Casting Your Bread
Getting your words out is incredibly easy, but doing it right is still a daunting task
IF IT IS the Writer’s solemn obligation to express himself on the page, the Reader feels no such burden of responsibility to read it. And the Publisher, worse still, feels positively behooved to step between reader and writer and declare, in no uncertain terms: You shall not pass!
J.R.R. Tolkien’s Gandalf was decidedly a Middle Earth publisher before turning to magic.
Once upon a time, long before Al Gore invented the Internet, getting published was already a Sisyphean task. Publishing houses, awash and abrim with typed manuscripts and SASEs, were the sole arbiters of reading material for the general public. If you wanted to be published, you had no choice but to write a suitably humiliating query letter, supplicating the publisher to please be so kind as to read your humble words and, pray, consider the possibility of perhaps…. And then wait up to six months for your rejection letter.
In real terms, except that today you can submit your work online most of the time (but not always), nothing has changed that much in traditional publishing. You sweat and pour your life’s blood onto the page and then send it winging along its way to as many publishers as you can find, hoping to land on someone who is in the particular mood to read and enjoy your words.
Tuesdays are good. Just before lunch. In springtime.
Despite that, there are myriad new ways to be published today, flooding the market with millions of unvetted texts. We can write blogs, start our own websites, or self-publish. The resulting surfeit of stories and essays and poems and excerpted novels — none of which having passed before the eagle eyes of an editor (and often not even a proofreader) — means that while it seems easy to publish today, it is still a daunting task to get published by someone else.
I have been down all of these roads before. I publish blogs in a few places, I write web content for a few different sites, I have a self-published volume of poetry (total sales: 7), and books published in the traditional way by an established publishing house.
And while, as a writer, I appreciate being able to publish whatever I want without having to get past a gatekeeper, I am also aware that DIY publishing is full of pitfalls. Rare is the author that is a good judge of his own writing, and I believe we still need the discerning eye of a publisher and editor to help us find the right audiences for our work. If that means we publish less often and fewer texts, so be it.
Vanitas Vanitatum: Self-Publishing
Self-publishing is the easiest way to get yourself published fast and efficiently without any interference from anyone. All you need to do is choose your platform — like Createspace, Kindle, Lulu, or any of dozens of others — and fill in the blanks. In some cases, you are obliged to order and pay for the printing. In some cases, there is a distribution service that you can pay for as well, and still others offer everything from print to promotion to sales as long as you are willing to pony up for their services.
Others, like Lulu, for example, offer an on-demand service, meaning that each person who orders gets their copy printed and shipped one by one. For the writer, there is no investment in this method except your time, but the retail prices of on-demand books tend to be much more expensive since they have no economy of scale.
If you choose to self-publish without using the platform’s distribution and promotion services, it means that all the work of selling the book falls squarely on your own shoulders. This is, make no mistake, a full-time job and will require a substantial investment from your side as well. Most writers are not marketing, branding, or advertisement experts, but if you want to hit your target audience smack on the jaw, you need those skills.
But this is not my major gripe with self-publishing, or “vanity press,” as it used to be called. The biggest problem with self-publishing is that it is not critical. You are the only one who judges your work as being worthy of reading or ready to read. The process of going through a publisher, painful as it may be, at least ensures that your work has been honed and refined as much as possible before being subjected to the reader’s final judgment.
I think of the publisher as the ultimate critic — they are nitpicking nerds and crotchety curmudgeons and generally hard to please. They hate spelling mistakes and dangling modifiers with a vengeance. And, above all, they know if your text is going to be sold and read or not. If they decide to take a chance on you, you can be confident that there is a good reason for it.
A Middle Way?
In the ether between traditional and vanity publishers is a phenomenon that is gaining more and more adherents, it is ‘”lean publishing.” This is all about publishing a book-in-progress, using specific publishing platforms. A writer may go through many iterations to get the right amount of reader feedback, cut and snip and rewrite until you are on the right track, and then build traction for it once you do.
The advantage of this method is that you can still publish everything you want, but you still get real critical feedback as you go. It is not for everyone, obviously, and it does not mean you have to completely tailor your texts to the demands of the readers, sacrificing your own vision. The task of the writer is to make sure he or she holds on to that vision, using the feedback to help the reader understand it better.
My only fear in this method is that interacting with the readers on a nascent project would unduly influence me. If I published the first chapter of my novel, a novel whose plot and premise both made me happy, the readers could chop it to pieces and, following their advice, I could end up with something entirely new. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but I will wonder where my novel ends and pandering begins.
Maybe not. What do you think?
