While working on these things I’ve skipped social engagements, time spent with friends, and other fun things that I’d like to do. Most of my friends are creative people, but I’ve realized that the reason I get stuff out the door and they never seem to finish, is because I’m at home working while they are out having fun. When I do go out with them and we end up talking about projects, the sentiments they always express are things like, “I just don’t have the time to work projects as much as I’d like to.”

Well, neither do I. But the difference between me and them is that I can say it with a straight face, because I work my goddamn ass off to ship.

I’ve always been a huge proponent of free content, because I feel like it enriches the world. And I’ve given tons of things away for free while I was learning and getting better. But I’ve always known in the back of my mind that this day would come. While working on Tune and s.k. I’ve realized that these are the best things I’ve ever created. And I just can’t give them away for free. I’m my own worst critic – some of the things I’ve written I gave away for free because I knew in the back of my mind that they weren’t good enough to ask people to pay for them. But Tune and s.k. are good – they approach professional caliber work. They are worth more than free. The long hours I spent on them are worth more than free.

Beyond that, there is one other reason that I can no longer afford to give away my stuff for free – student debt. I have tons of it, more than I’d like to admit. I made some dumb choices in college and now I’m paying for them. Student debt is the only debt I have – I own my car and have worked diligently in the past six months to pay off those blood-sucking parasites at the credit card company. But my student debt still hangs over my head like a guillotine. I need to get rid of it. And even though I doubt that I’ll make much from my work, all the time I spend working on projects needs to help release me from this sickness. And debt is a sickness, make no mistake.

I mentioned in a previous post that I thought people should give things away for free if they can afford it. I still believe that. However, as I look down the barrel at years of student debt, I’ve realized that I can no longer afford to give my work away for free. The projects I gave away for free took a long time, but the better I get at writing, the longer things take. It’s reaching for that last 10 percent that doubles the hours. From now on I’ll be charging my work.

Don’t worry – this new stuff is awesome. If I was a reader I would pay for it, and I can say that with a straight face.

The overall winner for generating hits is Scribd.com. They were gracious enough to feature my work once I put it up there. That front page bump really helps.

3,556 “Reads”
413 Downloads
8 5-Stars (including one by Scribd’s CEO)
9 Comments
1 Featured Award
1 Rising List Award

The next is Feedbooks, which is a pain to upload to, since all 134 sections of the book have to be put up separately. It took me about two hours to upload the whole thing, but I did it because I like that the site makes converting to other formats and downloading to mobile phones either. Work on Feedbooks grows slowly as your work falls from the “Recently Uploaded” page and moves up the “New and Popular page. It usually peeks around day 10 after uploading, so the first two days aren’t a great tell, but here they are anyway:

129 Downloads

Last, there is my site. Not many people take the work from my site since it’s only available in PDF, but I want to include it anyway.

16 Downloads

So there it is, the first 48 hours. Soon I will go through the lame process of removing all the tabs from my work so I can put it up on Smashwords. I also plan to release it via bit torrent, on Mininova, since I had good luck with that site when I released my tech poetry, which, to date, has been downloaded 2,797 times from that site alone.

I left out Wattpad this time around and will probably take my work down from there soon, since I’ve gotten less than 100 views or downloads from that site in the whole time I’ve had my work up there. I guess I just don’t participate in the social networking of that site enough to get good returns. Or I’m not writing vampire fiction. It’s probably a mix of both.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who made the first 48 hours a success!

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!