For decades, scammy "book doctors" and vanity presses spun a tale about how Big Publishing was too conservative and risk-averse for really *really* adventurous books, and the only way to get your visionary work published was to pay them to fill your garage with badly printed books that you'd spend the rest of your life trying to get other people to read:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/04/self-publishing/
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/04/the-wulf/#underground-fave
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Like all successful grifts, this one worked because it wasn't entirely untrue. No, mainstream publishing isn't filled with corporate gatekeepers who relish the idea of keeping your brilliance from reaching its audience.
But.
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But editors sometimes make bad calls. They reject books because of quirks of taste, or fleeting inattentiveness, or personal bias. In a healthy publishing industry - one with dozens of equal-sized presses, all commanding roughly comparable market-share, good books would never slip through the cracks. One publisher's misstep would be another's opportunity.
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But after decades of mergers, the population of major publishers has dwindled to a mere Big Five (it was almost four, but the DOJ blocked Penguin Random House's acquisition of Simon & Schuster):
This means that some good books definitely can't find a home in Big Publishing. If you miss with five editors, you can exhaust all your chances with the Big Five.
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The U.S. Department of Justice filed a civil antitrust lawsuit today to block Penguin Random House’s proposed acquisition of its close competitor, Simon & Schuster. As alleged in the complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, this acquisition would enable Penguin Random House, which is already the largest book publisher in the world, to exert outsized influence over which books are published in the United States and how much authors are paid for their work.
There's a second tier of great publishers, from data-driven juggernauts like Sourcebooks to boutique presses like Verso and Beacon, who publish wonderful books and are very good to their authors (I've published with four of the Big Five and half a dozen of the smaller publishers).
But even with these we-try-harder boutique publishers in the mix, there's a lot of space for amazing books that just don't fit with a "trad" publisher's program.
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These books are often labors of love by their creators, and that love is reciprocated by their readers. You can have my unbelievably gigantic *Little Nemo in Slumberland* collection when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of it:
And don't even *think* of asking to borrow my copy of Jack Womack's *Flying Saucers are Real!*:
https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/03/flying-saucers-are-real-anthology-of-the-lost-saucer-craze/
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I will forever cherish my Crad Kilodney chapbooks:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/19/crad-kilodney-was-an-outlier/#intermediation
Then there's last year's surprise smash hit, *Shift Happens*, a two-volume, 750-page slipcased book recounting the history of the keyboard. I own one. It's *fantastic*:
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Then there's the whole world of indie Kindle books pitched at incredibly voracious communities of readers, especially the *very* long tail of *very* niche sub-sub-genres radiating off the woefully imprecise category of "paranormal romance." These books are landing at *precisely* the right spot for their readers, despite some genuinely weird behind-the-scenes feuds between their writers:
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In the strange universe of Amazon Kindle Unlimited, self-published romance authors collaborate and compete to game Amazon’s algorithm by any number of means. Trademark trolling of words like “cocky” is just the beginning: there are private chat groups, ebook exploits, and conspiracies to seed hyperspecific trends like “Navy SEALs” and “mountain men.”
But as Sturgeon's Law has it: "90% of everything is shit." Having read slush - unsolicited manuscripts sent to publishers - I can tell you that a vast number of books get rejected from trad publishers because *they aren't good books*. I say this without intending any disparagement towards their authors and the creative impulses that drive them. A publisher's job isn't merely to be good to writers - it's to serve *readers*, by introducing them to works they are apt to enjoy.
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The *vast* majority of books that publishers pass on are not books that you will want to read, so it follows that the vast majority of self-published work that is offered on self-serve platforms like Kindle or pitched by hopeful writers at street fairs and book festivals is just not very good.
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But sometimes you find someone's independent book and it's *brilliant*, and you get the double thrill of falling in love with a book and of fishing a glittering needle out of an unimaginably gigantic haystack.
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(If you want to read an author who beautifully expresses the wonder of finding an obscure, self-published book that's full of unsuspected brilliance, try Daniel Pinkwater, whose *Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy From Mars* is eleven kinds of brilliant, but is also a marvelous tale of the wonders of weird used book stores with titles like *KLONG! You Are a Pickle!*):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Mendelsohn,_the_Boy_from_Mars
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I also write books, and I am, in fact, presently in the midst of a long book-tour for my novel *The Bezzle*. Last month, I did an event in Cambridge, Mass with Randall "XKCD" Munroe that went *great*. We had a full house, and even after the venue caught fire (really!), everyone followed us across the street to another building, up five flights of stairs, and into another auditorium where we wrapped up the gig:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulnlSRbH80Y
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Afterwards, our hosts from Harvard Berkman-Klein Center took us to a campus pizza joint/tiki bar for dinner and drinks, and we had a great chat about a great many things. Naturally, we talked about books we loved, and Randall said, "Hey, have you ever read Rosemary Kirstein's *Steerswoman* novels?"
(I hadn't.)
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"They're incredible. All these different people kept recommending them to me, and they kept telling me that I would love them, but they wouldn't tell me what they were about because there's this huge riddle in them that's super fun to figure out for yourself:"
https://www.rosemarykirstein.com/the-books/
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"The books were published in the eighties by Del Ray, and the cover of the first one had a huge spoiler on it. But the author got the rights back and she's self-published it" (WARNING: the following link has a HUGE SPOILER!):
https://www.rosemarykirstein.com/2010/12/the-difference/
"I got it and it was pretty rough-looking, but the book was *so* good. I can't tell you what it was about, but I think you'll really like it!"
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How could I resist a pitch like that? So I ordered a copy:
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-steerswoman-rosemary-kirstein/7900759
Holy *moly* is this a good novel! And yeah, there's a super interesting puzzle in it that I won't even hint at, except to say that even the book's *genre* is a riddle that you'll have enormous great fun solving.
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Randall wasn't kidding about the book's package. The type looks to be default Microsoft fonts, the spine is slightly off-register, the typesetting has lots of gonks, and it's just got that semi-disposable feel of a print-on-demand title.
Without Randall's recommendation, I never would have even read this book closely enough to notice the glowing cover endorsement from Jo Walton, nor the fact that it was included in Broderick and Di Filippo's "101 Best SF Novels 1985-2010."
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But I finished reading the first volume just a few minutes ago and I *instantly* ordered the next three in the series (it's planned for seven volumes, and the author says she plans on finishing it - I can't *wait*).
This book is such an unexpected marvel, a stunner of a novel filled with brilliant world-building, deft characterizations, a hard-driving plot and a bunch of great surprises.
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The fact that such a remarkable tale comes in such an unremarkable package makes it even more of a treasure, like a geode: unremarkable on the outside, a glittering blaze within.
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@pluralistic
I've got that first edition cover and I didn't notice it at first, and then I was "Wait..." Read it back in 2019
Found the second book as an ebook a couple of years ago and since have read the rest of them. Second and third books are _amazing_. (First and fourth books are also good, but didn't blow me away quite as much.)
Miki
Cory Doctorow
Aaron V. Humphrey
Stuart Spence
Cy