By Eolake Stobblehouse

There is this ancient Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times". It seems like this curse has been used liberally in recent history, for the times are certainly interesting.

Most anybody shooting for becoming a professional writer has heard the horror stories about how hard it is to make it into print. "Dune", one of the most famous science fiction novels ever (by Frank Herbert), reportedly was sent out fifteen times to publishers without being accepted, whereupon he gave up and threw it in the dumpster. His wife picked it up and sent it out again.

It is normal and perhaps natural for creative people to curse the powers that be for not understanding their genius. But anybody who has worked in the publishing business will tell you that it is a very risky business. Even with authors who have had big hits before, there is absolutely no guarantee that it will happen again, and with new authors... well, Russian roulette seems safe by comparison.

And we are talking a lot of money here. The running of the business, advertising, and even the simple printing bill makes sure there is a high entrance level.

And it is not only that. If an author has something that has an almost guaranteed audience, but that audience just happens to be too small (say 5,000), then it simply does not pay to publish a book. Specialized technical books, or poetry comes under this heading, along with... well, probably thousands of fields, some of which nobody has even contemplated yet. There is simply no "mini-market".

Or rather, this is how it was. (You knew this was coming.)

Just within the past year, new possibilities have opened up for the writer. Exciting new possibilities, revolutionary new possibilities. (These are clichés, but I can't help it.)

The ways this can be done are so many and variant that I will have to make more articles on this. Some of them are purely electronic, and other are based on traditional paper books. The latter is a case of a pure win-win scenario. Nobody looses here. (Except perhaps a few big printing houses, and traditional book-distribution channels, if they don't adapt.)

Printing of books and other paper publications have always been very expensive, because of the technology involved. You have to have made metal printing plates with your text and material on it. One of them per color. These have to be put in huge, noisy machines, and the machines use a very messy printing paste that has to be cleaned out of the machine between each color. All of this means that it simply does not pay off to print less than thousands of copies, because the start-up cost is so big.

Well. Up through the nineties, a very new technology has come forth. Digital printing. I will spare you for the technical details (makes it sound like I know all about them, doesn't it:), but it means that a machine takes your computer file and prints from it directly, without all the messy mechanics described above. It also means that you can print economically all the way down to one copy!

Another big problem has been storage and distribution. Even if you had the money for a self-publishing venture, you ended up usually with the garage full of copies, so your car had to stand in the rain, and no way of getting rid of the damn things. Gee, once again the Internet changes things. Companies have shot up recently that publish your books for you. They take your book in electronic form over email, and they store it electronically on their server. Then they take orders from your customers over the web, and they print the books one at a time as the orders come in!

They sell the books in a quality fully as good as traditionally printed books, no "discount quality" here, they sell them to prices similar also, and they pay you royalties at least comparable to what writers have seen, maybe more. There is an entry fee, but not bigger than you'll be in the black after perhaps fifty books or so sold. A far cry from the many thousands it has taken in the past.

I don't have to tell you that this changes things. Of course it does not mean that anybody becomes an instant and guaranteed hit with this. You still need two things: Skills in writing, and some promotion. But this means that if you can supply this, you have very good chances. You are no longer dependant on finding editors and publishers who believe in you.

(Not to mention the slowness of the traditional publishing. They usually takes months on end just to answer you. They don't like if you submit to more than one publisher at a time, so this could become years. And even if they want to publish you... I have a good friend, a girl who wrote a novel, and she was picked up by a major publisher here in Denmark. That is over two years ago, and the book is not out yet, or even close as far as I know. The other process here can have professional books in the hands of customers in weeks, perhaps even days!)

Probably many authors need an editor to become really professional. But I think that can be found, and will probably become a new side-industry in itself, editors-for-hire. (Many writers, even non-failures, love to criticize and might like to earn an extra penny on it.)

Another aspect of all this is that from the viewpoint of the reader, books may at one point become cheaper than they have been, because the big old support system will not be necessary. (No surplus printing either.) And more importantly, the variety of books available will become far greater. We will see printed works that never would have seen print in the old days. For better and for worse, of course:)

... In the last decade, books and reading have become more and more popular. This is a very happy development, and with these new technologies, it will become far more so, and for the first time, writers are on top of things.

- Stobblehouse