The explosion of self-publishing in the twenty-first century took everyone by surprise, particularly the existing publishers. It was one of those things that we didn’t know we wanted until we had it – like televisions and mobile phones. In some ways, however, it is merely a small move back towards the fundamentals of being a storyteller.
In the beginning there were only storytellers and the people who made up their audiences as they moved from town to town, village to village. Then the storytellers learned to write and the audiences learned to read.
Next came the middlemen offering bags of gold and countless ideas on how to bring these two sets of people together more effectively. Some offered to print the words, design covers and transport the results to the audiences. Others offered to open shops where the stories could be displayed and promised they would be able to ensure that the stories were talked about and praised by all the right people.
Then they offered the possibilities of dramatising the most favoured stories on stages and screens, building cinemas and theatres for the audiences to come to and inventing radios and televisions which would carry the stories into people’s homes.
All these services that the middlemen were offering were so useful to the storytellers and to their audiences that both became lazy, willing to allow the middlemen to do all the hard and boring work on their behalf, leaving themselves free to stay home and do the things they liked the best – writing, reading, watching and listening.
The middlemen grew increasingly powerful and soon the storytellers were more worried about pleasing them than they were about pleasing their audiences. The business people became the ones who decided what stories would and would not be told.
The storytellers spent all their energies trying to impress the middlemen and trying to persuade them to help. Those who failed to do so grew despondent and bitter. Then, when the publishers became too busy to read everything that was sent to them, the storytellers had to turn their attention to pleasing the agents who sprang up to serve the publishers.
And so it had come to pass that it was now the poor storytellers who were offering their services to the middlemen rather than the other way round, and the audiences could only gain access to the stories that had been blessed by those middlemen.
A lot of people were able to make a lot of money, of course, because that is what the middlemen are particularly good at, but this was not the way that things were meant to be when the storytellers first started and they began to feel ill at ease.
Then one day, in a dazzling flash of light, the internet appeared in everyone’s lives and suddenly the middlemen with all their bags of gold didn’t seem so important. Their services did not seem quite as useful because the storytellers found that with a little more effort, and without having to leave their homes, they could go straight to their audiences again, using a service which seemed to be almost as free and open as the country roads they had strolled along before the middlemen first arrived. Self-publishing, which had been damned as mere vanity during the reign of the middlemen, suddenly seemed a perfectly reasonable way to lay your goods out for the public to view.
Within a very short time most authors had learned how to publish themselves, or knew someone who could do it for them. Then came another development: the pop-up bookshop. Some of the authors who found it impossible to get their wares into the established retailers simply set up their own pop-up shops in premises that had been rendered dark by the high street crisis.
Whenever authors get together we can be heard complaining about those who we work alongside. We complain that our agents never return our calls; our publishers never promote our books and the booksellers then refuse to display them with the prominence they deserve.
Digital publishing called our bluff on the first two because we can now publish and promote our own stuff, so we have no one to blame but ourselves if things don’t go as well as they did in our dreams. With pop-up shops any author who thought they could do better than Waterstones now has a chance to put their money where their mouth is.
If authors can be their own agents and their own publishers and their own booksellers we will never be able to complain about anything ever again – apart from the readers, of course, and no author ever complains about their readers, only the lack of them.