The largest media development since the Gutenberg printing press is coming. The full force has not yet hit, but the waves are lapping our shores. Computers, scanners, printers and their possibilities have changed everything. How we write, how we distribute (and eventually how we think about publication) are already different. For example, we now have the possibility of becoming publishers ourselves.
As any writer knows, the most difficult part of the creative process is getting an established publisher interested. Such publishers are almost impossible to simply approach. Instead you must use an individual or concern, known as your agent. He, she, or it approaches the publisher on your behalf and only then is the work considered.
Since a publisher is also a bureaucracy, the various levels within are all consulted as well. Particularly powerful in these days of book-sale decline is the sales section, which attempts to ascertain whether your project has wide enough appeal. If it is guessed that your project will sell, it may then be approved.
Once contracts are signed, you and the work are turned over to another individual, known as your editor. Sometimes these people are helpful, even necessary. At other times they are more interested in making a house product, something that will conform with their other publications. They are also interested in sales and may adapt the work to appeal to what is seen as a wider public. Others will also make decisions for you: the book size, the number printed, the font used, the cover decided upon.
Every step along this dolorous way finds your book steadily taken away from you. The needs of the company are equated with, or surpass, the rights of the author. You may have, indeed, written your masterpiece, but to the average publisher, it is just another product.
Authors have labored under this load for some time now, but help is at hand. It is now possible to print, bind and profitably distribute your work all by yourself. And here is the manual to show you how.
You may write without censure and you gain all the profit, though you will also shoulder all the debts. You can be in print in a month rather than the year most commercial publishers require, though you might not be able to sell all you print. And you will never again get royalties -- indeed you will never get more than 10 percent of the retail price.
You will also perhaps encounter a peculiar prejudice. Among those who believe that big publishers solve the problem of quality reading material, there is the feeling that self-publishing is just (merely, only) vanity press. Indeed, it used to be called that, with all the opprobrium that the phrase demands. (In Japan self-publishing is stigmatized as jihi shuppan ("you-pay-publishing"). There is, however, no reason for such discrimination: Mark Twain regularly self-published; Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" and works such as "The Joy of Cooking" and "The Elements of Style" were originally self-published books.
This new manual on self-publishing takes the author step by step through the compelling and complicated process. Finding your printer and binder, buying your ISBN numbers, how to set up your company, dealing with tax problems, and how to approach distribution agencies -- the possibilities of Kinokuniya, the "Perils of the Amazon," and so on.
One of the sections of this manual is headed: "Is Profit Possible?" The answer given is "maybe." It is clear that if you have written "The Da Vinci Code," you are better off in the hands of the pros. But most of us have not written engineered block-busters, and for many of us, getting our work to readers is more important than making a profit out of them.
Self-publishing is not all that cheap, but the costs are not prohibitive. This manual's estimates run fairly high, but it is possible to publish for less. The reader would do well to investigate the online printing options available.
Kathleen Morikawa's excellent manual will point you in the right direction and help you over the fences and stiles. She knows the field well and has herself self-published "The Couch Potato's Guide to Japan: Inside the World of Japanese TV." With her help, you too can take your neglected manuscript and happily give it to the world.
With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. However, before writing your first comment, please create a display name in the Profile section of your subscriber account page.