Do it yourself

Vanity publishing is all the rage these days. Not long ago the idea of putting out something by yourself under an independent label, owned by yourself or one of your many dependents, was considered to be rather shoddy. There was really no replacement for winning a contract (important words) with one of the ‘majors’, whether record label or publishing house. The acumen of the people who ran these monolithic enterprises was held to be beyond reproach, whose glory reflected back on to the artists and writers they invited to join them.

These ‘majors’ are no longer held in such high respect. Everyone knows that the classical record labels who used to make or break a career — DG, Decca, EMI, Philips — now cannot even rely on winning a majority of the Gramophone Awards each year, assuming, in the case of Philips, they still exist. The great academic publishing houses are also finding it hard to lead the way in a market in which anyone can publish books online in a fraction of the time and cost it takes to make a proper book of something.