Trad and Indie: So what’s different in 2020?

The new technologies of communication were supposed to open the literary landscape to everything and make all things possible, but instead the world of writing/reading has been sinking ever deeper into a bog or maybe it’s a quicksand. There needs to be a new way of reading and writing, assuming there is still time in this bizarre and quite possibly doomed century.

Not so long ago I assumed that soon writers and readers would be able to meet each other wherever they chose, around whatever books they preferred. Independent publishing seemed to open up the possibility that everyone could be an author and every reader could find a book (and author) they liked and could afford. Books would become easy and fast to produce. Gatekeepers and cultural brokers from identical backgrounds would no longer determine what was published. To some extent a bit of this vision has come true, but far less than what might have been. The infinite potential of the new technologies has been squandered and a new two-tier publishing world has emerged.

The two publishing worlds have accommodated one another. The Trad Pubs have happily regrouped and concentrated themselves into mega-corporate enterprises, swallowing up small publishers like sardines, cramming writing once again into little boxes marked by gatekeepers ever more vigilant and responsive to the needs of their local ecosystem with its critics, fashions and fame.  The so-called “Indies” are dominated by rules and expectations in part set by the publishing industry itself, requiring ever-greater expenditure on processes which independent authors once expected to do themselves.

Many books are no longer even written by their authors. Professional writers do what used to be called “the writing”. Editors do the rest. The degree of uniformity is astonishing. Sentences have shrunk to the minimum. Subordinate clauses have gone to the woodshed. The semi-colon and colon have largely been outlawed. Nobody would ever publish footnotes in a fictional book, or include photos unrelated to the text. In most cases there are hardly any photos at all, even in autobiographies and biographies. Copyright law makes sure song lyrics or poems by someone else cannot be included in a book. Content editors make sure the text conforms to specific “arcs”. Everyone expects three acts and a “hero” protagonist. Writers who still want to author their own books are enjoined to go to courses and learn to write so every book in each genre is as far as possible the same as every other one, apart from title and author name. Cover art, even font-styles, converge around genre expectations.

In Trad Pub the global space is once again divided up into “territories” defined by nation-states. What should have been a free flow of ideas and exchanges across an open planet has fallen into a morass of dot com suffixes with financial consequences attached. Trad Pub still pretends to be terrified of Indie, but it shouldn’t be, because Indie has been more and more mimicking Trad Pub and Trad Pub is making good profits from selling in the online market. Court cases secured publishers’ rights to set absurdly high prices for ebooks while Indie writers continue to destroy their own viability by setting lower and lower prices and indeed give a lot of their writing away for free.

Trad Pub retains the aura of superiority in cultural value. Literary writing conforms to certain expectations about ideology and positioning. Certain themes are “big”, especially if they are to do with those who are ‘Other’ to the publishing enterprise itself. It is sustained by hordes of English majors and over-educated humanities people willing to work for miniscule wages for the privilege of serving the interests of these grossly inflated transnational companies. Some books are mired in complex moral issues, most recently the question of cultural appropriation, when mostly white members of the cultural majority try to write about the experiences of the “less fortunate”. But in truth most of these books, whether worthy or unworthy, are being supported by the publication of one or two or three blockbusters every year from famous authors. If the books can be sold into movie markets or developed for long-form TV series then their success is assured via the feedback loop between viewing and reading.

In the Indie world, genre is King, Queen, Bishop, Knight and Deity. Editors, cover-designers, blurbists  and the rest ensure that writers conform to the genre. If you write one book in that genre then woe betide you it you don’t write a series of others, with matching title livery and often the same characters. This is popular mass-market writing, everyone agrees, and there is no room for literary fancies or trans-genre mucking around.  In Trad Pub they only want one book a year from their writers, if that, but in Indieland they want two, three, four or more one after the other. Mass production for a mass readership. Now readers don’t even want to read. The big thing is audiobooks so readers become listeners, mainly because the level of literacy in the general population has fallen so low.

Where is writing outside the norm? The most encouraging signs come from small local independent publishers who find all kinds of new (and old) writing worthy of publishing. It is fortunate that many writers can get back their rights to their own works from publishers who have gone out of business, or whose contracts were limited. The new publishing technologies mean these books, long unheard of and forgotten, can be republished and brought to new readers. But what about the countless writers who want to do something different but are being railroaded into the latest trends via K-Lytics and feel obliged to write shape-shifter romances featuring panthers, lions and mongoose (mongeese?) There needs to be a space where they can be published even if they aren’t going to score on the peculiar algorithms used by Amazon and the rest. Books used to appeal to small groups of readers. People didn’t expect to make $50,000 a year or more by writing pot-boilers, although now it seems to be a career path. But it’s all about money and ranking these days, whether Trad or Indie.

Meanwhile I am pushing onwards trying to find some path between the two even though I increasingly think it’s a truly thankless venture.

3 thoughts on “Trad and Indie: So what’s different in 2020?

  1. Great post, Annette. I’m probably a good example of a writer who exists outside today’s norm, because I have no plans to pursue a trad deal, and I don’t plan to use any of the popular self-publishing sites. Instead, I’m doing the craziest thing imaginable… I’m going to sell directly to my readers! On my website! Oh, my! Time will certainly tell if I’m onto something, or if I’m just shadowboxing in the dark. Good luck to us all!

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    • Hullo Darius, Thanks for the comment. I’ll visit you back in a moment. I really support the idea of selling directly to readers from one’s website. In fact I have looked into this many times, especially when I first published my children’s book The Priceless Princess and realised that Amazon will not publish print versions in Australia and readers who order it have to pay a fortune in mail. At that time though there was no ability to put a Paypal button on a WordPress site. You can do that now, I am about to do it myself when my next books come out. But it’s still quite limited, involves a Paypal account, keeping track of financial things etc. And it also means you have to monitor your orders, pack everything yourself and trek off to the Post Office, unless you plan to use DHL or something. I wonder why you would not put your book(s) up on KDP and Ingram Spark? Anyway, thanks again. Annette.

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      • It’s true… self-managing all the nuts and bolts of publishing is truly a big pain in the keister! However, there are ways to keep some parts simple, especially when it comes to logistical problems like shipping. I don’t know if you’ve looked into POD (print on demand) options, but I’d wager there are a few locations in Sydney (among other major cities) that can provide you with localized print/distro packages. As for KDP, Ingram Spark, and all the rest… I have no interest in them, because I’m lucky enough to have a steady income, which means I can focus on slowly creating my own sales space that will only require a few risk-junkies who are willing to gamble on an unknown author! Hopefully this eventually grows into an accepted means for first-time readers to buy my work. Time will certainly tell. I could be dead wrong, but I do know if I wanted to get max ROI from writing books for a living, I would always write to market, use the top self-publishing platforms, buy as much advertising as I can afford, and crank out at least eight books every year. Ugh! I feel tired just writing that. Haha

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