7. How Not to Self Publish
by Steve Rosse
Someone asked me today, “Why are you so angry at people who self-publish?”
I was surprised by the question. I don’t think of myself as angry at people who self-publish. There are some wonderful self-published books, like Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” or Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.” I adore that book.
But here’s the thing: Life is a dirty, painful, unfair business, and only two things make life worth living: love and art. I believe that being in love or creating art are as close as we will come, while alive, to understanding God. Thus, writing is sacred. A good book is evidence of the divine spark in every human. And people who publish terrible books are making the divine profane.
Want a simpler, more down to earth explanation?
Let me ask you, what do you care about? Fine wine? Fancy goldfish? Football?
Let’s say you care about football. Let’s imagine that you’re a huge fan of the sport. And let’s say that your team hires a new player, one who claims at his first press conference that he is going lead the team to the championship.
Then he goes out on the field for his first game, and because you’ve been studying football your whole life, you can tell from the way he runs out on the field that he’s not just less than his reputation, he’s actually pretty awful.
Remember, you care about football. You idolize great athletes. You feel that people who play football well, play it with passion and finesse and power and inspiration, you feel that these people are special and deserve attention and praise.
And this guy is claiming to be one of those people, when you know that he is clearly not one of those special people.
Okay, that’s how I feel when I see some guy proclaiming himself a writer by putting his name on a book’s cover, when the first paragraph of his book clearly shows him to be no such thing.
I’m disappointed, and yes, I guess if I’m being honest, I’m angry. I’m angry on behalf of the people who worked hard to earn the title “writer,” people like Whitman and Dickens and Woolf and Hemingway and Heinlein and Salinger and Chandler and Tolkien. I’m angry on behalf of the young artists out there who are trying to be heard and have to compete with the din of thousands of people who can’t write, and what’s more, who don’t want to write.
And there we have the crux of it. It’s obvious that all these dilettantes cluttering up Amazon don’t want to write because they’re spending more time marketing their books than they ever did writing them.
They want to be writers because they want attention, but they don’t want to write, because writing is hard work and most of the time you fail. Even the best writer in the world fails more often than he succeeds. Writers lose sleep and lose marriages and lose friends and eventually some writers lose their sanity, because it’s almost impossible to write well.
It’s so difficult that producing a readable, publishable, salable manuscript the first time you try is a statistical impossibility. Yet every day hundreds of beginners pay big money to get cover art, an ISBN number and a slot on Amazon for the first piece of creative writing they’ve ever attempted.
I hate football. But I love a good book. I cherish those moments in my life when I’ve closed a terrific book and sat stunned in my chair, hoping nobody in the room speaks because I don’t ever want anything to wash those last words of that last page of that terrific book out of my mind.
So I don’t apologize for throwing pennies at the field. I’m proud to be a literature hooligan.
Eastlit Note on How Not to Self Publish:
How Not to Self Publish is the seventh article in the series. Previous articles in the series are:
Steve Rosse is a former columnist for The Nation newspaper in Bangkok. His books are available on Amazon.com
