Self Publishing Comes of Age

What used to be seen as a last resort is fast becoming the most successful trend in writing. Alison Flood talks to the authors doing it themselves in the Guardian.

From the piece...

GP Taylor is one of self-publishing's success stories. The former vicar sold his motorbike to fund the first print run of his children's novel Shadowmancer; its popularity, driven by the author's tireless campaigning, led to a publishing deal with Faber & Faber and a career as a New York Times bestselling author. He seemed to have made the transition from amateur to professional without a backward glance - but eight years on, he's considering going back to self-publishing.

He's not the only one. With Bowker reporting an "explosive growth" of 169% last month in "non-traditional" publishing, it's not just vanity projects that are taking the self-publishing route these days. Amazon announced last week that John Locke had sold 1,010,370 Kindle books using Kindle Direct Publishing, making him the first self-published author to join the "Kindle Million Club", alongside the likes of Stieg Larsson and James Patterson. Meanwhile, self-published authors Louise Voss and Mark Edwards currently top Amazon.co.uk's Kindle bestseller list, and say they're selling up to 1,900 copies a day of their jointly-written thriller, Catch Your Death. Faulkner award-winning author John Edgar Wideman last year chose to publish his new collection of short stories through Lulu.com; the site, offering authors an 80/20 revenue split, has published over 1.1 million authors to date, adding 20,000 titles to its catalogue a month. Writers around the world are getting their books to readers – and getting paid for it – without a publisher standing in between. Self-publishing, it seems, is becoming respectable.

"I'm a real advocate of self-publishing," says Taylor, explaining why he's thinking about going back to self publishing for his new book, an adult crime novel. "With the number of authors out there, I'm just one of many midlist writers. I'm not a celebrity, and book sales are pretty bad at the moment. [But] with self-publishing, it's a case of if it's good, people will buy it, and with the internet you can get people to notice it." And David Moody, who was making a £1,000 a month self-publishing his horror novels until he attracted the attention of film producer Mark Johnson and landed deals with Thomas Dunne Books in the US and Gollancz in the UK, also believes self-publishing is a serious option for new writers. "I'm actually a little miffed that I'm not self-publishing right now! I might even go back to it at a later stage," he says. "This new route to market is, in my opinion, becoming a viable alternative to the old submission and rejection merry-go-round … it's undoubtedly easier for writers to get their books out and for readers to find them today than it was just a few years ago. Sites like Lulu and Amazon's CreateSpace allow them to produce print editions of their books without the hassle of setting up a publishing business and dealing directly with print-on-demand publishers."