Writing is risky. Especially writing fiction. As Forrest Landry points out in his latest post at For The Trees, alarm and ire have arisen over the number of writers who give up these days and self-publish. He pointed to a blog post by E. Ann Bardawill at Something Fell, on The Killing of Mockingbirds. She used Richard Adams’ Watership Down as an example, and that drew me in because it’s one of my favorite books.
I know a little about this tendency of writers to give up and give in, because I was one of them.
In a sense I gave up on what is probably still my best work to date, by self-publishing rather than continuing to go through rejection and revision. Now I wish I’d kept looking for an agent or publisher, kept rewriting when all the rejections (where anyone bothered to read past the cover letter) pointed out problems. Now what do I do with a book that’s been published first by a POD subsidy outfit and again by me? I’d still like to see it published by a “real” publisher, but I fear that I gave it a premature funeral.
Some good has come of all this. My mother and a few other older relatives got to see my name in print and read the story in book form, before they passed away. I’ll never regret that, but I never intended to give my book such a limited audience. I never will again.
If you don’t want to go the distance, find something else worthwhile to spend all your free hours on. If you want to be a writer, if you know in your heart you’re a writer, go for the gold. Stop reading articles about POD and self-publishing. Stop subscribing to writer’s magazines that print them. The publishing industry may very well be ripe with middle men and favoritism, with big money interests and maybe even corruption. But you the lowly unknown writer aren’t going to change that by self-publishing. Read more articles on good writing, the market, getting an agent. Learn how to structure a story or novel. Give each sentence its due attention. Read more Richard Adams. Read Annie Dillard. Keep writing. Keep rewriting. Keep submitting. Keep rewriting. Keep rewriting. (That bears repeating.) Rework it until you can see your face in it, and submit it until either it’s published or the post office runs out of stamps.
1.
Self publishing is, for fiction, useless, mostly because you assure yourself of having no audience. Big publishers have trouble convincing people to pay for books. Folks who write online for free have trouble getting readers to even spend their time, let alone dollars. That’s easy for me to say — now — but I didn’t always know that. Luckily I learned before I had a manuscript. If you don’t know a lot about the publishing world self publishing sounds quite reasonable. I’ve done amateur magazines forever so I could easily have seen iUniverse as an extnesion of that.
I’m not so sure agents won’t look at self published books. Quite a few have made it to publishers. But, no, it isn’t the best plan.
Comment by Eric Mayer — June 18, 2006 @ 1:01 pm
2.
If you find the expectations of the past don’t match the outcome of the present, then what does that mean?
Whether you now consider self-publishing a mistake is not that pertinent at this point in time. Life isn’t fair, and I’m not at all certain that I feel like gloating over my personal views of the futility of nearly everything in life, and your seemingly eternal optimism and faith in others.
I will admit a certain curiosity to see if the saying that goes something like: “Only perseverance is the final arbiter of success,” was true, or if it was just another pile of feel-good malarkey a workaholic society distributes en-masse to keep people happily deluded in an economy sorely lacking in monetary rewards for ‘most people’ who actually do the work. I also wonder whether I was too encouraging of your activity instead of expressing more skepticism and cynicism regarding what I believed you chose to do. Perhaps I should have said, “What an idiotic idea. Get a real estate license, instead!” Or perhaps, “Do nothing.”
Self-publishing got you out of the mindset of only sharing your writing with agents or publishers that claimed to be looking for submissions; it also let your writing ‘out into the world’ so to speak, where many potential readers had and still have the opportunity to read it. The reviews you’ve received from other readers, the votes you’ve accrued at some sites are certainly and largely warm fuzzies.
If self-publishing had been your first choice in publishing and it was your first novel, then perhaps regrets would be in order. It wasn’t and you probably shouldn’t. You kept submitting to the traditional slush pile for years. Surely, at some point, it must occur to try something else. Isn’t one definition of stupidity to keep repeating the same action when that action keeps failing?
I guess the question you should consider asking yourself at this point is would you have been better off toiling away in another activity that would have been more rewarding to you? Perhaps not real estate, but something else? Were the years of effort (to this point in time) worth the rewards given? Presuming that rejection from the publishing powers-that-be would still have been the only result, if you could turn back the clock of time and take the knowledge of the outcome (so far) with you, would you decide to take another path, or would you still consider writing the novels a worthwhile expenditure of time?
Comment by Ken — June 19, 2006 @ 2:05 pm
3.
Writing demands a certain kind of faith that the words will come… and is a different process than publishing. When we struggle to get our stories on paper, we’re absorbed in the craft of fiction, fully immersed in our imagination and the world that we’re trying to create. Writing, in this sense, is about finding a story… and then being able to tell it to the best of our ability. All that matters is one reader: you, the writer.
The distinction between self-published authors and authors published by main-stream (”real”) presses is, ultimately, irrelevant when each writer sits down to tell a story. It’s the same blank sheet of paper that each of us face, the same struggle to get words down, the same fear of making mistakes or revealing too much (or not revealing enough).
In the end, it’s this struggle to write… not the success or failure of a book to find a publisher… that makes us better writers, I think, and helps us improve over time. Each of us works hard to get the words down… some of us for months, some for years. If we can focus on the process of writing (and not on the process of publishing), we can help each other better learn our craft… and find satisfaction in that… and maybe, with a little faith, that’s enough?
Comment by Bruce Black — June 28, 2006 @ 2:01 pm
4.
Thanks for all your replies. I guess it all comes down to what your goals are and whether the end product meets your expectations. (And how many things in life really do meet all our expectations?) If the goal is selling books, then yes, self-publishing is wrought with pitfalls. If the goal is writing and getting satisfaction out of the process as well as the product, then the mode of publication doesn’t matter so much, and as Bruce so aptly points out, the product is better for it and with a little luck perhaps the end result is success, according to how the individual defines that.
Comment by Barbara — June 29, 2006 @ 6:41 pm
5.
What happens when you self-publish? Do you contact a printer and pay X thousands of dollars and get a hundred books shipped in a box to your front door? Then you walk around, handing out books to friends and family (not always the same people), leaving a few at coffee houses in the hopes they will be read?
I’ve always wondered….
Comment by Sarah — July 3, 2006 @ 2:18 pm
6.
Sarah, it’s difficult to say what happens when you self-publish, because there are so many possible scenarios. Some people go with a POD (print-on-demand) subsidy publisher that charges money to print and distribute (and the distribution is usually only to online stores, rarely to brick and mortar stores). Other authors do everything themselves, which means the author is also editor, packager, distributor, and pays to have copies printed by a printer. And yes, basically the author is stuck with doing all the sales, either way, since very few booksellers are willing to take on a self-published book. There’s plenty for the bookstores to choose from, published by traditional publishers, available via established distributors, with a guaranteed return if the store doesn’t sell the book. Self-publishing is a lot like a kid setting up a lemonade stand. The lemonade may be delicious, but the kid’s not going to make more than a little pocket change and is lucky to break even.
Comment by Barbara — July 4, 2006 @ 7:52 am