The Boulevard of Broken Dreams: Self-Publishing in America II

The self-publishing revolution will be televised! Tune in and check it out!

It’s the end of gatekeepers warning that a manuscript is not publishable. The end of pesky editors demanding revisions and rewrites. The end of marketing specialists twisting and bending copy to lure in readers and sell books. The world of self-publishing is a writer’s dream—a paradise of endless programming on an infinitely expanding number of channels.

Have something to say? Publish it! Nothing to say? Publish that, too!

The self-publishing revolution is equal opportunity and maximally diverse. All voices are afforded a stage; all authors are welcome. While many pay big money to play, any and all can join the revolution with little to no financial obligation. There are many entries into the world of self-publishing, differentiated only by the cost and the size of the dream promised.

But if the self-publishing revolution is televised, it is not on the Big Four (ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX). Nor is it on cable giants like HBO or Showtime or even the public broadcasting mainstay, PBS. In the publishing world, these venues are akin to the Big Houses like Simon & Schuster, Penguin, and Hachette.

DIY publishing is more akin to getting the 4am slot on your small town cable channel. Sure you get airtime, but you also have to adjust your expectations. Low production value, small audience, and minimal impact are common characteristics, tolerated only by those with no other choices.

Even compared to the smallest of small presses, with a handful of annual releases and a limited or nonexistent marketing presence, most DIY publishing is marginal. Even at their most afflicted, the majority of small presses have an editorial backbone and an aesthetic or ideological raison d’etre. The same cannot be said of the self-publishing industry, which exists to produce a profit and to prey on the vulnerability of those who desperately want to be published and are willing to do so by any means necessary.

At its worst, the self-publishing revolution is a predatory practice—a financial extension of the neoliberal publishing industry.

At its best, it is a revolutionary force that affords a greater diversity of writers and writing to populate the book world.

What then should we make of this revolution in publishing? Should we view it with joy or dismay? Pity or pride?

From the perspective of the thousands of well run small presses, the self-publishing revolution occurs outside of the gates legitimate publishing. Why? Because at a minimum, a press requires an aesthetic or ideological aim that is guided and promoted by an editor. This minimal condition is a sufficient one to deem some works worthy of the press’s catalogue and others unworthy. Without this condition, there is no quality control and there really is no press—only publishing. Publishing work without consideration of its content is nothing more than mindless duplication. Without an editor’s eye, self-publishing is more akin to a mechanical act than an intentional one.

There is something troubling about publishing anything and everything submitted to a publishing house. Perhaps it lies in the very notion of “publishing” itself, a notion that seems to require the interaction of two individuals at minimum: the author and the editor. In a sense, self-publishing is an oxymoron, as it implies a reduction of the author-editor relationship to one of identity rather than difference. Even more radically, one could argue that self-publishing as a practice deconstructs the very notion of publishing by allowing anyone and everyone to reproduce their writing without review.

As the hierarchy of publications shifts and expands to contain everything from peer-reviewed, refereed journals to Wikipedia entries, it becomes increasingly important to trace the source of published materials and the journey they have taken to reach the reader. The responsibility of the reader to understand the provenance of published media grows as the methods of publication expand. The book traditionally has an aura of authority, but the rise in self-published work puts this assumption into question.

The self...