The Micronesia of Publishing

It’s conventional to talk about publishing as split into two camps, two rival poles:

There is Trad Land, populated by literary agents and Big Publishers and imprints whose colophons drip with history and just a little (nay, more than a little) snobbery. Back in the day, those places smelled of tweed and pipe-smoke. Women wore earnest glasses and looked mildly frazzled. They felt like places where you could talk about sentence structure without being laughed at and where all but the very rawest publicists had a hundred tales about Embarrassing Incidents involving Major Authors.

Then there’s Planet Indie. (And yes: I’m muddling up my poles, lands and planets in a giant astro-geographical soup. But phooey to you. I live in a world beyond Lobachevsky and out here, in my universe, everything makes perfect sense.)

On Planet Indie, things don’t smell of tweed and pipe-smoke. No one really knows what a colophon is. The only person who wears earnest glasses is you, if that happens to be the look you’re rocking. Planet Indie doesn’t have an assembly of gleaming towers in London and New York. It has – well, it has your bedroom and your living room and, quite often, the coffee shop you most often go to for caffeine / company / an internet connection that doesn’t curl up and die on you.

Both places produce an awful lot of books and an awful lot of sales.

Fiction is largely read electronically these days. Perhaps about seven-tenths of all fiction is consumed digitally (mostly e-book but a good splash of audio.) Add in the print fiction that is purchased online and cyberspace accounts for more than three quarters of all fiction sales. That’s territory which indie authors can compete for very successfully indeed. During our Self-Pub month (for members), I spoke to Marie Force who has sold ten million books, the vast majority of which she’s sold as an indie and the vast-vast majority of which will have sold in e-form.

And yes: it’s still true that traditional acclaim tends to accrue to trad-published authors – print media doesn’t review indie authors, for no good reason beyond simple laziness. The result is that “authors you’ve heard of” and “authors who’ve sold a gazillion books” are non-identical sets. There’s plenty of overlap, of course, but media hoo-hah is not even remotely a reliable guide to book sales.

Now all this, really, is by way of preamble, pre-canter, and pre-gallop, to the thing I really wanted to say. Namely this:

Lots of IDIOTS – myself included – often talk as though there are only two ways to get published. Trad-land and Planet Indie. So when writers get rejected by literary agents, they often have a tendency to think of self-pub as their primary fallback.

But, oh my friends, I have led you into grave error. There aren’t really two types of publishing, there are three.

There’s Trad-land, with its agents, its colophons and its gleaming metropolitan towers.

There’s Planet Indie, with its book sales, its productivity, and its faint smell of pyjamas.

And there’s a whole scattered archipelago, the Micronesia of Publishing, populated by innumerable little micro-publishers, each of whom publish rather few titles and sell rather few books.

But, of my friends, in those islands there be riches. Some examples:

Risky literary fiction

The bigger publishers need to sell a reasonably large volume of any title to justify the launch costs. That now tends to rule out more challenging or more experimental fiction, except from authors already famous enough to sell pretty much anything.

So a slew of really excellent literary micro-publishers has sprung into being. We’ve had as it happens a long association with the two principals behind Galley Beggar Press, a tiny publisher whose authors have won, or been short- or longlisted for, pretty much every major literary award you can think of. In terms of sheer quality of output, I doubt if there’s any Big 5 firm who could compete.

But Galley Beggar isn’t unique. It’s part of a vigorous international constellation of such firms. They are producing some of the best fiction in the world today.

Niche non-fiction

Let’s say you’ve written a really important book about the history of needlework in the early Colonial period. Or – a book I kinda want to buy – a history of bilge pumps from 1500 to the present day. The world needs projects of passion like that, and no sane person would ever judge the worth of such books by the volume of sales they generate.

No agent will touch those books. A 15% commission of Not Very Much is – um, let me get my calculator – approximately Not Very Much At All. So agents don’t want them.

But you might not want to self-publish, and why should you? There’ll be a micro-publisher somewhere whose range on the history of maritime technology is badly missing something on bilge-pumps. They need your book.

Niche memoir

Or let’s say you’ve written a memoir with a mental health theme. Or an Iranian one. Those books may well be too niche to grace the front tables of a major bookstore. The big publishers aren’t well set-up to sell them. Agents don’t want them, for that precise reason.

But there’ll be a publisher out there who absolutely does want those books and has an audience greedy to read them. You won’t reach a large volume of readers, but you will reach the readers you most want to reach. Those publishers too do a great job.

***

These reflections remind us that a lot of the advice out there on the internet – and a lot of the advice we give as Jericho Writers – is simply ignoring one of the most important ecosystems in publishing.

We ignore it because the collective volume of sales is not that huge, but also because the geography of this archipelago is so hard to define. We at JW can point you at all the literary agents in the world. We’ve placed clients with all the Big 5 on multiple occasions. But we don’t know even 10% of the micro-publishers out there. No one does.

You, as author, simply have to navigate your own seas. You know your niche. You can find out the publishers who publish work for that niche. Dig out contact details. Address them direct. You don’t need an agent. You don’t need to feel timid or underqualified. If you’ve written that book on bilge-pumps, then someone wants it. Find them. Do a deal. Get published.

And if you do get published, then I bow to you. There’s as much honour and majesty in getting your book on bilge-pumps published by a passionate and knowledgeable house as there is in getting your samey police procedural published by a big house that publishes a million other samey police procedurals.

I’ll probably slip back into dividing the world into trad and indie, just because the habit is so ingrained. But please don’t forget that when I do so, I LIE. There are three broad camps, not two, and they all count.