Publishing: Independent & "Indie"

It's been a couple of months now since my book came out, on the excellent Dead Ink Books. It has been such a fun few months. The guys behind the press - Wes and Nathan - have done so much great stuff that I could never have managed to do by myself. I've been on a book tour with my Dead Ink cohort Richard Smyth. Both of us have been to Manchester, London, Leeds, and Wakefield, on promotional events. We've been in the paper and in magazines. It really has been a great experience and I'm massively grateful to everyone at Dead Ink for everything they've done, and to Richard for making the book tour so enjoyable.

My friends will attest that I'm a big fan of Independent Things. Independent shops, independent cafes, independent music, independent clothes, the newspaper The Independent. Basically if you put the word "Independent" in front of it, there's a fair bet I'll find something to like about it.

You see, the thing about independent things is that they're INTERESTING. In independent record labels, and in independent press, you find fanatically driven people putting out the things they love with few resources, and doing it because they love it. That's the sort of thing that's exactly up my street.

Dead Ink have been running as a press now for several years, and they're pretty well established. They started out as a digital only imprint, and now do 'actual' books. (With pages, and everything.) I had always hoped to have my book come out on an independent press, so I was really excited when they got in touch and said they wanted to publish my book.

Because I'm such a fan of Independent Things, people often ask me what I think about self-publishing. (Confusingly, people who self-publish also often call themselves "Indie Authors".) I've got an opinion about it, just like I've got an opinion about everything.

Lots of people are self-publishing these days. It's so much easier than it used to be, and as a consequence loads of people are doing it. A lot of the people I've talked to who have self-published, end up doing it because they haven't been able to find a publisher for their work. Nothing wrong with that, if that's the way you want to do it. But one thing that I've found in working with an independent press is, that even working with a small press you have so many more resources and reach than you would have putting something out yourself.

Here are the things I've really enjoyed in my experience working with Dead Ink Books.

1. Editorial input.

In summer 2013, I handed Nathan Connolly what I thought was the final draft of my novel. I'd got things as far as I could myself, and had already sent the book around a few trusted writer-friends for critique. But what the book really needed was an editor's eye: somebody experienced, who could look at my work fully objectively (let's face it, your writer-friends are never going to be as savage as you need them to be) and tell me where I was going wrong.

Nathan had a few suggestions about the structure of the book, and about where I could work a bit harder to improve things. Many of his suggestions were extremely good and changed the book much for the better.

If I hadn't had access to an editor through working with Dead Ink, I can categorically say that Brick Mother would have been a much worse book.

2. Graphic design.

I cannot draw for toffee. I have friends who can, but if I'd been self-publishing, I would have had to pay a friend to make the cover. And yes, drawing a cover is a service you should pay for - because good design and artistry costs money, and I wouldn't feel great about asking a friend to do it for nothing.

In addition, because they're my friends and I don't want to hurt their feelings, if they'd done a not-quite-right version of the cover, I wouldn't have felt able to say. Working with the fab Estelle Morris (who designed the cover both of Brick Mother and of Wild Ink), I was able to email suggestions back and forth, and choose from an impressive array of images which she'd given to me to choose from. It was a very good experience and I think the cover looks ace.

3. Publicity & distribution

Now this is a big one. I like socialising and I like a good chat, but a salesperson I am not. Could I go around book fairs convincing a distributor to pick up my book so it would make its way into shops up and down the country? I could not. But Wes and Nathan can: they've got all the Dead Ink books distributed, in shops throughout the UK. To my knowledge, there isn't a distribution company in the UK that will distribute self-published titles into shops.

And as for publicity: we've been in various blogs, magazines and papers. Some of the blog stuff, I sorted out myself - but I do also think that many of the blogs wouldn't have touched my book with somebody else's bargepole if it hadn't had a good cover, good content (see above) or been published by reputable small press.

In addition, I've appeared at two literature festivals and two book parties now, all publicity events which were organised by people at Dead Ink. It's crucial to me that that kind of organisation stuff was sorted out by somebody else: it left me with more free time to write.

4. Infrastructure and organisation.

Every time you sort out a book review, a goodwill copy, journalistic requests, etc, somebody, somewhere, has to get down the post office and send books out. Somebody has to warehouse the books somewhere, whether it's a sort of modest warehouse that also doubles as a spare room or a box under the kitchen table.

Who has done this for me and my cohort Richard Smyth? Wes and Nathan. Yes, I've got a box of books in my house, but they're my books, for me to take around events and sell. They're not books that I have to use to fulfil orders through the website - Nathan and Wes do that. Again, leaving my hands free from organisational stuff, in order to have more time to write.

It is true that alongside this I manage my own social media account (Twitter! Facebook!) - but thanks to the input and doings of Dead Ink, I don't need to use my own accounts to spam my followers / friends with exhortations to buy my book. I hate it when authors do that and, thanks to Dead Ink, who will do some of it for me, I don't need to do it all myself.

Doing It Yourself

A lot of people in publishing will tell you that self-publishing is the mark of failure. It's the last ditch resort, they'll tell you, of anyone whose work is so terrible they have no chance of publishing through conventional means. Unlike a band who put out their own record, or a director who funds his own film on a shoestring, self-publishing is considered to be the last refuge of the talentless. Her work is so bad, the received wisdom says, that nobody else believes in it enough to put it out.

In the punk scene, it's the norm to put out your own record (or agree to let a friend do it for you). A large part of the culture of punk is the strength of feeling against mainstream culture, and the corporations who control it. Large entertainment corps like Sony EMI make millions of dollars from the exploitation of musicians. They own the creative endeavours of those who work for them - the music and words they write, and their performances. They can even shelve a band's album, and stop the band from releasing it themselves, if its in their interests to do so.

"Is the publishing industry really as bad as all that?", you might ask. "Surely it's not so corporately driven as the music industry." It's true that there are lots of small presses doing excellent work. It's often the small presses that take the risks; they're often run on a shoestring, by people who have day-jobs who run their publishing house in the evenings and at weekends. These sorts of presses are usually run for love, not money, and they don't make a lot. (One of my favourites is Nightjar Press, who have been putting out a series of short story chapbooks for the past couple of years now.) Big publishing houses, on the other hand, have a responsibility to generate profit for their shareholders, and that isn't always going to mean that they're publishing great literature. Katie Price biography, anyone?

In some cases, the publishing industry actively works against the wishes of its authors. Once the manuscript is sold, the writer may lose a certain amount of power over what happens next. You may not always have a say in how the book is marketed, or what the cover looks like. If you care about whether people will read your book, and whether the content of it is accurately represented by how it looks on the shelf, you will care about the cover. Some publishing houses (hello, Bloomsbury) are well-known for grossly misrepresenting their authors' work with egregious covers. As recently as 2010, Bloomsbury published novels by Justine Larbalestier and Jaclyn Dolamore, both of which had non-white protagonists, with white models on the cover. Why does it matter? Simple answer, it matters because it's racism. The same thing has been done to Ursula K Le Guin's work. There's a comprehensive article on 'whitewashing' on BookSmugglers here.

The tools for self-publishing are now within the reach of most authors. As Zetta Elliot says in her HuffPo article on self-publishing, "Writers today have options. We don't have to wait for someone else's stamp of approval".

There are loads of different ways to self-publish, from e-publishing to offset printing to print-on-demand; each has their advantages and disadvantages. Time spent researching the various methods to decide which will suit you, and your work best, will definitely pay off here. In short, as writer Hamish MacDonald says in his article Do-It-Yourself Book Press (on the No Media Kings website), "Generally, self-publishing involves an inverse relationship of work to money: The more work you’re willing to do, the more money you can save; the more you want to just skip to an end product, the more it’ll cost you".

Self-publishing isn't by any means an easy route, and to my mind if you're going to do it you should endeavour to do it well. There's nothing worse than a self-published book that looks self-published - dodgy formatting, spelling errors, unbelievably shonky sentence construction. You shouldn't look upon this route as a quick route to publication because the simple truth is, if your work is bad, nobody will want to read it. Your work should be the best it possibly can be before you bring it out into the public eye. There's an excellent, if somewhat acid, article by the writer Chuck Wendig on common errors that self-publishers make on his blog terribleminds: "You think publishing is full of mean ol’ myopic gatekeepers and you can do it better? How is anybody supposed to take you seriously when you can’t even approach a fraction of the quality found in books on bookstore shelves, books put out by publishers big and small? ... [if] you’re going to put something out there, make it count."

In other words, make sure your work is ready. Rewrite it, edit it, keep on polishing it the same as you would if you were trying to impress a 'professional'. Going down this route requires much more dedication and self-discipline than does a conventional route. The person breathing down your own neck is you. You must be the one horse-whipping yourself into creating something great, into something that other people actually want to read; and once it's out, you have to be the one who gets around, who networks, who gets the book into shops and libraries. It's not an easy route, but it gives you more control, and maybe more satisfaction.

More information on self-publishing on the No Media Kings website