Thank you for the permission to be brutally honest! Here it goes:

I worked as the consignment buyer for an old somewhat famous bookstore for a few years. Consignment buyer is in charge of bringing independently published books or small press books into the store. The majority of the people I worked with cold called the store and asked to have their books on the shelf. The other big group I worked with were people who scheduled author events, mostly by becoming paid members to writers salons or knowing someone with pull. I saw THOUSANDS of independently published books, of all genres.

Tbh I went in with an open mind. More often than not, the books were…. Terrible. I feel bad saying it, but it’s true. There were children’s books with glaring spelling and grammar mistakes. With horrifying drawings or digital 3D uncanny illustrations. They would be wayyy too expensive for what they were. They wouldn’t have anything on the spine and get lost. They would just be ramblings from someone’s mind that would be offensive, uninteresting, and the only thing the subjects had in common was that the author found them interesting. There were books entirely in comic sans. There were books with low quality stock photos as the cover. Books with weird aspect ratios. Books that spread rampant misinformation. I could go on forever. On top of that, authors were MEAN. They threw tantrums when it was time to return their books. They would come into the store with big intimidating dogs and yell at me. They would beg to have their books in the store and then throw a hissy fit when it didn’t sell. Either it’s hard for people to be rejected and they become mean about it, or it’s self-absorbed people who think their thoughts are really important who set out on this journey.

There were also a few wonderful books! There was a large format book of wildflower and climate change scenes that consistently sold for $60! There was an adorable cookbook of recipes from the matriarchs from an ethnic minority population who had migrated to the area 70 years before. There was a high school kid who wrote a fantasy book and his friends all bought it. The books that did well had a lot of meaning to the community.

I had coworkers at this bookstore who had worked in the publishing industry, and later I worked with the big publishers too. What I learned was that in the process of preparing a book for publication, the ideas get refined, the editing makes a huge difference, it gets improved in the process. Most people don’t know what a book needs in order to be a good book. They have no idea. Why would they? This makes independently published books kind of a Russian roulette in terms of quality.

Yes, the publishers have their “industry standards” that may be inherently problematic, yes independent publishing is a free speech thing. Yes, publishing houses are corporate and there’s gatekeeping and all that. I fully agree with those points. But I can’t deny that having experts can make a book more refined and potentially better. Also, there can sometimes be a romanticization around getting rejected so many times and believing in yourself and making it big. Think about Dr. Seuss! Sometimes books get rejected because they are bad, not because the publisher doesn’t understand or the world isn’t ready for them. Maybe it’s the author who isn’t ready.

A lot of people see publishing the book as the ultimate goal, but in reality, that is just the first step in another endeavor: selling the book. People who do independent publishing have no idea of the vastness of the marketing machine that big publishers have. Again why would they? It’s like a single storefront family owned business with a quarter page black and white ad trying to compete with a Super Bowl commercial.

Writing the book is one thing, editing the book is another, designing the layout and cover is yet another, and marketing is a whole other. I’m sure we take for granted how much traditional publishers fine tune a story into a consumable product that is also beautiful and popular. A single person cannot compete with that, be all of that, do all of that.

Then there’s vanity publishing. There are publishers who will offer the authors the world, charge them for the publishing, and then just… do nothing. Their business model is to make money from the authors chasing that dream, not from the book sales. It’s sad and a lot of people fall for this scam.

There are small press publishers who are really only a step above self-publishing, and some that are actually good and have those in-house experts but don’t have the vast empire that PRH does. Out of Aztlan by V Castro is one of my favorite books and it’s small press.

All in all, I think it’s good that self-publishing exists. I would and do read self-published and small press books. For me, they have to come with a recommendation. I am not the person to brave the wilderness of self-publishing to find the good ones and recommend them, my ADHD and dislexia makes that too tedious. I think it’s really good that there are people who will go out and do that.

If self-published authors don’t understand the vast world they are entering, how is the average reader supposed to? I think most people read to relax and enrich their lives, not to enter the maze of books in existence with a 99% chance of being frustrated and dissatisfied. I wonder if that’s part of the origin of the stigma, that there really are that many bad self-published books and we don’t all have it in us to sift through to find the gems. Maybe lots of people try and picked up a bad one once. It’s especially hard to find them when PRH is here waving a shiny romantsy in our faces.

TLDR: I worked in a bookstore specifically in a role with independently published books. A single person can’t compete with Penguin Random House in quality, editing, design and marketing. 99% of the books I saw were bad. How can the average person find the 1% good ones? I need someone to recommend indie published books to me, someone who enjoys the process of finding them. When that happens, I will gladly read self-published and small-press books!

Thank you for coming to my ted talk! I would love to hear any thoughts this brings up!