The great thing about self-publishing is that anyone can do it.
It’s also the bad thing.
For a knowledgeable and competent writer, self-publishing is a way to avoid the hassles, delays and disappointments associated with the commercial — and profit-motivated — “houses” like Harper & Row, Penguin, university presses and so on.
For an incompetent writer, it’s a way to unleash poor structure, grammar, word choice and every other sin our English teachers told us to avoid. Dissemination of these weaknesses lowers our standards. As more shortcomings slip into print, we grow less alert to quality.
Midway between commercial houses and self-publishing are the “vanity presses”: Out of audacity or a sincere desire to share one’s knowledge or creativity, one pays a publisher to produce his or her book, rather than the other way around. Many of these outfits are sketchy, lacking editors, fact-checkers, marketers and more despite claiming to offer those services.
Not that the rare achievement of signing a contract with a reputable house is any guarantee. Most, in response to persistent economic trends — including the proliferation of self-publishing, which bypasses them — have laid off editors and proofreaders, resulting in poor writing and outright errors sliding by.
Case in point: “Thousand Islands: Inspired by True Events,” by Tom Reilly, published in 2024 by Brooklawn Production Press (most self-published and “vanity” productions are attributed to a “press,” which is often no more than a printer or the author’s own one-off creation). The novel’s inspiration is the brutal and still officially unsolved 1968 murder in that St. Lawrence River resort region of Irene Izak. Blending fact and fiction, Reilly proposes a plausible solution.
Reilly is a thorough researcher and good story-teller; the reader wants to find out what happens.
But that doesn’t mean he’s a good writer. A lawyer by trade, his storyline wanders off into excessive details about other legal cases of uneven relevance. Almost every page is infected by typos and grammatical errors like “shrunk” for “shrank.” At one point, there are three such mistakes in one sentence. An editor would have caught those, cut down on gratuitous vulgarities, and dialed back the constant and distracting “then” to convey whatever someone does or says next. And that’s just the start of a long list of needed repairs.
Reilly credits family members for (unsuccessfully) rooting out what he calls such “gremlins,” but there’s no indication that they are professionals. In so doing he violates one cardinal guideline in publishing: Never ask a relative to critique your work if you want to preserve family harmony.
Contrast this with a book put out by an established publisher, the State University of New York Press: “Finding True North” (2018) by Middle Saranac Lake resident Fran Yardley. An accomplished writer, actor and storyteller, her combination “history of one small corner of the Adirondacks” and memoir is refreshingly free of usage errors, dead-end detours and all those offenses that weaken self-published and vanity works. In addition to possessing her own highly polished skillset, she worked with a “real publisher,” one that employs, either on staff or on call, trained personnel who are prepared to give time and skill toward a top-notch product.
These two books illustrate the contrasts in today’s publishing world. Self- and vanity-publishing are grand, and democratic, opportunities, but let’s not allow them to erode long-established standards.
Adapted with permission from a commentary that appeared in the Watertown Daily Times, Dec. 10, 2024.
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Addendum: The Adirondack writing galaxy lost a bright star on Jan. 5 with the death of Elizabeth “Betsy” Folwell. The longtime editor of Adirondack Life, her feature articles and “Short Carries” columns set high standards of perception and expression. She knew this region from paddle routes to politics, and had an unerring knack for translating that knowledge into words that always resonated. RIP, Betsy.
This post was originally published on here
