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

[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.