AN IMMODEST PROPOSAL

I recently published a novel under my Magpie Press imprint, The Person Who Hated People, the 14^th work of fiction I have published.


 
Yes, I published it, which means that I self-published it. But I reject the current term “Self-published Author,” which stumbles out of so many tongues and trips not so lightly off the typing fingers of so many writers. My immodest proposal is that we drop this term and adopt, instead, Digital Indie Author.
 
Digital because most such works today exist because of the 21st-century digital technologies that have brought about print-on-demand books and eBooks. 
 
Indie because how more indie can you get than to do it yourself, controlling all aspects of the final product?
 
Author is self-explanatory. Or, at least, it should be. 
 
Self-published was a term established years ago when the only recourse authors had if traditional publishing houses had foolishly (or rightly) turned down the opportunity to bring their lovingly created works into the world was to go to an outfit like Vantage Press. It was an interesting name as it was so close to the generic handle that the trade had given to such fee-charging publishers, “Vanity Press.” In 1975, it could cost an author $4000 to have Vantage Press “publish” your book with a promise to market and promote it. But as they rarely, if ever, did market and promote your book, they were no more than a printing service, happy for this fee to print your book and let you then buy, at cost, many copies to store in your garage as you desperately tried to publicize your book and convince bookstores to order it. How many trees died to accommodate this scam? Although one can imagine that if an author wrote a non-fiction book of localized and specific information, such as Successful Seashell Gathering Along the Coast of Maine, that author might see some success marketing the book to independent bookstores along the Maine coast and even get some speaking gigs at libraries and Lions Clubs and Chambers of Commerce monthly meetings along the Maine coast. But if the poor (and likely to remain so) scribe wrote fiction—forget it.
 
In the past, each traditionally published book was born with the efforts of many people. First, someone had to write it. Which, of course, the author did. This was the only control the author had—producing a manuscript. Then, someone in a publishing house (big or small) had to get excited by the book’s artistic or commercial potential and purchase the publishing rights. Then, the publisher’s small army of dedicated professionals took on the various tasks of turning the manuscript into a book bound between covers, hard or soft. These included editing the manuscript, checking for spelling and grammatical errors, and advising on changes to the more literary aspects of form, style, storytelling logic, etc. Others designed and created the cover to be eye-catching as it sat on bookstores’ shelves or in paperback racks. The marketing department got busy positioning the book in the marketplace, tub-thumping it to retail buyers and the reading public, setting up a book tour for the author, TV and radio appearances, newspaper and magazine interviews, and general coverage. Then, the distribution machinery kicked in, getting the physical books to bookstores, drugstores, airport shops, etc. That was the only way to get books made, distributed, and, hopefully, sold to many happy readers, outside of going the “vanity” route.
 
The situation today is radically different. Not that it is that different for mainstream publishing, which still does all the above outside of marketing well every one of their titles—they now leave that to the authors themselves, except for their reliable bestselling scribes. However, it is different in that how it was done in the past is no longer the only way to get a book published. Today, an author can take advantage of many services, not the least being Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, to easily take their composition from manuscript to published book in eBook and print formats. How easily? Worldwide, in 2023, there were roughly 563,019 traditionally published books and 2.6 million self-published books with ISBNs. This at a time when book sales have hardly grown in the last 20 years. 
 
It must be faced: books are not high up on the ladder of this world’s important and popular cultural products. For that, look to television, film, and popular music. And yet, many people feel the call or need or ego-driven desire to put their thoughts, knowledge, and stories into words. For words—those little black bugs on white—seem, and may well be, the purest physical representation of their thoughts. We live in the world, but we exist in our thoughts. To invite people into our thoughts is, we hope, to ask people to love us. Or, at least, to get to know the extraordinary, talented, and intelligent people we are as intimately as we know ourselves to be. One does not write a book if one does not have a healthy ego.
 
Whether the book is by any objective measure (if there is such a thing) good to excellent as opposed to just okay to just awful, with the mundanely competent coming somewhere between, is another matter. What matters is that authors desire to see their works in a printed form that can be marketed and distributed to potential readers. How many readers then take their books in hand is a roll of the dice. 
 
What digital printing technologies have offered authors who publish themselves is admittance into the crap game.
 
But is it fair to scarlet-letter these authors with the epithet “Self-Published?” Yes, it is accurate, but it has a negative connotation. Such authors may be in the crap game, but they are not in the club, they have not gone through the initiation rites, and someone has not blessed them from above—they are not one of the chosen few. 
 
And yet, Virginia Woolf, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Jane Austin, Marcel Proust, Margaret Atwood, and Edgar Allan Poe all self-published books.
 
I suggest the term Digital Indie Author would be eminently fair and accurate. It is also newly born, so it has no history to taint it. Our culture has found things admirable in indie rock and indie films, so why not indie publishing?
 
Speaking of crap games, is it true that most, if not all, digital indie-published books are crap? Well, Sturgeon’s law (or Sturgeon’s revelation) states that “ninety percent of everything is crap.”

Theodore Sturgeon (1918-1985) was a science fiction author and critic who rankled over others in the literary world who declared that science fiction was crap. He contended that ninety percent of everything is crap, so what else is new? Let’s concentrate on the ten percent that isn’t. Does this hold for digital indie publishing? Most likely, if Sturgeon’s contention is accurate and not mere hyperbole. Even if it’s a too-generous assessment, it’s meaningless whether the ratio of crap is ninety percent or ninety-five percent, or ninety-nine and a third percent. And there is always the possibility that the crap percentage could be lower. Although, who could read 2.6 million digital indie books a year to find out?
 
In the current state of mainstream publishing, where gatekeepers abound and it’s tough to break into the club, digital indie publishing allows all authors to see their work in print in book form. It’s tough enough for all book publishing, mainstream to indie, to succeed, so why burden, nay curse, the indie author with S-P stitched onto their bodice or tee-shirt or hoodie? 
 
Let’s level out the playing field at least a little and let all die be cast.