by Phyllis Twombly

Created on: June 11, 2009

Self-published authors who suddenly learn all their book marketing and promotion is up to them may have the unfortunate tendency to become stalker authors. This is one of those 'hope to never see or be one' kind of things. An author who becomes a stalker is a sad thing indeed. There was a Newhart episode with Tim Conway, who guest starred as a self-published author desperate to sell his bookor even trade one for a meal. I'm guessing his character opted for the 'garage package' where you end up with a garage full of books to sell. It was hilarious. It was also sadly representative of the experience of more than a few self-published authors. Most of them don't engage in self-publishing to the point of becoming penniless but failure is a definite possibility.

Authors may expect a traditional publisher to do some promotion but self-publishing gives no such guarantees. While the industry has come a long way, problems remain. There's still no minimum editing standard for self-publishing companies. While some traditional publishers currently allow more errors to slip through, the general perception is that self-published books are always poor quality. The truth is that many high quality books are now self-published, in spite of the regrettable number of poorly edited works.

Fighting this misconception is a large part of the reason self-published authors tend to become highly assertive. The excitement of seeing one's book in print is one thing. To learn people are rejecting it outright because it's self-published is quite another. After all the hard work and believing in one's own manuscript enough to back it financially, offhand dismissal is downright offensive. This might be the moment in which the stalker author is born.

A self-published author expects to be treated about the same as a traditionally published author. Even after researching the industry I was still surprised at the amount of discrimination I encountered after my novels started to come out. The Internet seemed like the ideal place to search for lists of recently published authors. Most of these listings deliberately exclude self-published authors, with the excuse of limited space. The minimum standard for some of these sites is for a writer to have an advance for an unpublished manuscript.

In my own experience most of the modern media, from radio and television to newsprint and the Internet, have a more intelligent attitude. A few will still have nothing to do with a self-published author but

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