I have to point you to two terrific blog posts from Writer Beware's Victoria Strauss, who tackles the fallacy behind POD companies calling themselves "independent publishers" and their customers calling themselves "independent authors." The POD companies are eager to cast themselves as the equivalent of indie movie-makers. But the comparison doesn't fit. Indie film-makers and musicians don't pay someone to package and market their work, they do it themselves. Victoria notes:
If you sign a contract with a self-publishing company, you are not an independent writer, no matter how emphatically the self-pub company says you are.
She goes on to note:
If you are a true self-publisher–if you've handled every aspect of publication on your own–then yes, you can accurately call yourself an independent author.[…]If you've used a print-on-demand self-publishing company, you've granted it a limited license to your work, you've chosen from a pre-determined package of services, you're dependent on whatever distribution the company provides, and you probably don't own your ISBN number. Also, since most self-pub companies reserve the right to discontinue publication for any reason, you don't fully control your work's availability, and since most pay a royalty, you don't control its income, either. In other words, you are not independent.
By the way, there's some very good news coming soon about the future of Writer Beware that will make it even stronger.
Thanks for the shout-out, Lee. So far, I’m getting way less sh*t from those posts than I expected. Though I’ve probably just jinxed myself.
Writer Beware is the best!! Thanks for continuing to make people aware of it. I really wish everyone who writes would study that site and the blog.
“Musicians don’t pay someone to package and market their work.” Yes they do: they do all the time. What are all those CD duplication and music marketing services for?
Ha, I’ve had a bit of a sh*t-fest of my own this evening for linking to Victoria’s post today (and linking to a post by Nicola Morgan, on her excellent blog, which also discussed the problems inherent in self-publishing).
It would all be so much less frustrating if the arguments posed in favour of self-publishing (I will not use that “indie” term) were not quite so fallacious. Nevertheless I shall continue to blog about these things. At least some people listen.