A cautionary tale, with ebooks

How self-publishing looked a decade ago

Twelve years ago on the Guardian blog Anthony Horowitz asked, "Do we still need publishers?" A pertinent question at the time — so what do we think now?

Horowitz has multiple successes to his credit including Alex Rider, the Power of Five, Foyle's War and - if your memory goes back that far - even a few episodes of Robin of Sherwood. (Actually, forget those; he was just starting out, and had the impossible task of measuring up to the legendary Richard Carpenter. But the other stuff more than makes up for it.)

Horowitz considered the various possible futures of publishing and came up with some interesting questions. Here’s what he had to say about digital books (this is back in 2012, remember):

"I'd love to write a murder mystery where you could actually tap on a bit of dialogue you mistrusted and discover that the character was telling a lie. Where the reader actually had to become a detective and where the last chapter, the reveal, had to be earned. Or how about a book with different points of view, where you could choose which of the characters became the narrator?"

The second of those ideas certainly did well for Ellery Queen eighty years ago, incidentally, so why not now?

I have my own story about self-publishing. I ran into a well-known author who wrote a very successful novel. It came out thirty years ago, but even so I'll bet you've heard of it. He saw me with an iPad and asked, "Do you think these ebooks and things will catch on?" It turned out that he still owned the digital rights to his novel, as those hadn't entered the picture back in the early '90s. The publishers wanted to do a Kindle edition and were offering him 25% of net receipts.

"Email me the book," I said. "I'll turn it into a Kindle file this week and you can have 99% of net."

"Isn't that like vanity publishing?" he worried.

Not at all. Vanity publishing is where somebody runs off a limited print run and makes money by selling the books at a high price to you and your friends. But his worry was that self-publishing still carries a stigma - and, of course, without a publisher to back it up there'd be no publicity.

He should have done it. The book is already famous, and everyone knows he's a proper writer. But instead he went and signed with his print publishers, who must have been aching from the strain of holding back their Cheshire Cat grins as they walked him to the door. Ah, so foolish - but so many authors are still a bit befuddled by the digital age. Annoying, too. That one percent would have paid for me to write a dozen books!