Self-Publishing

Nothing brings it home like an article in the New York Times. Reporting from Book Expo American in Washington, DC., the venerable NYT takes us into the heart of action, where publishers and authors court book sellers. But what was the headline? Not something dull, to be sure, but a banner trumpeting the success of a self-published author.

On writing forums all around the world, those who believe that vanity publishing will be their claim to fame are chattering with the like-minded. If Kathleen McGowan can do it, so can we, they declare. The NYT article opens with a snippet of her success, the fact that she was at BEA last year, racking up thousands of dollars in debt to garner a bit of book vendor attention, and here she is today, about to be published by a Big House.

No one ever said that a traditional publisher would NOT pick up a self-published novel, as long as it had respectable sales figures. Ms. McGowan plugged her tome through hard work, but the article does not delve into that aspect of the quest for publication.

Unfortunately, the vanity press crowd may be too dazzled to read on, to hear what a book store owner has to say about the self-published.

Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books, an independent store in Coral Gables, Fla., and Miami Beach, said he liked to trawl the exhibition floor looking for interesting titles. But self-published books, he said, gave him pause. "There is a validity," he said, "to the selection process" of a known publisher.

There were other self-published writers in attendance, all trying to catch the eye of the vendor who would put their work on a shelf in a brick and mortar. Mr. Noe, who has sunk $200,000 into publishing the scribblings of men in jail, was failing to attract so much as a nibble for his offerings. Not much interest out there for the musings of the incarcerated, it would appear.

And then there are those who fervently believe in what they have produced, and do not see (or choose not to see) the rolling of eyes from the target audience. Steve Brown was there with 1,000 copies of his magnum opus, in which he refutes many fallacies about the Bible, like the actual number of animals that Noah took on the Ark. Entertaining reading, that is. He's spending thousands of dollars to get his work published, and now he'll have Kathleen McGowan's success to hang his hat on.

For every one who makes it there are countless thousands who shell out money and get nothing back. The vanity presses will play up the rare case and ignore the most common outcome, but they are in it to make money. Publishing is a business, and it's caveat emptor all the way.