Why Self-Publishing Won't Get You Reviewed

In which I make myself unpopular, probably

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There’s a lot of talk, these days, about shifting paradigms and the publishing ecosystem changing. Writers, at last, can cut out the middleman and speak directly to their readers without the gatekeepers, middlemen and royalty-chisellers of traditional publishing getting in the way.

Self-publishing, thanks to Kindle Direct, print-on-demand and suchlike, has never been easier or more democratic. Writers are Taking Back Control. So why does it fell to many of them like the mainstream media continues to treat those who publish their own work as second-class citizens?

To start with, I should say, if paradigms are shifting and more writers are able to reach their readers, that’s a good thing. Let a million flowers bloom. Some great books are self-published, and many writers are making a small fortune out of self-publishing their work. It’s an absolutely legitimate strategy. Hell, here I am self-publishing journalism, or whatever this is, on Substack.

The days when self-publishing meant “vanity publishing”, and you had to drop several grand on getting a few hundred copies of your book printed with Precious Memories Press before doling them out as unwelcome Christmas presents are long gone. Some self-published books are a sight better than books published by commercial houses.

But. There’s a trade-off, and I’m here as the books editor of an outlet of the Moribund Mainstream Media to set out what it is. In the swings department: you get complete creative control over editing, design, distribution and marketing of your book; you stand to make multiples of the royalty per copy that commercially published authors do; and if you have an existin g platform with lots of followers, you can market your book directly to signed-up fans of your work. That’s all jam.

The estimable Emma Gannon, for instance, is a model of how sweet that jam can be. As she posted in a note not long ago:

So I do not intend to be grinchy, only informative, when I say that in the roundabouts department: you are highly unlikely to find your book in most brick-and-mortar bookshops; and you are highly unlikely to get your book noticed by a conventional newspaper or magazine’s review section. I can’t speak to the first, but I can set out my reasoning (which I’m pretty sure is true of my opposite numbers on other newspapers) on the second.

This may well not matter to you, and good on you if it doesn’t. People often overestimate the effect that books editors like me have on sales in any case. Yes, it’s nice to be reviewed. It does the ego good when it’s a positive one. As Martin Amis once admitted, the only thing any writer wants from a review is 20,000 words of closely-argued praise. But does it make that much material difference?

Having lots of reviews creates visibility — readers know there’s a new book by you out — and a rave review of a book by, for instance, a first-time author who wouldn’t be noticed otherwise can really help. But on the whole, what my or any pages have to say about the latest Zadie Smith — whether we love it or hate it — probably won’t have much impact at all on how her book will do. And if bad reviews could kill a book, Matt Goodwin and Dan Brown would be a lot less well off than they are.

Anyway. We ignore self-published work not out of snobbery, but in light of simple mathematics. There are dozens and dozens and dozens of trade books published by commercial houses every single week. Google tells me there are 200,000-odd books published in the UK every single year. Even quite generously proportioned books pages such as my own will have space to review just a handful of these.

A literary editor can’t read, or even read in, most of those books before he or she commissions. He or she is, essentially, making a bet on what’s likely to be worth the attention of his or her readers — and then asking the best critic he or she has available to tell those readers if the bet was a winning one.

So we play the percentages. Are some self-published books better than commercial books? Yes. Are most self-published books better than commercial books? Emphatically not.

That’s because there are multiple bars to entry to be cleared. “Gatekeepers”, they sometimes get called in a resentful way. But every editor, every critic, every buyer for a bookshop, every literary editor, hell, everybody who posts a star rating on Goodreads or Amazon, is a gatekeeper — and they are doing a valuable job. That job is, however imperfectly, to sort signal from noise.

Before it comes to market, every book published through the old-fashioned method has had to pass under the eyes of an agent, an acquiring editor, and the multiple publishing professionals at an acquisitions meeting, and will have been (often) substantially scrutinised and sometimes wholly reshaped by an editor at the publishing house.

Every single one of the several people this process involves depends for their livelihood on making judgments as to what constitutes a book in which the general reader will be interested. They get it wrong a ton of the time, and they have all sorts of biases — but if they get it wrong all the time, or they have no sense at all of how the market responds to a subject or genre, or of what counts as readable prose, they’re going to be out of a job.

The bar to entry for a self-published book is, essentially, zero. You can go direct to market without another human being so much as casting an eye over your book.

That means that on average, the chance that any given self-published work will be worth a review is a lot lower than the chance that any given commercially published book is worth a review.

And given the sheer volume of self-published material out there, for the likes of me to treat it as if it’s on an equal footing with something published by Yale or Allen Lane or Picador would make running books pages that readers will want to read even more difficult than it already is. Those many dozens of candidates for review would, once we cede the principle, be many hundreds. My inbox would become unmanageable and my pages would, most likely, fill with reviews of the “would have benefited from the attention of an editor” type.

That’s why, even for promising-sounding titles or writers I admire, I stick to the principle — recognising that self-published authors have made a highly respectable choice about how they want to publish, but that it’s one whose many upsides don’t include the likelihood of a review in the mainstream media.

I spend a small but significant portion of my time telling self-published authors why I can’t offer their books review consideration, though. Most, when I take the time to explain our position as reasonably as I can, are very gracious about it. A handful — I’m thinking of a prolific US historian who runs a publishing house which only publishes her own work — cut up rough¹. When I told her that we didn’t consider self-published work for review, she harrumphed that “bigotry and prejudice cannot be fought with reason”. When I wrote a version of the above explanation, she retorted: “That is prejudice. Like racial profiling, it condemns a person based on the group to which they belong rather than on their individual merits.” And so on.

Perhaps, reader, you find yourself taking her view. Perhaps you think my logic is faulty and I am trapped, like the old media I represent, in a fusty and increasingly irrelevant corner of the late 20th century. If so, fair enough: but I set it out here in case it’s of use or interest.

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I wrote for the Spectator about that Nicola Sturgeon interview, and why I think, ho ho, Sturgeon is fishy.

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Cheap jokes were to be had, too, in my Spec review of the new James Bond videogame 007: First Light.

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This week’s Book Club podcast was with Emily Wilson, classical translator extraordinaire. We talked about — among other things — why it’s weird that Roman literature exists at all, why she’s a bit down on Mary Beard, Tom Holland, Stephen Fry, Bettany Hughes and other leading lights of the classics boom; plus what she thinks Cardi B and Megyn Thee Stallion’s WAP can tell us about Aristophanes.

1. Not all cut up as rough as (I presume) the author of a book called (IIRC) Janet and John’s Hot Weekend, a copy of which was posted anonymously to every member of the Daily Telegraph’s books desk staff in the 1990s with a cryptically menacing note attached. Each copy was unreadable, so presumably unreviewable, because the author had drilled what I think was intended to resemble a bullet-hole through it and slathered the hole with crusty fake blood. Anyway, we didn’t bother the police with it. I think I still have my copy somewhere.