Publishing in Today’s World, Part 1

Mary Ellen and I were at the pool last night. Both of us are writers - she of academic texts, and both of us are publishers - she owns Atlantic Path Publishing. We both do water aerobics and swim as well. We met in the pool and, despite having done business together on land, get a lot of work done in the pool, too.

We were talking about publishing, micro-publishing, and credibility.

The publishing world today is incomprehensible to me. Most of the big New York houses, it is rumored, are really owned by one huge conglomeration out of Germany which has low regard for the reading tastes of the American public. If you look at the quality of many of the book being promoted by the BNYP (Big New York Publishers) it isn’t hard to believe that rumor. I can’t tell you how many books I have purchased in the last few years that were highly publicized and found them virtually unreadable.

It happened yesterday - I received a recent order from Amazon, a novel that had glowing, five star reviews including a cover blurb from one of my favorite authors calling it “riveting”. I’d had a busy day and was looking forward to an hour on the beach lost in this book. Twenty-five pages into it I realized I was forcing myself to read. The prose was insipid and trite, the characters were totally wooden as though plucked from The Writer’s Guide to Pre-Designed Characters (if there is such a thing which I suspect there is), and the plot - well, I kept waiting to see evidence that there was one. I gave up, went to the pool and complained to Melissa about it. A lot.

Melissa worked in a couple BNYPs before moving here and starting her own micro-press. She is a member of several professional organizations for small, independent presses and is very committed to advancing the credibility of small presses. I admire her research and comprehensive knowledge of the subject. Here in Gloucester alone we know of at least six micro-presses which publish everything from academic supplements (Melissa’s) to fiction, non-fiction, poetry and anthologies. She agrees that the BNYPs are hard to comprehend these days. They publish a tiny fraction of the work submitted to them, publicize a small fraction of that, and claim that they only make money on 40% of the work they do publish.

Thanks to the era of print-on-demand technology and affordable desktop publishing, many writers have started their own presses. Marketing and distribution is handled over the internet and, while they rarely sell as many books as the BNYPs do, their profit margin per unit is higher, and they can keep their books in print as long as they have the energy and the interest to do that. The issue is quality.

There have always been vanity presses, publishers whose only standard is that you can pay them to print your book. Today companies like ExLibris and iUniverse have taken the vanity press a step further by allowing potential authors to purchase higher end book design and some marketing and distribution tools the old vanity presses never had. The problem is quality. There is no more editorial control on these books than there was on the vanity presses. The books get cranked out with no regard for content. However, after my experience reading yesterday, I wonder if it is any different in the BNYPs anymore.

Ever since getting the idea for Parlez-Moi Press I have been toying with these ideas - to publish or not to publish? Lila’s book has done well. Am I brave enough to risk doing one of my own? In recent years independent film-making has gained respect and followers. Perhaps it is time for independent publishing to follow their lead. Getting a book into published form doesn’t mean much anymore - whether done through a BNYP or an online POD. It’s no guarantee of quality. But the time seems right for small presses, committed to high literary value and opposed to manufactured “literature”, to gain a following.

Us bibliophiles can only hope....

Thanks for reading.