Trendsurfing: Publishing-on-demand
By David Rowan
In the old days if you thought you had a book in you, you'd eagerly fire it off to the publishers and then fall dejectedly over a pile of rejection slips. No longer. Just as blogging and podcasting have let anyone reinvent themselves as a prospective media star, now it's the book industry's turn to make way for the amateurs. Thanks to a raft of cheap new printing technologies, anyone with a computer can now knock out professional-looking hardbacks or paperbacks in production runs of just one copy at a time. It is a trend that threatens to rewrite the rules of publishing - just don't expect it to be a chapter in the industry's history that you will necessarily enjoy reading.
This is not conventional vanity publishing, which requires budding authors to hand hundreds or thousands of pounds to outfits in order for them to "accept" manuscripts for publication. Instead, it turns the writers themselves into the publishers, who can run off their great works for as little as £10 or £20 a copy, typically with no extra set-up costs if they edit and design them themselves. Known in the trade as POD - printing, or publishing, on demand - the technique is already becoming an established way for academic and specialist book houses to print small runs as books are needed. The difference now is that ordinary punters are being invited to join in, with no intermediary deciding whether or not they have something worthwhile to say.
Blurb, launched last month (at blurb.com), claims to be targeting "every blogger, cook, photographer, parent, traveller, poet, pet owner, marketer, everyone. (This means you.)" Uh-oh. Blurb's mission, it says, is to "democratise the publishing industry" by turning your digital documents into full-colour hardback books with minimal effort, even offering ready-made templates that you can customise to create your own baby books or recipe collections. Each copy is printed in the United States as required, and there are no fixed charges beyond the reasonable costs per unit - £17 for hardbacks of up to 40 pages, £26 up to 200 pages, not counting postage (a service to the UK is promised soon). And yes, your total order can be just a single copy.
What great creative works, then, are Blurb and similar services casting into the literary culture? Lulu, which charges a basic £2.60 to stitch a paperback plus a little over a penny per black-and-white page, currently lists on its website (lulu.com) thousands of self-published titles that it has already handled. If you fancy reading any of them, it will use a Xerox digital printer to push you out a copy on demand, taking a cut of the author's specified mark-up. But before Waterstone's or Transworld need issue sudden profit warnings, a glance though what is on offer suggests that the role of conventional literary editor may still have some value. Lulu's current bestsellers include a home-designed calendar devoted to Sam, "the World's Ugliest Dog"; a "reference" work called "JFK is Still Alive"; and a recipe book-titled "Home Cooking to Cure Cancer", which will apparently "help reduce and destroy most diseases". Not to mention the 8,619 novels, poetry collections and sexual fantasies currently listed generously under the heading "literature".
Big-name writers and publishing houses are predictably sniffy about the new interlopers. Jilly Cooper has denounced Lulu for "bring[ing] forward an awful lot of rubbish", and Dan Brown's publisher has dismissed it as "nothing more than another form of vanity publishing without editorial arbitration". But whether they like it or not, the amateurisation of our culture, led by bloggers and citizen journalists, has finally reached the bookshelves. And who knows - somewhere in a Xerox machine the next Rowling may be waiting to be discovered.
In the old days if you thought you had a book in you, you'd eagerly fire it off to the publishers and then fall dejectedly over a pile of rejection slips. No longer. Just as blogging and podcasting have let anyone reinvent themselves as a prospective media star, now it's the book industry's turn to make way for the amateurs. Thanks to a raft of cheap new printing technologies, anyone with a computer can now knock out professional-looking hardbacks or paperbacks in production runs of just one copy at a time. It is a trend that threatens to rewrite the rules of publishing - just don't expect it to be a chapter in the industry's history that you will necessarily enjoy reading.
This is not conventional vanity publishing, which requires budding authors to hand hundreds or thousands of pounds to outfits in order for them to "accept" manuscripts for publication. Instead, it turns the writers themselves into the publishers, who can run off their great works for as little as £10 or £20 a copy, typically with no extra set-up costs if they edit and design them themselves. Known in the trade as POD - printing, or publishing, on demand - the technique is already becoming an established way for academic and specialist book houses to print small runs as books are needed. The difference now is that ordinary punters are being invited to join in, with no intermediary deciding whether or not they have something worthwhile to say.
Blurb, launched last month (at blurb.com), claims to be targeting "every blogger, cook, photographer, parent, traveller, poet, pet owner, marketer, everyone. (This means you.)" Uh-oh. Blurb's mission, it says, is to "democratise the publishing industry" by turning your digital documents into full-colour hardback books with minimal effort, even offering ready-made templates that you can customise to create your own baby books or recipe collections. Each copy is printed in the United States as required, and there are no fixed charges beyond the reasonable costs per unit - £17 for hardbacks of up to 40 pages, £26 up to 200 pages, not counting postage (a service to the UK is promised soon). And yes, your total order can be just a single copy.
What great creative works, then, are Blurb and similar services casting into the literary culture? Lulu, which charges a basic £2.60 to stitch a paperback plus a little over a penny per black-and-white page, currently lists on its website (lulu.com) thousands of self-published titles that it has already handled. If you fancy reading any of them, it will use a Xerox digital printer to push you out a copy on demand, taking a cut of the author's specified mark-up. But before Waterstone's or Transworld need issue sudden profit warnings, a glance though what is on offer suggests that the role of conventional literary editor may still have some value. Lulu's current bestsellers include a home-designed calendar devoted to Sam, "the World's Ugliest Dog"; a "reference" work called "JFK is Still Alive"; and a recipe book-titled "Home Cooking to Cure Cancer", which will apparently "help reduce and destroy most diseases". Not to mention the 8,619 novels, poetry collections and sexual fantasies currently listed generously under the heading "literature".
Big-name writers and publishing houses are predictably sniffy about the new interlopers. Jilly Cooper has denounced Lulu for "bring[ing] forward an awful lot of rubbish", and Dan Brown's publisher has dismissed it as "nothing more than another form of vanity publishing without editorial arbitration". But whether they like it or not, the amateurisation of our culture, led by bloggers and citizen journalists, has finally reached the bookshelves. And who knows - somewhere in a Xerox machine the next Rowling may be waiting to be discovered.
posted by David Rowan at Friday, March 31, 2006
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