From June 14, 2012

Part of my series of columns on pub­lish­ing, Writ­ing on the Ether, appear­ing Thurs­days at the invi­ta­tion of Jane Fried­man at JaneFriedman.com

 

A final­ist in the 2003 Aus­tralian Com­edy Awards and adapted into a fea­ture film in Italy (Solo un Padre, Warner Brothers/Cattleya)

“Read­ers should enjoy this ami­able, well-crafted and gen­uinely roman­tic book.”

—Pub­lish­ers Weekly

Find out more on Ama­zon and down­load a sam­ple to your Kindle.

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Self-Publishing/Noe: uAreWhich?

What if self-publishing is only a step­ping stone?

What made me crabby – no, furi­ous – was the theme in sev­eral of the sessions.

You don’t want to make Vic­to­ria Noe crabby. Let alone furious.

“Be a suc­cess at self-publishing and you will be rewarded with an agent and a tra­di­tional pub­lish­ing deal!”

When she signed on for uPub­lishU self-publishing con­fer­ence at BEA, “tra­di­tional pub­lish­ing deal!” is not the gist of the mes­sage she expected.

The first time I heard it, I thought I was just under-caffeinated. But by lunch, I con­firmed that oth­ers heard it, too.

After all the bom­bast we’ve encoun­tered from born-again authors about how DIY shall save the hud­dled masses yearn­ing to be free of tra­di­tional pub­lish­ers — and wear your sun­glasses when you call it “indie” — Noe heard some­thing else. And she has questions:

• I mean, what else should you think when suc­cess­ful self-publishing authors all talk about get­ting dis­cov­ered for their great, new, tra­di­tional deals?
• What else should you think when agents say they won’t take on some­one who self-publishes only?
• What else should you think when speak­ers tell you how to get noticed by tra­di­tional pub­lish­ers as well as prospec­tive readers?

Noe went to her Face­book author page on the mat­ter. There, she calls into ques­tion a good many orga­ni­za­tional draw­backs of the cute-named con­fab. For example:

I don’t think it’s too much to ask that for $150 you shouldn’t have to wait 3 hours to get a glass of water.

But her main con­cern is that a lot of the uPub­lishU pre­sen­ta­tions seemed to assume that self-publishers — at least those attend­ing — are really try­ing to pull off a Hock­ing Switch, whereby Amanda Hock­ing man­aged to par­lay her self-published “vampyre” oeu­vre into a deal with St. Martin’s.

Note that the Hock­ing Switch may be, absolutely, what some authors are going for.

There was a prob­lem con­nect­ing to Twitter.

 

On the other hand, I get what Noe is say­ing. If you ride into a con­fer­ence that specif­i­cally come-hithers authors who want to self-publish — only to sense when you get there that there’s an assump­tion you’re try­ing to claw your way into tra­di­tional pub­li­ca­tion — your horse has just turned another color right under you.

 

There were some strong peo­ple on the uPub­lishU agenda, too, includ­ing the Copy­right Clear­ance Center’s Christo­pher Ken­neally; Smash­words’ Mark Coker; Bowker’s Kelly Gal­lagher; Pub­lish­ers Weekly’s Jim Mil­liot; Amazon’s Jon P. Fine; Kobo’s Mark Leslie Lefeb­vre; agents Steven Axel­rod, Mar­i­lyn Allen, Lau­rie McLean and Mar­cella Smith; Wattpad’s Allen Lau: and more — some of whom we’d see the next day at Pub­lish­ers Launch BEA. (More on that one below.)

So this was hardly a light­weight pro­gram tossed together for “the kids who write.”

 

And I don’t know the orga­niz­ers of uPub­lishU. It would be great to hear from them if they’d like to give us their response on this. Was the tone inten­tional? Click to comment

I’d also like to hear from agents on the panel, since Noe felt she heard them say they wouldn’t take on purely self-publishing authors. This is inter­est­ing, and not what I hear from some other agents — not that they all work the same way, of course.

That panel’s title, by the way, was pretty cute, all by itself (not the agents’ fault): “THE X FACTOR: The Role of Agents in YOU Pub­lish­ing.” I’m struck by how much cute­ness seems to afflict event names (and some star­tups) in pub­lish­ing. It gets cloy­ing, doesn’t it?

 

For the rest of us, Noe’s obser­va­tion gives us a chance to con­sider some things that may too fre­quently be taken for granted.

• Is it the goal of most self-publishing writ­ers to attract the favor of a tra­di­tional pub­lisher and get that contract?
• Do such orga­ni­za­tions as Orna Ross’ new Alliance of Inde­pen­dent Authors work pur­pose­fully with two camps of self-publishing authors? — those who see their future in self-publishing and those who see it as that step­ping stone to tra­di­tional con­tracts? Jane Fried­man, host of the Ether and hash­tag unto her­self, talks this week with Ross, as a mat­ter of fact, in this video, about how some authors find they really want a pub­lisher to han­dle the admin­is­tra­tion of their mar­ket­ing. The alliance must see diver­sity in what its mem­bers want, surely.
• And if self-publishing isn’t fully vested by most of its pro­po­nents as a poten­tially career-long strat­egy, then is it being accorded a dis­pro­por­tion­ate amount of attention?

For Noe’s part, the uPub­lishU trads-in-selfs’-clothing effect had no allure. While she says she’d love an agent to guide her through the woods, sounds to me like she’s got the route down cold:

I want to be pub­lished, and I’m enough of an impa­tient con­trol freak to embrace self-publishing. That does NOT mean I’m skip­ping the uni­ver­sal need for edit­ing, nor am I doing my own cover design. I know my lim­i­ta­tions. I will pay for those ser­vices, and oth­ers, to sup­port the level of pro­fes­sion­al­ism that I expect in myself and others.

And she has a few words for those uPub­lishU organizers:

If you still believe that the goal of self-publishing is to land a big, tra­di­tional book deal, at least be upfront about that. Then peo­ple like me, who don’t have that goal, can spend their money and time elsewhere.

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