Self-Publishing and Collection Development : Opportunities and Challenges for Libraries

Abstract

Index 179i Katina Strauch, the founder of the Charleston Conference (and a leader of the editorial board of this series of books), has a fantastic vision and drive, as anyone who knows her will attest. The first time I met her, someone brought her to our offices (also located in Charleston) for a show-and-tell tour. As she wandered into BookSurge in 2003, I am sure she was uncertain what to make of the ragtag bunch trying to change the publishing industry. Our offices were "uptown" behind a fried chicken restaurant dumpster and next to a bingo parlor that was held up at gunpoint as we conducted meetings in the front office one day. We found bullet casings in the parking lot all the time. Despite these bleak surroundings, she was nice to me, she was curious about the publishing and print-on-demand business we had built out of those humble beginnings, and she made me a part of her conference the following year. We became friends, and she continues to be an inspiration to me.Several years later, she invited me to put together a plenary session on libraries and self-publishing for the Charleston Conference. At that point, I had sold BookSurge to Amazon.com, had moved to Seattle to integrate the company and technology, and had come a long way from those ragtag, strip mall, bingo parlor days. I worked at Amazon for two years after the sale, helping to turn BookSurge into CreateSpace, now the world's largest and most successful self-publishing company.I suppose as an early self-publishing visionary-and because I was now a part of the library industry with our new company BiblioLabs-she Foreword Mitchell Davis, BiblioLabsii | Self-Publishing and Collection Development thought I would be good to put together the plenary. It was a huge hit. It was one of those Charleston Conference sessions where people pour over into the hallways and ask questions remotely while watching on closed-circuit television in another room. We definitely felt like we were onto something.The next year, she asked if I could do a preconference on the same topic. I jumped at the chance and was able to convince some of the best brains and the most entertaining people in the library and publishing world to come debate the topic for half a day. It was an inspiring day for everyone who attended and had a chemistry I have yet to see in a conference of its type.This resulting book is the product of the conversation Charles Watkinson and I had afterward. At the time, Charles was the director of Purdue University Press, and he had delivered a fantastic presentation on what he was doing within the organization to facilitate self-publishing. We were still buzzing from the day's activity and discussing how the day had uncovered more honest ways to think about and talk about self-publishing in academia. I had called the preconference "Self Pub 2.0," attempting to convey the idea that self-publishing was a technology revolution entering a new phase-that at the end of the day technology could be applied in any way the imagination saw fit.I still got resistance to...

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