Howey: Self- vs. traditional publishing = false equivalence

[Nerds_feather]

Rather, he argues, the choice writers face is between self-publishing and submitting to an agent. His argument:

One reminder that I’ve blogged about at length is that most books don’t sell very many copies. And that’s okay. It’s not a self-publishing thing; it’s a publishing thing. 98% of manuscripts submitted to agents never get published at all. They don’t sell a single copy. Nobody mentions this when they deride self-publishing as an option. The false premise seems to be that you can choose to self-publish, or you can choose to have your book on an endcap in every bookstore while you are sent on a 12-city tour by your publisher. That’s not the choice. The choice is to self-publish or submit to an agent. This is the choice.


If you self-publish, you can immediately move on to writing the next work. You don’t have to look back at all if you don’t want. You have the rest of your life to promote that work, if you decide to promote it at all. If you are one of the 1% to secure an agent, the earliest you might see that work in a bookstore is a year. More likely, it’ll be three to five years. And you’ll be asked to rewrite that work, not based on any artistic vision, but based on what’s currently selling, what publishers are currently looking for.

NOTE: I'm not endorsing this view, but see it as a possible springboard for conversation.

 

[Bick]

The argument seems to address only one reason that books sent to agents are not published, i.e. that they don't meet a current niche market need (and that you can obviate this fashion bias by self-publishing). There is a large white elephant in the room though. I think most works sent to publishers for traditional publication are probably rejected because they're not very good. Self publishing will get your book out there, but without the editing, correcting, rewrite requirements, and advice that might bring it up to par. And many may be beyond help. In a sense Howey's argument has some validity, but only for those works that are unusually good but are being overlooked for spurious reasons. I suspect such works are in the minority.

 

[TheDustyZebra]

I think there are definitely some valid arguments there. It's true that it's usually put forth as a choice between self-publishing and professional publishing, when the choice (for most people) is more often between self-publishing and not publishing.

I especially like this bit:

Why don’t we approach literature like we approach music and the fine arts? Yes, there is a commitment when it comes to time and money. Yes, the chances of “making it” are slim. But with music, photography, and the fine arts, we “self produce” while we grow our audience and hone our craft. We work our way up, rather than break out. We love what we do, and we dream of making a living doing it, but it isn’t necessary.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

There are some good points in that article, but he, too, is setting up a false equivalence. Getting an agent (or trying to get an agent) doesn't stop you from self-publishing if you can't get a publisher to pick up the book. So it's not really a simple either/or. There are many different scenarios possible. Once you self-publish, you limit your options.

And if an agent asks you for a rewrite for commercial reasons rather than artistic ones, you can always say no.

 

[tinkerdan]

It seems that the point he is making is that, if you have written a book, you can send it to an agent and there is the same chance of his representing you and your book as there is that someone will buy it if you self publish it.

He might be a bit off about the value of the end-cap in a brick and mortar.

But I think that what he's highlighting is that if you can't get an agent you can always go the self publish route.

The counter argument that you can't get an agent because it is crap is probably erroneous. But I'm not an agent or publisher and I would have to at least listen to the agent or publisher who tried to explain that he reads all submissions and always publishes the good work while rejecting the crap.

 

[TheDustyZebra]

But I'm not an agent or publisher and I would have to at least listen the the agent or publisher who tried to explain that he reads all submissions and always publishes the good work while rejecting the crap.

I'm not an agent or a publisher, but I would have to be highly skeptical of any who claimed that he reads all submissions and always publishes the good work while rejecting the crap.

There are both (1) crap getting published, and (2) good works going unpublished. However, there are likely more of both being self-published, simply based on volume. Publishers have only so much money and time.

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

The vast majority of what agents and traditional publishers turn down is unequivocally bad, and it isn't necessary to read more than a few pages to figure that out.

There is a difference between didn't read it at all and reading the whole thing.

As for whether publishers are in the habit of publishing bad books: show me a "bad" book that was published by a large publishing house that doesn't have a large following of readers who think it is wonderful. Such books have something that appeals to readers. There is something there that speaks to a wide number of readers, even if the rest of us see faults. And are those books really bad, or are they staggeringly mediocre? Would anyone be complaining about how bad they were if they weren't raking in the money?

 

[Brian G Turner]

I'm just glad I never listened to Hugh Howey - I thought I'd completed my WIP in 2001, but with hindsight, it was nothing more than a first draft.

A very badly overwritten one at that.

Of course, that didn't stop me thinking that I was a creative genius, on a par with Shakespeare, and that I was going to revolutionise the fantasy genre.

Luckily, my first couple of crits on chrons suggested that I learn what POV was, and that 15k words was probably a bit long for a first chapter - as was 700k for a book.

It took about 10 years to get back into writing, partly because real life kept me busy, but also because I accepted I didn't know how to write and needed to learn.

Heck, I submitted a manuscript to Teresa last year, thinking I was almost there - and was roundly rebuffed.

However, I had an epiphany moment a couple of months ago. I found myself able to naturally write in a direct and concise way that could account for conflict and character development - thanks to Teresa's prompting.

I only now think that I've almost cracked it for commercial standard fiction writing - but am aware there is always something to learn.

If I'd listened to Howey, I'd be stuck in my original mentality, thinking that I was an artiste, and damned the world if they didn't understand great literature.

Considering that Howey thinks it takes 3-5 years to get a completed novel published, I suspect he demonstrates his own naivety and lack of understanding of the industry in this piece.

He's a good short story writer, and has been exceedingly lucky to become a bestseller. But IMO his experience is extraordinary-yet he seems to think that it should be the norm.

PS - Will move this to the Publishing board, as it's probably more relevant there.

 

[Tirellan]

This argument also seems to be equating getting an agent with getting published by a traditional publisher. There are plenty of books taken on by agents that do not get picked up by traditional publishers; some are excellent, most are better than most self-published books.

 

[chopper]

Howey appears to me to be something of a "look at me, aren't i wonderful, demolishing all known paradigms" one-note tune. you're either self-published, or stupid! you're either for Amazon, or you're stupid! this sort of trolling doesn't endear me to him. and i agree with Bick - just because you've written something, it doesn't mean it automatically deserves to be published.

 

[FibonacciEddie]

... There is a large white elephant in the room though. I think most works sent to publishers for traditional publication are probably rejected because they're not very good. Self publishing will get your book out there, but without the editing, correcting, rewrite requirements, and advice that might bring it up to par....

Agreed ... there is a big chasm between 'good' and 'good enough'

The question for me (at least) is how long to hawk my 'current best' work around the agent/publisher route (knowing it is not as good as if I redid it from scratch) ... or should I simply take what I have learnt and spend that energy on the next project ...
... particularly true of Manuscript 1

 

[Brian G Turner]

The question for me (at least) is how long to hawk my 'current best' work around the agent/publisher route (knowing it is not as good as if I redid it from scratch) ... or should I simply take what I have learnt and spend that energy on the next project ...
... particularly true of Manuscript 1

Once you reach 30 posts, you can post your first 1500 words in the Critiques section for feedback.

 

[psychotick]

Hi,

I tend to agree with Hugh on this. Maybe I'm biased being an idie, but even so there is sense in his words.

Look the guts of it is this. You write a book and then you have two choices - self pub or go to an agent / publisher. Yes you can do both or else just put it on a shelf and give up - but lets not complicate things. So his choice dichotemy is correct from the writers perspective.

I as a writer don't have a choice between self pubbing and trade pubbing, because the reality is that I don't have the ability to make my book trade pubbed. I can only try to get an agent etc and hope. But I can absolutely self pub.

As for sales well it's really a no brainer isn't it. Most self pubbed books won't sell many copies - that's not in dispute. Most books that are trade pubbed will sell more copies. That's not in dispute either. However what seems to keep being overlooked is that most books (99%?) that are sent out to agents in the hope of being trade published will not sell a single copy at all.

Bick, I'm sure you're right most books sent to agents are not of a standard and will be rejected. And some of them will undoubtedly eventually be self pubbed. Now here's where things get interesting. Before I self pubbed I went the agent route and got my series of rejections. And no argument that the book was not up to par then. It was also off fashion as well. But the one thing that I never got from a single agent was a letter saying - "well here's the problems with your book." So all I did was spend three years achieving nothing.

Then Thief was self pubbed in 2010. It didn't sell well, but I still got some reviews and feedback. With that I was able to go through rewrites and edits, cover design, blurb work and put it out again as a far better book. Now it still doesn't sell well (it's in a strange genre) but it does sell.

And moreover the feedback I got and the rewriting etc etc, made my next book a much better book - and Maverick has sold around 5k copies without any publicity.

So the reality is that if I hadn't originally gone indie in 2010 with Thief, I would now presumably be still without a single sale or a single dollar seen from my writing.

The plain fact of the matter is that going the traditional route is for the most part simply sitting on your arse achieving nothing. A few may be lucky enough to get feedback. (Hell in my case only half of the agents I submitted to even bothered to say no let alone give me any feedback.) And a few freakishly lucky as well as talented people may even get an agent and a deal etc. But the vast majority will never even have the luxury of even getting told what if anything is wrong with their book.

Cheers, Greg.

 

[Mouse]

You don't have to have an agent to be trad-published. I don't have an agent.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

And you can also self-publish if you have an agent, many are open to a hybrid career:

Bent on Books: A Peek at the Hybrid Author: Choosing to Self-Publish

I'm glad I ddin't self-publish my first book as I planned to. I'm glad I fought for an agent through the 100s of rejections - I was about to start the trawl again with a new book when I got an offer.

The thing is, what I don't think we realise when we're subbing is the agents are up against the same as us: selling a book to publishers. They don't earn until they do. They won't offer unless they think you can write the book, rewrite it to hone it, behave yourself on line, and write the darn thing again.

Seeking an agent taught me perserverance; getting one has taught me discipline. I suspect getting published will teach me something else. Being self-pubbed would teach me something else again, I'm sure, and I'd never rule it out. Whether any of them will pay me remains to be seen....

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

Yes you can do both or else just put it on a shelf and give up - but lets not complicate things. So his choice dichotemy is correct from the writers perspective.

But it is complicated, which is why some of us do not see his dichotomy as correct.

But the one thing that I never got from a single agent was a letter saying - "well here's the problems with your book." So all I did was spend three years achieving nothing.

It is not their job to tell you what is wrong with your book, but I am sure you know that. But it is the reason why writers groups exist. Once you'd gotten a few rejections and figured out that it might just be that your book still needed a lot of work, you could have looked for a good group that would give you the same type of feedback you have been getting as a self-published writer.

Or perhaps you were already a member of a good writers group while you were subbing your book, in which case your three years were not wasted. If you were not a member of a group and working on improving your skills as a writer, or getting feedback from Beta readers and improving your skills, and were just sitting there waiting for an agent to sign you up and make you rich, then that was your mistake, not submitting your work to agents.

There are a lot of other things you could have been doing during those three years. (And actually, I suspect that you were doing some of them, and by representing yourself as having done nothing but wait you are not doing yourself justice.)

The fact is, it is endlessly complicated, and anyone who tries to break it down into an either/or, whatever that either/or might be is doing aspiring writers a disservice.

They won't offer unless they think you can write the book, rewrite it to hone it, behave yourself on line, and write the darn thing again.

Actually, most would prefer that the book was already ready to send out to publishers. And that is part of what makes it complicated. There are all sorts of agents. Some who are willing to work with writers to help them become better. And others who concentrate their efforts solely on selling books for a large client list.

 

[Fishbowl Helmet]

Howey's not that far off with his timeline. The high side sounds way off, but the low side, not so much. If you rush things you can get a book from day one with a publisher to the shelf in about 18 months (in the States at least). I have no experience with the turn around time of an agent receiving a book then getting it sold to a publisher though.

As almost always, Teresa's right about the quality of stuff that comes to the agents and editors. You can easily tell in the first paragraph if something's terrible. The screaming vast majority (99%) of stuff submitted is unpublishable crap. The secret most novices don't want to hear is that the agents and editors are dying to read something good for a change. The "secret" most self-publishers don't want to talk about is a good hunk of that 99% ends up on Kindle Direct.

The trouble with the self- vs trad- debate is that it's a false dichotomy from start to finish. They're simply not the same thing on a real, fundamental level. Yes, trad publishing puts out books that writer types don't like or hold their noses at, but that stuff still sells. But at least with trad there's some measure of quality control attempted. Not that it's done perfectly or well, but at least it's there. With self- you're rolling the dice. Anyone can publish anything. Which is great. Till it's not. Yeah, I know gatekeepers are evil, but by and large they do a fairly good job at feeding my addiction to books of decent quality.

 

[tinkerdan]

This debate will go on for a long time and I think that it could be distilled down more easily if we recognized what it is as opposed to what some would want us to believe it is.

By that I mean that many arguments want us to believe that its an Apples vs Oranges thing. When at best its really and Apples off the tree at home vs Processed Apples.
Processed apples have fewer worms. That doesn't always make them the best because you have to rely on every level of the process that the people handling it will be getting that same perfect ripe taste you get when you manage to pull one off the tree and find the best one in the batch.

There are differences in the process but the apples all come from the same basic place.

Slushpile-to agent-to publisher [via fast editing capabilities-if they use them all]-to the market-to the consumer.

Slushpile-to the market-to the consumer.

Now since it's already been argued that a simple read of the first paragraph will tell us if the works is worthwhile or not--even though we have a vast pile to go through--it's not necessarily a daunting task. It's just more work than if we could rely on someone to do our slushpile read for us.

You could argue that the consumer wouldn't know how to do this, but I would submit that since the agent and publisher are doing this for the consumer and seem to think they have the finger on the pulse of the consumer then it's really the consumer who is doing this anyway.

One advantage the traditional publisher has today is the bank of authors who have been tried and true to pull from[the same bank that gets pulled from first before they go to the slush pile for more.] So you would hope they realize that they need to treat those writers like the farmer would his best apple orchard. Presently the publisher has the resources to cost effectively bring the finished product with all the GMO advantages.

The self publisher doesn't have some of those advantages readily available so it's more of a raw product.

But, the sample process allows the consumer a larger than necessary sample to raw slushpile for them to make their decision. So for the consumer that doesn't mind going through the slushpile Self-publishing really is not quite as horrible as it seems.[There still is the possibility that you will find a worm.]

For those readers who don't have time to read those first pages they can rely on the traditional publisher although it does seem odd that that reader still will spend a large portion of time checking the sample first. There will be the advantage that when you find the product you want it might be more consistent throughout. [no readily visible worms]

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

Now since it's already been argued that a simple read of the first paragraph will tell us if the works is worthwhile or not--even though we have a vast pile to go through--it's not necessarily a daunting task. It's just more work than if we could rely on someone to do our slushpile read for us.

The first paragraph will tell when it is definitely not worthwhile. A lot of writers will complain, "But they never even read the book." (As if they would know if it was read or not.) When the truth is that the agent or editor read quite enough to tell. But the more likely it is to be worthwhile, the more pages an agent or a publisher has to read to make a decision. Or (in this day of ebooks) for the reader to make a decision if they download a sample first.

These days, I am downloading a lot of samples to my Kindle Fire, and with most of them I can decide whether I don't want to go any further after reading only two or three pages -- sometimes it's just a matter of taste, and I know it, sometimes it's because the book promises to be very, very bad. But this does allow me to do what only slush pile readers could do before and discover new writers I might never have had a chance to read otherwise. Among these have been some self-published writers, whose books I really, really liked.

Which I think is wonderful. But I do wonder when I find one of those books, usually by someone who hadn't the confidence to submit their book to a traditional publisher, whether it might not have been published by a traditional publisher if they had submitted it to agents before they tried self-publishing, and if I might not have found the book and enjoyed it that way.

For me, as a writer, making money from my writing basically buys me more writing time -- it's time that I don't have to spend earning the money I need doing something else. So when, as a reader, I find a book I love by a self-published author, one of the books that I think might have been published by a traditional publisher if they had ever been given the chance to read it and publish it, then I have to wonder if the writer might not have made more money that way, and so had time to write many more books that I would have loved to read.

 

[psychotick]

Hi Teresa,

Yes and no. I was doing other things during those years where I was submitting my book to agents. But I don't know that many of those other things were helping my writing particularly. Mainly I was just writing things that I wanted to write with no real crit from anyone. And I might point out that that was the early naughties - say 01 to 03. It wasn't until seven years later that I was able to self pub.

And yes, I know that it's not an agent's job to crit a book. I don't blame them for that. I am annoyed that probably half of them never even bothered to write a short note to say no - but that's another matter.

But really my point is that I spent ten years with my writing essentially going nowhere simply because self publishing was not a possibility. (Well boutique maybe - but even I'm not that stupid.) And I feel for all those who are now going through the same thing. Desperately trying to get an agent and a trade publishing deal, waiting for rejection letters that half the time don't come and of course crits from agents that almost never come.

And when I read Brian's post I damn near wept. (Sorry Brian.) I don't know why your book didn't get picked up. But the scary thing is that I don't think you do either. You're guessing. I don't say this as a mean thing. This is just the reality of living in a vacuum of feedback. Now you've sat there and decided that it was for reasons x.y and z, and for all I know you may well be right. But you could equally be wrong. And how terrible would it be if you found out another five years from now that no - it wasn't x,y, or z that was the reason? It was that the agents were busy, they had a mountain of other manuscrpts to look at and they could only take one, your book was a little off topic or in a genre they didn't like, or they simply didn't like the writing style. Or worse that all those things that you "improved" over all those years, were things that you shouldn't have.

I'm not going to tell you you have to go indie and push your boat into the water. And if you do I can't tell you whether you'll sail or sink. I can't tell you whether your work is good or bad, saleable or not. But I can tell you this. You don't have the choice to go trade. Hugh is right, that is a myth. A badly worded option. You have the choice to try and go trade. But you absolutely do have the choice to go indie.

And if you do you'll finally get some feedback (hopefully) from the people that matter in this game - the readers. It may be good or it may be bad. It may well be a little of both, somethimes neither and occasionally something completely different. (Believe me completely different happens more often than you would expect in this game.) But at least you'll be in the sea, sailing with a star to steer by.

Because the last thing you (or anyone else) should want is to spend another ten years sitting on the shore saying "my book's not good enough". Or worse changing things because you think that's why it hasn't been picked up.

To probably misquote the German dramatacist Wolfgang von Goethe - More light, bring me more light! And light is what every author needs in this business.

Cheers, Greg.