If I can’t get what I regard as my best work published by any of the people I’ve got to know over 60 years in the business, working as a commissioning editor, writer, and agent, what does that tell you?
Editors have no taste. Or they’re cautious to the point of cowardice. Or I’m a crap writer.
But I’ve got a reasonable track record. I act as a candid (and constructive) editor to my authors. I apply even higher standards to my own work than I do to theirs. And I’ve paid a professional reader to give me an objective opinion, because if my loved ones like my stuff, I’m suspicious, and if they criticize, I’m furious.
We all think, when we start something new, that it’s bound to be a bestseller. We’ve seen what’s topping the lists - we may even have taken a brief look at one or two of them, without buying them, of course: they don’t need our money - and we know what we’re writing is better. A lot better.
Until we hit a bad day. Or week. Or month. Then we wonder why we bother. We envy the people who collect the bins or mend cars or build houses: they can go home at the end of their shift satisfied they’ve done something solid and useful. What’s solid or useful about words that don’t even make a coherent story? Especially when it’s a story no one wants to publish.
Even that doesn’t stop us writing, though. It’s an affliction, when you’re forever straining to scratch a bit of yourself that you can’t quite reach. You twist and turn, you rub yourself up against hard surfaces, you go for long walks, you take to drink. And then something softly shifts, often when you’re in despair because your ideas are at the bottom of a deep well and you’ve only got a short rope and a bucket that leaks.
But there may be something shimmering in the shadows of that leaky bucket. You take it out carefully, very carefully, because you don’t want it to dry out too quickly in case it goes brittle and crumbles away in your fingers. You’re as nervous about it as if it was an orphaned baby hedgehog, that would die if you poked it or fed it the wrong thing. But, cautiously, it responds. It opens one eye. It moves a little towards you. Slowly, slowly, it recovers its strength. Soon, though you scarcely dare believe it, it’s becoming almost playful. Which is when, clumsily at first, but with growing confidence, you involve it as part of your game.
Now you have your story. Do you protect it, and yourself, by sending it out under a pseudonym? You try it. No one wants to know. You dress it up differently and send it out, with confidence, under your own name. Still no dice. Your confidence collapses like a sad soufflé.
Then you get mad. You have worked long and hard and honestly and you are convinced your work is as good as the rubbish out there that everyone’s cooing over. You try going Zen and telling yourself it doesn’t matter. You look at the books on your shelves, the classics and the bestsellers of their time: how many people have heard of them? You’ve read them, or so you claimed: what do you remember of their plots or their much-lauded style? You squint at the logos of the publishers of these vaunted masterpieces. How many of them are still around? You agonized over sending your book to a few of those that remain. You watched your inbox and scoured your phone for messages and tortured yourself awaiting a response. How few of them deigned to reply? All that emotion expended on a bunch of jerks whose critical judgement is on a par with that of a mutilated millipede, and who will all be swept away in the next round of corporate catastrophes!
And yet. You want someone to read what you’ve written. The thoughts that you’ve crafted so carefully, the words you have used to such exquisite effect to articulate emotions others experience but can’t articulate: they deserve an audience. Not for the money, though that would be nice, more to show the world that all that time you have spent huddled over your notebook and keyboard has actually produced something tangible. Solid. Readable. Something that could involve and intrigue and amuse and stimulate anyone who likes a good story, distinctively told. And who doesn’t?
So you consider self-publishing. It will get the word, your words, out there, where they deserve to be. You will be (almost) totally in charge of the process. It won’t cost you much, except in time, and you’ve done time already. Lots of people do it, including some well-known bestselling writers fed up with the frustrations and incompetence and greed of conventional publishing.
Actually, millions of people do it, and that’s the problem. There’s no critical or quality control: as long as it isn’t obscene or libelous, it’ll be accepted. All your so-called literary friends will sneer, maybe not openly but certainly in private, that you couldn’t even find a tiny independent imprint that considered your work of sufficient literary merit to risk spending money on getting it printed. And it will never appear in bookshops, not unless you invent the name of a publisher that sounds kosher, get a couple of hundred copies bound with a cover that looks professional, and persuade the owner of your local independent bookstore that it’s just the kind of thing people will enjoy reading while consuming the cake and coffee that makes the place more money than all that literature.
But who else is going to take a gamble on you, if you don’t? You remind yourself of all the grumbles your conventionally published friends had about their experience: their books weren’t edited properly, there were all sorts of typos littering the text, the sales department insisted on a cover that was totally inappropriate, they made no effort to get it into the supermarkets, they didn’t promote it effectively and failed to spend the sum they’d promised for marketing, which they’d got away with instead of paying an advance. Nothing but crooks in designer jeans who talk about the sacredness of the text in the same breath as boasting about profit margins that impoverish their authors. At least if you publish it yourself you’ve no one but yourself to blame.
Writing as a profession - or craft, or calling, or disease - is littered with corpses. Yet we go on doing it because we don’t think of failure any more than we think we’re going to get knocked down by a car or die before we’ve achieved our goals. Will self-publishing get us there? Yes, provided we possess the strength and stamina to overcome the shame and shyness most of us feel when having to promote ourselves. Yes, provided we spend as much, if not more, time than we did on writing the bloody thing on the stuff for which publishers employ whole departments: the editing, design, layout, paper, cover, blurb, quotes, the dreaded metadata, pricing, promotion, printing, and getting the books into the shops.
We will still wish a conventional firm did it for us, even if we then complain their efforts fall far short of expectations. But if we do it ourselves, it will be with the same fantastical belief that, though millions have failed to make the world aware of their work - let alone persuade their family and friends to write enough five-star reviews to kick Amazon’s algorithms into recognizing it as a potential bestseller - we will be different. We will succeed because we deserve to. Writing is not just a solitary business, it’s a totally self-absorbed one. But we reach out to touch the world, and if it takes self-publishing to do that, it’s worth a try. Isn’t it?
Author of Still With It!
That’s very encouraging, though I’m one of many people who are happy to sell other people’s work but not that comfortable at promoting their own. Call it modesty, or foolishness, it’s something I’d prefer to leave to professionals, even though I know they won’t do a professional job because they’re overstretched and under resourced. But if we want to see our work in the shops we have to put the work into marketing. It’s either that or settling for the support of a few enlightened souls.
Great essay. I think it's worth it. I made the switch from trad to self-publishing and it's worked beautifully for me because I love marketing and I like having the control. Cover doesn't work? Re-design. Error? Fix the doc. Also, these days, everything in trad is taking so long. I was on sub a year and there were editors that hadn't got back yet. Do I wish for a trad publisher to take some of the burden off my hands? Not currently but maybe later. Also, I'm intrigued by the new models springing up in publishing like Bloom and Author's Equity.