ozarque has astutely observed that "Most fights are about who's in charge."
If a writer humbly submits their manuscript to other people, they're putting those people in charge. The author is always begging for favors -- read this, accept this, buy this, stamp me as Worthy -- unless they become so wildly popular that the scales tip. This power dynamic is what encourages so many publishers to treat writers badly: they know that most of those writers will take it, because they have accepted the system.
A writer who walks away from that table and self-publishes is telling them, "You're not in charge. *I* am in charge, and this book will sink or swim on my hard work and its own efforts. And after I have paid for its manufacture, I will be pocketing the profits myself. Thank you and good-bye." Well, nobody likes to be told that they're not important, they're not needed, their opinions are irrelevant, and they are not welcome. A writer who self-publishes is sort of firing the publishing industry and saying he or she can do better going it alone. That's a glove in the face.
Most of the time, self-publishing doesn't yield very good results, because almost all of it is done by people who don't know what they're doing. The publishers could actually relax about that; it helps their cause by producing spectactularly awful books. But to maintain their bottleneck, they must attack the alternatives, and especially anything that might actually be successful. It's one reason they change their tune when a self-published book becomes wildly successful; they run to the author and say, "Oh, we'll let you be in our club now," and almost all self-published authors will take that bait. Then it's like, that was an accident, that book should never have been self-published because it was really good enough to be a real book all along.
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Hmm...
Date: 2010-02-21 04:54 pm (UTC)If a writer humbly submits their manuscript to other people, they're putting those people in charge. The author is always begging for favors -- read this, accept this, buy this, stamp me as Worthy -- unless they become so wildly popular that the scales tip. This power dynamic is what encourages so many publishers to treat writers badly: they know that most of those writers will take it, because they have accepted the system.
A writer who walks away from that table and self-publishes is telling them, "You're not in charge. *I* am in charge, and this book will sink or swim on my hard work and its own efforts. And after I have paid for its manufacture, I will be pocketing the profits myself. Thank you and good-bye." Well, nobody likes to be told that they're not important, they're not needed, their opinions are irrelevant, and they are not welcome. A writer who self-publishes is sort of firing the publishing industry and saying he or she can do better going it alone. That's a glove in the face.
Most of the time, self-publishing doesn't yield very good results, because almost all of it is done by people who don't know what they're doing. The publishers could actually relax about that; it helps their cause by producing spectactularly awful books. But to maintain their bottleneck, they must attack the alternatives, and especially anything that might actually be successful. It's one reason they change their tune when a self-published book becomes wildly successful; they run to the author and say, "Oh, we'll let you be in our club now," and almost all self-published authors will take that bait. Then it's like, that was an accident, that book should never have been self-published because it was really good enough to be a real book all along.