Writers wrestle words. It’s in the job description. Sure, we start with letters and end up with War and Peace unless we’re careful, but the building really takes shape when we string words together into some kind of structure. Using the correct word, the one that means what we all think it means, matters.
I bring this up because I recently stubbed my nose on an instance where it became abundantly clear that certain populations of writers have some rather odd definitions of common words and phrases. I won’t get too specific, other than to say that a convention might have been involved and I may have been sitting on a panel with somebody I would have thought might have known better.
For better or worse, I’ll lay out the nomenclature as I see it.
Indie: short for independent. They come in two flavors, each context-sensitive.
An indie author is somebody who is not affiliated with a publishing house. I generally think of these people as self-published authors because, in addition to writing the books and overseeing the production, they also upload their own files to various marketplaces.
An indie publisher is a company that is not affiliated with a larger company. These are generally considered small presses, although the line between small press and large seems to lie in the eye of the beholder. Baen Books is an indie, but you would be hard-pressed to call them a small press except by comparison.
Trad: short for traditional. These companies come in a wide variety of flavors.
Short fiction is almost universally trad, although a few indie authors have tried various permutations on short story singles and collections. All the magazines would be considered trad, because that’s a market that’s been around almost as long as there have been periodicals.
The term trad gets conflated with the big publishing conglomerates, which confuses the issue when you start mixing in single-player traditional presses that don’t operate as a subsidiary of some larger corporation like Holtzbrink Publishing Group or Penguin Random House.
The confusion arises because all publishers are traditional. The traditional publishing model hinges on the author licensing (sometimes selling outright) a work to a publisher to produce and distribute in return for some level of promised compensation. So that distinction above about indie publisher? The calling out of trad? It’s all the same thing. The only difference is scale.
The difference is the indie author who also happens to be the smallest of small presses because they publish only one author’s work—their own.
Hybrid: both fish and fowl, depending on context.
A hybrid author publishes some stories on their own and licenses some works to publishers.
The kerfuffle arose when a well-meaning individual said that a self-published author is one who pays somebody to publish their books for them.
No. There’s a name for that. Vanity press. (See also: scam.) I understand that, back in the day, the terms self-publishing and vanity press were used interchangeably, often with horror stories of erstwhile authors stuck with cases of books in their closets and trying to sell them out of the trunks of their cars. These days, it’s companies preying on the ignorance and wishful thinking of naive authors. They charge a few thousand dollars up front on the promise of putting the book in a bookstore and then up-sell every step along the way.
It’s not the first time I’ve heard this canard quacking around the edges, because the meaning of that word—self-publishing—has changed over the last couple of decades. I understand the confusion. There are a lot of vanity presses out there calling themselves “self-publishing companies.”
From a writer’s perspective, the diagnostic is clear.
Someone who uploads their own files, either directly or through a distribution interface like Draft2Digital, is self-publishing. Anybody who does’t is trad. If you do both, you’re hybrid. If you’re paying somebody to publish your books for you, please don’t.
Know what the words really mean. Anything else is inconceivable.
JMO. YMMV. Feel free to argue with me in the comments.
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Great sense of humor. Thank you for clarification.