Recently I have been reading some great reports of excellent authors choosing to self-publish. John Edgar Wideman's decision to self-publish his next book is featured in
Big Think and Zetta Elliott recently wrote two articles for
The Huffington Post. This shift of perception from self-publishing as a desperate concession to a choice of free agency was an inevitable part of the evolution of publishing. Ten years ago big houses with set philosophies and established authors were buying up the little houses to eliminate the competition and pool resources. Recently, with the economic scourge, publishers have cut their budgets, all but eliminating tours and other promotions while relying on talking head memoirs to keep them flush. They are desperately trying to find new ways to market ebooks....and depending on how that pans out, they could be looking to new and unusual talent in the future. To me, that's the glass half full with Kindle and iPad. With the dramatically lower cost of production and the elimination of overhead, the have the opportunity to move back into more
boutique publishing with more diverse authors.
When Gordon and I were finishing what we thought was the final edit of
"Put your hands here....." (funny story about the title I'll fill you in on later) in 2000, I read every book on writing and getting published I could put my hands on. We created a great summary, complete with excerpts from the manuscript and I compiled huge lists of contacts at book publishers and agents' firms. We bought a roll of stamps and a case of envelopes and went to work. Rejection letters seem to defy normal systems of mail return. We got them back so fast it it was hard to believe they even looked at the summary....wait a second....maybe they didn't! The form letters were the real tell. I never flinched. I knew this was going to be hard, but I also knew that we would get published. We continued to pursue publishing houses.....getting farther and farther down the list from the ones we most desired. After a few months we had stacks of rejection letters, some stock replies and some more personal responses.
Through my research at the time, I was occasionally confronted with ads or links to On-Demand publishing houses and after we ran out of steam and stamps, I suggested it to Gordon. We never really saw it as a desperate move, but we did see it as more work. I would have to get serious about editing and we would have to go through the manuscript with a different filter (as editors, publishers and marketers). We researched and found a new publisher in Canada that was trying to get established. Trafford offered us a box of books, printed marketing materials, placement with the largest web bookstores and cover art help for under a thousand dollars. At the time, that was a great deal.
About a month later we had a proof of the book and after we did the final review, a BOX of our books landed in the foyer of our little Worcester, MA apartment.
I will interject a little tip here: if any of your family members (especially your
mother) have taken most of their lives to learn grammar, structure and punctuation rules, let them read the book
before you okay the final proof. There is no changing those printed and sold copies when you get the phone call at 10pm and must review your errors page by page. Precisely
because you didn't include them, they will point out every last one.
After we admired them for a day, then I took a deep breath and immersed myself in another type book and online research; marketing and self-promotion.
Much like Zetta Elliott, we shipped out most of our book stash to reviewers we never heard from. I found great sifi and general book reviewers, but we might as well have just thrown them out the window as we drove down Stafford. I did get out and promote the book in person. I found spots for them in local bookstores and we found a bookstore back in St. Charles that would do a signing for us on our trip to see family. A friend of a friend wrote for the paper and they did a nice announcement before the signing, but I think we sold 5 books that day and the bookstore owner didn't want to keep any signed copies. By then we were working on
From the Painted Stick, with every intention to publish again with Trafford. We had some experience now and thought with two or three novels we would have more opportunity to appeal to a greater audience.
Our book cover and editing skills improved and the quality of Trafford's projects was improving. We published
The Hog Hotel just before we moved to Arizona in 2004. Through the move, my MAT studies and our new jobs, we lost the opportunity to push that novel when the ISBN was released. There are of course, many other opportunities we lost as we made our way through that education. We should have taken full advantage of friends' skills with graphic design and played with the cover art. I love all three of the covers but they were all so personal to us, we might have lost track of our potential audience. I would have borrowed a better camera for the covers and authors photos. I would have brainstormed more with Gordon on titles for the first book. The obvious drawback to that title is, by itself, it may give the impression that the book is of a subject matter other than what it is, but Gordon always had that title on the manuscript and he wanted to print it. If you don't know the context, this is the first paragraph of the book:
"Put your hands here, like this." He said, and proceeded to arrange them into a makeshift telescope in front of his left eye. I tried to follow his lead, but instead chose my own right eye. He saw this, and corrected me instantly. It didn't seem at the time to be of any importance, but I rearranged my hands in front of the other eye just the same."(Did I tell you we got better at editing?)
The book title has ended up louring some strange estores to stock it, and that by itself might be reason to change the title. But that's the risk of real freedom, the kind you get from self-publishing. Sure, there's a learning curve, and you can get into trouble with titles or burn out from door to door bookstore hopping, but what matters at the end of the day is the creation is
yours. No ghostwriter, no high-tower graphic artist who will never even read your book. No hand-wringing waiting for agents to call and no tears as you see your work go through the editors machete. Self-publishing as free agency for new and established authors opens up a whole new world of
authenticity....something that's been very rare in published work.
I think we are both very happy to have taken the path that we did. Gordon is a storyteller first, in art and fiction, so the books are part of his oeuvre, an assessable and affordable example of his artistic statement. It's no surprise to me that there are three more novels coming.
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