On why I'm doing what I'm doing

[avevale_intelligencer]

First of all, everyone who wants to be a proper published author should read this informative and helpful post from seanan_mcguire, in order to understand why I'm settling. (You should also read anything else she writes. She's good, and she's published, and she knows what she's talking about.)

I know print-on-demand isn't real publishing. It's only not vanity publishing because I haven't had to pay them for it. And I know, because many people tell me so, that the system for getting published is perfectly fair and reasonable and if I haven't got good enough to be accepted by an agent or a publisher then I just haven't got good enough, and if I don't have the gumption to keep trying and learn from multiple rejections then that's my own lookout.

Well, I've been writing since I was at least ten, and reading since I was three or four, and I'd say my comprehension is pretty good, though my problem with publishers' submission guidelines I've already documented. If there's any more to learn about how to write then I've probably missed out on it by now. I'm fifty-four now, depressed and exhausted. I don't have time to get good, and I don't have the gumption (and I know it's lazy of me) to start at the top of a very long list of agents, work through and build up a pile of letters saying "We are not taking on any new clients at the moment." No agent, no editor, has the time or the inclination to tell me what I'm doing wrong in my writing (apart from "I didn't love it"), and I shouldn't waste the poor overworked people's time by asking. They have real authors to take care of.

I need to face that this is the writer I am, this is the writer I'm going to be, and if my stuff pleases anyone at all then I should be grateful for that and not expect any more. I am not a special snowflake, or even a snowflake at all. (Check out the subtitle of the journal.) Hence Lulu.com.

(Of course, if Orion or Tor or Curtis Brown or somebody bursts through the door clutching a copy of Three Windows and crying "This is fantastic, what else have you got?" I'm not going to be cloddish about it. :) But that's a Lottery dream, and the thing about those is that real life is still there when you wake up.)

This has been to some extent a vent.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

You are good and you can write. The thing that isn't added to all the publishing 'rules' is that it also takes luck on top of talent and so forth. It's that last little thing, it's incalculable and it's Not Fair. I have been where you are, I was there for years and years. I had had consistently rubbish luck and then suddenly I had one little flash of the good stuff, and it came via a print-on-demand publisher. POD is a grey area: it's not just 'vanity', far from it and there are some very respectable POD houses (Immanion, for one). I'm currently agentless, but I like your work and if I have the chance and you have something suitable (would need to be novel length) I can and will show it to my editor, if you wish. Use the contacts you have -- Seanan and I have the same editor, and if she hears good of you from two directions, it will up her interest. But please don't give up or give in.
I look forward to your collection and I will talk to another friend who sells small press stuff at cons to see if he'd carry your book with the others. Best wishes.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I have one finished novel-length thing, which started out as a collaboration with soren_nyrond: if he says okay, I'll send it to you.

[occams_pyramid]

Thinking of small press stuff at cons - Beccon might be interested in carrying it?

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Is Roger doing fiction now?

(I still owe him a book of original songs...)

[occams_pyramid]

He does all sorts of things, and has often sold stuff for other people. It can't hurt to ask!

[pwilkinson.livejournal.com]

Yes, occasionally - though he publishes more criticism and filk, and I suspect can only manage one or two publications a year. However, Roger generally has books from a couple of other publishers on the Beccon table at cons - again, it's worth asking (and he's certainly not the only publisher running tables in dealers' rooms who is quite willing to sell other books).

And, if you haven't done so, try looking a bit further around the British small press SF publishing scene (and you will very quickly find that, in this market, people are quite willing to pay £10 for a paperback the size of "Three Windows"). There are quite a few out there, some (including, but not restricted to, TTA Press, PS Publishing and Immanion) with substantial and very reputable track records - admittedly, there are others which are simply writers publishing their (often appalling to mediocre) own books.

(And you could try giving yourself some publicity on the BSFA website forums - but do make sure that you post promotional material only in the appropriate areas and also make at least one or two contributions to the general conversation.)

[stevieannie.livejournal.com]

It maybe because I Am Not A Writer (of fiction, anyhow), but I don't get that approach.

As a musician, I have a vehement dislike of big music publishers. If EMI or Sony came knocking, I would *honestly* not be interested. I've had a teensytiny taste of having to produce my art to other people's requirements and I didn't like it one little bit.

What I don't get it why it's OK - in fact normal - for independent musicians to produce their own music, publish it, market it and gig it. All the money that they earn goes to them, and they have control over the production of their art.

But people in the publishing world seem to frown upon it for some reason, and I don't understand why writing should be so different... Lulu.com and the suchlike are simply tools to get the material into other people's hands, just as Soundsgood.com or any other CD pressing company.

Take control. Publish your art yourself, and rejoice in the printed word - regardless of whether you paid someone else to be judgemental at you or not.

Hurrah for "Three Windows"!

[keristor.livejournal.com]

I agree with you that Lulu are the equivalent of a CD pressing house (I would compare them with CD Baby for instance). Some of the others, though, aren't, they do take your money as a 'fee' for publishing your books and their contract terms can be definitely bad (keeping publishing rights, for instance; Lulu expressly say that if you want them to stop publishing your book they will do it but others apparently expect the rights in perpetuity; not necessarily exclusive but it seems that you can't take your book away from them). It's the bad ones which have given the whole industry a bad name in some places.

However, it's not quite true that musicians who 'self-publish' are treated with the same respect as those with large record companies. Have you tried to get your CDs into high-street shops (not specialist or small shops, I mean the large chains like HMV)? Most of them won't even look at them unless they come through a 'known' distributor, and those won't usually look at CDs unless they come from a 'known' label. The same with a lot of radio stations. It's much the same situation, except that independent music publishing has been around for longer than self-published printed books so it's a little easier to get heard. The quantities tend to be bigger as well, even for filk selling 200 copies of a CD of any decent standard is not at all unusual whereas the figures quoted by the SFWA indicate that for POD titles the average is well below 200 (Lulu are quoted as saying that they want a million authors selling 100 books each rather than 100 authors selling a million each).

But a lot of the SFWA article came across to me as an elitist "we like it the way it is because then we are in the few Published Authors and you plebs aren't". The publishers (and the big record companies) like it as well, because if there weren't those pesky independents they would have a captive market. That's the same reason that they belittle people who publish on the net, especially free, it undercuts their importance.

[stevieannie.livejournal.com]

Really depends on your definition of "respect". There is a rapidly contracting market for mainstream published music - high street music retailers are falling like flies in the current recession, which means that "The Charts" are usually defined as downloads these days. As far as downloads go, the major hitter is still iTunes, and if you approach things professionally, iTunes is easy to get self-published material onto. Other download sites are catching up, but I don't know of any who operate a "major retailer only" deal.

Even big "owned" musicians don't make their money from shop-led CD sales - income is all generated from gigging and getting the music out there. This is true for bands all the way from Fleetwood Mac to... errr... me. I don't know of any venues who ask about whether you've got a record deal before booking a gig. So I'm not sure where your assertion of "respect" comes from.

I think the difference between musicians and writers in the "self-production" scenario is that musicians habitually go out and push their product into people's faces. Writers don't do that so much, and don't have the pre-established stages to fall back on. I have seen self-published writers taking stalls at craft fairs and county shows, and doing very well at it, too. It's all about how you push your product and make it visible to the buying public.

But my point to Zander wasn't about any of this, it is far more about the fact that I truly believe he should feel as proud of his Lulu-produced work as of anything that had been published through a more mainstream route. He is taking the first steps in making his art available to others in his preferred format and I applaud that wholeheartedly. Art is art, however it comes to the party.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

I'm not saying that Zander publishing his work through Lulu rather than the conventional path is in any way inferior, at all, and I am very pleased that he has done it.

Gigs are not in the same comparison, there is no comparable activity for authors (unless they are so well known that someone will pay them to read their books out loud, not a common thing even for professional authors) and so are not relevant. The relevant comparison is recorded music and books, and there as I said there is a distinct similarity. The vast majority of recorded music generally available is via major record labels, and that is almost all of the music which the ordinary person will buy or even hear (possibly a couple of hundred out of a town of tens of thousands go to live gigs of independent musicians). They sell in millions, where independents sell in thousands or hundreds, often at gigs (which authors don't get; a market stall selling books is the equivalent not of a gig but of a market stall selling CDs).

As far as conventional distribution of hard-copy material is concerned, as far as I can see independent musicians are indeed badly treated. How many even have an Amazon presence, let alone any of the major stores?

Electronic distribution is yet another system, and there too there is a like-for-like comparison, but there the time factor comes into play. Lots of people have had MP3 players for ages but e-book readers are only just starting to become available at halfway reasonable prices whereas most people now seem to be able to use their phones to play music (some can read books on their phones as well, but the number of people who are happy with 4 or 5 words per line and often not even a whole sentence on the screen at once is not all that high). In spite of what the early adopters like to say the number of people who willingly read books on computer monitors and small screen handheld devices is still very small compared to the number who read actual books; this may change but that's the case at the moment. And even the phone e-book readers are quite new and there are a number of competing systems and formats, not all of which are compatible.

[the-alchemist.livejournal.com]

Publish your art yourself, and rejoice in the printed word - regardless of whether you paid someone else to be judgemental at you or not.

I don't disagree that self-publishing can be a really positive thing to do, but there's one really valuable thing that a publisher will give you, and that's an editor. Every published author I know says they really need an experienced, professional second opinion on everything they write.

Of course, it's more than possible to hire the services of an experienced editor before you self-publish, but that would eat up all the profits of most self-published books and more. So it's only really an option for those who don't mind making a loss, and those who are really very good at both writing and marketing.

[howeird]

Seanan is a good example of an extremely assertive self-marketer. I've watched her go from a shy young woman hiding in the back of a filk band to a multi-talented Force Of Nature during the past dozen or so years. Most of us don't have the drive, energy, spare cycles and perseverance she has shown, and that's pretty much why we're not published. Jay Lake is another good example, as is John Scalzi.

And of course a significant chunk of it is luck.

If it's any consolation, you *are* world famous. At Conflikt 2009 "classic filk" circle I announced I was going to sing a song by Zander. There was a lot of "ooh" and "aah" in response to that. When I got to the chorus of Sam's Song, it sounded like everyone was singing along.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

You sang Sam's Song? Thank you!

[howeird]

Thank you for writing it, it is brilliant. I learned it from Kathy Mar's CD. She was at the con, but not in the circle at the time.

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

You wrote Sam's Song? That's a standard, classic filk anthem in North America as far as I can tell.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Yes, I did.