Probably in most cases. But not always. Even if a book only was read by a few strangers, or even just one, an author who self-published could feel a great satisfaction.
I wrote a novel that only 4 friends, 2 co-workers, my wife and my brother read. I felt it time well spent. (I just printed it out and stapled the chapters together).
I do think it’s a shame some people are hurt by vanity presses. but that’s not always the case.
RealityChuck is right – there’s nothing wrong with self-publishing, if your book is on a specialized topic and has a very narrow market – family cookbooks, the abovementioned guitar history, etc. I have read very good self-published novels that, in a less belt-tightened age, might have been given a chance with a traditional publisher. But things are tough all over.
I’m sure. But it’s a very high price to pay in order to say a couple of people read the book.
You may have, and since your costs were minimal, it was OK for you. But, given the choice, wouldn’t you have preferred that someone offer to pay you a few thousand dollars and get the book into bookstores all over the US? And have 16,000 people read it instead of four?
There’s nothing wrong with ‘wanting people to read a book you wrote,’ but there’s nothing especially right about it either. It’s value neutral.
There is something ‘right’ about creating something that other people honestly enjoy. But that requires a lot of hard work and discipline to get through the drudgery of multiple drafts and the humility to have your work critiqued and edited. It also take a commitment to read a lot both of and about your chosen genre, to understand what readers want and need, and to meet them there.
But a lot of self publishers is that they don’t want to do any of that – they have written an amateurish first draft, and they think they’re done. They don’t feel like they should have to compromise or collaborate with anyone, or have their work judged, or pass anyone’s test. There is something wrong with that. You want readers to read your book, but you aren’t willing to give them the best reading experience possible. Your ego gets in the way.
There’s a space for self publishing, but for the most part there’s a reason a vanity press is called that. It’s driven not by the readers desires, but by the vanity of the authors.
To put it another way, there’s nothing wrong with wanting a super bowl ring. But it kind of means more to earn it than to buy it in a pawn shop and pretending that you earned it.
In any case, I found the OP amusing. I didn’t even know what X Libris was, but I think I see ads for it too. To me those ads are just extra entertainment and worth every penny.
Some self publishing companies are better than others. Glancing at XLibris, I can see some pros and cons. The pro is that they are pretty frank about being a self publisher – not all are; some claim to be a traditional royalty-paying publishing company and stick it to naive authors through reading fees and other nonsense. Or they pose as an agency and ‘sell’ your book to a vanity press that’s part of the same operation. So as faint as the praise is, XLibris is clear about who they are. The con is that they mislead authors by pretending that they can place books in retail stores. No self publisher can claim that.
Actually, one of the most honest of the vanity presses is Vantage Press – one of the oldest around. Their material makes no promises of success and they ask the author to answer some questions, including:
XLibris is not even that honest, but you’re right in that they’re far from the worst.
You know, I could imagine these as seeds for a writing exercise – start with one of the first sentences and make it into an interesting story. For instance:
“Everybody in Our Village loved to go by Granny Wilkins’ cottage. Maybe it was the lilacs that twinkled a cheery greeting in the dooryard, or maybe it was the brass knocker that twinkled on the white-painted door, or maybe – and I suspect this was the real reason – it was Granny herself, with her crisp white cap, and her wise brown eyes, twinkling away in her dear little old winter apple of a face. And no one gave a second thought to the bleached bones that made up her garden fence or the children who went to visit and didn’t return.”
Actually, Gene has toned down his prose considerably from when this first hit the Internet and where the trolled the Usenet newsgroups and pulling every newbie trick in the book – creating multiple accounts, responding in snarky tones to every comment ever made (even constructive ones), attacking published writers and saying they know nothing about books, and, of course, constantly claiming “The lurkers support me in e-mail.”
The book on the web now is a considerable improvement (not good, but within reach of submediocre), and he even seems to have listened to some of the suggestions (I mentioned out to him that good writers avoid putting exclamation points at the end of half their sentences, a bit of advice that got me a nice dose of his scorn, but I notice he’s cut out the exclamation points.)