Penguin?
Harper Collins?
Au contraire.
I’m doing it myself.
Now, I can hear the alarm bells going off in your
heads from here.
Self-publishing?
You mean “vanity press”?
Isn’t that for people who write encyclopaedic tracts about steam engines or Edwardian doll’s
houses that are only found yellowing away in the gift shops of obscure regional
museums?
Isn’t that for people who toss out ream upon ream
of “universe building fantasy” under titles like “Chronicles of the Obsidian
Cycle: Volume XVIII - The Fall of Nathgar"?
Isn’t it for books and writers that just aren’t very good?
That’s what I thought too.
And it took me a long time to come to terms with the idea that the
only way to get my book out there was to do it this way.
It didn’t feel like it would be a “real book”.
About 18 months ago I tried to go down the conventional publishing
route. The first step in that is to send an extract from your manuscript to a
literary agent. These are the only people – you are told – that publishers will
pay any attention to.
I did a bit of research (as all neophyte writers are instructed to)
and made a list of around 20 who specialise in material that “Projection” looks
and sounds a bit like.
I wrote a synopsis and tailored letters explaining who I am and
why I think they would like my book.
And I got maybe five rejections. I never heard back from the rest.
So what do you do then?
Try sending it to the other, less relevant 180 agents working in
the UK?
Before I answer that, I want to take you back to the period from 2002
to 2004.
- I was in a punk band
- You can see the remnants of our MySpace page here…
- We released a few records by producing them ourselves and putting them out on the singer’s own label Boss Tuneage
- You can stream our entire output on Spotify to this very day
At no point did any of us ever think that we had to be signed by a
record label to do what we wanted to do. It’s punk innit? DIY not EMI etc etc.
(WEIRDLY, the guy on the far right of this picture reading a trout fishing magazine is the artist who did "Projection"'s cover illustration, Karl Broome!)
Anyway...
Why should a book be any different?
It was not until late 2019 that this parallel really dawned on me.
What is so sacred about publishing makes us peer down our noses at
books that lack the “official certification” of having been through the “established
process”? Do I need external validation that much? Or do I just want people to
read my story?
Publishing is just as grubby and money-driven as the record
business. Books fail to get signed in their thousands every year not
because they’re rubbish but because they don’t guarantee a return on
investment.
That’s why you pretty much have to be famous ALREADY to get a book
deal. Doesn’t matter what for. Name recognition is what shifts units, and the
budgets and the margins are just not there to take chances.
Some shit with a celebrity’s name on will sell more than 999 out
of every 1,000 new unknown authors’ books, no matter how good they are. FACT.
I’m not having a go at agents, publishers, celebrity memoirists,
Instagram influencers, Youtubers or anyone else here. This is just the way it
is – the economics determine everything else.
The odour of sanctity that lingers around publishing is rapidly
being dispersed by the 21st century cultural fart-cloud and soon it
will smell like everything else.
So if you want to create something, do it yourself.
That’s what I’ve done.
Or to put it another way: I had to self publish because the publishing industry wouldn't piss on me if I was on fire.😁
Or to put it another way: I had to self publish because the publishing industry wouldn't piss on me if I was on fire.😁
