Self-Publishing Industry Gaining Momentum

Posted on May 4, 2010

The New York Times has an interesting article about the rise of self-publishing. The Time's story says it is "hard to remember the stigma that once attached to self-publishing."

In this time of Twitter feeds and self-designed Snapfish albums and personal YouTube channels, it's hard to remember the stigma that once attached to self-publishing. But it was very real. By contrast, to have a book legitimately produced by a publishing house in the 20th century was not just to have copies of your work bound between smart-looking covers. It was also metaphysical: you had been chosen, made intelligible and harmonious by editors and finally rendered eligible, thanks to the magic that turns a manuscript into a book, for canonization and immortality. You were no longer a kid with a spiral notebook and a sonnet cycle about Sixth Avenue; you were an author, and even if you never saw a dime in royalties, no one could ever dismiss you again as an oddball.

It is refreshing that the stigma of self-publishing has become old news. Young authors may not remember there was ever a stigma attached to self-publishing, but older authors probably do. The Times article mentions the enormous number of self-published and microniche title last year, which was 764,448.

But times have changed, and radically. Last year, according to the Bowker bibliographic company, 764,448 titles were produced by self-publishers and so-called microniche publishers. (A microniche, I imagine, is a shade bigger than a self.) This is up an astonishing 181 percent from the previous year. Compare this enormous figure with the number of so-called traditional titles - books with the imprimatur of places like Random House - published that same year: a mere 288,355 (down from 289,729 the year before). Book publishing is simply becoming self-publishing.

764,448 titles is a big number, but it is worth mentioning again that 270,000 of those were from one publisher, BiblioBazaar, that cranked out titles with the help of a computer program. Even without BiblioBazaar, there were still about half a million self-published and microniche books published in 2009.