Backword Begins

Sunday, June 14th, 2009 | Posted by: Henry Baum

The inaugural post of Backword.  It occurs to me that some people are going to take issue with this whole enterprise.  In the world of self-publishing, there are people who are so embittered by the gatekeeper’s hold on traditional publishing that they’re cynical about the concept of gatekeeping entirely.  This has been apparent in the criticism of a site/service like Indie Reader.  Indie Reader’s a site for self-publishers, in which writers pay a fee to have their books vetted by publishing professionals and listed on the site. The cost of Indie Reader aside - which is one of the major criticisms - there has been equal criticism about people from the world of traditional publishing invading the indie realm with an outmoded system of publishing - i.e. gatekeeping is bad and antithetical to the spirit of self-publishing.

The same sort of criticism could come up about a site like this - except in this case the writers are declaring themselves the gatekeepers.  What we’re doing is not dissimilar to Indie Reader: it’s a hybrid of new media and traditional publishing in which some books make the cut and others don’t.  So Backword could come under the same type of criticism as Indie Reader.

Except a couple of things: the hope here is to include more writers eventually, but we’re starting small.  But more fundamentally, I don’t see any problem with there being an editorial process to weed out some books and accept others.  Really that’s the premise behind every good small press, so to say this is a corrupt system is pretty off-base.  To that someone might counter: well, I self-publish to avoid the editorial system entirely.

To those people I say, I love publishers.  I love Grove Press, love the early years of Vintage Contemporaries, Future Tense Books, Soft Skull Press, and so on.  I also love literary movements.  Not saying for a second that Backword is a new Beat Generation, but I’m saying that there is a lot of power in a group of artists/writers banding together.  And I think for self-publishing to gain more legitimacy, hybrid examples like this one are going to start cropping up more and more.

The other day there was a criticism on the Self-Publishing Review of the new deal between Simon and Schuster and Scribd, where Simon and Schuster is going to start releasing books via Scribd.  The criticism was:

Sites like Scrib’d weren’t really made to be platforms for corporate publishers to peddle their wares. I find it mildly annoying that after the denigration of ebooks within the industry, that now publishers are starting to flock to all these places to put their ebooks.

The way I see it, it’s a good thing for traditional publishing to be using the tools that are currently being used most often by self-publishers.  The new paradigm in publishing is totally going to take effect when traditional publishing and self-publishing is indistinguishable.  That’s when trad publishing will be using print on demand more regularly and everyone’s got an ereader.  So trad publishing honing in on the tools of self-publishers could be seen as a good development.

In short, hybrids rule.  And so I hope this site sets off a wave of other people doing the same - niche self-publishers banding together, non-fiction writers, whatever the case.  The hardest thing about self-publishing is having to do everything yourself.  But this site and group is trying to illustrate that it doesn’t have to be that way.  Self-publishing is not just about lone writers adrift in the wilderness, but it’s got the possibility of a movement.