This might seem like a dumb question, but I’m going to ask it anyway: why hasn’t self-publishing upended the traditional publishing world? Or at least threatened to do so soon?
You might say: but it has! After all, Fifty Shades of Grey was initially self-published, and it has surely had a larger impact on American letters than anything the Pulitzer Prize committee has tried to stan.
And yet, isolated viral BDSM chronicles aside, you would be hard pressed to find a “serious” author, either establish or aspiring, who would even think about publishing their own work.
This, despite a plethora of tools that make it exceptionally easy to publish an e-book, as well as print-on-demand books, which really aren’t as shabby as you’d think.
Even ten years ago, this wouldn’t have been an interesting inquiry. But as I see it today, we now live in a world where the cool (and possibly most lucrative) thing to do as an aspiring media personality is launch your own podcast or newsletter or YouTube. And yet, all the aspiring fiction writers I know are still chasing after NYC agents and traditional publishing deals.
Elsewhere, the trend is clear, and it’s not just individual producers who are making the leap into new platforms and mediums: there’s upstart media companies being routinely created around either one mega show or a constellation of offerings.
As someone whose day job is working for a media company that started as an Instagram and has since raised and made millions, I feel pretty confident in saying A) it’s possible to build a media business online! and B) there is something of a tried-and-true path. Doesn’t mean it’s easy, but the formula is essentially: create content to capture attention. Monetize that attention through ads (or candy bars, or subscriptions, or merch).
Whatever you think of individual podcasters, newsletter writers, and various “content creators,” they have at least proven that there is a viable alternative to the traditional world of building an audience in tandem with a firm, whether that be the NYT or the PR department at a given publishing house.
But when it comes to “online” writers, especially on Twitter/Substack, you seem to only have two basic camps: those who were already famous and well-read (e.g. Joyce Carol Oates, prolific Tweeter; or Chuck Palahniuk on Substack). And then you have a second camp of Twitter avatars who spend all day squabbling over the latest essay in Bookforum.
The first use the internet to support their already-established careers. The second chase clout as a substitute for a career.
What’s notable about this second group is just how little they produce outside of their content. I’m talking here about the essayists with “Bylines in [list of legacy publications few people actually read]” as well as the Twitter proles beneath them who publish lists of their favorite books, quotes from famous authors, moody photos of Raymond Carver, etc. Maybe someone in this class of the aspiring online will get an essay published in the New Yorker. Maybe they’ll get a book out on an independent press. But so far as I know, there’s no one who has been able to bootstrap an ongoing literary career even after building a sizable online audience or reputation. (Even the Cat Person person has managed a measly single short-story collection, seven years after going extremely viral and having lots of money shoveled at her.)
My point isn’t just to shit on people who spend too much time online and not enough producing (because, well, who am I to talk). Really, I’m just noticing that in all of these other entertainment-related domains, you now have an excess of people who have managed to build a career using the internet to go directly to their consumers. And in the literary world, that just hasn’t been the case.
Where does self-publishing fit into this? Theoretically, it seems like a new career path should be opening up for the aspiring writer of serious fiction: publish online, promote online, rinse and repeat.
Each of these steps is obviously difficult and taxing. And there’s no guarantee you’ll ever make money (which is true of traditional publishing as well). But why isn’t there someone cranking out short stories on their Substack, posting excerpts on Twitter, and then self-publishing the entire collection on Amazon Direct?
Even for authors who get an initial book deal — why aren’t they supplementing that by self-publishing novellas, or travel memoirs, or even just their assorted journals? These are both A) all things that writers in the past used to write all the time and B) notoriously not things the traditional publishing world is that interested in, making the self-publishing route even more of a no-brainer.
The honest answer may simply be that people are trying. There just isn’t enough money in this racket anymore.
But more common, to my eyes, are the aspiring novelists who are still hoping to get an agent (who will then get them a book deal), and who are using Twitter to just waste time while they wait.
The promise of traditional publishing has typically been A) an advance, though those are dwindling, from what I hear, and B) promotion. But talking to people both in and around the industry, it seems like most authors are left to promote their own work themselves. They have to pursue the miscellaneous interviews and appearances which, in the end, probably aren’t worth the squeeze.
So why does the traditional model persist? Part of it may be academia. Most “serious fiction” writers, if you haven’t noticed, are professors somewhere. Getting published by a well-known entity, even if it doesn’t pay well in itself, at least helps them advance in their day job.
Another cynical answer would be that, if you took all the literary imprints and lumped them into a singular business, Literary America Corp is probably losing a decent amount of money. (I know from someone inside the industry that a certain recent Pulitzer-winner for fiction has never published a single profitable book.) Most of these literary imprints are housed within larger publishing firms, which make their money on less niche offerings. They continue to produce serious fiction because it’s good for their reputation, and because it appeases internal stakeholders who are usually themselves quite serious readers.
Even if you don’t think self-publishing can or will be all that disruptive, it’s worth asking why there’s been no real outside threat to the traditional publishing model, in the way there has been, to say, newspapers. I mean, it’s still basically a few people in New York in charge of the whole thing — which itself may be the answer.
The industry may simply be too small and relationship-based to either be easily or profitably disrupted. Serious fiction may persist as a cultish activity, to borrow from the late Philip Roth, and that cult may just insist that the proper, trendy thing to do remains getting an agent who can get you a deal. Then you try to get reviewed in the same old zombie publications that have no real influence on the broader culture today. And hopefully it’s enough to sell enough copies that the imprint isn’t too much of a drag on the larger publishing house. And then everyone — from the writers, to the editors, to the readers themselves — can at least feel good for supporting real art, even if we know we’re all basically the musicians on the deck of the Titanic, playing only for ourselves.
But what if you wrote things people wanted to read? Wouldn’t you want to meet them where they are?
Today, they’re either online, or they’re nowhere at all.