Do it yourself
Matthew Bell
Amature friend claims that the greatest favour anyone can do for his or her friends and family is to die without publishing a single book — no novel, no memoirs, nada. There’s no legacy like it.
I know what she means. There has been an explosion in vanity publishing and (not the same thing) self-publishing: increasing numbers of people consider an ISBN number a surer sign of a fulfilled life than an account number at Coutts. Indeed, having a book in one of the British Library’s groaning warehouses is a sign that you’ve arrived. Authorship is one of the most enduring egoboosting luxuries there is.
So what’s the drill? The easiest option is vanity publishing, but it can be a trap for the desperate and naive. Johnathan Clifford, who coined the term back in 1959, has been campaigning for the last 15 years to warn people of its pitfalls (www.vanitypublishing.info). ‘What normally happens is that the client pays the vanity publisher as much as the vanity publisher feels he can get away with for very few copies of the book,’ he says, ‘Books that are vanity published simply disappear into the woodwork never to be seen again.’ His campaign has led him to be consulted by the House of Lords and he has even managed to get certain publishers banned from advertising themselves. ‘Mainstream publishers never advertise for authors — they never need to. ‘ Susan Hill, who set up her own publishing firm from a barn in the Cotswolds, agrees it’s a scam. ‘I know a very unhappy man who was a headmaster of a small family-owned prep school. He thought he had had an interesting life and a lot of stories to tell and was persuaded to go to a vanity publisher. He paid £7,000 for 1,000 hardback copies and he believed they would be sold in bookshops and so on. And of course not a single one was. He was left with a lot of books and a large bill he could ill afford to pay.’ The best bet, then, is self-publishing. Nietzsche produced Beyond Good and Evil himself. He printed only 60 copies, but it was the book that made his name. All you need for self-publishing is a couple of grand, or less, and a lot of hard work. RAF pilot Mark Robson proof-read and typeset his own fantasy novels, and then marketed them by work ing as an unpaid floor-walker at bookshops near his airbase. He would help browsers choose books and suggest his own if they expressed an interest in Tolkien. After shifting 30,000 copies, he recently landed a fivefigure, two-book deal with Simon and Schuster.
Nic Portway is another self-publisher who has made a hit. He has owned a 1922 Vauxhall 30–98 sports car for 40 years. The 30–98 is the sort of vehicle car buffs lust after. In the mid-1980s there were almost 100 of them in Britain — they are now worth about £85,000 each — but there were no books about them. Portway saw a gap in the market, wrote a book called, simply enough, Vauxhall 30–98, published it himself and charged £118 per copy. The printrun of 800 was snapped up, and the book was in the top 100 books of the Publishers’ Guild of 1995.
This year’s big self-publishing success has been A.F. Garnett’s Steel Wheels, a romantic history of the railways which so wowed A.N. Wilson that he dedicated a whole column to it in the Daily Telegraph. That was nice, of course, but Garnett, who is 75, simply wanted to get his book out of his system.
Self-publishers have the satisfaction of overseeing every aspect of the book’s inception. Susan Hill says, ‘If you wanted a proper printer to print 500 copies of a paperback for you, normal sort of book length, you could expect to have to pay to have it typed and then typeset, then designed on to the page. That would cost between one and two K.’ But it is feasible to do it oneself. Portway had a friend lay out his book on the computer program Quark Xpress. Any English graduate will be glad to proof-read in return for a slap-up lunch, and a freelance art designer will dispense visual advice for a small fee. Printing costs would be about £5 a copy. After the purchase of a barcode and ISBN, you are looking at about £5,000 to self-publish and print 500 books.
But if you’ve got bags of money, the best vehicle of status confirmation is a letterpress book, handmade on a private printing press. This weekend the UK Fine Press Book Fair descends on Oxford to show off recent publications. There are not many of them, as it happens. Few of the 65 private presses gathered from Britain and overseas will have produced more than 20 books since they last convened, two years ago. That’s because it is such a time-consuming business setting a book letter by letter, row by row, galley by galley. It’s expensive too. The Alembic Press of Oxfordshire will be offering a poem, ‘Corrugations’, laid out over 16 pages in a concertina-style format for £650 — and that’s considered good value. The Whittington Press in Herefordshire sometimes uses stocks of vintage paper taken from ancient ledgers. Its books unashamedly put form over substance — the text is mere adornment. What better marketing solution for My Life in Accountancy?
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