A book is a book, is a book ... or is it?
Posted on Thursday, October 9, 2008
Book production is flat — no, wait — “stunning,” according to 2007 ’s preliminary figures from R. R. Bowker’s Books in Print database. The difference depends on what counts as a book.
U. S. publishers turned out about 276, 649 new titles the traditional way, in which the publisher pays the writer, about the same as in 2006.
But the number of print-on-demand and short-run (small press run ) books showed a “staggering” five-fold increase to 134, 733, Bowker reports. Print-on-demand includes books that some writers pay to have published and sold online.
“Plenty of avenues exist for writers to see their work published outside of the traditional route,” Writer’s Digest magazine assures, amid ads that promise: “Reject the rejection letter.” “ Your book, your way. ”
Self-publishing is old as Henry David Thoreau’s no-frills philosophies in the 1800 s — and new as Christopher Paolini’s fantasy novel, Eragon, which took off like a dragon.
The old image of vanity publishing was the guy who went broke to fill his garage with boxes of his own books. But new technology can make self-published books available on Amazon. com and Barnes & Noble online, www. barnesandnoble. com.
Fort Smith writer Clay McKinney, 36, self-published his story collection, Element, with iUniverse (other print-on-demand publishers include Xlibris and Lulu ), and tells why:
“This all started as a way to put some of my stories into a nice, neat package for friends and family,” he says. “But it grew from there, especially after ‘Duplicity’ [a story in the collection ] placed third in the National Writers Association’s contest.” McKinney has other, fulllength books in the works that he expects to “take the traditional route,” but self-publishing has been “interesting,” he says, “and very exciting.”
THE OTHER PAGE Self-published books still have many of their old disadvantages. Book stores generally don’t stock them. Reviewers by and large dismiss them — as does the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Sunday Books section — and the open question is whether they count as books at all. Bowker, for example, “is excluding this output from its traditional reporting.” Self-publishing “bypasses the editors and marketplace,” Little Rock writer Darcy Pattison says. Sometimes, it makes sense. She self-published her book, Novel Metamorphosis, to sell at the writers’ retreats where she teaches.
Most books, though, have to stand the test of a tough commercial market to get much attention.
Books “archive the best of our culture,” especially fiction, Pattison says. “If you want to enter the marketplace with a piece of fiction, the bar is still very high.”
In the SFWA Bulletin (trade journal of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America ), Hugo Award-winner Mike Resnick reports dismay from the recent World Science Fiction Convention in Denver. He describes the place full of writers trying to sell table loads of books they spent their own money to publish.
“They were so clueless,” he objects, “they thought this was the way we all started.”
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