Oh, dear, as if I don’t already have enough pet peeves, I’ve got to go and find a new one. (Actually, this one has been brewing for a few years now.) It’s the active versus passive use of the verb “to publish,” as in the difference between “I published” and “I was published.”
And my beef has nothing to do with grammar.
It has to do with false advertising.
Now let me say one thing right up front: While I have cut my teeth (and, if I were a horse, they would now be very long teeth) on the very tough nuts of the traditional publishing world — 15 books published by such houses as DK, W.W. Norton, and Harmony (an imprint of Crown) — I believe that the new advances in e-book publishing and self-publishing in general are revolutionizing the publishing business and giving authors more options than they have ever had.
The waters are rough right now: There’s a lot of flotsam and jetsam floating around, the old-style luxury ships (that would be the high-end print publishers) are sinking under the cost of everything from paper to fuel to staff benefits, and on the high seas, there be monsters and pirates. I don’t know what the future of publishing will look like, but it’s going to look very different from it does today, and part of it is going to include self-published books.
For myself, I’m thrilled. I haven’t given up on traditional publishing just yet — I had a book come out this year, in fact — but I’m excited by the new options digital and self-publishing platforms are giving authors who can try to reach niche audiences directly. I’ve got a list of projects it may take me the rest of my life to do. It’s an exciting time, not just in writing, but in music, too. My partner put out a CD a couple of years back (“Songs and Sandwiches;” that link has a link to some sample cuts; Check out “Saturn’s Moons,” which has me playing keyboards). I also just played keyboards for another friend’s self-made CD (Marilyn Miller’s Nighthawk; check it out).
So I’m not a snob about self-publishing or self-published CDs or self-made ANYTHING. Increasingly, it’s becoming a necessary first step to getting your work out there.
And I think that people who put that work out there — finish a book, or a CD, or whatever the thing is — have very right to be proud of their work and tell the world about it. So let’s get that out of the way.
But there’s this one little thing.
“I’m pleased to announce that my book Diary of Your Basic Good Guy was published last week.”
WAS published.
What does that mean to you? To me, it means that someone else — as in a publishing company — published the book. Someone else put the money into it, paid to have it developed, edited, proofread, designed, printed, bound, shipped, and marketed. Someone else — not you or your mother or your partner — some objective stranger whose job it is to pick books that will sell — took you in because he or she believed in your book and your writing and your ability to reach an audience. Not only took you on board — but paid for your ticket. Invested in you. And did everything possible to make you look good.
And that still tells me a lot. Yes, the lines are blurring. Yes, a lot of crap is traditionally published. Yes, some great books are coming into the world via digital self-publishing and author-controlled print-on-demand and author-owned small presses. Yes, the ways publishers and authors are working together are evolving and new partnerships are being introduced, especially in the digital world of apps. But the tide hasn’t turned, yet. There is still a stigma attached to self-publishing. Not as much as there used to be; people are certainly more and more willing to take a look at a self-published offering that has all the right elements. But it’s got to prove itself.
The problem is that I’m seeing a lot of people, though, who are using “Was published” when what they really mean is “I published” and a lot of these books don’t look very professional. Not only aren’t they being published by someone else, but the authors aren’t putting the work and money and care and attention into their products that a traditional publisher would. (In a lot of cases, I don’t even think they know what those elements are.)
I think there’s a little bit of disingenuousness here in that word choice. Certainly, a writer — someone who supposedly uses WORDS for a living, self-published or not, aspiring or experienced — should know the difference. Why, then, choose the word that implies that someone else fronted the bucks for your book?
Funny thing is, I can spot so many self-published books a mile away — on writers’ forums, Facebook, Twitter, you name it: Something in a 140-character Tweet about a book tips me off as to whether it’s self-published, and if my radar goes off, I’m almost never wrong. That tells me something, too.
I think one of the biggest hurdles to self-publishing is precisely the fact that ANYONE can publish his or her own book. Many writers who do don’t put the kind of money into their work that a traditional publisher does. They don’t hire a professional copyeditor who can excise a serial comma from 100 yards. They go with cheap template designs. They don’t have an index. And the finished product shows it.
With all those cut corners, those books no more resembles a finished professional book than that YouTube video of your cousin Max sounds like Luther Van Dross. To co-opt the language of professional publishing and say “My book WAS published…” seems to add insult to injury, and shows a remarkable ignorance of what being published by someone else really entails.
As I wrote, I’m a big fan of new media. I currently write three blogs and I fully intend to publish several e-books and some small-scale, locally oriented, print-on-demand projects in the coming year. But I won’t tell you they “were published” when it will, in fact, be ME who is doing the publishing. I intend to do work I can be proud of, make the best publishing decision for it, and then promote the heck out of it. I don’t intend to be embarrassed by self-publishing something, and I don’t intend to lie about it or imply otherwise.
In my previous post about language and grammar, I called the passive voice “weasel words. I think this is a pretty good example of how the passive voice can help writers avoid telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Or do you think these writers really don’t know (and don’t care)?
Your thoughts?
Wonderful post. I struggled with this for a while, and then I decided that it was awkward and slightly dishonest to write about myself in the third person. It’s awkward for people who write their own bios on a website to say “Aaron is a guitar teacher” etc. If I’m writing it, I should say “I am a guitar teacher.” I see more and more websites of top authors using the first person this way as well, and that helps make it more acceptable. Third person lends a general sense of objectivity to things, but it isn’t honest if you’re actually talking about yourself.
Hi Aaron: Thanks for your comments! interesting the point you made…. when I wrote the article, I wasn’t thinking so much about first versus third person as about the use of (passive) language that suggests that someone else published your work when in fact it was you who published it. But you are right that they are related issues, and it’s all in the way you use them. I too always have to make the decision whether to write about myself in a bio as “Karen Berger” or as “I.” Often I choose, “I” especially if I want the feeling of talking directly to my readers. But if it’s a more formal situation, say a bio that is intended to be read by editors, or establish me as an expert with potential clients, then I might choose the third person. But in that case, if I had self-published a book, I would write something like “Karen Berger published her book 10 Ways to Succeed as an Ocarina Soloist, with Vanity Press in 2011.” I wouldn’t say “Karen Berger’s book 10 Ways…. WAS PUBLISHED by Vanity Press” if *I* was in fact the one footing the bill.
Point well taken. It’s time to be honest.
Are you the thru-hiker and trailbook writer? I admire your work.
Hi Ray. Yup that’s me! Thanks for the compliment.