Wrestling With Ghosts
19. Sep, 2009 
7 Comments
SFSignal pointed me to this, a five parter call to arms concerning the legitimacy of self-publishing and the illegitimacy of the traditional publishing machine.
Part 1 says “The traditional publishing system has become a vile backwater of internal handshaking, intensely gated communities, and lottery-styled odds. Building a “substantial publishing record” involves beating down editor’s mailboxes as much as it involves quality writing. Trying to get short works in print takes months of submissions, postage costs, and much more time shopping the work than writing it. Submitting poems and stories to small literary magazines can take six months to get a response. Agent queries and small publishers are sometimes almost as bad. So a “substantial publishing record” is a ten-year wait-fest, give or take five years.”
And then goes on through the remainder of that post and four others to essentially say that if you want to acheive legitimacy through self-publishing, you need to do a lot of work.
Presuming that your scribblings are worth reading.
This strikes me as saying that there are two paths through the maze, either one of which lead to the exit, both of which will lead to rejection, frustration, lots of hard work and no guarantees.
The differences between the two paths? Going the traditional route, one must have minimally decent writing skills, continue to pound out and regularly submit copy to folks who – though they may be vile, self-handshaking bridge trolls – are recognized as having a skill set that allows them to make usually correct judgements about both the quality AND the marketability of writing.
The alternate path does not require minimal writing skills, does not require regularity, does not require continued submission. It does offer immediacy. Write something, pay to have it put into book form, offer it for sale on the web. To an audience that is not recognized as necessarily having any skill set for judging the quality of the work, other than the “wisdom of the mob”.
Since much of the focus of Mispeled’s series is on the time spent: which of these two paths offers the surest and quickest journey to acceptance and legitimacy?
There is an almost guaranteed path – develop minimally acceptable writing skills and keep pounding on the doors of the traditional publishers and a no-guarantee path – write and self-publish and hope that you’re good enough to attract a decent (and fickle) on-line following.
Seems to me that the traditional path also offers one with less competition: Robert Sawyer has a piece in which he riffs on Heinlein’s rules of writing and uses them to illustrate the barriers to publication and how each successive step eliminates half the competition: start at barrier one with 100 writers, end at step six with one.
Which offers less competition? The path where you compete with only one out of every 200 writers (you and another writer who made it through the barriers) or one in which you are competing with potentially every single one of those other 200 wannabe authors? 2-to-1 odds looks a hell of a lot better to me than 200-to-1 odds.
The above of course ignores the fact that it is not necessary to engage in ginning up a fight between traditional publishing (if such a thing even exists anymore) and self-publishing. Writers can and do work in both areas and one of the only (legitimate) reasons for self-pubbers to attack traditionalists is for whatever PR cred might be gained with the fans of the militant side of self-publishing.
I’m reminded of a saying often heard on the paintball tournament field, though not original to paintball. If you want to win the game, you need to play your own game and not worry about what the other team might be doing.
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Interesting. Self-publishing has not yet, will probably not soon, overcome a stigma in the eyes of the general readership. But as quality, availability and content improve, so will respect. It’s the small press reprint houses I find most interesting at this time.
The terms used in the original was “legitimacy”, which seems to be connected to sales/money/widespread distribution, becoming a household name.
You focused on quality, availability, content. I think that in terms of what Mispeled was referring to, those aspects are not part of the equation – but beyond my take on his rant: quality and availability require some kind of a formalized “market”.
If we suppose that a good network of interconnected reviewers/promoters/marketers (and a thriving market served by the same) for self-published stuff comes into existence, won’t it just move the goal post for those “writers” who think that the system is against them? If the reason(s) for your non-success is bad work habits/bad writing/bad story-telling, it won’t matter who the ‘establishment’ is….
The other aspect of this debate that kind of tweaks me a little bit is that every single market (I’m familiar with) suffers in the quality arena the wider the spread of content providers becomes. The middle is where almost everything must reside in order to insure a decent quantity/pricing, not at either end. If there was a monopoly for writing and only one working author, there’s no pressure on the author to turn out quality – and lots of pressure to pump out anything that will bring in the bucks. If everyone and their cat is getting published, marketed and distributed, there’s no pressure to turn out quality work. The “best” quickly becomes that which is the “loudest”.
Besides, I am of the firm belief that every form of art needs someone looking at it dispassionately and rendering judgments. The only time that is a real detriment is when the outside looker is no longer dispassionate. (At which point in time, usually following some kind of struggle, the gate-keepers are overthrown and a new crop replaces them.)
But the primary point I was making was that the self-publishing route is not necessarily the shortest path to “legitimacy”. Sure, you can get your novel into print and up on the web tomorrow – but that doesn’t mean anything so far as legitimacy is concerned.
I had a laugh at the (auto-placed?) ad for lulu.com which appears at the foot of your post.
I guess it comes down to the definition of “legitimacy”, doesn’t it? If it’s defined by sales figures, then Dan Brown may be the most legit author in the world, or perhaps Stephenie Meyer, who from what little I’ve read of her work (and it wasn’t much, I tell you) couldn’t write her way out of a wet paper bag, but hit the hot topic at the right time – scooping up millions of sufferers of Post-Potter depression in the process. But for me “legitimacy” has little to do with sales numbers. Sure, sometimes a skilled writer with good ideas well expressed sells a ton of books. Scalzi seems to have done pretty well. But in genre fiction, it’s more often what’s hot than what’s well written, and for me legitimacy means good writing, plotting, characters, world building and ultimately I have to care about the people (human or otherwise) in the book.
I have to believe skill at the craft will out, regardless of the route taken, but as long as there’s a stigma attached to self-pub authors (“nobody wanted them so they did themselves”), the traditional route will yield the most solid choices for the reader, and often the best edited choices as well.
I may have rambled far out of bounds here. If so, forgive. I suppose as time goes on and more publishing is done POD, self-publishing will have less stigma as it will all be seen as coming out of the black box anyway.
I had my recent say on this topic last week over here.
I like the new look. Much cleaner. A far more elegant weapon from a more civilized time with which to kill an opponent.
I too like the new look. Polished, good color scheme.
Colin,
I’ve laughed at that also in the past. Those are adsense ads and they are often hilariously inappropriate