Indie Marketplace

The launch of “Indie Marketplace”, a new forum that will bring together readers, writers and publishers of independently produced literature, is an indicator for the future of book publishing and promotion.  However, a single forum cannot change the publishing industry overnight, and the book publishing industry has lagged behind music and movies in constructing a new model for distribution of content and discovery and development of new talent.

To be sure, one big advantage enjoyed by music and film media is that both can be downloaded from a website in their traditionally-consumed form.  Books, on the other hand, are still largely read from the written page.  At least, this is the format preferred by the vast majority of readers, myself included.  Efforts are being made to circumvent this, such as e-books.  While the technology may take off, E-books have not yet hit their stride in the mainstream book market.  The biggest use of new technology in books is Print On Demand, or POD, which allows small and independent publishers to create finished books for a fraction of the cost and with smaller print runs.  On a pure production cost level, this greatly reduces the barrier to entry into the market, which creates the other fundamental issue facing the independent publishers – credibility.

With POD making it easier to get into book publishing, this is exactly what many people have done.  It is well known that most avid readers are aspiring writers.  The advent of POD gave them a way to put their book into print, giving rise to increased use of "Vanity Publishing.”  Companies sprang up to help aspiring novelists publish their own books and created a new business model where the writer was the primary customer, not the reader.  In this model, the product’s quality did not matter, only that there were enough writers who would pay for their services.  The new POD technology quickly became associated with an inferior product and was scoffed at by the mainstream book industry and book critics.  While it is indeed a fact that many poorly written books that would not otherwise ever get to print are published through POD, this attitude is a disservice to the many talented independent writers and publishers who have to contend with this image. 

The question is, why can’t the independent book publishing movement gain traction, as has been done elsewhere?  It isn’t as if this problem of embarrassing efforts is exclusive to writing.  One need only look as far as “American Idol” to realize that there are many individuals with a lack of talent and a lack of sense who are willing and committed to punishing the rest of us with their efforts.  The same can be said for any creative form that exists.  It’s a part of human nature.  However, these other forms of creativity have built up groups of fans, artists, and producers where new work not only gets attention, it gets credibility.  Quality work is identified by interested fans, and spreads by word of mouth and self-promotion.  The most notable success of such a grass-roots marketing effort is rap music, which in the late 70s and early 80s was considered untouchable by any major record label.  The artists simply started by recording albums and selling their music from the trunk of their cars.  Today that segment of the music industry is one of the biggest and most profitable.  It shows that it can be done.

With independent books, the goal cannot be to look for the next Stephen King or John Grisham.  We already have an industry set up to do that.  It is the main reason that there are fewer independent booksellers, and fewer choices for readers at the bookstore.  The goal of the new movement has to be based on identifying quality work by lesser or unknown authors, providing more options to readers, and more opportunities for the industry to develop and survive.  If not, the future of independents will largely be an ongoing struggle to avoid being slowly strangled by the big publishing houses.