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. The recent history of the OUP music department, oscillating between New York and Oxford in search of a market, is a case in point.
The answer has been a proliferation of self-published material. Of course in a sense every book or record with the author’s name on it has been vainglorious; but in the old system there was always the argument that those impressive people at the top of the organisation one aspired to knew best, and what could one do but accept their offer? They said one was worthy of this fame, not oneself. That deference has now been stripped away — along with house styles, intensive copy-editing and checking of facts — leaving the author to grasp the technology at his or her disposal.
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