Academic Ebooks

[Ancient History]

So Paul Krugman posted this bit on the slow demise of academic journals the other day, and it reminded me of this article from a couple years back on shadow scholarship. These articles have been on my mind a bit lately because I'm writing an essay on an aspect of Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos - which has rapidly grown to the size of a small book, with no sign of stopping - and in a few months when it is (hopefully) finished, I want to publish it. The question I'm facing is which direction to take: pursue a more traditional print publishing deal, or to publish it myself as an ebook.

There are a lot of barriers to print publishing; I have a couple publishers I can contact, but I'd pretty much be calling them cold. It would take months for the thing to be edited, laid out, proofed, printed, and shipped, and for a large part of that time I'd be hands-off. Digital publishing, which I really like, requires more effort on my part - but I can pretty much do all the work necessary on my laptop, with total control of the project up to and including release. Not as pretty or as well-edited as it would be from a publisher, but I probably would mark the price as bottom dollar anyway - money isn't the issue here; I'll probably never even cover the costs of my research materials no matter which way I publish.

Another aspect to consider is academic interest and acceptance. Academia is moving at a faster pace these days, it's not just publish or perish - graduate students and professors in many disciplines hardly ever darken the door of traditional libraries, they do a lot of their research online, reading blogs and e-journals and papers or abstracts, delving into obscure and arcane databases pertinent to their discipline. And well they should, because that's the way of the future: even textbooks are being released as ebooks these days, sometimes sold by chapter. But, and there is always a but, I'm concerned about being brushed off as another crazy kid writing some crap that no serious Mythos scholar is ever going to read, just because it's an ebook and not in print. Even (perhaps especially) if they tear it up, I want peer review. A peer review that points out your flaws or points out the holes in your essay is at least taking you seriously.

And the scholarship of weird literature is not exactly up to speed on the latest internet academic standards, or we'd be able to download copies of Lovecraft Studies off iTunes for 99 cents each. It's not that there aren't academic Lovecraft/Mythos ebooks available - there just aren't a lot available, and there are serious gaps. I'm concerned a new work by an unknown author will get lost in the shuffle of general Mythos/Lovecraftian ebook crap. Typing "Cthulhu" in Amazon's Kindle store, for example, yields 188 results. De Camp's biography of Lovecraft is available as an ebook, but not Joshi's; The H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia is available, but not Harm's The Cthulhu Mythos Encyclopedia. Given the gaps involved, I'm a bit torn over how to proceed...other than to continue and plug away at the essay.

Any thoughts?

[Doom]

Old school, dead tree publishing is basically dead. No agent will consider you unless you've got a publisher, and no publisher will consider you unless you have an agent...that's not nearly as much of an exaggeration as it should be. Even if it wasn't all but impossible for a newcomer to get into, sales of dead tree products have been dropping, and dropping, and dropping, with profit margins shrivelling...Amazon is heading up, big box bookstores are going down.

E-books and self-publishing don't quite have the respect they should have, but it's growing year by year (and there's already at least one million-selling e-book fiction author, not that you'd know this by talking to dead tree publishers/agents).

You should be THRILLED that there are only 188 other Cthulhu books...you'll represent more than one half of one percent of the market! That's amazing market share for a newcomer.

As far as academics, being peer-reviewed is a bit overrated (I worked for such a journal for a few years, decades ago, and it's much worse now). Yes, it's nice, and worth *something*, but not necessary. Your work will rise to the top and be recognized on its own merits if it has any.

I do have the notes of some guy who went from print to self-publishing e-books, and he mostly explains the process. PM me and I'll give the link, I don't have it here in my office.

[K]

I've got a novel almost completed and my plan is to self-publish.

The reasoning is entirely about the money. A first-time sci-fi or fantasy author is making 5-10K for a contract that gives the publisher the right to sell 50K books, usually.

Sell books on Amazon for $3 a piece(half to a third of the price other books will be selling for), and you only need to sell 2500-5000 copies to make the same money, and anything past that is money in your pocket (so that 50K the publisher sold would be worth $100K, in case the math escaped you for a moment).

Now, you do have to do your own marketing and the like and build a following, but you'd be doing that with a traditional publisher too.

The nice thing is that if you book sells well, it's basically the kind of thing that attracts publishers anyway if you really need a dead-wood copy on your shelf. Sell well, and you can seriously fuck them up.

Still, you are trying some fringe academia stuff and not novels. Self-publishing might be your only route since the ironic coffee-table book market is always very lean and the academia market won't even look at you.

[JigokuBosatsu]

I don't know where you are, but you might want to look for opportunities overseas. I hear more about wacky limited edition fringe stuff over in Europe than I do here.

And for everyone here who is either publishing or wanting to, good luck, my brothers. It's a jungle out there.