Why I hate self-publishing and how I live with myself for doing it anyway.

I've always hated self-publishing. Even back before the Internet, when the only thing I was writing were doomed adolescent pitches for the Doctor Who New Adventures. Everything about the idea sickened me, from the screeds of poems about dead pets and accounts of Norfolk railway stations that were actually being 'published' to the cynical cash-bleeding efforts of the companies behind vanity presses.

Confession no. 1: In 2004, I sold ad space in Newsweek Europe, and those same evil vanity presses were my valued clients. But that also meant I got to know exactly how they operated, which just increased my disdain for them. They used to prey on the egotistical and the vulnerable, and particularly people who were an enchanting combination of the two.

The rise in Print-on-Demand and indentikit self-publishing internet start-ups began to muddy the waters. Companies were still expecting writers to pay for the lofty privilege of slapdash paperbacks that would rot in the victim's garage until doomsday, but now the upfront costs were much lower. There was even, depending on your point of view, a legitimate reason for a person to use these services. Not to print your manuscript in a bound format to send to agents and prospective publishers (seriously guys, just don't), but if you'd written some stuff for pleasure and wanted a single copy bound for posterity, well why not?

Confession no. 2: In 2005, I self-published my MPhil thesis via Lulu. My reason for doing this was to have a bound copy of a piece of work which I'd spent a whole year researching, and several days writing up. An early e-book version of this did actually sell a whole dozen copies to various online chums who were curious about my academic work, but basically I did it to produce two paperback copies of my thesis - one for me and one for my parents. It was cheaper than the Post Office photocopier.

Now we've hit the e-reader age, and the old vanity press arguments have resurfaced (that publishers are evil gatekeepers who care only about keeping you away from your rightful share of literary fame and fortune). And now that the cost of publishing an e-book is now potentially zero, people are more ready to listen to arguments which in the past were very clearly the lies of crooks.

What cheapskate readers and greedy writers are failing to appreciate, however, is that they are still lies. Amazon does not care about the book you wrote. Amazon does not care about your cheap reading matter. Amazon cares about clawing out market share for its particular brand of e-reader. It cares about locking you into their hardware system until you have a large enough library that you will never, ever shift your loyalty.

I know that everyone, in their heart, knows this and doesn't really care. Why should they? Free books for readers, 70% royalty rates for writers, it's a golden age. And golden ages never last, but that's fine. See the shape of the future, though, in the writers who signed up for Amazon's KDP Select programme - a scheme which offers various promotional and earning opportunities in exchange for selling your book purely on Kindle for a 90 day period. Look on any writing forum right now, and snigger at the slightly confused posts from self-published writers who are suddenly a bit surprised that cuddly old Amazon, writers' friends that they are, have made it a bit tricky to withdraw from Select. Well of course they are, idiots. You gave them exclusive rights to distribute your IP, you don't really think they're going to make it easy to walk away from that, do you?

In this way, Amazon have shown that they can be just as unpleasant as the vanity presses of yesteryear. It's a common business tactic being employed on people who are really just consumers. If you subscribe to a professional magazine, chances are you'll get an invoice each year whether you wanted to renew it or not. You put the onus on the customer to withdraw from the contract, and you reap the benefits of people being fundamentally disorganised and apathetic. I've singled out Amazon here, but you can apply it to just about any other self-publishing platform.

So in spite of the current fashionability, self-publishing hasn't changed. It still comes down to commercial organisations trading on the hopes, dreams and gullibility of an individual, even though they're playing for higher stakes and they're not tapping self-published writers for as much (if any) actual money.

And what about the content?

Self-published books are rubbish, aren't they? I'll be fair, you can point to quite a few that are OK, and even one or two which are pretty good (sub-confession: I've read some decent ones myself in the last few months), but pick a self-published book at random and the chances are high that it will be utter tosswater. Even if it's not actually sub-literate, there will probably still be a scattering of grocer's apo'strophe's and evidence of a tragic inability to learn the difference between you're and your (the old their, they're and there mismatch is the stuff of fond memories these days). The vast majority are simply awful.

Some common arguments tend to arise at this point:

OMG, I read a 'trad' published book and it had some spelling mistakes in!!!
Sure, it's a rare book in which there are no errors at all, the result of an iterative process that includes the writer, agent, editor, designer and typesetter all getting their own chance to spot the previous guy's mistakes while sprinkling in a few new ones. Really, though, what's your point? Your plodding Doctor Who fanfiction is the most turgid and obscene thing ever written, but it deserves to be published more than Kate Orman's The Left-Handed Hummingbird just because she (or her editor, typesetter, etc) made the world's greatest typo concerning a 'visitor's  ass'? You'd inflict your woeful grasp on the English language on the world purely because an exhausted typesetter let some italic commas through on Salman Rushdie's latest novel? Do you really think self-published books have an unfair image problem just because you found a split infinitive in that Dick Francis thriller you read last Christmas?

Publishing's a closed circle. It's all about who you know.
You may well have a point. People like doing business with people they like. Many have their reservations about networking, and, fair enough, it can reek of cliques and corruption. So let's rebrand networking right here. Let's call it 'being pleasant'. As in: "that [successful new writer] makes me sick. She only got her contract through being pleasant to agents, and then being pleasant to that editor at Random House. And now I just heard she had the nerve to go and be pleasant to someone at a party who turned out to be a film producer! Can you believe what an unprincipled pleasantness-obsessed scumbag she must be?"

See? You'd really turn your back on a fantastic industry packed with people who know and care about literature without even just trying to 'be pleasant'?

My Indie book's just as good as any Trad book - I paid a professional editor.
There's a popular saying about fools and their money. People work as freelance editors, and for a fee they'll edit your soon-to-be self-published novel into English, or something approaching it. Fair enough. This is a big one for me, though: Editing is not in itself a guarantee of quality.

Given that poor editing is a hallmark of most bad self-published fiction, that might look odd. But here's the thing. An editor will take your manuscript and run a spellcheck, a grammar check, knock out adverbs, make a few structural suggestions, whatever you're paying them for. Fine. And an editor at a traditional publishing company will do some or all of that as well. When you're paying an editor on a freelance basis, what they won't do is turn around and tell you that your book is shockingly dreadful, and proof positive that you can't polish a turd. Someone you've paid to knock your book into shape will never come back and say: 'Do yourself a favour. Start from scratch.'

As a writer, you obviously think that everything you produce deserves to find an audience. If you didn't, you wouldn't bother writing it, and it's your absolute right to believe your work is top notch. A publisher, however, makes a very simple call on whether the audience deserves to have your product inflicted on them. The most established professional writers still get pitches knocked back gently from time to time because an objective pair of eyes realises they're just not worth sharing with the world.

So, yes, sometimes you can write your book, and get it edited professionally, and pay someone to do a cover that's not totally dreadful, and your self-published book will look and feel exactly like a real, professional book. But it might still fall down through just not being very good.

The elephant in the room (Confession  no. 3)
Yes, a few months ago now, I self-published Something Nice - 10 Short Stories. How will I self-justify this in the light of everything I've written up to this point?

OK, let's give it a go. In Something Nice, there are two competition winners, and a further three stories which were professionally edited and published in other people's magazines, and one which was recorded in a slightly dramatised audiobook format. So that's six out of ten which have passed the acid test of having someone else take a punt on them. The remaining four? Well, maybe they're dreadful. Your call, readers. But they're certainly better than the stories and poetry I left out. Which will never be published. Something Nice could have been twice the length and twice the price, but I'm not going to put anything out under my own name unless I'm desperately proud of it.

And that's another thing that's bothering me. Self-published authors are churning them out. Even seasoned professionals who should really know better. Where's the quality control? With the best will in the world, sometimes everyone writes something which should be quietly filed away and forgotten, or tossed out on to a blog at best. Do you really not care what you're putting out under your name? Will your grandchildren be proud, do you suppose, when they see your entry in Worst Writers of the Amazon Era?

And here's the other bit of self-justification. Something Nice is something I did. I had a bunch of short stories, all the rights had reverted to me, I wanted people to see them, fine. But it's a side project. I'll carry on writing and pitching novels (and new short stories) to publishers until I write something so good that they can't help but publish it. But where those YA novel submissions and translation attempts fall on stony ground? Well, that's that - I may or may not self-publish more material in the future, but I'm not in the game of publishing stuff that's not good enough to reach the market by more reputable means. 'Indie' authors? You're selling yourself short lads. Raise your standards, and raise your aspirations.