This is an extremely valid point. Those of us who create literature that defies the current consensus will have no chance of being published. Even if the writing and logic are sound, the publisher doesn't want to look like a social pariah, or may have personal reservations. Someone has to read your manuscript, and if they don't agree with your message, you're done.
^ I had an agent reject me a few months back because they didn't like something that happens in my novel. They said they'd consider it if I changed it - all because they found it frustrating that a character they liked did something they didn't agree with! I couldn't believe that. Now that's just one tiny example of what you can be up against -from big issues to small issues, getting published can be difficult and you have to have the right person read your book in order to gain somebodys faith, respect and interest. If there is a clash - whether it be due to character, plot, politics or whatever, it can be hard to get somebody to take you on. I guess this could be the case whether you write fiction or biography or history...
This isn't feedback on the website, but I wanted to talk a little about indie publishers, and the context within which Create Space can be very useful. Now, understand that times are changing. For a long time, vanity publishing was more or less a guarantee of failure. (The exceptions were, in fact, exceptions.) This was because the sort of people who went for vanity publishing were either interested in a small print run (on purpose, for things like printing a small pretty version of their family's geneology or whatever) or were aspiring writers who'd gotten stuck. I am distinguishing between aspiring writers and other writers because this difference is important. Many, many people want to get published. Fewer want to write, to keep writing until they improve, to educate themselves about the publishing and writing businesses, and to submit their work to editors until the work sells. The ones who want to be published but don't put in the (long, tedious, boring) work are aspiring writers. The ones who are diligent about writing, improving, reading, learning, writing and writing and still writing because they're almost there . . . are writers. If you don't agree, just go with it for the purposes of this essay. You'll see why this distinction matters in a moment. Now, New York Publishing has for many years been the go-to option for writers. If you wanted a big press release, a decently sized advance, good editors, ads and newsletters and someone at a big company pushing your work, you had to go to New York. And readers who wanted reliably good, interesting novels to entertain them would buy from bookstores that mostly stocked books published by the New York publishing companies. In effect, New York Publishing was a bottleneck. To get exposure, writers had to have their manuscript accepted by an editor at some New York publishing house. And the publishing houses got many tens of thousands of manuscripts, which they mined for the best ones. Most manuscripts have glaring spelling, punctuation and grammar errors and are tossed; the remaining 15% get pored over, and only the very best of those would be chosen for publication. All this meant that the bar for publication was very high. There was an element of luck, sure, but as a rule the people who got published regularly were good (or at least competent) writers. And anyone who kept trying doggedly to improve, who kept writing and submitting and writing the next thing and submitting that, had an excellent chance of getting published at some point. It might take them many years, but eventually they'd get there. So writers were fine. They had a goal, they worked toward it. They wrote, they learned about the business, they kept going. But the aspiring writers would get stuck. These are the ones who didn't do their research, who didn't even want to research the business of writing, so they never understood that "competently written manuscript" eventually leads to "published book." They didn't want to write (they wanted publication, not the writing life) so they submitted the same manuscript over and over instead of writing the next thing. They wouldn't spend the time learning the craft, so they continued to submit manuscripts with serious errors, ranging from SPAG to flat characters to books with no ending. (That is, no conclusion to the main plot.) And the vanity press people took notice. They offered deals. They'd take most any manuscript and put it into a book format. A neat cover, a blurb on the back, why, it's just like the real thing! And aspiring writers ate it up. These are people who didn't do the research or take the time to develop craft skills; they had no way to know about the market, or about how quickly most readers can identify substandard writing (within a page, in case you're wondering). They just wanted to be published, not knowing that the dream in their mind was radically different from the reality. They thought "publication" equals "success," and they were willing to pay to get there. Things have changed. Now, the Internet has made it easier to review, search for, advertise, and read samples of published writing. This doesn't affect aspiring writers much. They continue on, ignorant about the business of writing and unaware of their ignorance. They still publish their work through vanity presses, believing that dreck with a badly done cover and a price tag of $29.95 is somehow, suddenly, more than dreck. But this does affect writers. The ones who have done their research, written their million words of crap and gotten to the gold beneath it, studied the ideal publishing houses and looked for agents and followed pro writer blogs. These writers have suddenly found that, through e-publishing and Print-On-Demand (POD), it is now possible to provide professional-level content for readers without New York Publishing. This is a revolutionary change. Four years ago, practically no self-published work could make money or reach readers. Now, there are self-published works making thousands of dollars each month. That doesn't mean the aspiring writers aren't having their dreck "vanity-published" anymore. They continue to equate "published book" with "success," and they act accordingly. It just means that now they've been joined by real writers, competent ones, who have studied the market, looked at their options, and made their choice. They know that readers want content, and they know that readers will often look for reviews or sample chapters before making their choice. So some writers have used the Internet as a tool to further their goals. They want a readership, so they put their best work up and offer sample pages so readers can buy with confidence. Some of them post their short work for free somewhere, with links to Amazon and PubIt and Smash Words and Barnes & Noble (where their other work is available). For these writers, Print-On-Demand is not part of any "published book" equals "success" paradigm. Instead, Print-On-Demand is a way for them to expand their readership by providing a physical copy of an e-book. This physical copy makes gifting easier and allows people who don't much like to use eReaders to read the book in the format they prefer. And all of a sudden, self-published works became binary. Now, self-published works are likely to be either dreck or good, which is a major change from four years ago when "self-published" essentially meant "terrible." And since readers can tell within a page or two whether a book is dreck, the only e-published work that tends to get attention is the good stuff. Which is why there were 54 self-published writers selling 1000+ ebook units a month as of Jan. 5, 2011. (Data can be read here: http://derekjcanyon.blogspot.com/2011/01/keys-to-epublishing-success.html). And this is why the New York Publishers are quickly getting their stuff into e-format too. And why pro writers like Kristine Kathryn Rusch are hurrying to get their old books and their short stories into e-format. Again, the big change: The Internet allows self-published quality works to gain attention, while sinking self-published dreck. And when you're on Amazon or the Barnes & Noble website, the sample chapters from a self-published writer and from a Random House book look identical except for content. The bottleneck isn't there anymore. Good stuff can reach readers whether it has gone through New York Publishing or not. So. If you want to use Create Space, I'm not going to knock it. As part of a general move to e-publishing, Create Space and other POD companies have a legitimate place in the business model. That doesn't mean Create Space will lead to success, only that it can. But it also implies that you shouldn't cross it off your list of options until you've done your research. The people on the Writing Forums are generally helpful and are pretty knowledgeable overall. But. These new changes to publishing have happened literally within the past year. Everything we told you about vanity publishing being horrible was accurate a couple years ago, but it's out of date; it's useful, but incomplete, and given the speed of the e-pub changes that are taking place, we probably won't have a complete overview of publishing again for another year or so. Good luck, do your research -- and remember that the automatic stigma against self-published authors is currently revising itself. A "self-published" writer making money through e-pub while sending queries to the New York publishing companies is nothing to sneeze at.
eBooks are here to stay, the Kindle is Amazon's #1 selling single item, of all time. There are dozens of eReader devices on the market, and the smartphone market.. just about every smartphone platform has a Kindle app, and other ebook reading apps, plus the eBook reading software for your computer, they're everywhere! PoD is fine for what it is for, but it really is becoming secondary to electronic publishing. For some specifics, look at the Espresso Book Machine, and Lightning Source, a subsidiary of Ingram Content Group, they're a PoD company that works with publishers rather than authors. The EBM is a cool machine. You give it a PDF, it gives you a paperback book.
One aspect of Createspace which potential users should be aware of is that 100% of the formatting of your work is your responsibility. You choose the trim size of the book from their list of options (5 inches by 8 inches is the trim size for a standard trade paperback); you choose font and font size; you set-up the pages to make sure they fit the selected trim size; you number them; you design your cover and write any back cover info you want; you set your price (it has to be enough to cover their production cost for each book which is dependant on size, page count, and a couple other options). In other words, after you have gone to all the work to write the book, you have to be the editor, designer, and typesetter too. They make this all fairly easy, and if you are careful, the books come out looking great. They offer professional services to do the editorial and design stuff, but the costs for that can get large.
The only thing I found semi-difficult about the process was the page formatting and getting them to accept it. I was starting to get really frustrated before I finally found a link to make it work. The rest I just blew through; they do a good job with the pulldown menus to really make it as easy or as difficult as you want.
My main problem is trying to work out the tax codes and fill out the form so I don't have to pay 30% tax. But I figure I probably won't sell enough to make it worth my while to pay the requisite postage and the person who needs to sign the passport copy. If anyone knows the number of the US tax treaty with NZ, can you let me know? The US tax website was not particularly clear on it...
As a writer choosing publishing route, one has to ask oneself if one has what it takes to market the book oneself, though.
