The following is a guest post from William Joel and an entry in February’s Self-Publishing Writing Contest. Click here to vote for the winner of this month’s contest. Want to help out your fellow indie authors? Consider entering March’s contest!
Recently, with the emergence of one Publish-on-Demand service (POD) after another, there seems to have been an explosion of self-published works. Some might even view this as the being a new way to be published, but they’d be misinformed. Self-publshing has been around for as long as there have been books. In fact, in the field of book creation, professional publshing houses are Johnny-come-latelies.
Instead of traveling all the way back to the birth of books, or even the days of rows and rows of monks, hand-copying texts, we only need to begin with the advent of moveable type. Think Gutenberg and the 15th century.
Once it was possible to mass produce books, which meant dozens or hundreds of copies, books could exist in the hands of the average person. Of course, the average person did not know how to read, or if he did read poorly. Details, details.
Still, it was a beginning. At that time, the printer was the publisher, and the marketer, etc. Or, more likely, the author was everything but the printer. Over time, small publishing houses did emerge, but there was still lots and lots of notable books that were “self-published.”
Let’s move forward a few hundred years to my favorite example of self-publishing, Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” That’s right, one of the most famous books of Englsh language poetry was self-published in 1855, 1856, 1860, 1867, 1871–72, and 1881. Wait! It was published six times? Yes, it was, in different editions, all created and self-published by Whitman himself.
In fact, poets have often published their own works, often in the form of chapbooks, very small volumes. But scientists often self-published as well. Early on, before the advent of scholarly journals, it was the only way to get their ideas into each other’s hands.
So, why do some see self-publishing as a new phenomena? The answer is visibility. The newest self-publishing channels, along with various social media, allow for an even greater distribution than ever before. Instead of these works staying safely tucked in their niche markets, self-published texts can now share the same distribution channels as those from publishing houses.
So always remember that we who self-publish our works are part of a long, proud tradition.
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