BookGarage

A dream and a vision for professional self-publishing

We are the witnesses of a (r)evolution in the publishing industry triggered by Amazon and the like.

Jeff Bezos has opened the gates and the gatekeepers are looking at each other unsure of what to do.

Self-publishing has created a marvelous thing: everyone can publish a book, and establish a one-to-many direct relationship with readers who buy and enjoy the new voices.

There’s a terrible monster that haunts the publishing valleys, too: everyone can publish a book, and readers are exposed to the slush pile for the first time visible to the many. Recently, Books-A-Million has declared that its bookstores will be equipped each with POD printers. “Every book is printed because it has been sold,” breaking the old paradigm stating that “every printed book maybe is sold.”

The advent of cheaper and cheaper flash printers, together with higher and higher print quality, makes it so that printing books in advance hoping to sell them later is bound to disappear as a business model.

Books are already in online catalogues available to all bookstores.

These last will have their own POD printers in the back office, and customers will access loads of online information about the authors and their listed works.

A reader will be able to pay and download to a device with RFID (a short distance wi-fi service, think of bluetooth), and/or click to buy the printed edition. Get a coffee or a latte at the embedded BookStop Café and be served latte, cake, and a freshly baked book, right on the spot.

No more distribution costs, no more returns.

Every single printed book is printed because it has been bought.

Bookstores will have a never ending catalogue and be able to sell any physical book. Dinosaurs that will disappear are those publishers who still believe that their service and added value to writers is primarily to get published, and writers need to put up with everything else for that privilege.

This business model is no more sustainable because the basis for it is no more; it will disappear, and those who don’t change their plans will soon be forgotten and crumble faster than IBM did when the clone PC and the primitive Windows operating system made through to the market.

I also see the end of the query process.

Agents will perform like professional sport scouts.

They will look proactively for writers online; after all, a promising athlete doesn’t go to every scout’s house and run 40 dashes in his front yard hoping the scout’s lurking.

The athletes play their game, and the writers will write their novels.

In both cases, the audience is there already, scout or no scout, agent or no agent, and for a writer that is all that counts.

Now, with this revolution in place, how could any author emerge and be noticed among the millions of books that are available now online, and the thousands of titles that do appear daily on the various e-retailers?

Readers are wary and grew suspicious of independent authors, and think they now have to wade through the slush-pile that is published with the ease that comes from pressing the button ‘publish’ on Amazon.

There’s only one word.

Quality.

Period.

As now a hybrid author, I started as an Indie-pen-dent. I’m a professional, and my approach to writing (although I started when I was 6 yo) has been to aim first at top quality.

A book is a product, although a creative one, and it has customers (readers).

Offering anything but the best possible quality would be betraying the trust customers put in you as a brand, and authors are brands themselves.

In self-publishing, I soon realized that quality lacked in most attempts to the detriment of the reading pleasure.

As an author committed to quality, I knew that—by myself—I could reach up only to certain heights—quality-wise—and the need to be supported by professionals in my journey was and is a must. 

It is true that—today—professional editors (for all levels of editing), proofreaders, cover artists, etc., are available with a research in google, but for authors it is time consuming, frustrating, and sometimes risky to venture into a professional relationship with someone who could turn into a pr-editor rather than an editor. See for example http://pred-ed.com , the list is daunting and it grows continuously. And it is not just editors, or other freelancers, but unscrupulous agents and publishers, too. All ready to rip-off the naïve writer.

Even committed authors can fall prey to scams and waste lots of hard-earned money on people who promise to turn their manuscript into jewels only to return what MS Word does with its auto-correct features.

The naïve writer is lulled into thinking she/he now has a polished book that readers will appreciate.

Then, the reality kicks in.

I wanted to avoid, as much as possible, the risks and remove the traps from writers’ journey, and raise as much as possible the quality of books in the self-publishing arena. At the same time, help readers find—among all independent writers—those who are professionals, who care for their readers, and understand that becoming an author is much much much more than writing a draft and uploading the word document to Amazon.

With my partners in BookGarage, we aim at becoming the place where real book lovers gather, authors who care, professional publishing freelancers who are proud of the value they add to good stories, and readers who will not need to sift through the slush-pile in order to find a good independent story.

Our aim is that authors accepted in BookGarage, and freelancers, will only produce books that readers can appreciate.

They might not like the story, but they’ll find well written books. And we believe we ultimately are there to serve the most important people for authors: their readers. Less is more, and quality does not always go along with quantity. It can be seen as a truism, but I think what’s available online has proven all readers that it is time to change that.

Massimo Marino COO & Co-founder BookGarage

www.massimomarinoauthor.com

massimo.marino (AT) bookgarage (AT) com

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