Re-Christening Self-publishing…

The post I made yesterday started some good discussions on my website, Facebook and at Office Hours in Second Life on Wednesday. The leading candidates as a viable alternative to the term self-publishing” were J. Steven York’s “Author Direct” and the idea of “Indie Publishing” (taking a nod from the music field). I liked my “Artisan publishing,” but someone at Office Hours noted that it sounded as if bread or muffins should go with each book sold. Since many a bake-sale is more profitable than self-publishing efforts, that idea has something going for it, but muffins are notoriously difficult to download. (They get stuck in the tubes.)

At office hours Robert E. Vardeman suggested “Vertically Integrated Publishing.” We all liked it. It describes exactly what we’re doing: cutting out the middleman to allow us to lower our prices to consumers while increasing our own profits. It sounds businesslike, which is a positive thing, indicating that we’re doing this not because we can’t be published elsewhere, but that we’re making this choice for sound business reasons. It also condenses down nicely into vipub for short; and can encompass everything from straight digital publishing, to physical publishing and multi-media treatments of a work.

One other very good point got made during the discussion. Self-publication does have a negative connotation to it, and one that we’re probably not going to be able to scrub off the term. Face it, modern professional publishing has spent the last century and a half making sure that we identify them as the gatekeepers and arbiters of what is good and what is not. Third-party publishing carries with it an aura of legitimacy even though we all know from countless examples that traditional publishers will publish crap if they think it will sell. I won’t point any fingers, but we all know that bestseller does not mean “best written,” that books that win literary prizes can be boring as sin (and often so obtuse as to be incomprehensible); and that books written to feed a fad tend to go down in quality as the market battle expands. (That’s the reason why fads have horrible crashes, as did techno-thrillers, the horror market and cyberpunk, just to name three.)

What will be required for vipub to gain legitimacy is for established authors to a) be up front about the fact that they’re putting this work out themselves and they’re proud of it and b) for those same authors to offer samples of their work so readers don’t go blindly into buying something. In essence, we tell the readers that what we’re offering is a high quality product, and use free samples to prove the validity of our claims. In doing that we build up trust between readers and writers which, when you think about it, is what you’re doing with everything you write anyway. And since vipub allows us to offer work at reasonable prices, readers are not going to be risking quite as much if something turns out to be a dud as far as they are concerned.

So there is the power of the Internet. Ask a question, get a great answer: Vipub-Vertically Integrated Publishing. It’s going to be up to us, in this time of transition, to shape the future, and giving it a name is a great first step.

(And, yes, another chapter down today.)