To Publish or Not to Publish

As a writer your options are endless. Too often, we fixate on the goal of finding a commercial publisher for our work. Your goals may dovetail nicely with those of a commercial publisher. When that’s true, traditional publishing is an ideal way to get your work out into the world. In other situations, different approaches will serve your interests and goals better.

Some writers write for themselves only. A person who keeps a journal or diary may not want to share their work with anyone else. A journal is a good place to solve problems privately. If you keep a work diary, you may use it to figure out how to improve your performance. This is not something you would want to publish. As a potter, I keep an artist’s notebook overflowing with sketches, drawings, glaze formulas and reminders about firing particular kilns. As valuable as this notebook is to me, there is no reason I would want to publish it.

Some writers have a small personal audience for their work. A family history or a collection of personal essays fits this category. This kind of writing benefits your family and friends but may not have a larger audience. A private printing of 100 or fewer copies using a print-on-demand service or a short-run book printer makes sense in such cases. Personally, I find this type of writing and publishing very satisfying.

If you work as a teacher, workshop leader or consultant, you may write materials to support your work. It may make sense to print and market these materials yourself. If your professional activities bring you into contact with a large number of people who could benefit from you writings, you may want publish your work on a larger scale.

If you sell a large number of books on your own, you may attract the attention of a commercial publisher. Alternatively, you may wish to become of commercial publisher yourself. In either case, you have increased the visibility and profitability of your writing.

So Many Books

Writers, publishers and bookstores are alarmed about the demise of the book. They worry that television, Internet surfing, online gaming and social networking will crowd out books and reading. Yet, the facts do not support such fears.

Neither reading nor publishing is in decline. In a book titled So Many Books, Gabriel Zaid provides some enlightening statistics. When the Gutenberg press appeared in 1450, publishers launched approximately 100 new titles that year. In 1500, about 250 new titles appeared. By 1950, 250,000 new titles appeared. By the year 2,000, the number of new book titles broke the 1,000,000 mark. Measured by the number of new titles per year, book publishing is thriving.

The dismay in the publishing world actually comes from uncertainty over profits. The profitability of the various forms of publishing – hardbacks, paperbacks, print-on-demand books, e-books –is in doubt. Similarly, there are questions about where we will buy books and how we will read them. Will we buy physical books in bookstores or download digital books to our cell phones? No one knows for sure, but in the long term, it doesn’t matter much.

Short term, chaos will dominate publishing. The market will test dozens of emerging publishing models, most of which will fail. A few of those models, however, will become wildly successful. Longer term, publishers, writers and booksellers will adapt to the new business models, and the number of book titles published each year will continue to grow.