I like to think that I have (or could, if I wanted to claim it), some “street cred” as a writer. Before I turned down the self-publishing path a couple of years ago, I had published four books ‘traditionally’ – three nonfiction and one novel – about two dozen articles and essays (four of them in juried publications), and a handful (dozen or so) poems and stories. All in ‘traditional’ mediums. I’d edited six published collections, and contributed to more newsletters and editorial columns than I can hope to remember. It’s not being J.K. Rowling, but it all counts as “cred”, right? The truth is, in today's publishing culture, it doesn’t count for beans. In the publishing industry, only one thing counts - the ability for the publisher to make money.
I’ve written and posted quite a lot recently as I’ve mused over what it means to be a writer, to seek after the truth of our lives, and to speak it through fiction. All very wonderful and noble, you may think, but what good is it if you can’t get those words to readers? In the dominant cultural mind, the mainstream publishing industry is the way to do that, and American publishing is a hard industry to break into. The odds, as they say, are against you.
Publishers turn down brilliant works because the author is too old for them to “sell,” - yes, this happened: I read it in a recent op-ed piece written by an editor at a large publishing house, explaining why she sometimes turns down very good books - she turned down a book she adored because the author was 54. Or they turn them down because the author doesn’t already have an active online platform, or because it's been too long since her/his last publication, or because the editor thinks the writing is too complex for American readers. That last one startled me, but I’ve actually seen the rejection slip, and that’s what it says - the plot is too complex for American readers. The market is publishing for the masses, and the market has a pretty low opinion of the masses.
Self-publishing has had an unfortunate reputation for decades, and, often, deservedly so - a lot of what is called “vanity publishing” (the author pays a publisher to print their works) is frankly abysmal, as is a good deal of what is now published in the form of e-books, which authors can publish for free on a variety of platforms. But there are also some profoundly beautiful works out there as well in that medium. It is a free market, which is what attracts me to it. A thirty-something, recent-lit-grad, New-York-publishing-house editor will not decide the merit of your works, but readers will.
Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Ben Franklin, John Stuart Mill, Jane Austen, Walt Whitman, and William Blake - these are just a few of the luminaries in history who have self-published their work. Some (Whitman as a perfect example) were vilified by some for the work they published, others gaining acclaim and respect in their own time. Unconcerned about the opinions of "the publishing industry," they turned their concern more to sharing their work with the world. And how much poorer would the literary world be if they had not done so. They didn’t care about “street cred,” or the opinion of the powers that were in the then-publishing industry - they simply cared - about what they were writing, about sharing it with those who might read.
That, honestly, is the true tradition of self-publishing. Be a storyteller, put your stories in front of readers. For decades, publishing has been (much like academia) a “gate-keeper” industry. Those with some sort of credentials (degrees or pedigrees) decide who gets in and who doesn’t, and this shapes the reading of the consuming public, because it shapes what is available to read. And that is what is changing with the availability of free self-publishing platforms. Writers have an opportunity, here, to raise the bar.
Let’s set aside (for the moment) debates over large companies like Amazon and Barnes & Noble and what they have done to small publishing houses, bookstores, and independent publishers. That’s an important debate, but not what I’m talking about here. What we have in the shifts currently going on in the publishing industry is a chance to change things. If, as many claim, the American public has been “dumbed down,” it is at least in part (and I believe a large part) due to what they’ve been offered: education shaped by politicians and not educators, media shaped by profit interest and not public service, books marketed more on the celebrity status of the author and not on challenging or enlightening content. In a truly free market, (which I believe free publishing offers us the opportunity to create), all of that can change.
Not that I (or most writers) sit down to my writing table every morning with revolutionary intent in mind. Many of the things that I write, I write just for fun. This blog, for instance – a wonderful musing release in the middle of days of struggle, and many of the stories I’ve produced recently are fancies, flights taken in moments of “what if?” But, even there, I find the themes that haunt most of my writing (and that haunt my thoughts): the abuse of power never being justified, the tragedy of youthful talent in the hands of the wrong mentor, the twisted co-opting of what used to be a dynamic working-class culture in this country, the terrible loneliness of being the sole voice to stand for something. I return to these themes over and over, and if I write words that help one person with a difficult decision, or bring memories back, or help them see the lives of others more clearly, that is enough. More than enough. So, the audiences that flock to big box book stores or to Amazon may find my books, or they may not. But if just one of the right people does, I am ok with that. And I know that this conclusion is the polar opposite of the (dare I use the word) philosophy of the publishing industry. And I know I don’t need them. I don’t need their “cred,” their respect. I just need my own.
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