The Internet is a vast and fabulous place, full of talented folks freely distributing their knowledge. An unfortunate prerequisite for that sort of website is experience, which I haven't got an overabundance of. What I do have, though, is fierce and unwavering self-obsession! A propensity for navel-gazing, indulged in so frequently that I can describe the anterior geography of my lumbar vertabrae! All of which makes, I'm sure you'll agree, for smashing reading.For those of us who have not yet scaled the heights of Technorati authority, blogging can feel like a series of shouts from the crest of a sand dune into the trackless desert beyond. It's a peculiar sort of desert, though, because even if no one's paying attention to you, you know they're out there...somewhere, maybe on the other side of that ridge, all crowded around a fabulous post by That Other Writer. The one with traffic.
Measuring eyeballs is something of an Rumsfeldian epistemological problem, because although we know what we want to know (number of readers) and we know how to go about knowing it (site tracking), the mechanisms of gathering that knowledge (tracking algorithms) are often arcane. This taints the gathered knowledge with uncertainty, transforming it into something vague and more akin to an opinion. For example, my old stats software routinely reported eight or nine times the number of Writebastard visits as Google Analytics currently does. Do I know how many people actually pass this way? Not really, no.
As anyone who's spent any length of time by themselves in the desert eating locusts can attest, your mind goes a little funny after awhile. You start to see and hear things that aren't there. You hold long conversations with yourself, or post random Chinese poetry. It's a short stumble from there to one of the more interesting expressions of writerly solipsism: self-publishing.
It's one thing when some demented comic deity like Warren Ellis decides to go all POD and whatnot, and I'm not talking about the "Of course he can make a go of it, he's famous" argument. It's true that Ellis already has a career, with income, Hollywood deals, hookers, blow, and sandwiches. POD's an experiment for him, not a regular money-maker. That said, I do believe that there's an increasing convergence between Kevin Kelly's "1,000 True Fans" idea and the author-driven marketing and publicity efforts described by Jeff VanderMeer in Booklife. Publishing houses, strapped for cash and hurting like every other business, aren't giving most authors nearly as much as the once did in terms of publicity and marketing support, so authors are having to handle an increasing proportion of that work. They're already doing more than just writing.
With the rise of print on demand services, it's increasingly easy for writers to present their work directly to their readers in a more appealing format than that dreadlocked guy on the corner who wants to sell you a handwritten copy of his Time-traveling Ferret Manifesto with Time Cube. Pay 30 bucks to Bowker and you can get ten ISBN numbers, which means you can use a company like Lulu to publish your book, and then distribute it through Amazon or a non-profit like Small Press Distribution. Warehousing and distribution companies like Ingram, which once had near-monopolies on book distribution because they controlled what got shipped to chain bookstores and independents alike, are no longer essential. Add all of this together, and the idea of a genuine one man (or woman) publishing house doesn't seem entirely absurd. Instead of just writing Carrie in his cramped trailer, the next Stephen King might very well write, publish, distribute, and market it from his laptop.
There's just one problem with that scenario, and from where I'm sitting (at my desk in front of a cork board covered with novel-related 3x5 index cards) it's a big one.
Once the "final" draft is done, and it leaves the house as part of a submissions package or as a complete, requested manuscript, novel writing ceases to be a solo effort. I'm not thinking about the existing gatekeeper structure, where agents must serve as the heralds of your work in the courts of publishing. The agent, first, and the editor, later, become an integral part of the novel writing process because they are professional readers. They're not family, friends, Facebook fans or even that bastard at the workshop who's tough but fair despite (or perhaps because of) his borderline Asperger's. They're collaborators, providing your manuscript with the direction and polish that it needs to pass first across an editor's desk and, later, through the gauntlet within a publishing house as that editor sells his colleagues on your work.
With self-publishing, you can skip all of that. I'm certainly not capable of serving as author, agent, and editor. I'll never have the necessary critical perspective required for all of those tasks, and I don't think it's outrageous to suggest that there are very few who do. I can dot my is and cross my ts and spell-check and de-dangle my participles, but I'll never see my own work with anything other than my author's eyes.
I'm happy to use POD for certain things. It's an extension of having access to a photocopier, only better, because the quality level of the product that you can produce is higher. Your POD project is accompanied by an online storefront for distribution, and there is a growing network of sites dedicated to reviewing self-published work. But for me, such a project will always be promotional material for other, more "traditional" efforts. Sort of like a multi-paged business card, maybe with a color cover if I'm feeling flush, or drunk.
I just can't see my first novel greeting the world with a Lulu.com logo on its spine. Shouting into the desert is fine for blog posts, but when it's time to publish a book, I'll be heading into town.
LATER:
Max Dunbar: "The Great Underground Myth: Why Self Publishing Doesn’t Work." [Via @jazzwriterchick]
