crowdfunding | Self-Publishing Poll

ysabetwordsmith pointed out this poll on self-publishing, which I visited briefly. After reading a handful of the comments, I was struck by their violence: there's a lot of emotion there in the people denouncing the practice of self-publishing.

ysabetwordsmith said about that: "Any instance of extreme hostility raises the question of why people are being so violent about it."

I think that's a good question. Why do you think some of the people opposed to self-publishing are so hostile about it?

Edit: Please note, I'm not really interested in debating the profitability of the publishing industry. What I'm trying to understand, primarily, is why there's so much vitriol leveled by writers and readers at self-published authors (as in one of the commenters who said of self-published authors that they can "call themselves authors" but they never will be real ones). This kind of extreme behavior strikes me a strange. Particular coming from writers to other writers. And readers—that makes no sense at all. If they don't want to read self-published work, they can just... not read it. Why the anger?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I'm just not sure where you think the giant profits are. Yes, it's a hard business and hard decisions get made. On the other hand, they continue to publish me and I'm not a great seller by any means, I write weird and un-commercial things, and occasionally run off on my own and slap books up on the internet. It's not all about profits, any more than a business that needs to keep running always is. (Which it always was. There was never a time when everything was pure love and no one cared about profits.)

This. I am quite certain that my small, university-related press did not say, "Hey, yes, we would like to publish your book of poems" entirely without self-interest, but neither did they do so in the expectation of moving craptons of copies and getting me on Oprah.

You do not need to be in a business to make giant profits in order to be in a business to make money. There are many, many business that are purely profit-driven, yet only make modest sums past expenses.

As a reader, I am frequently frustrated because many of my favorite authors are no longer in print. I can only find their books at a local used bookstore, if I get lucky. And that's because of how the traditional publishers work. And traditional publishers work that way because they want to maximize what profits they get.

Well, sometimes it's because the author has not chosen to seek out another printing. In fact, that is very often the case.

Are ou saying that self-publishers, crowdfunders, and self-publishing companies like Lulu are not in it to make at least some money? What's wrong with making money with art?

No few of them are dead, now, sadly. It's hard to expand my knowledge of the history of a genre when the original authors are no longer around to ask for reprints, and the books are not yet old enough to be considered classic works of art.

Of course publishing companies (of all types) would like to make money... and with print on demand, if there is no demand, there is no printing. But if there is demand, then printing can be done, even if it's a small or obscure market.

But in a traditional publishing set up, if a book does not sell at least a certain percentage of the first print run or two, then there's no reason for a traditional publishing house to keep publishing it. Even if there is a small group interested, it will not keep up with the cost of the unsold books that are pulped.

Self-Publishing Poll

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