Response to Mike Resnick

This past weekend at ConCarolinas, I had the honor of sitting on a panel with the venerable Mike Resnick, to discuss the nature of self-publishing. For those of you not familiar with Mr. Resnick, he’s a very well known and respected author and a long-established fixture in the sci-fi community. However, for those of you who have not had the opportunity to meet Mr. Resnick, he can be a little off-putting. He is very gruff and unapologetically straight-to-the-point. This created an issue at the panel as he showed no restraint in belittling self-publishing and self-published authors. Totally taken off-guard by this unexpected and mean-spirited attitude, I found myself restrained by both manners and convention pecking order to simply let him speak his mind, which he was very comfortable to do for the vast majority of the panel.

This is frustrating because it’s becoming a very familiar event. Authors published through traditional publishing houses, especially those who have been around the block many a time, are becoming more and more vocal about self-publishing. At the same time, the traditional publishing houses are working hard to limit and restrain the self-publishing industry. At the moment, the big news on this front is how the big bookstore chains are preparing to institute a policy that will bar their bookstores and online stores from carrying books printed by printers that they do not own or are not owned by companies they have an existing relationship with (IE the traditional publishers).

It would look like the literary world is a hostile environment for the smaller presses, the Print-On-Demand presses, and such. And the truth is, it is. Making it as a self-published author has always been hard, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult with the traditional publishing houses out to undercut them. Sadly, it’s one of the growing pains all up-and-coming artistic revolutions must undergo.

Throughout history, when it comes to the arts, the truth is that the powers-that-be become their most tyrannical when the smaller forces that have appeared due to social change start to gain momentum. It happened repeatedly during the twentieth century alone. Theater hated movies. And when movies became the dominant form of performance art, they came to hate television, just as television hates the Internet. In the graphic arts, the traditional artists fought tooth and nail to keep the abstract expressionists under control, but any stroll through a modern art gallery will tell you who came out on top of that fight. Classical music loathed Jazz and Swing. Jazz and Swing loathed Rock. What stations are preset on your stereo?

Self-published writers are the avant-garde of the literary world. They have the capacity to push the boundaries of the written word in ways never before conceived of. They have the freedom to explore topics, methods, and to open up smaller niche markets that the traditional presses did not have the option of pursuing. Self-published authors have the ability to excel over their traditional brethren for so many reasons, but key to that is the rejection of the typical writing model. The process of querying a publishing house, submission to a publishing house, rewriting one’s work to meet the needs of the publishing house, no longer has to be the only fashion in which the written word is made available to the reading public.

Part of the reason why self-published authors have become this way is because of the Internet. What MP3s did for music and YouTube did for movies and TV, self-publishing with the help of the Internet is doing for writing. E-books, POD books, small presses with the ability to distribute online, all have become tools available to the enterprising author able to see the possibilities. Self-publishing is the natural extension of writing in the Internet age. It grants freedom and empowers the writer to create what they envision, not what a committee at a publishing house envisions. Writers are free to create the art they choose, not the art they’re paid to make.

Self-publishing is becoming a bigger and bigger factor to the traditional publishers. The acceptance and awareness of self-published works is growing each year. Already, you have many successful names attached to self-publishing as well as many more that are seeing their sales increase from one year to the next. As such, self-publishing is becoming a threat to the monopoly that the traditional publishing houses have on the literary industry. And it would seem as a result, you start to see drastic actions of desperation such as the veritable embargo that the major online retailers are preparing to enforce.

Self-publishing does not need to be an antagonist to traditional publishing. Traditional publishing’s biggest complaints are all rooted in a very true weakness of self-publishing; the lack of quality control. Some small presses exert control over their inventory but POD and e-book distributors will generally publish pretty much anything. And so the derogatory term ‘vanity press’ can in fact be appropriate at times. Traditional publishers can help, rather than hinder, self-published authors, and come out for the better in the process.

As already stated, self-publishing can reach smaller niche markets that traditional publishing cannot. Traditional publishers could help to subsidize smaller presses and even POD publishers in an attempt to better serve the reading public. At the same time, it would allow them see the authors in the field, the writers more concerned with the art they’re making rather than the business of making it. Self-publishing could easily become the minor leagues of the literary world. Everybody could win.

But at the moment, that isn’t the environment that’s being created. Traditional publishing houses, often times spoken through traditionally published authors like Mr. Resnick, invoke hostility and animosity towards the self-published authors, leaving them with a bitterness towards traditional publishing and a desire to beat them at their own game. And as music, performing arts, and graphic arts, have shown, this is a gamble where even industry behemoths like traditional publishing can lose big.