Blog Editor’s Discussion: Self-Publication

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While I was brainstorming what I wanted to write this piece about (my version of brainstorming looking very much like drinking coffee and reading on my Kindle), I had a strange thought, which bloomed into a veritable forest of queries. What, I wondered, did the process of self-publication entail? How has the e-book changed the game, both for publisher and authors? Is it possible for average authors to make a living this way? After a mild argument with myself, I switched to decaf and went to work researching.

Amazon, it turns out, offers Kindle Direct Publishing ( https://kdp.amazon.com/ ) to anyone who has an account. There are several different programs for prospective authors to use in publishing e-books, but I think Amazon’s effort deserves place of pride for many reasons. Primarily, it is exceptionally user-friendly. As long as you put together and submit your work according to their rules, they will generally have it published and for sale within twenty four hours. Another major boon is the size of their audience. Publishing with Amazon means putting your work in front of an enormous amount of people, ostensibly translating to sales.

As with any business venture, however, there are negative aspects. While Amazon likes to advertise a 70% takeaway of profits on the part of the author, there are decidedly undermentioned caveats. First and foremost, if a sale is made outside of the United States or a specific collection of countries, the author gets 35% of the profits, due to the cost of trading in foreign currency. The same reduction is applicable if the work in question is published anywhere but on Amazon, or if it fails to meet minimum or maximum price guidelines (https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A30F3VI2TH1FR8#1-2_why_35 ). Obviously I understand that a business has to make fiscally responsible decisions, but I do wish some of these points were more clearly laid out in the advertisements, rather than hidden in the fine print. Even with those restrictions, I think Amazon offers an amazing service that should be celebrated.

Perhaps the most incredible thing that can be said about KDP is that it removes entry barriers, and de-stigmatizes self-publication to a high degree. Hugh Howey, author of the Wool series has stated that “Most of my months are six-figure months” (http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/07/tech/mobile/kindle-direct-publish/ ). Many authors like Howey have found financial and critical success in self-publication, success that might have eluded them completely had they stuck with traditional publication. By removing basically any restrictions on what can or cannot be published, Amazon, and businesses like them, have opened the floodgates. The resulting deluge of work can (fairly) be criticized as being typically bad, but it can also be recognized for enticing and developing some truly great writers. The great benefit of these communities is that they offer autonomy, as well as judgment-free support from a huge range of authors and readers, professional and amateur, in polishing authors.

I think that self-publication will not only grow at an extraordinary rate in the future, but that it will contribute to the creation of a new generation of great writers. Somewhere right now there are authors taking root, men and women who are obsessively honing their craft and growing under the tutelage and financial support of a broad community of literature-lovers. With the right environment, and enough people supporting them, they will surely bloom into something wonderful. What, dear reader, do you think of that?


Nick Smith is a senior English and History Major and Creative Writing minor from Alexandria, Virginia. Nick loves all flavors of literature, but he has always had a fondness for science fiction and fantasy, especially when paired with comedy.

Paper or Plastic: The e-Book Debate

kindleI can’t decide how I feel about my Kindle. Do you, valued Snopes blog readers, have a Kindle or other electronic reading device? Or what about an iPad, Nook, or other more advanced technology I don’t know about? All are applicable to the following discussion.

The modern age of e-books allows for the lazy reader (myself included) to access nearly any work online at the click of a button. Looking at my Kindle right this moment, it suggests that I first check out David Sedaris’s Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls and follow it up with a foray into Dickens’s Great Expectations. That’s quite the spread. A little random and not entirely helpful to my individual tastes. This is I’m sure due to the fact that half of the books I’ve downloaded were for school assignments. Others reflect my choices from Christmas break and rare moments of leisure reading when I wanted nothing to do with schoolwork. These options consist largely of embarrassing ‘chick-lit’ and snarky nonfiction not likely to enter a school syllabus.

I actually do really want to read the Sedaris work, chiefly because contemporary postmodern literature is my favorite mode of writing. I know from experience that my Kindle is not the place for it. E-books make reading non-traditional forms of literature, which are often already hard to decipher, even more difficult to read. Take a look at a contemporary of Sedaris, Dave Eggers. The copyright page of Eggers’s creative nonfiction work, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, playfully tackles the normally mundane information that dominates any book’s opening pages. Having read the work in print, I knew to look through those pages on my Kindle as part of the book’s entertainment. Without that knowledge though let’s be honest: there is no way I would have clicked on the copyright page or dedication before clicking on the “Chapter 1” icon. His sarcastic interlude in the copyright information would have been lost.

The point of this diatribe is to identify my chief concern with the trend towards electronic literature. It contradicts the emphasis on form that occurs in much of contemporary writing, not to mention the potential for formatting errors. While I don’t have any books of poetry on my Kindle, I would imagine that this form of writing would be even more difficult to read on an electronic device.

So, should Kindles be abandoned? Despite my distaste for their obvious downfalls, at the end of the day I would say absolutely not. Where else can you access both David Sedaris and Charles Dickens with a few clicks, not to mention Alice Munro, Tom Wolfe, and Ernest Hemingway? Although there is no adjoining Starbucks or comfy leather armchairs included, the e-book has its own benefits. Literature has never been more accessible, even if the spacing and/or page numbers distort the work’s formatting. So pick up that electronic device one more time and let that backlit screen light up. Hey, at least those detachable, flashlight bookmarks have become obsolete—those things were a pain.


Amanda is a senior English and Global Politics double major from Atlanta, Georgia. Her preferred genre of literature is Creative Non-Fiction, and she enjoys hiking in the American West during the summer.