Two Curious Instances in the History of Self-Publishing

Aspiring authors can easily find support for their plans or perhaps fantasies of publishing their own books and finding fame. The World Wide Web is a particularly lush breeding ground for such hopes; there we're reminded that famous self-published books include Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Twain's Huckleberry Finn, and, closer to our own time, John Grisham's A Time to Kill, Timothy Mo's Brownout on Breadfruit Boulevard, and Jill Paton Walsh's Knowledge of Angels, all of them well-received works of what anybody would be happy to call literature. A bit outside that category one finds L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics, James Redfield's The Celestine Prophecy, Irma Rombauer's The Joy of Cooking, and even How To Flatten Your Stomach and The Beanie Baby Handbook. Jim Bendat published his book on inaugurations, Democracy's Big Day, through an Internet-based print-on-demand company and enjoyed not only respectable sales but invitations to comment on the Obama inauguration for Sky News.

As a recent article in the New York Times emphasizes, the rise of digital publishing and print-on-demand books, which may sell as few as five copies and can be published for as little as $99 (Bendat's investment) have made self-publishing cheaper, easier, and thus much more popular—not necessarily a good thing. One bookseller quoted in the Times estimates that "for every thousand titles that get self-published, maybe there's two that should have been published."

Nobody really thinks that the average self-publisher is a well-established author unhappy with his publisher, like Twain or Mo, or a poet far ahead of his time, like Whitman; and for every What Color Is Your Parachute? or The Elements of Style, both originally self-published, there must be thousands of negligible books paid for by self-indulgent or self-deluded writers. But getting published is hard (traditional book publication has gotten more selective and fraught as self-publishing has become markedly cheaper), and, in addition to the undoubtedly large number of good books that have never seen print, there are worthy titles forced to appear under the imprint of Long Barn Books (set up by the novelist Susan Hill) or Paddleless Press (Timothy Mo).

I became aware of two such operations in the late 1990s: Chrysalis Press and Totterdown Books, which interested me in the problems that prompt alternative publishing arrangements. Both Chrysalis and Totterdown were created to publish good books that publishers wouldn't accept, though their circumstances are otherwise very different. Both were traditional publishers—that is, though proprietary and created for an occasion, they printed and bound a supply of books and then tried to sell them, rather than printing them one at a time for Internet buyers.

In 1996 I received a letter in reaction to an article on the Booker Prize that I had written for the Sewanee Review. It came from a man, unknown to me, who told me that one member of his "small publishing outfit," which according to the letterhead was The Chrysalis Press of Kenilworth, Warwickshire, had read my piece and "agreed with practically every word of it." On the strength of that, they were sending me a book that had failed to be reviewed on its first appearance. This was Margaret Buckley's A Woman's Man and Family Portrait: 2 Tales. I was intrigued, read the book, and admired it very much. It was sensitive and authoritative and contained some very fine writing. A further correspondence revealed that the Chrysalis Press was indeed a very small outfit. It was created by a man named Brian Buckley in order to publish the work of his wife, Margaret Buckley. (The person who had originally written to me was the Buckleys' son-in-law.) Brian later sent me Margaret's full-length novel, The Commune, then a book about D. H. Lawrence cowritten by the two of them, and then some autobiographical writing: first there was Novelist Incognito: A Life of Margaret Buckley, made up mostly of Margaret's journal and letters...