The Vanity ‘Fare’

Like most enterprises, the digital revolution has ‘democratised’ book-publishing by providing easy self-publishing options for writers who can’t penetrate the barriers erected by the industry establishment. The downside, though, is that it has dispensed with quality controls and, even more troublingly, the ‘democracy’ element is being reversed as the oligarchy of the elite publishers is being replaced by the monarchy of a single distribution giant… In our on-going series on the evolving publishing industry, Nidhi Dugar Kundalia explores both the positive and negative development of the self-publishing culture.

Back in the Nineties, our favourite pastime was walking down the street we lived on to borrow or buy books from Raman’s, a part library, part bookstore. Raman’s was a small, triangular rough-andtumble shop with the most wonderfully curated selection of books, including some translations, lots of English classics and even a few collections of multilingual poems. There was Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose and then Don DeLillo’s White Noise… It was the sort of place that made you feel that owning a bookshop has got to be the greatest adventure ever.

But by early 2000’s, our local literary community was in mourning: Raman’s was closing its well-worn doors. The new multi speciality bookstores like Crossword and Landmark were eating into its sales while Raman’s was unashamedly being ‘just a bookshop’. And it was, unfortunately, still committed to being intelligent. It didn’t have non-book products. It was time to say goodbye to our small independent book stores.

But even then, there was no iPad. Dial up Internet still made that ‘ting’ sound. The digital threat seemed so far off, so unimaginable.

There are 15 books near my bedside tonight, all on the Kindle, mostly unread or unfinished. Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna, Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland…and others. Where to start? When to finish? Just when we were coming to grips with e-reading, technology tossed in yet another big change. And it keeps getting bigger, becoming all encompassing. Self publishing, the crux of our story, has been around for a while, but Amazon and its rapids, like its gigantic namesake river, are eroding and destroying everything that comes in its way, taking it to unprecented heights.

There are 15 books near my bedside tonight, all on the Kindle, mostly unread or unfinished. Barbara Kingsolver’s The Lacuna, Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland…and others. Where to start? When to finish?

The thought of Amazon being the only place to purchase a novel sends shudders down my timbers. I don’t mind if someone opts to read stories on web, just as I don’t mind if Amazon is ‘one’ of the places to buy novels; I’m only cagey about Amazon cornering the reading landscape. Apart from selling books, Amazon’s biggest business, of late, has been publishing books. Any writer who has a manuscript and wants to have it published, can log on to their website, pick the size and cover of the book and choose service options such as layout, design and proofreading. It’s as simple as that. Like the crass consumerism leading us into a globe without an ozone layer or rainforests, these tons and tons of writers, novelist, non-writers go on self publishing sprees, inundating the web world (and often the real world), with empty titles – Safe Haven by Angela White, The Russian Bride Phrasebook by Ivan Asimov, Mate of the Werewolf by Changeling Encounters – were a few that made to my list of e-books with worst covers.

Self-publishing has undoubtedly opened an alternative path for writers, given that over 98% of all unsolicited manuscripts submitted to traditional publishers are ignored or rejected. But it’s naive to believe that a self-published novelist is ‘fighting the system’ (as I had argued in a previous essay in this series, titled ‘Print only on Demand’ and published in November, 2013 issue). If the self-published book is made available by a lone monolithic company, in effect, self publishers at Amazon have cast off ‘The Big Six’ publishing houses for ‘The Big One.’

At the moment, many publicity options for self-published writers rely on anxious people paying ridiculous sums of money for vaguely defined and often worthless services. As if on cue, I receive an email as I write this piece. “Dear Nidhi,” the mail from a self publishing Indian start up reads. “If you have any story to tell, you have come to the right place. We provide you with range of affordable publishing services that will ensure a good book and easy ways to access your markets within India and internationally. So why wait? Jump right in or give us a buzz!”

A massive amount of dross gets self-published on the web and produced to appalling standards – the grammatical errors, factual inaccruacies and formatting issues being the lesser of the shortcomings. The authors could benefit from some serious editorial guidance – although that’s as disrespectful as a Hauz Khas gallery owner abusing the proficiency of hobbyist Sunday painters. So why should any

capable author go to a publisher who overtly dumps on the very idea of creative freedom? What matters is that people are being creative in the first place, and trying to find an audience for work that they believe in. It doesn’t matter if ‘a massive amount of dross gets self-published.’ The quality of the work in question is beside the point, as are the economics of self-publishing in general.

Also, can you have good, considerate, imaginative editing and defined and spotless copy-editing if you self-publish? If you cannot, then what about the status or role of altruism before the final form of the fiction as accepted by the audience? What about the willingness of the author to go under water his ego, to produce the novel that is the most honest to itself ?



What matters is whether or not a book ‘enhances the world.’ While the portrait of Sunday hobbyist creative independents is somewhat charming, the corruption charge in the world of self publishing is increasingly relevant, considering a front page report in The Hindu late last year titled Now, you can buy likes on Facebook. That is what passes for verification in what is the deeply corrupt world of self-publishing and when it comes to publishing with Smashwords or Kindle Direct Publishing, anything is accepted! This creates a deluge of subpar books that often gets lost in the shuffle. This prompts the author to turn to social media and even buy social media followers. Harry Potter was perhaps the last gasp for many independent bookstores. THEY made that book happen, following their tried and true hand-selling approach. The word of mouth kicked in, just as it was supposed to.

Reviewers, who further cleanse the good books from the bad (which, by the way, is another discussion for another day), also depend on traditional publishers, who act as winnowers, sorting out the wheat from the chaff, and at least trying to make sure that they are sent books they might be actually interested in. It’s this weeding out process that goes missing in self-publishing. Star rankings on Amazon or Goodreads cannot be steadfast substitutes – we’ve seen only too often how easily reviews are faked or manoeuvred or purchased. What is needed is something much more vital, something more robust, something that does not try to put lipstick on any literary pigs, but which instead builds its business on picking out the brass from the sewage and passing it on to the guys with the megaphones.

But just as there is a one in a lakh chance of winning the lottery, the self publishers are lured with the promise that they will be the ones to hit the self-publishing jackpot, like Amanda Hocking, who has sold more than 1.5 million copies of her self-published books, and E. L. James, the author of the Fifty Shades trilogy.

The issue of self-publishing, which I include to mean both printing one’s own books and hiring a so-called vanity press, is one that’s been generating frenzied debate at ongoing literary meets. On the positive side, self-publishing has freed frustrated book writers from having to scale the mostly impenetrable fortress known as the book industry and to sidestep those who hold the keys to the palace, like the literary agents, editors, and publishers. But the wreckage wrought by Amazon is also not trivial. There is no way to dictate to the digital revolution. It’s the ‘interregnum’, that period when one emperor dies and another is to take over the throne. The race is almost over and the victor is about to be revealed…