “dig­i­tal slush pile” you hear about — it’s an audi­tion for prime time.

That cloud of dust you see is Bob Mayer headed over here to tell me that there aren’t enough con­tracts in the world to woo him back to a pub­lisher and that he and Cool Gus are in the self-publishing biz for good. Which is fine, there are some folks, yes, just that ded­i­cated to the DIY way or the high­way, and I’ll see you in the com­ments, Bob.

 

Mean­while, Cader lists these as those five still self-published titles from the Kin­dle Top 100:

• The Secret of Ella and Micha by Jes­sica Sorensen
• Down to You by M. Leighton
• The Wild Ones by M. Leighton
• Blood Stained by CJ Lyons
• The Unwanted Wife by Natasha Anders

And what nour­ish­ing lit­er­a­ture it all is, huh?

Cader goes on:

And of those five, Leighton’s two books are also mov­ing to Pen­guin Group’s Berkley–and Berkley/NAL now pub­lishes seven more of those orig­i­nally self-published books on the Kin­dle best­seller list

Just How Far We’ve Come From “Van­ity Pub­lish­ing,” in fact, was her­alded this week by Jeremy Green­field at Dig­i­tal Book World, his story includ­ing this phrase about two self-to-traddies: “more tra­di­tion­ally self-published.”

Don’t rush by that. Savor it: A cou­ple of books, he wrote, were more tra­di­tion­ally self-published than others.

So now we have such a thing as self-publishing in a tra­di­tional way.

And self-publishing in a less tra­di­tional way.

What fun.

Green­field is draw­ing a dis­tinc­tion between the fanny-fiction of E.L. James’ orig­i­nal necktier-upper on one hand, and other self-published work that does not begin life as a deriv­a­tive of some­one else’s work.

But I can fore­see rag­ing, enter­tain­ing bat­tles among the self-publishers ahead, can’t you? All about who’s the most “pure” of the self-publishing camp.

Agent Clare Alexan­der said in Lon­don at Future­Book 2012 that, one of these days, we’ll have to invent pub­lish­ing so we can tell good work from bad work.

So as you head back to your fields, prais­ing all the things you’ve heard and seen in 2012, con­sider the approach described in one of the ten­der­est lines of the scrip­tures: Keep all these things close, and pon­der them in your heart.

Not in a Top 10 list.

| | |

Click to read this week’s full Writ­ing on the Ether col­umn at JaneFriedman.com.

Join us Thurs­days at JaneFriedman.com for Writ­ing on the Ether, and Tues­days for Ether for Authors at Pub­lish­ing Per­spec­tives.