Self Publishing: Taboo to Virtue

Self Publishing: Taboo to Virtue

I attended my first writers conference in 2004. It was a weeklong affair that started on Monday with a battalion of proud manuscript possessors and ended on a chill but crisp Sunday morning with a batch of trodden troops wondering where they’d gone wrong. It proved quite the eyeopener. Like so many others, I arrived excited and hopeful. I learned how dreadful my manuscript was in the group sessions, and I learned about rejection in the pitch sessions. The lessons outside the curriculum proved equally valuable: I wasn’t alone; while I wasn’t the skilled crafter I’d seen myself as days earlier, I was a writer at heart and had a solid foundation to build upon; and, above all, self-publishing was the only taboo.

Among my group was a guy who, upon having at some earlier time finished a manuscript, proceeded to have the manuscript printed and bound, taking it, of his own initiative, by definition, from manuscript to book without the blessing of anyone in the sacred houses of publishing. He didn’t make the week. Of all the criticism doled out during the group sessions and the humiliation delivered in the pitch sessions, the wrath poured out upon him for his presumption was far worse. By Thursday, he was gone.

Of all the lessons I returned humbly home with, the greatest, repeated by each instructor as opportunity presented itself was: self-publishing simply is not done. Not a mere act of innocent ignorance, like opening with a dream sequence, leaving your character alone to wallow too long, etc, the act of self-publishing was the ultimate act of hubris. Books, unlike manuscripts, were sacred things. There were processes involved in the transformation one to the other. There were gatekeepers mitigating between. There was a journey the one must suffer to become the other. Rites of passage to be suffered. And any who dared bypass these trials were interlopers of the most heinous sort.

So I wrote. I found a glorious and wonderful group to exchange lessons of craft with and to grow with. I queried. I received rejection. I repeated. Those were the days of snail mail, and so scarred am I by the hope and disappointed of those days that I still rarely pass the mailbox with out checking it, even if it’s Sunday and I’ve already checked it twice.

By 2010 I felt that I had to give up. I acquired a sixty-page block. I could take any idea up to the threshold of that vast bulky middle where I would decide that I simply couldn’t put myself through the process again. But I kept trying. I had an idea that haunted me constantly. Twice a made page sixty. Once I made it past the pitfall and thought I was underway until I hit one-hundred and lost steam! At last, I decided to outline. I found the story to be four books instead of one, and I managed to break through the barrier, finishing the manuscript in 2014. I set forth toward conferences, pitch sessions, rejections, and one alarming discovery. At the first lecture, an agent responded to the question of that terrible old taboo of self-publishing thusly:

“If you’re not willing to take a chance on yourself, why should I?”

The gates of the citadel of publishing had been breached!

The first ten years of vast industry changes had come and gone, but these years were only the beginning of change and by no means the fastest paced or most impressive! Now, anyone anywhere can sell anything to anyone. Anything anyone wants to write can be delivered directly to anyone who wants to read it. Likewise, anything that anyone can download onto a digital device can be pirated and republished in minutes. But don’t let that bother you, because if your work isn’t good enough to be successful nobody’s going to bother pirating it. Generally, the changes have been great for me and for millions of writers and readers around the world.

Change needs to go on, and authors need to lead the change. When I put my first book on Amazon, they took $2 while the few brick-and-mortar stores needed $4. Now that those stores are out of business, Amazon demands nearly $6 and I have no option but to let them take, and, of course, the increase gets passed on to the reader. Resale of used printed books should include a royalty to the author. The purchase of a book is the purchase of two products: the paper and ink required to print the book and the story contained within. Back when sales were done in musty basement bookshops and records were kept on scraps of used paper, regulating the sale of used books was impossible, but now, when a book is sold online, the author should be able to reap a specific royalty. And someone needs to make foil, spot gloss, and emboss available and affordable for digital printing so we can again make beautiful books.