Number of Self-Published Titles Jumped 40% in 2018 | Hacker News Reader

Number of Self-Published Titles Jumped 40% in 2018

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97 pointsunquote58 comments

I have found kindle books that come from a reputable publisher are MUCH higher quality than self-published books.

I just don't think many self-published books have the meaningful rejection, editing and proofreading that a publisher provides.

That doesn't mean that there aren't good self published books. And things might change over time, if teams form. I think publishing a book requires a team.

Meaningful reviews and awards might also help separate the wheat from the chaff.

I hope I don't get roasted for this; but I whole-heartedly agree. There's also a sizeable publisher that I find has remarkably poor editorial control, and so I hesitate to read works published by them: Tor.

Which is strange; they've always been a source of pulp science fiction and fantasy, but I enjoy such works and have enjoyed Tor works in the distant past. But recently? Notsomuch.

Isn’t pulp fiction by definition low quality?

Pulp fiction just means works published in pulp magazines or similarly disreputable publications. Some was bad, some was great. Many acclaimed authors wrote for the pulps:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulp_magazine#Authors_featured

In your very own link it says the term is used to refer to "run-of-the-mill, low-quality literature".

Pulp is, by definition, material printed in cheap wood pulp magazines.

Pulp is, by association, low-quality writing.

Pulp is also, by allusion, a particular genre/structure mirroring the dominant topics and styles of the original magazines - regardless of its quality.

You aren't wrong. Even if the content if good, even great, with incredibly rare exception, you really, really need a good editor to turn that content into something useful.

It's the same in the record business. See "The Wrecking Crew" about how the studio musicians turned the raw material of the artists into hits. (Often the original bands could neither sing nor play their instruments very well.)

On the other hand, I loved The Murderbot Diaries from Tor.

I used to be open to self-published, in the hope of more great books to read. After years of intense disappointment at so many poorly written self-published novels, or in desperate need of a good editor, I simply avoid them now. If it doesn't have a publisher I'm rarely willing to risk the waste of time and money any more.

For all their faults publishers seem able to bring a worthwhile quality floor. Sure there's been the odd exception in each direction.

One counter example is “Harry Potter and the methods of rationality”. Possibly one of the best books I’ve ever read.

Another example is "Worm", which I learned of from the author's notes for Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality:

https://parahumans.wordpress.com/

Worm and it's sequel, Ward, are amazing.

Worm is 1.6 million words long?? You read the whole thing?

It was released as a serial. Think of it as a long series of shorter works.

You read a chapter. Then you read another chapter. Repeat as long as you manage to keep interest.

Worm is an awesome tale that have mostly destroyed other stories about super heroes for me.

Yep. About the same length as the Game of Thrones book series (ASOIAF)

Yeah, I think Worm really fits the HN crowd. It's a de- and re-construction of the superhero genre, with really creative superpowers. I love the world building in Worm, it's internally consistent which is something that gets hand-waved away in most superhero stories. It starts out as a sort of young-adult superhero story but slowly morphs and escalates to a sci-fi epic.

I really admire the work ethic of the author, he has been delivering high-quality chapters every week since 2011, and you can just read it online for free.

Wasn't that a serial fanfiction published over a pretty long period of time? I seem to remember reading the chapters weekly. Fanfiction like that tends to be its own category, with the better ones rising to the top of the rather large pile. Another example is Metropolitan Man.

Another example is the Wool series by Hugh Howey. That was one of the first big self-publishing success stories.

The books are incredibly entertaining and actually spawned a number of short stories and novels by other self-publishing authors set in the same universe.

I liked reading HPMOR and it's certainly among the best fan fictions I've read, but in my opinion it has all the usual benefits and shortcomings of fanfics: It's based on fascinating ideas and a new perspective on the known world and characters, it has an unconventional story that the author obviously tells in the way he wants.

On the other hand it shows a lack of editing. There are whole chapters that don't move the story forward (like a third of the book is dedicated to student battles that just seem like a filler before the author decided how to end the story). I feel like those would all get significantly shortened if this would be a published book with an editor.

Anyway, I like reading fanfiction, but I think it stands on its own and it's hard to compare it with conventional published literature.

I see what you mean but don't really agree, the chapters that do not move the story forward allow to dig into characters, to get a better image of the universe we're reading about. I enjoy reading it, so I appreciate it's here, it helps immersion as the book is not only a specific storyline.

I've always been frustrated in Harry Potter that there's not more writing about the lessons for example. There's quite a bit about it in the first book, then it's more and more scarce.

For me personally, the thing about self publishing is it gets authors noticed by actual publishers. Many of my favorite current authors started in self publishing but didn't stay there.

I can see how it seems that way (that self-publishing gets authors noticed by publishers), but it's actually pretty rare that it works out that way for any given writer. As I understand it, publishers generally don't look favorably upon a self-published author.. unless we're talking pre-published Andy Weir level numbers.

The number of typos I see in traditionally published materials indicates that they don't add much value in the proofreading realm.

I've seen examples where they've deducted value especially when publishers' proofreaders are unfamiliar with obscure technical terms and mistake them for typos. This happens especially when changing a single letter would change the word from obscure to something relatively common; the meaning is of course not preserved.

Examples:

- in a novel about the Buddha, 'jhana' was changed to 'jnana'

- in an article about installing Linux, 'rawrite' (RawWrite) was changed to 'rewrite'

I saw that at the beginning with kindle books, and I gave lots of bad reviews.

I think as printed sales dropped off publishers would shovel older printed books into OCR and publish the results immediately.

Over time, the situation has got better. Many books I purchased years ago have updated versions available. I suspect it is because most of the valuable pre-digital books have been OCR'd and proofread, possibly by the customers.

Newer books were always digital and didn't suffer OCR problems.

I'm surprised Kindle doesn't have a "popular typos" like "popular highlights".

It's the same kind of thing that happened with indie games and Steam. The barriers to entry have become so low that everyone who fancies themself an author can publish a book regardless of how bad it is. The net result is potentially more good books, but realistically finding the good ones has become really difficult because there are so many bad ones.

On the other hand, I like these self-published books, because they can stray from the norm. A lot of published works end up following a similar formula, which is less likely to be the case in self-published works.

This is where meaningful reviews/awards would be required.

There is too much dreck to wade through to find that genre-bending gem.

Having a good community also helps to separate the good books from others. I mostly read fantasy and the community on reddit is so good to get recommendations, participate in polls, interact with authors, etc. There's also a yearly contest where 300 self published books are reviewed by bloggers. Here's a recent poll [1] and here's a somewhat older thread for recommendations [2]

I got a Kindle Unlimited subscription this year and some of my favorite series are:

* Cradle by Will Wight

* Arcane Ascension by Andrew Rowe

* Heartstrikers by Rachel Aaron

* Worm by Wildbow (I'm counting webserials as self published too)

* The Sword of Kaigen by M.L. Wang

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/cwz83u/the_rfantas...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/7lib3d/what_are_so...

I'll add Ra by Sam Hughes (qntm.org) https://www.amazon.com/Sam-Hughes/e/B07M92WWT7/ref=dp_byline...

> I think publishing a book requires a team.

No, you just need better tools to do so. Of course, having humans reviewing your book can help increase the quality, but that has nothing to do with having a publisher.

> I have found kindle books that come from a reputable publisher are MUCH higher quality

You are also biased because there are a LOT of really bad books published by traditional publishers anyway.

I understand what you're saying, but I disagree.

Tools won't find plot holes, they won't find one-dimensional characters, they won't find pacing problems.

Having a publisher means someone cares about their reputation, that there are risks, that resources are devoted to quality.

To be clear, I'm not saying that self-publishing means you will get a terrible book.

It's just that self-publishing is inclusive, published books are exclusive, and that changes the statistics. It's hard to locate a good book in a sea of self-published books where there are no quality bars.

Reputable publications put out less than 1% as many books as are self published, and they still spew a lot of terrible junk. Do you include say Tor etc as reputable? If not that percentage drops further.

What self publishing provides is a closer match for your personal interests. That’s only useful if you have unusual tastes, but I have personally given up on published fiction.

PS: What recent good reasonably hard science fiction can you name? Most people say The Martian, but that was originally self published.

"Children of Time" is fantastic and "Three Body Problem" is good. I haven't read the rest of the Three Body series but it seems popular.

I don’t want to argue about it specificity, but “Three Body Problem” is not particularly hard science fiction.

Bouncing a signal off the sun as a signal booster. Eleven-dimensional supercomputers called sophons which, when viewed in three dimensions, only occupy the volume of a proton. That’s a little out there.

IMO, people calling that Hard Science fiction shows how far from mainstream the idea is.

I agree, although you did say "reasonably" hard and it is popularly categorised as hard sci fi. The stuff about using entangled gigantic photons to manipulate signals to Earth was definitely absurd, but the discussion of the actual three body problem was more reasonable.

I dunno. I've never been a huge buff for the harder side of sci fi and Clarke novels seem to leave me cold, so maybe not the best judge of this.

Because reputable publishers noticed that people were still buying the self-published ebooks in spite of the lack of solid copyediting or quality typesetting, reputable publishers, too, are starting to cut back on such things.

I am a translator who occasionally translates literature for some big-name publishers, and I find that the onus is sort of on me now to ensure a high-quality final product, because the publisher no longer provides a real hands-on editor to work on the manuscript after me, only a young and inexperienced (and sometimes downright lazy) copyeditor/proofreader.

Quality control is a common good in retail markets. In a healthy market, consumers don't care about top quality from medium quality. They might even go for low quality if it's marketed well. Only the "pro" consumers or hobbyists care about these differences.

So there is profit to be made in price and quality race to the bottom. When the quality drops across the board those uncaring customers just leave the market. This has caused crises in other industries before. They don't care until they're gone, with the passionate hobbyist canaries leaving early.

I believe it is probable that an independent individual would be able to provide a useful advice and interesting speculation on the subject of philosophy, psychology, ways of living etc. Everybody is exposed to significant amount of life experience and information and given just that + sufficient intelligence and a habit of analyzing that can come up with something interesting and useful.

At the same tile it probably is much less probable that an independent individual has writing skills necessary to produce a high-quality work of literature.

So we have to choose if we would like to limit our inputs by only considering well-written literature. I believe what I'm actually looking for has high chances of occurring outside that filter. Perhaps we should not insist on getting a pleasurable and a practically valuable reading at the same time.

No wonder with Amazon taking 70% of the sales price if the e-book goes even one cent above $9.99. If the e-book is sold below that it's "only" 30% - those are absolutely exploitative conditions!

I'm glad that more books are being self-published, I don't trust publishers. I don't know how many times I was aproached on Linkedin and invited to write a book on a topic, just because I've listed it on my profile.

If that's how a lot of technical authors are chosen, that could explain a lot about the quality of a lot of books.

I also don't like the page quotas that publishers have, like it has to be at least 400 pages. Well, what if there is only relevant information for 300? I would rather spare myself the time of reading 100 useless fluff pages.

Also, a lot of potentially good authors get rejected by publishers or not even invited, as publishers have no idea who to ask to write a book to.

The publishers take a premium cut and leave the authors with minimal royalties, meaning that most authors can't make a living from their books, meaning that less books get written.

Allowing authors to self publish lets more authors have a bigger share of the sales, allowing them to continue to write and everyone benefits.

I don't think that the odd quality author that writes a crap self-published book is a good enough of a reason for introducing a middleman, let the market decide. If the book is crap, no one will buy it and it will show. You can only fool the internet for so long.

>If that's how a lot of technical authors are chosen, that could explain a lot about the quality of a lot of books.

I agree, but I don't see how self-publishing makes that problem better and not worse.

>meaning that less books get written.

I have a hard time believing this, in the age of the internet. For one, there's more content produced than ever, and it's still accelerating. Second, do we need more "books"? Why not essays and papers and blogs? Not every idea needs to fill 256 pages; most are best served with a less lengthy medium.

But yes, writing a book is a form of art, like making an album or producing a painting. It's very hard to make a living doing so.

For example, for web development, there is a lot of introductory content but there is very little in-depth advanced content published by editors. Advanced content is usually self-published.

And not because people are not looking for that, but because it's not profitable for editors to do several books on the same topic at different levels of difficulty.

What they want is another introductory book on another topic, as they know that is what sells better.

An author getting royalties from advanced books would not be able to make a living, but by self-publishing this becomes much more feasible.

One of the wonderful things about the Internet: if you don't want to pay Amazon 30% there is a universe of people out there you can sell to for 3~5% or so through your own web presence. You just have to go get them.

The thing is, Amazon in its privileged monopoly position in practice forces you to choose between publishing exclusively on Amazon or self-publishing, at least for new authors.

This is because unless you agree to exclusivity, you will be denied access to essential marketing tools like free promotions (via the KDP program), which are essential for building initial social proof and give the book at chance to take off in rankings.

Unless you have a pre-existent audience that you can point to your Amazon non-exclusive book, there is zero chance that it will take off.

As an avid reader + book buyer I see little value add coming from the publisher other than marketing which should be available separate from the publisher or lack thereof ... As with other media like music the author/artist should cut out the middle man and reap the bulk of retail costs using print on demand

ditto for academic publishing

Publishers can help with a lot of book-related things--typesetting, printing, cover design, and so on--that authors don't necessarily know how to do themselves. Automated print-on-demand services get you most of the way there, but professionals can still do a better job a lot of the time.

The real problem is the money to pay for it all. Most authors can’t afford to gamble four or five figures editing, proofreading, promoting, and distributing a book that may show nearly zero return. Think of publishers as VC for books.

Publishers don't necessarily do a lot of structural editing. Copyediting (proofreading), yes. But that's more like three figures to pay someone to do (which you really do need to do). Non-fiction editors will often also pay for someone to do a technical edit.

Promotion. For the average book, not much. The main promotion/benefit for, say, technical non-fiction is that you're in their catalog and will be on display in venues like trade shows.

Generally speaking, publishers aren't paying for book signing tours, publicists, etc.

Distribution these days isn't a big deal. Everyone can be on Amazon.

I've gotten a lot of benefit from Pragmatic while writing my book (went in beta back in August)... Probably more than I thought I would get.

The biggest benefit has been the specific technical editor that I work with as well as the tooling that saves me a lot of time. I think this has led to a much better book that should (hopefully) be felt by readers.

Only 40%? Considering the bar for entry, and the vast amount of spew that comes out under the guise of "self-published", that seems wildly low.

1.68 million in 2018 with a 40% growth rate. That's an incredible number, soon growing to reach one self-published title per hundred literate adults.

I'd be interested to see the distribution of the sales in the 24 months following a book's self publication. How many are sold 0 times? Exactly 1 time? 10 times or fewer? 100 times or fewer? 1000 times or fewer? How many books are sold over 1000 times? ...

I added LeanPub (a self-publishing platform) support to my technical writing tool Helpinator a while ago, but did not see any significant interest in this feature. May be I am experiencing a kind ob bias in this case, authors of technical books are exceptional people at most :)

Less gatekeeping, but lower average quality?

Do publishers aid in marketing?

Levels vary . If you are a star you'll have in-store signings and ad campaigns. Standard deals wouldn't have much support but that could change if things go well. Generally they can aid but not for the vast majority. They do not have the same reach you do with your niche subgroup so any marketing is more general and not targeted. You end up paying for the marketing anyhow if you are lucky to receive it.

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