Publish AND Perish

I engaged in a lively argument with some friends at a bulletin board I frequent, me basically parotting the arguments against self publishing I've learned my whole life.

Who've I learned it from? My Dad for one, though even he recognizes that the modern world is different. It's one thing to spend $17,000 in 1965 self-publishing a press run, quite another to submit an electronic file that can be ordered one at a time for $17.

Where else? Let's see, Donald Maas bad-mouths self-published books in his book on writing the 'break out novel.' He says a lot of shit I agree with in terms of what makes a book generate the world-of-mouth impact that puts it on the map. But he's also a literary agent by trade. If the next Dan Brown is a POD guy, agents are fucked.

And while I'm not the sort most people would peg as 'Green,' (I just threw an aluminum can in the trash, and do so often, even though I realize that aluminum cans are one of the rare items that can be recycled with less environmental damage than landfill/virgin manufacture). I detest the whole recycled-as-an-end notion, it's a techonology, and if it costs more to recycle paper than to grow pulpwood, that means you're using more resources and being 'less Green.'

And landfills, modern landfills, are less damaging to the world than some individual humans. But I digress (it's my specialty).

But what could be more green than Print on Demand?

Full disclosure: while being determined to go the traditional route for myself, Ive subscribed to PODi's newsletter for YEARS. This is an e-mail that shows up, was it 1999 I started? 2000? It was back when POD technology didn't offer laminated covers, when print quality was an issue, when an Indigo digital press cost three times what they do now. So I know a little about the subject.

A book that is printed as ordered has two huge plusses:

It's never out of print. You want it, go to Amazon or wherever it's catalogued, and order it. Maybe you're the first guy in twenty years to want to read it, there's no practical reason it can't still be available. You get your copy of some obscure book you heard about, or a back issue of a literary magazine that was the first to publish an author you've come to love. And it's brand new, the spine isn't broken and the pages aren't yellow. It's just some ones and zeros that cost about nothing to store, waiting for your interest to inspire the manufacture of a copy.

Zero waste. Where I work, we have an Indogo now. We still have traditional, plate-hanging presses for longer runs. But we can do four color process runs of one at the same unit cost as hundreds. The economy of scale only kicks in when the click charges exceed our plate costs, and in that case we run it on the SpeedMasters (really good Heidelberg presses). You can't tell, even with a loop, which press it was printed on unless the SpeedMaster operator fucks up.

The remainders I love to buy, they're books printed that were auctioned off unsold. They mark the hell like the 'cutouts' of the LP days, and discount it to get it off their hands. Why? Because they had to print 10,000 copies to make it worth doing.

I make my living in desktop publishing. Computer Graphics. I redraw logos, I set type. I order dies. This is all stuff that used to be done with lead, teams of men would attempt to keep up with the kind of output I can do. Guys lost fingers jig-sawing inferior boards to ones cut witha laser now for die cutting magnets.

My uncle, he was a journman typesetter. If it hadn't been for desktop publishing, he wouldn't have had to change careers. Instead of being this amazing luthier and fine woodworker, he'd be this lead-blinded, retired Linotype Operator. I used to live next door to an older version of him, a guy who gave his eyes to the production of the Kansas City Scar, who gave me his pica pole because he couldn't see the numbers on it anyway, and because I was in the trade that eliminated the job that crippled him.

Uncle Kenny may not have been in the Luddite brigades who said desktop publishing would never give the quality of 'real' typesetting (tough InDesign now gives me the ability to do proper justification, with hanging quotes and extended caps, something DTP wrote off in the late 1980s as impossible). But they were there, insisting that desktop publishing as just a way to let any asshole who could scribble on a napkin design his own menu, typeset his own paper, book, newsletter.

And yeah, any asshole with a computer and a $40 printer can make the menu for his restaurant. And if you have any sense of design, you eat there, you look at the menu and you wonder why he doesn't let a nephew just do it with Crayolas.

The POD scene, it takes all that and throws it into the Bestseller Industrial Complex. If your book is shit, who's going to buy it? If 'A Confederacy of Dunces' came about today and couldn't find an agent, John Kennedy Toole could POD it, take a 'next generation anti-depressant' and go one with life instead of blowing his goddamn head of and making his Mom be his posthumous agent. And if that boob who came around my former workplace with his crazy self-published manifesto about Lyme's Disease and his mail-order bride (this was a 'non-fiction' book, at least in his view), that nut, his 'wife' and what, his Mom, that's his sales.

Publish and Perish. The 'and' of my childhood is replaced by technology. Quality control? It's up to the author. Legal issues, sue the author (he probaly has NOTHING to take, I don't). The cover sucks? Well, if it's my book, shoot me an e-mail. There's no way I design books for other guys and then hire someone to design mine. I'll be my own patient and take my medicine. It's hard for me to imagine that I could come up with a cover more offensively tasteless than the latest Janet Evanovich...