To begin, I want to say a word or two about this journey I am taking into the project of self-publishing. It took me a long time to get here. For years, friends urged me to do it, to take the manuscripts rejected by professional publishers and put them out into the world myself, but always I said, no. Or hell no. I could not even consider it. Those manuscripts are stuck in outdated Word programs on discarded computers, and there they will remain. Writers grow old, and some work does not age well. I have moved on.
But in that time, much has changed. After 18 years out of the professional publishing world, I did try to re-enter through the front door with my latest work. I found an agent, the generous and accomplished Claire Roberts of Claire Roberts Global Literary Management, LLC, (whom I recommend highly) who worked hard to place TWO TRAINS LEAVE THE STATION, but the book is not marketable right now, evidently. I am not marketable. I could have tried to put A PLAGUE OF GODS through the same process, but I figured that by the time the last rejection for it came through, we’d be in the next pandemic. The only options left for those books were to let them die or publish them myself. Here are some of the things that have changed. Self-publishing is not what it used to be. Which is to say, it’s not as embarrassing. In my early writing days, having a manuscript rejected was a failure, but self-publishing that manuscript was a public failure. To my eyes, at least. Now, because of myriad reasons tied to the current state of the business of publishing, self-publishing has become a viable and more respected option. A lot of people are doing it. Still. Would I prefer to be accepted by the gatekeepers? Yes. Is my work good enough to be accepted? I have no idea. Will self-publishing hurt my career? Again, no idea. But maybe. Probably. Do I care? …… No. Perhaps that is the real something that changed. If I wish to add to the community of art and ideas through writing, and it appears that I do, I cannot do it through tweets or posts or Substack or Patreon or whatever platform might pop up tomorrow, or even in blogs like this one. Or I should say that I certainly could, but I don’t want to. Books are how I communicate. Not a fast way, not efficient or easy or lucrative or sustainable, but it’s the way that remains interesting to me. And so, if self-publishing is the way for me to continue to be able to communicate through books, well, here I am. My two recent books are of a moment. This moment. It’s been kind of refreshing for me to see my little books in this way. A small flash in a moment, and that is all. And that is fine. But unlike my other discarded manuscripts, tarnished by doubts fostered by repeated rejection, I believed in these little books, more than I ever believed in those books, for reasons I can’t entirely account for. So when I was staring at the prospect of burying them inside the bowels of my laptop, I finally snapped. I don’t want to play this game anymore. The game I was referring to when that thought popped into my head is not the one that appears to demand for entry a record of success along with a robust twitter following, although I don’t want to play that game, either. The game I don’t want to play anymore is the roller coaster ride that has me working for years writing and rewriting and rewriting again, and then waiting for even more years until the final rejection comes through, a game filled with highs and lows and then even more lows, until the whole project peters out, and I have to decide whether to start another round. That game. When I snapped, this is what I thought. I thought, I don’t have to be jerked around anymore. Or more to the point, I’m too old for this shit. How about I take my work into my own hands, and play by my own rules, and live with the consequences. So here we go. As it turns out, it’s kind of fun to be in charge of everything, the titles, the covers, the layouts, the timing, the expectations. On the other hand, it’s also kind of too easy to make a whole lot of mistakes. Typos, for instance, called to my attention by family and friends. Then there are the questions about how to market this work. How do I put my work, myself, out into the world without an institution to back me? Finally there is the likely risk that I am forgoing success. But isn’t that measure of success governed by the game I’m not going to play anymore? On balance I have to say, now that I have begun, that this self-publishing business feels unexpectedly, refreshingly, strangely liberating. |
CategoriesHere is space for a blog in case I want a blog, or need a blog, for ideas I might want to write down but will have no place to put them. By those standards, it will be random and irregular. I can make no plans or promises, because in times like these, I don’t know, and you don’t know, what’s going to happen next.
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