Self-Publishing and Collection Development: Opportunities and Challenges for Libraries

By Robert P. Holley

The current publishing environment has experienced a drastic change in the way content is created, delivered, and acquired, particularly for libraries. With the increasing importance of digital publishing, more than half the titles published in the United States are self-published. With this growth in self-published materials, librarians, publishers, and vendors have been forced to rethink channels of production, distribution, and access as it applies to the new content. Self-Publishing and Collection Development: Opportunities and Challenges for Libraries will address multiple aspects of how public and academic libraries can deal with the increase in self-published titles. While both academic and public libraries have started to grapple with the burgeoning issues associated with self-published books, many difficulties remain. To develop effective policies and procedures, stakeholders must now tackle questions associated with the transformation of the publishing landscape. Obstacles to self-publishing include the lack of reviews, the absence of cataloging and bibliographic control, proprietary formats for e-books, and the difficulty for vendors in providing these works.General chapters will include information on reviewing sources, cataloging and bibliographic control, and vendor issues. Information addressing public libraries issues will highlight initiatives to make self-published materials available at the Los Gatos Public Library in California and the Kent District Library in Michigan. Chapters on academic library issues will address why self-published materials are important for academic institutions, especially those with comprehensive collecting interests. Several self-published authors focus on how they attempt to make their works more suitable for public libraries. Finally, the book concludes with a bibliographic essay on self-publishingAs the term "traditional publishing" begins to fade and new content producers join the conversation, librarians, publishers, and vendors will play an important role in facilitating and managing the shift.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781612494432

Book preview

Introduction to

Self-Publishing and

Collection Development

Robert P. Holley, Wayne State University

I first learned about the increasing importance of self-publishing not from an article in a library publication or even from a library blog or a discussion list. About three years ago on my way home from work, the woman on National Public Radio was talking about how around 75% of all titles published in the United States were self-published. As a teacher, researcher, and writer on collection development, I was amazed at this figure and wondered why I didn’t know about this important development. Did librarians have their heads in the sand? Indeed they did, with a few exceptions.

Thus, I decided to find out more about this significant, but overlooked, development. My research over the last few years has led to several presentations, a special segment in Against the Grain, and now this book. I believe that it is the first monograph to deal with self-publication and its present and potential impact on libraries. Many librarians consider self-published or indie titles to be nothing other than the current manifestation of vanity press publications—those titles that authors paid to have printed only to sit in their basements or garages since bookstores wouldn’t carry them and libraries turned them down even as gifts. All this has changed with e-books, print on demand, and Amazon and other Internet outlets. In fact, an industry has grown up to support these authors.

Both established authors with commercially published books and newbies have discovered the advantages of self-publication including higher royalties, complete control over content, and the ability to get things into print quickly. According to Publishers Weekly, 15 of the top 100 best sellers last year were indie publications. Some authors have a loyal following with readers who want their libraries to purchase their books.

For libraries, the negatives of many self-published books are real. From the content side, many are poorly written with typos and formatting errors, have abysmal cover art, and are difficult to purchase especially if published only in a proprietary format. Practically, most of these books lack cataloging, don’t receive reviews, aren’t carried by the traditional vendors, and get minimal marketing except for the authors who want the local library to buy the book and/or sponsor a book talk. But beyond these difficulties, self-published books can meet the entertainment and information needs of users, the reason why libraries exist. The chapters that follow will discuss these points and many others. In any case, the sheer volume of these publications makes it impossible for libraries to ignore self-published books forever.

Public libraries are much further along in integrating self-published materials into their collections. Self-published books are more likely to be fiction with a strong emphasis on genre fiction, the type of pleasure reading that many public library users expect to find. Henry Bankhead describes the efforts of the Los Gatos Library to provide such materials and to support local indie authors in his E-Book Self-Publishing and the Los Gatos Library: A Case Study. One special feature has been partnering with Smashwords whose headquarters are located in the same city. In Supporting Self-Publishing and Local Authors: From Challenge to Opportunity, Melissa DeWild and Morgan Jarema focus on their efforts to make print publications by local indie authors available in the Kent District Library, Michigan. This library shelves indie publications in a separate section to increase their use and also sponsors a Michigan Authors’ Night.

Kay Ann Cassell comes up with a less positive answer in her Do Large Academic Libraries Purchase Self-Published Books to Add to Their Collections?’ She includes cases where academic libraries buy such books, but they do so much less frequently than public libraries for many reasons, including the lack of reviews and vendor support as well as the fewer number of self-published scholarly publications. In Why Academic Libraries Should Consider Acquiring Self-Published Books, Robert P. Holley then argues that academic libraries should take more interest in self-published materials because they can serve as primary sources, document popular culture, include research from independent scholars, and provide less expensive access to textbooks. Donald Beagle with Digital Authoring, Electronic Scholarship, and Libraries: From Walled Garden to Wilderness" recounts his experiences both with commercial publishers and self-publishing. As an independent scholar, he sees the following advantages to self-publishing his research: the ability to make his findings available when the subject won’t sell enough copies to justify commercial publication and complete control over content including eliminating unwanted publisher changes and providing more supplementary matter since e-books don’t have the same size limitations as print publications.

Bob Nardini, ProQuest Books, and Robin Cutler, Ingram Publishing, deal with different aspects of vendors and self-publishing. Nardini (Book Vendors and Self-Publishing) focuses more on selling to academic libraries with statistics that show that such sales occur but with a limited number of copies sold and a higher cost of doing business since such titles have higher handling costs without the support that traditional publishers provide. In her Ingram and Independent Publishing, Cutler is more optimistic because IngramSpark, a support service for indie authors, has mechanisms in place to support sales to libraries and bookstores.

Eleanor I. Cook addresses the concern that self-published materials are less likely to be reviewed in Review Sources of Interest to Librarians for Independently Published Books. She examines a broad array of reviewing sources in various categories that include Amazon.com, sites designed for readers, and traditional library and bookstore reviewing sources. While the sources that libraries use now contain some reviews, the percentage is much less than for commercially published materials. Robert P. Holley addresses another concern, the lack of cataloging/metadata for self-published materials, in Self-Publishing and Bibliographic Control, an important issue since libraries use cataloging to help users find materials and for internal processes. The Library of Congress provides very few cataloging records so that libraries must depend upon vendors and other libraries to provide records or create their own original cataloging, an expensive process.

Self-published authors recount their experiences in the next four chapters. In Self-Publishing and Libraries: The Slush Pile Is the Platform, Tom Bruno, tired of rejection letters, turned to self-publishing to make his work available. He also describes several models for self-publishing. AlTonya Washington calls herself An Indie Author in a Library World. When a commercial publisher turned down the next title in her series, her choice was to self-publish. Based upon her experiences, she emphasizes reaching out to readers, including those readers who want to find their favorite authors in libraries. Elizabeth Nelson focuses on the process of getting her novel published in The Romance of Self-Publishing. She discusses the options along the way and why she made the decisions she did. Alacrity House Publishing LLC is somewhat different because Frankie L. Colton founded her press to take advantage of the structures available to self-published authors. Her press has created several anthologies of local writing and also provides services to authors that wish to self-publish under this imprint.

The volume concludes with Self-Publishing: A Bibliographic Essay by Joseph D. Grobelny in which he provides a selective review of the literature on self-publishing. His essay provides access to articles that give additional information on the topics covered in this volume.

Overall, this volume presents the many facets of self-publishing. My hope is that readers will take self-publishing and indie authors more seriously as both an important trend and as a way to provide additional content of interest to their users. With money to be made, I predict that both the established players and creative entrepreneurs will figure out ways to make it easier for libraries of all types to discover, purchase, and make available self-published books.

INTRODUCTION

I first met Mark Coker of Smashwords in about 2010 just before the iPad came out and a little before Amazon started offering the Kindle format for libraries. One of our library pages, the people who shelve the books, said to me: Hey, Henry, you’re into e-books. Do you know there is a major e-book publisher here in Los Gatos? In response to my look of blank incomprehension, he told me about Smashwords. I then contacted Mark Coker who readily agreed to come to the library and do a presentation on e-books. Mark grew up in Los Gatos and had very warm recollections of using the Town Library as a child; he even remembered the name of his favorite librarian, Mrs. Jean Krcik.

What became immediately apparent as Mark was making his first presentation in the former Los Gatos Library building (we have since moved to a new building) was that Mark knew a lot about e-books and the commercial e-book market. At that time in 2010, figures from the International Book Publishing Association (IBPA) showed a marked increase in e-book sales. Smashwords was experiencing an equally significant increase in readership and book sales. What was also interesting about my initial meeting was that Mark knew very little about the challenges facing the library in terms of lending e-books. I realized conversely that librarians in general knew very little about the retail e-book market and even less about e-book self-publishing. This is significant because I think we each actually learned a lot from our differences in approach.

This chapter will seek to explain the context of Los Gatos as a community and the unique properties of Los Gatos Library. It will examine the plight of libraries with regard to local authors and examine the traditional library aversion to self-published work. We will try to understand the changing landscape of e-book self-publishing and why indie publishing is a more apt descriptor. We will learn about the genesis of the Smashwords–Los Gatos Library collaboration and about how it developed and how it functions. Finally, we will examine one of Los Gatos Library’s latest self-publishing collaborations, the Community Publishing Partnership Initiative, and analyze the project from a cost-benefit perspective.

ABOUT LOS GATOS

Los Gatos is a small, affluent town on the edge of Silicon Valley in California where the median home price is well over a million dollars. The population of Los Gatos is about 30,000, and the Los Gatos Library’s total operating budget is about $2.2 million. Thus library expenditures are about $73 per person. However, like most libraries in the state of California, Los Gatos Library participates in the state-sponsored universal borrowing program by which participating libraries issue cards to any resident of the state. In the past, before recent state budget cuts, this program monetarily compensated libraries that served patrons outside their area. With the loss of this program, however, the Los Gatos Library serves a significant portion of residents outside of its service area, particularly those from adjacent communities including the city of San Jose, without additional compensation.

The town of Los Gatos has a history of being a community focused on the arts, including the literary arts. This tradition extends back to the early part of the 20th century, as recounted by Bergtold (2004), when Los Gatos was home to writers including Ruth Comfort Mitchell, Kathleen Norris, and Charles Erskine Scott Wood, and into the mid-20th century, when John Steinbeck and Neal Cassady called the Los Gatos area home. The present-day town continues to embrace the literary arts: in 2011 the Town Council created the position of poet laureate of Los Gatos.

ABOUT LOS GATOS LIBRARY

Los Gatos Library is the smallest independent public library in Santa Clara County. Unlike adjacent counties in California, Santa Clara County does not have a unified library consortium to leverage economies of scale in providing library services. Instead the county is divided into one county library district that serves seven communities with the remaining communities of San Jose, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Santa Clara, and Los Gatos each running their own libraries or library systems. As such, Los Gatos is the smallest library with the least economy of scale. Los Gatos Library is conversely able to be more agile, especially in relation to the use of information technology, which has somewhat less of a burden in terms of cost and deployment in comparison with physical services. For example, the Los Gatos Library is a leader in the use of instant messaging, was the first library in California to deploy a mobile app through Boopsie, is one of a handful of libraries in California that use Mac computers for public computing, and was one of the first libraries in California to adopt open-source software for its library catalog and circulation system.

In addition, the town’s local history is a featured part of the library collection. The former library director and a dedicated group of volunteers have amassed a large online collection of more than 8,000 documents and photographs featuring the town’s history. This collection can be seen, in essence, as a form of library-as-publisher in that the library, in partnership with local volunteers and citizen providers, is creating free online access to its own database of library-created, Web-published material, some in the form of electronic documents. Where it differs from independent or self-publishing is its lack of connection to worldwide distribution channels and its lack of monetization.

ABOUT LOCAL AUTHORS

Traditionally, local authors have come to the Los Gatos Library to seek legitimacy for their work and to acquire readers. This generally has taken the form of authors presenting the library with a bound copy of their book that they have had independently printed for a fee. Though Los Gatos is a library that welcomes local author contributions, accepts donated copies of books from these authors, and has a local author section, not all libraries are able to do so. In addition, for Los Gatos Library, maintaining the local author section places somewhat of a burden on both the library and on the local author. The library is burdened by having to meet with each supplicant author, having to make a decision relating to the author’s work based on the physical item being presented, and having to physically process and catalog the item and include it in the library collection. The burden on the author is both having to pay for the production of physical books and having to distribute these items. Local authors who try to donate electronic copies of their books have an additional challenge in that most libraries are unable to host their own e-books and instead rely on third-party providers who license and host e-books, though OverDrive recently implemented a local content-hosting feature to enable libraries to share e-book material with their patrons when the library retains the copyright (Valentine-Gold, 2013). Overall, there is a greater degree of efficacy for independent local authors to take advantage of free platforms such as Smashwords to publish their works as e-books that can then become available to the world via retail outlets such as iTunes and Barnes & Noble and to libraries by means of independent library e-book distributors and hosting services such as OverDrive and Baker and Taylor.

STIGMATIZATION OF SELF-PUBLISHING

Traditionally libraries and librarians have taken a very dim view of what is known as self-publishing. This is in part because traditional publishing, centered on the major New York publishing houses, has been the arbiter of quality in the writing world. If the book was good enough, then the author would be able to secure a publisher to publish it. A publishing deal became the hallmark of success. The very concept of publishing, the meaning of being published, revolved around this traditional model. Part of the essence of this model was the role of the publisher as a filter to guarantee quality. It’s not surprising, given the examples detailed by Leddy (2007) of an editor such as Max Perkins in relation to major 20th-century authors such as Thomas Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The example of Gordon Lish and Raymond Carver, explored by Hemmingson (2011), also comes to mind. In these cases, the editors, and by extension the publishers, can be seen as having a very active role in the success of their writers. In some cases, their editorial contribution to the written work was possibly instrumental to the author’s success. Thus, the stigma attached to authors who do not conform to the overall framework for deciding quality derives from these authors not passing through the approval process and engaging in the traditional publisher-author relationship.

The possibilities offered by worldwide Internet distribution have led to the breakdown of the relationships within traditional publishing and provide alternative paths to success for authors. An additional benefit for libraries and readers is 24-hour access to the library’s collection of e-book materials. The author-editor relationship and, with it, the possibility for collaboration and quality control still exists, but in a different form, independent of the overarching organizing influence of the publishing house. This is not to say that completely unmediated e-book publishing does not occur, but the assessment of quality has migrated away from the traditional means of production and toward the consumer of the written work through the independent agency of the author. Thus, it becomes more the responsibility of the writer to seek editors and first readers rather than the job of the traditional publisher.

THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN SELF-PUBLISHING AND INDIE PUBLISHING

It can be said that the e-book self-publishing model has broken apart the model of traditional publishing and reassembled it into a new set of relationships. Because online e-book publishing and the rise of e-books have created a virtually free alternative to traditional print publishing, the very concept of e-book self-publishing must be reconsidered. With relation to e-books, self-publishing seems more descriptive of the physical model of the vanity press, where authors, hell-bent on seeing their book in print at any cost, would agree to pay up front to produce a physical product and then themselves take on distribution responsibilities. In the electronic realm, with platforms such as Smashwords and Amazon, the term self-published does not quite apply. Distribution is achieved by the platform and its connection to a multitude of worldwide distributors such as iTunes, Barnes & Noble, Flipkart, and so on. Best practices and style guidelines are also instituted and shared by the platform. Therefore, the term independent publishing or indie publishing is a better term to describe this process as many of the functions of the e-book publishing process are not in this case being performed by the author. Through the rise of electronic formats and electronic distribution, the integrated, multifaceted book production pipeline represented by traditional publishing has been deconstructed and reassembled. Layers of approval and control have been removed; instant access to a massive distribution pipeline has