I’d like to think that I’ve matured, but it’s probably more likely that I was swayed by social trends alongside getting older. I remember being a kid and dreaming about having a house someday with a library that would rival Neil Gaiman’s – that’s the motivation behind keeping all that stuff, but now, as an adult thinking about buying a house in the next few years, I dream about a Spartan dwelling wired with media access devices, but no physical media.

And I don’t think it’s just me. People are embracing e-books, digital downloads, streaming, and other non-physical methods of media access. These things get more prevalent every day.

I think people are coming to realize that physical media, under all that pretty, colorful packaging, is just a portal to an experience. If you own a DVD, you own something physical: a plastic disc in a pretty cardboard and plastic holder. If you watch a movie – you have an experience. While plastic disc peddlers have done a damn fine job of creating the link in our minds between the experience of a movie and the movie’s physical media, the more digital becomes the norm, the more that link is shattered.
And rightly so.

Maybe I just make a bigger deal of things because I like to believe the world is a complex and interesting place. Maybe it’s not – it could really be that digital is just cheaper and more convenient and that explains most, if not all, of digital’s popularity. But I don’t think it’s that simple. I think there is a paradigm shift in our perception of what media is – and now, with digital getting more and more popular, the notion that media is an experience (an event, i f you prefer) is much easier to divide from the idea that media is a plastic disc or a paper book. Maybe books are a slightly different case because the act of reading is an important part of the experience, whereas opening a DVD and loading in a disc is more negligible.

But no matter what, you can never repeat an experience. Of course, you can try by owning the media that gives you a portal to a quantifiable portion of the experience.

But that time you watched Garden State with a girl and then kissed her for the first time on her couch? Or sped down a dirt road in the pounding rain with the windows down, soaked the to the skin, quivering with young lust and listening to Coldplay’s Yellow? Or that sunny cicada summer you read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in your car, eating hot french fries, after class and before you had to go to work, in those glorious stolen hours?

You’re never gonna get those back even if you buy the physical media.

I’d like to think people are seeing that idea – but maybe it’s easier to Netflix something from the couch than to waddle down to the local Wal-mart to buy a copy.

Hard to tell.

However, before you do that, there’s a lot of backstory that you should probably wade through. I’m not trying to give you homework or anything – all I’m suggesting is that you’ll understand this post a little better if you read this, this, and this first. If you don’t want to, that’s okay. But don’t say I didn’t warm you.

And now, without further ado, I need to reply to Levi Montgomery:

Okay, let’s narrow this back down to novels and digital fiction again, since that’s where this whole debate started before we escalated it away from the point.
I don’t know that I’ve done the best job I can to describe how digital text pricing should be levied, so I’m going to take another crack at it.

To start, let’s assemble a ballpark cost involved with being a writer. We can take as a given that to survive as a professional writer, one must have an income from that writing. This number varies depending on where you live and what other help you have, but let’s take 40,000 dollars a year as a target number. That seems like a pretty fair income for one person who gets to do what they love for a living. I don’t mean to suggest that this is what all writers should make, and I don’t want to get too caught up debating that number, but it gives us a ballpark figure to start working with the math.

Now, let’s talk workload and resources. Take a writer that writes 2,000 words a day, which is what Stephen King does (according to his writing memoir).Levi, I’ve seen your twitter reports about your daily writing – sometimes you write more, sometimes less, but I feel like 2,000 words a day is a reachable goal if writing is a full-time job. At 2,000 words a day, I’ll finish the first draft of a 100,000 word novel in 50 days. Now, that’s pretty fast, and it doesn’t allow for any rewrites, cover design, digital posting, breaks, or anything like that, so let’s double that figure and say that an industrious writer working every day can finish a novel and get it out there every 100 days. Since there are 365 days in the year, that puts a good writer’s output at about three novels a year, with some time in there for vacations and extra editing, if needed.

If I know that I can publish to the internet, in digital form, three novels a year if I’m working full time at being a writer, that gives me some data to start thinking about pricing. I know that in order to write full time I need to make 40,000 dollars a year. I have 3 novels with which to make that money. Since we’re talking about digital releases, the only costs involved for me are time. Writing, layout, design, editing, and distribution are all time costs, not resource costs.

In order to make my living, I have to sell:

at least 4 units for 10,000 USD or
at least 40 units for 1,000 USD or
at least 400 units for 100 USD or
at least 4,000 units for 10 USD or
at least 40,000 units for 1 USD

Keep in mind, this is total copies, so if I have repeat readers who might buy all 3 releases in a year, or any back releases, hitting those figures gets easier.

Now, just to give us some data, let’s pretend that the combined downloads of my current work through all online sources (that I can track) in the last year were actually sales. 2000 on scribed, 2000 via bit torrent, 100 from my site, 1200 on feedbooks. Let’s pretend that it was 5300 sales that I made in the last year.

Dividing that out, I would have needed to price my books at about 7.5 USD per unit to have made my target income for last year and support myself as a writer. Of course, my downloads weren’t actually sales. I’m using those numbers as what I have to start doing some math, not to say that I could really push that many units a year. My stuff isn’t good enough for that, and the resources I need (storefront and so on) aren’t available yet. Not to mention all the hassle of getting a bigger audience, piracy losses, and all that stuff. Those issues relate, and I know people will be upset if I just dismiss them without addressing them, but I’m going to do that, at least for now. We’re just talking here, after all. I’m trying not to get sidetracked.

So, anyway, my numbers are 7.5 USD for 5300 units so I can make my 40,000 USD and continue to write. I can afford to price them at whatever I can afford to make my living, since there is no physical production cost floor. As long as I can hit my 40,000 dollars a year, I can price them at whatever I want.

Now, say that next year is even better than this one – say that I’ve got some great content coming out and I’ve been building my name – I expect 10,000 downloads in the next year. If that’s the case, in order to maintain my target income, I only need to price my books at 4 USD per copy. Now I can offer the same thing for cheaper while still maintaining my lifestyle. Everyone wins. (It seems like there is a “devaluing” fiction conversation a lot of people are having lately that would fit in here, if I was going to try to fit it in.)

If for some reason I had a banner month, a crazy month where I got all 10,000 sales in one month at the beginning of the year, then I can now afford to price my stuff for free for the rest of the year.

I understand some planning is needed for something like this – projections, that sort of thing, but it’s worthwhile for me to do it if I feel like I can get more work to more people. As long as I can feel somewhat comfortable with the numbers, it would be great to be able to plan a little, too.

I’m sure that if I was a Google-level engineer I could figure out some pricing system and website module that dynamically priced content on my website based on how many sales I’d made and how many I needed to make to hit my goals of remaining a professional writer. Some awesome and wonky math that priced different novels at different prices to maintain their sales rank, all while lowering or raising prices as I needed to maintain my income, yet still offering my work as close to free as possible. Even not being a Google-level engineer, I’ve taken a crack at it to see if I could figure it out.

But the real point of the thing is that I’m not trying to steal work from people. I don’t advocate that. I just advocate only taking what you need. I have a copy of your novella on my hard drive right now, Levi, a copy you gave me for free so I could review it. I wouldn’t dream of releasing that work without your consent, no matter what I think you should do with it. It’s not my place to decide what you should do with your work. I can judge you or not judge you, but my judgment is not allowed to turn into action you don’t condone.

I don’t see pirates as Robin Hoods on some moral high-ground quest. The group is too diverse to lump all together. You’ve got your competitors who do it for the name, the people who just want stuff for free, your revolution folks, and people who just can’t afford content otherwise. They don’t all go together, even through their actions are all the same. And they aren’t Robin Hood.

But I also don’t see corporations pricing their content to only take what they need, either. So, I’ll happily condemn them both. I believe in working things out from the bottom and trying to come up with numbers to support it. If corporations need to price their books at 10 bucks a pop to stay in business and pay their employees and writers an acceptable wage, then fine. But right now I don’t believe it and until I see some numbers, I’ll continue to not believe it.

But I don’t think that I have the right to take from people what they aren’t willing to give away, either. However, I see that it is a moral obligation for people to price things fairly, based on maintaining the ability to release more. That’s a personal choice, I get that, so I will happily call out the guy who has the cure for cancer and is selling it for 10,000 bucks a pop, even though his costs are only 5 bucks a pop. That guy is a jackass, and deserves to be lampooned and made a public spectacle. But beyond that, I wouldn’t steal it from him. I’d try to shame him into doing the right thing. Failing that, I’d try to get some laws changed, since laws are supposed to be there to aid the common good, even if they routinely fail short of that lofty goal.

For me, right now, that means I can release what I can for free, even though I have to spend the majority of my time at a day job. That day job severely limits the amount of time I have to produce content and release it. However, that job also provides me with an income, so I can afford to release my content for free. It’s a trade off that I’m willing to make right now. Maybe later, when I’m ready to try writing full time, I’ll have to charge. But I know that I’ll do my best to keep my prices as low as I can afford and still be professional.

I hope that makes sense.

Both of Mark’s scenarios that don’t involve the taking of something from someone else, but still involve physical piracy (free newspaper and concert), stem from the same given: content creators have a right to decide how, why, when, and where their content is experienced, if for no other reason than they created that content.
I’m not sure I agree with that given as it stands, and I’d like to use a silly example to illustrate why. There is an anti-corporation argument that has a place in the piracy debate and I think this is also the place to bring it into our discussion. I want to use some examples to talk about where I think that argument comes from, but also what I think it means that the argument even exists in the first place. I hope that this will also help address Mark’s ideas about stealing.

We’re going to need two people for this discussion, so let’s pick polar opposites to try to tease out the implications of the thing.

First, we need someone who’s rich and can pretty much buy and sell whatever they want. Let’s use Bill Gates, since I seem to have been thinking about him lately. I don’t know why – it might have something to do with him recently joining twitter and also donating billions of dollars to charity (although those two events might be unrelated).

Second, we need someone who’s not rich. Anti-rich, even. For this, let’s use Marian, referenced in the same blog post I’m responding to. Since we were put up as mutual mouthpieces there, that seems fitting. Marian, unlike Bill Gates, cannot buy and sell whatever she wants. She’s limited by her limited income.

So here’s the scenario:

Say that I’ve just finished writing the next great American novel. It’s the best thing since sliced bread, full of the bees-knees, wisdom, humor, and great ideas. Not only is it gonna be a best seller, a strong member of the Oprah book club, and adored by the mainstream and counter-culture alike, it’s also full of life-changing ideas that everyone on the face of the planet, young and old, should read. Say that’s what the book is, just for example.

Now say that, before it’s released, word gets around that all the hype about the book is true, that it really is better than Shakespeare, the Bible, and Twilight (for the mass market appeal) rolled into one and my publishing company and I decide to set the price of the novel at 10 billion dollars a copy, because we think, for some reason, that we can get Bill Gates to pay that price.

Lo, the novel is realized. My publishing company and I sell three copies to the three richest people in the world. We retire in luxury and never work again. Bill Gates gets to read the book, being one of the three who bought it, but poor Marian never does, because she cannot afford the price of entry.

This is an extraordinarily silly example, but a necessary one, because it demonstrates some talking points:

People should only have a right to distribute content if their profits from said content are reasonable. What right, beyond the creation itself do I have to price my novel at such an exorbitant price? I created the content, but if the book is so good that it might improve lives, what right do I have to price it so only a few lives can be improved?

That’s the point about sticking it to corporations and where it originates. Just because I create something, do I have the right to completely control access to that thing? Maybe, but only to a point. After that point, the social contract says that the work should be freely available, or at the very least, as widely available as possible.
That’s what this is really about. Did Bill Gates really have the right to make 40 billion dollars because he started a software company that provided the right thing at the right time? Does he have the right to become the wealthiest person on the planet because he won big on a social roulette game?

I don’t think so. That’s too much. Letting someone profit that much from the creation of a single thing is absurd, whether it’s a company or a novel. Now, novels aren’t as absurdly profitable as the amount of money Bill Gates has, but you get the slippery-slope gist of the thing.

Now, Marian’s point was this: if the content isn’t priced affordably, she knows how to get it for free.

I think she’s right. It’s easy to get it for free. And digitalization of work brings that into a whole new perspective. Because although piracy might be described as the theft of a sale, the hard fact is that after the content is created, an additional digital copy costs the company nothing. NOTHING.

So how in the hell can they justify pricing a book at ten dollars? It’s an unreasonable profit margin for their investment.

If a publishing company spends 150,000 dollars to pay the author, the editor, the layout person, and the web guy who throws it up on the digital store – they only have to sell 15,000 copies at 10 bucks a pop to recoup that investment. Now, for a novel that they are willing to spend 150 grand on, they are easily going to sell 15,000 copies. It’s more likely that they are going to sell 100,000 copies or more, since they are banking on it being a best seller (otherwise, they would have paid 15,000 or less for the advance, layout, and editing fees). 100,000 copies at 10 bucks a pop gets them 1 million gross and 850,000 net. That’s an absurd margin.

This is simplistic, but basically how it works nonetheless. Now, if they price the book at one dollar, not only are they going to sell way more than 100,000 books, they also put it in reach of a bunch more people. They probably aren’t going to make the same margins, since they’d have to sell a million books at one dollar to make the same as selling 100,000 books at 10 bucks, but it’s possible.

And if they do sell a million books, it’s time to lower the price. Thus spake the social contract and the social contract mote it so.

(Beyond that, there is also the issue of the payment of the writer versus the payment of the publisher, but that’s another whole big thing that probably needs its own post.)

So, my belief is this: content creators have a right to distribute their content as they wish, as long as they price that content so the most people can have access to it (which means as cheap as possible) and still maintain a comfortable lifestyle that lets them continue to create that content. If you want to charge me ten bucks for a copy of a digital book, you don’t get to have a private jet. I’m sorry. No. That’s not feasible or socially responsible. Instead, people in my generation will steal your book. So it goes.

In the above scenario, I would be an asshole for writing something that could help people and then pricing it so only a select few could afford it. That’s capitalism, you say. Fine, I say, well capitalism is an asshole, too.

Information, content, entertainment, whatever you want to call it, should be priced so that the highest number of people can access it and the people who made it can live and continue to create it. When that happens, then content creators have a right to control their content. Until that level of social responsibility is inherent in the system – content creators shouldn’t have a right to do what they want with their content.

That’s the “right” of creation – bringing good to people, and as many people, as possible. If you don’t do that, you have no right to create.

I wrote a book of tech poetry, about technology, artificial intelligence, and the digital lifestyle. I released it on the net for free about two weeks ago, putting out a version of the e-book that was as polished as I could make it.

After putting the book online, I started trying to build some buzz on the net. I posted the book on scribd.com, shopped it around to some e-book blogs, and posted it on several forums, including XKCD.

Here’s how the book is doing so far, after two weeks on the net:

The book has made the “featured” and “hot list” on scribd.com. At the time of this writing, it’s gotten 3,855 reads and has been downloaded 744 times.

The book has been made into a torrent (thanks to Zorlin at the XKCD forum for doing that!), which has been downloaded 697 times at the time of this writing.

The PDF of the book has also been downloaded 48 times from my website.

I’m pretty happy with how the book is doing so far. If you know of another place my book has appeared on the net, please let me know. Thanks to everyone who’s reading my work.

Welcome to the final part of our weeklong discussion about self-published e-books and legitimacy. We’ve looked at different possibilities for attaining self-published e-book legitimacy and examined their pros and cons. We’ve heard several different perspectives from members in and outside of traditional publishing. It’s time to wrap things up and draw some needed conclusions.

The original concept that spurred this series was the idea of creating a “substantial publishing record” through self-published e-books, so that’s where I’d like to end. Sure, we’ve covered that building a large demonstrated readership (download numbers, reviews, etc), self-published or not, will probably get a traditional publisher’s attention. But what about legitimacy without transitioning to traditional publishing? Just what are we actually building here? A gateway to the big leagues? Or a separate and legitimate venue?

We’re trying to make the fringe mainstream – that’s the juicy beating heart of it. We’re punk music. We’re techie geeks. We’re social networking and blogging and twitter. We’re goddamn revolutionaries.

So this is how we do it: adoption and critical mass. Via flipping the bird at the establishment until the establishment is respectful or gone. Via not giving a damn about legitimacy.

Because we already have it.

E-book self-publishers need to take themselves seriously and keep plugging away at creating their own community. Don’t worry about the naysayers. They don’t matter.

The thing every author wants more than anything else is to be read. But it’s a two way street: we have to read, too. If we want our self-published e-books to be legitimate, we need to legitimize other self-published e-books by giving them our time and responses. There are some great sites out there that are already doing this, as well as other options, like blogs and twitter, for building a community.

So read each other’s work and review it on your site. If you don’t have a site, post about it on twitter, or facebook, or scribd, or wattpad, or bookoven, or however else you can get the word out. If you read something good, beat the digital pavement, signboard in hand. Trade reviews with people, but be honest about what’s quality and what isn’t. Build your name as a valued member of the community. Think of yourself as a professional and act like one, even if writing is only your hobby.

The only real way to give self-published e-books legitimacy is to make them legitimate ourselves. We need to write quality books, compose balanced reviews, and keep building our community.

Thank you very much for reading. Keep on keepin’ on,

-m.

P.S. To prove I’m not just a talker, if you send me a PDF of your quality self-published e-book, I’ll review it on my site. I know there are other writers who are willing to do this as well. Just remember, it’s a two way street, so help build your community and review someone.

Today we’ll hear from someone inside the traditional publishing world. This was emailed to me from a member of an established New York publishing house. Aside from working in publishing, he’s also been conventionally published himself. I know it’s unfortunate, but I’ve been asked to conceal his name. He doesn’t want to anger the publishing company that employs him. That’s fine, I understand. I’m just glad to have a viewpoint from inside the machine.

Anyhow, here is his insight, after being presented with my questions:

I totally agree with what you say about a self-pubbed work reaching critical mass via word of mouth, blogging, etc, and, most important, actual sales figures. If a self-pubbed author approaches a publisher and says I’ve hoofed my ass from Kalamazoo to Timbuktu to sell 100,000 copies of a book that explains everything about life, the publisher will sit up and take note.

As for part 2, in general, I think the gate-keeping system in place works pretty well right now. In every media there’s some sort of comparable set up of readers/scouts > agents > editors > publishers/producers/decision makers. Self pubbing or publishing on demand doesn’t really change anything. You’re either happy being self-pubbed or you still want acceptance/approval from established houses for reasons of greed or fame, and possibly on the rare occasion true belief that you have something that will improve the world somehow and want the greater distribution capacity a major house provides.

If this is all in terms of trying to get into a writing program, I’d like to think all that matters is the writing itself. Saying that one is self-pubbed might give credit in terms of the author’s willingness to work their butt off.

Thanks for the input, Anonymous.

Join us next time for the final part of our discussion, where we’ll wrap up our discussion and try to make some sense of everything. Thanks for reading.

Today we’ll hear from Levi Montgomery, a self-published writer who also blogs at The Write Rants. Levi was gracious enough to allow me to post his opinions here, and I appreciate it. So, without further ado:

The biggest single barrier to the wide-spread acceptance of self-published books is the staunch voice of the traditional publishing industry, crying in the wilderness: “But you need us! We protect you from the riff-raff!” The argument is that the industry performs a valuable service, acting as a gatekeeper to the public square, keeping trashy novels, misinformation, and radical error from being published.

This argument is rife with errors of its own, not the least of which is the assumption that traditional publishers do, indeed, act in such a manner; that they keep worthless fiction and incorrect non-fiction from making it to market. However, rather than shoot the half-dead fish in that particular barrel, I’d like to address another point: the issue of whether such a gate-keeping service should be performed at all, or if we, as a society, even want such a service.

The argument that this is a valuable service of the publishing industry would seem to be based on the putative existence of some sort of qualitative analysis of input, and would seem to derive its justification in keeping the perceived value of published output above some acceptable minimum level (both of which are arguable, but there are those half-dead fish again). But who is it that decides? Who decides that a book isn’t good enough for me to read, if not me? How do I decide, unless the book can reach me?

The underlying assumption in any gatekeeping function of the publishing industry is that the very reason publishing exists as an industry at all is that this function was so vitally needed that the walls were built around the machinery, to protect us all from those who might dare use it to voice a disagreement. But the fact is that the industry exists because the machinery became so large, so complex, so valuable, that publishing was outside the reach of all but the select few.

When publishing was a matter of standing in front of a large enough audience and telling a story, publishing could be assayed by literally anyone. If a storyteller wanted to tell a story, he did so. If he was good enough at it, he got the accolades and respect of his audience, and perhaps even payment, in the form of food, shelter, etc. The developments of technology, beginning with written languages, continuing through such crude printing technologies as woodblock and hand-cast metal type, and eventually reaching block-long high-speed web-fed printing presses, took this immediate access away from the average storyteller. Now, in order to put his story in the hands of his audience, the storyteller had to do one of two things. He had to acquire a printing press, or he had to go to someone who had one.

There were, perhaps unfortunately, more storytellers than the printers could handle, and they (like all industries) learned how to say no. The perceived function of the owners of the printing presses as a gatekeeper has its actual origin right there: the printers simply could not hope to publish everything. Nor could they hope to attract all the readers in the world, and in an attempt to differentiate their services from those of their competitors, they began to add what they perceived as value. They added editing. They added color. They added illustrations. And they added snobbery.

But the question remains unanswered: do we want a gatekeeper to the public square? Do we want a not-so-disinterested third party telling us what we can and cannot read? Remember the fireside? Remember the storyteller who stood there, regaling his audience with the story of how he conquered a saber-tooth? Aren’t we capable of deciding for ourselves whether we want to spend our time listening to him? I said that if he was good enough, he got respect and accolades. What I didn’t say was that if he wasn’t good enough, he got ignored. He lost his audience. He either stood by the dying fire alone and spoke on and on to nothing and nobody, or he went home and hoed his potatoes. His publishing career was over. Market forces did him in, not some gatekeepers somewhere, standing with crossed lances, turning him away.

And make no mistake, the problem of selectivity in publishing is not new. Since Og the Mighty first sat by the fire and told of how he’d killed a mammoth single-handedly, there have been people telling bad fiction and erroneous non-fiction. The night after Og told his story, there was another fire, smaller, lesser-known, and at that fire Ig the Skinny tried on Og’s story. He got laughed at.

Edward R. Murrow rather famously said “Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn’t mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.” But it doesn’t mean your audience is any dumber, either. Search the web long enough, and you will find a website telling you the best thing to do for a burn is to put butter on it. Bad advice, of course, but is it proof that the web is creating bad advice? No, because I have a book, printed in 1923, that says exactly the same thing. Did the famous gatekeepers keep that out of the hands of the unsuspecting public then? No. Do they do so now? No.

When Og told his story, we all believed him because we all knew him, and when Ig stole the story the next night, we all laughed at him because we all knew him. So what’s the problem we face today? Bad information? No.

Rule Number One, life’s General Order Number One, is “Always identify the problem.” You can’t fix it until you know what’s broken, and what’s broken today is simply this: we don’t all know Og and Ig any more. We can be heard to the ends of the Earth and beyond, we can listen to the voices of people we will never meet, and we have no way of telling the truth from the fiction. The village has grown too big.

So how do we fix that? We apply the same forces we’ve had since the days of Og and Ig. We have tools at our disposal that can handle the tasks. We have market forces to separate good fiction from bad, and we have peer review to separate truth from falsehood in the arena of non-fiction. These are not new tools, and they are neither inherent in, nor dependent upon, the function of the traditional presses as gatekeepers to the public square.

The fact is that, while publishers have been guarding the gates, technology has torn down the walls, leaving them looking suspiciously like the keepers of the toll gate in Blazing Saddles. You no longer need a printing press, you no longer need a distribution system, and you no longer need to stand in line at the gate. There are POD services galore that are more than eager to put out your book. If you want to tell, in excruciating detail, every minute and every second of the life of your grandmother, you can. For free. If you want to revive the old adage of butter on a burn, you can.

And do we want the owners of the presses to keep us from reading these things, or do we want something more robust, more reliable? Do we perhaps simply need to take out the same old tools, market forces and peer review, and let them do their jobs?

The question of legitimacy in self-published books is not a new question, it is simply an old question taken to a new arena. The answer is the same answer. The tools are the same tools.

Consider the illogic in saying that a “book” shouldn’t be published, unless it has the approval of the traditional publishing house, and then not extending that ban to all other forms of saying whatever it is that the “book” says.

Suppose I write a long series of blog posts, telling the story of John And Jane And How They Fell In Love And Lived Happily Ever After. Suppose that this series of posts is poorly written, filled with bad diction, bad syntax, bad grammar, empty similes and mixed metaphors, cardboard characters, sad clichés, and all of the other boogymen of modern fiction. I’m just a bad storyteller. I’m deluded and arrogant, and I have no audience, but no one is going to say that there should be some concerted effort to keep me off the web.

Suppose I build a website that claims to give medical advice, and I tell people to put butter on burns. So what? There are a million places on the web giving bad medical advice. It’s just another quack website.

But suppose I have the audacity to publish either of those as a POD book. Now I need to be kept out of the public square, somehow. Someone needs to Do Something. But what changed? Nothing. I simply chose to make a “book” out of my bad story or my bad advice.

The problem (remembering Rule Number One) is not keeping such things out of the hands of the public, it is separating the chaff from the wheat, in all channels of communication. And the answer is to apply the same tools that served us so well before the owners of the printing presses built their walls.

Market forces and peer review.

Fiction is easy. If you want to publish it, publish it. When no one buys it, go hoe your potatoes. End of story.

Non-fiction is a little bit more difficult, but the tools are there. There’s a long-standing tradition of peer review, and it simply needs to adapt to the new technologies. There was no magic bullet to keep the butter-on-a-burn meme out of our wetware a century ago, and somehow we all survived. When a better meme came along, peer review, in the form of doctors voicing their opposition, killed off the old one. There’s no fundamental reason why that can’t work in self-published book, both ebooks and print books. In fact, it may become easier and easier over time as technologies adapt.

What we most assuredly no not need is a return to the accidental rise of the press owners as gatekeepers.

Levi can be reached at levi@levimontgomery.com or at The Write Rants.

Thanks for reading. Tomorrow we’ll hear from a contact from inside a major New York Publishing house.

In order to make this article itself a little more legitimate, I also emailed several people in various part of the publishing industry. A few emailed me back, and I’ll be interspersing their comments throughout the various parts. This part includes quotes from Cory Doctorow the author and blogger who’s had great success publishing his traditionally printed works with free e-books. The quotes are taken from his emails to me, and used with his permission.

Publishing Websites

Similar to the current publishing model, a website could be created with editors that read submissions and only “published” books on the website that met certain standards. On the surface this looks very similar to traditional publishing, however, there is one key difference: resources are only limited by labor hours, not limited printing budget.

Currently a small publishing house only has enough resources to publish a limited number of books per year, even if they would like to publish more. This is limited by editor hours and printing costs. If the cost of “publishing” an e-book on a website costs nothing, there are less limits to how many books can be published a year. No longer will good books be denied because the publishing house has already published their maximum quota for the year.

This method filters out craptent and allows the legitimacy of real publishing. However, there is still a significant overhead (the website must be hosted and editors must be paid), so content would still have to be monetized somehow, via a subscription or some other method. In order to charge for content a website like this would have to offer a great variety of content, as well as great accessibility: each book would have to support multiple types of e-reader formats, at least until the e-publishing format is standardized, which will probably be awhile.

An indie company willing to live on peanuts could probably still do something like the paid content site, apply standards and all that, but still give content away for free. As long as the site has a reputation for only publishing quality work, eventually their word will add legitimacy to their selections.

Obviously, the biggest downsides to this method are cost, monetization, and the risk that the editors will become the same type of gatekeepers as traditional publishing, which is something that must be avoided. Because of these risks, this probably isn’t a feasible option.

Popularity Numbers

“The answer is another indeterminate, I’m afraid. Depends on the publisher, and on the online reception… Say you put it online and no one cared, and the publisher loved it but was freaked about CC. Show him that you’ve have all of 7 downloads, it’ll put his mind at ease.

OTOH, say it was a raging success — 50,000,000 downloads, talk of the town. You could probably parlay *that* into a publishing deal, on the strength of the demonstrated market for the work.

So: depends on the work, the publisher, and the reception.” -Cory Doctorow

When a record sells a million copies, it “goes platinum.” A million is pretty high, but along the same idea, perhaps a target number could be set for a self-published e-book that, when reached, established “legitimacy.” This isn’t a bad method, since it shows that the work is popular.

However, a system like this would be extremely difficult to track unless there was a standard site these downloads had to occur. For instance, my free books are offered on my blog, on scribd.com, and mentioned on a few other random free e-book websites around the web. Do I just add up the total of downloads and claim that number? What stops me from spoofing downloads myself? The difficulty of regulating (or “proving”) something like this makes it an unattractive option.

Financial Records

“A book that made a lot of money would absolutely get a lot of respect in the professional world.” – Cory Doctorow

Although authors probably don’t write for the money (most are barking up the wrong tree if they are), it’s nice to get paid for creative work. If a self-published e-book was popular enough to drum up some sales, financial records could be a way of legitimizing work. However, with a solid financial record, traditional print publishing is much easier to obtain, so I don’t know why an author with demonstrated e-book sales wouldn’t just jump into a traditional publishing contract. Still, for an author interesting in proving herself legitimate, actually selling books is a solid way to go.

The main difficulties, of course, stem from trying to sell an e-book that has no corresponding print version. You’d have to ask Scribd.com (or some other publishing site), but I’d imagine the majority of the monetized self-published stuff on that site doesn’t get touched.

Reviews

A self-published e-book could be legitimized through reviews in journals and on blogs. If a book gets enough voices talking about it and praising it, surely it becomes legitimate publishing. However, finding reviews for a self-published e-book has to be a very difficult task, almost as difficult as the traditional publishing model, which might make the whole thing moot. However, there are sympathetic bloggers out there who are willing to take chances and review self-published e-books, so although this method could be as awful as finding a traditional publisher, pounding the virtual pavement is still an option.

Critical Mass and Internet Notoriety

“Put another way: it’s hard to monetize fame, but it’s even harder to monetize obscurity.” – Cory Doctorow

This is probably the most attractive option, the most likely, and it combines aspects of most of the above options. Building a good standing on the internet is the same as building a good standing anywhere else. It takes work, a lasting presence, a reputation for quality content, and time. Sound familiar? It should. It’s almost the same damn thing as trying to get published through traditional publishing methods.

However, there is one (very critical) difference between traditional publishing and self-publishing on the internet, and that is the barrier to entry.

However, because the barrier to entry is lower, the barrier to “success” is higher. It might be easier to put something up on the internet, but once it’s up, getting people to pay attention is pretty tough. It means the same type of shopping around as traditional publishing. However, the feedback is faster, and that, if nothing else, is the best part about the net over those six-month snail-mail wait times.

On the negative side, a traditional “substantial publishing record” takes more time to get started, but is probably still worth more once it’s done.

Either way, I’d just like to see critical mass and internet notoriety as an acceptable option, as far as the ivory tower is concerned. Most of the time, it means enough for the rest of the world.

That’s all for this post. Join me tomorrow for the opinion of Levi Montgomery, an author who self-publishes his own work, both on the internet and through print-on-demand publishing. Same mispeled time, same mispeled channel.

Anyway, almost all Creative Writing teaching jobs (and some other jobs in a similar vein) require three things: teaching experience, a terminal degree, and a “substantial publishing record.” The first two can be obtained through a decent MFA program (almost all of them offer teaching as a way to pay for it), but the third is a little trickier.

The traditional publishing system has become a vile backwater of internal handshaking, intensely gated communities, and lottery-styled odds. Building a “substantial publishing record” involves beating down editor’s mailboxes as much as it involves quality writing. Trying to get short works in print takes months of submissions, postage costs, and much more time shopping the work than writing it. Submitting poems and stories to small literary magazines can take six months to get a response. Agent queries and small publishers are sometimes almost as bad. So a “substantial publishing record” is a ten-year wait-fest, give or take five years.

“Okay,” you say, “just hold on for a second. You’re being a little hyperbolic here, right? It’s not as bad as all that.”

Everyone has different experiences, to be sure, but for the most part, no. I’m not being hyperbolic. From personal experience: I spent a year shopping around my first novel, and months shopping the second. I have a grand stack of rejection slips from all types of small magazines for poetry and short stories, but only one poem in traditional print. It wasn’t skill, it was luck and persistence. It was marketing. That published poem wasn’t nearly as good as other things I’ve written, but I happened across the right editor with the right digestion on the right day. That’s the lottery, not a skill-based system. That’s silly.

“Well, your writing sucks,” you say. “Maybe if you were better, you’d have an easier time getting published.” Sure. That’s probably part of it. I’m still learning – it’s true. I’m working on that.

But in the meantime, there still has to be a better way than traditional publishing. It’s not like small print publication makes authors any money anyway, so there are only two reasons to get work out there in small print publication: to be read (which is the point of the entire writing enterprise, really), and, that’s right, you guessed it, creating a “substantial publishing record.”

Enter self-published e-books. The internet gives authors a way to publish their work without all the hassle of six month wait times, postage costs, and roller-coaster hopes. It gives almost instant feedback, and gets authors’ work out to the masses much faster. It’s green, because there’s physical printing, and it allows authors to have much more control over their work. In fact, it improves on everything over the typical publishing method in all respects, save one: legitimacy. It doesn’t build a “substantial publishing record.”

Typical publishing, at its most basic level, works like this: you (or your agent) send your work to an editor. The editor, probably way overworked and underpaid, decides if your work is worthy of publication or not. Basically, the editor functions as a “gating mechanism” that helps filter out all the craptent (that’s a portmanteau of “crap” and “content” for you savvy folks) bad writers try to get published. This filtration system is useful, because it makes it easier to determine whether something is “legitimate” or not. It’s the same idea behind peer-reviewed journals, essentially. It’s a good system, has worked for hundreds of years, and everyone likes it, right?

Right. Except for the amazing risk taking writer who can’t get published because he writes about content that doesn’t interest emplaced editors. Or the great author who has time to write, but doesn’t have time to shop his work around and spend all her time on marketing. Or the author who writes a glorious book that no publishers will touch read and gets so discouraged he eventually kills himself.

Hey, all these people are stoked about the current publishing model, right? [Please pay no attention to the crickets chirping in the background - they’re for comedic effect.]

There’s got to be a way to create a “substantial publishing record” with self-published e-books. In the next post, I’m going to talk about possible ways to do this and why they could be methods for obtaining “legitimacy.” I’ll also include opinions from a self-publishing author, a traditional author, and input from a traditional publisher. Stay tuned!

If you have a free e-book you’re looking to promote and get to readers, or you’re just looking for a read, Finding Free E-Books is a good place to start.