Agent Nathan Bransford says it’s a great time to be an author and entrepreneur. I’m cheering in the same crowd.
Having worked with some remarkable, professional authors who self-publish their work, I know that a savvy writer can put out a book and at least break even. It makes me wonder what would happen if literature became more local, and more democratic. Editors, agents, and book designers aren’t going away, but I can’t help thinking that more of the profit would end up in writers’ hands if they wrote with local audiences in mind (geographically local, and/or to their circles online), and self-published.
We get at truth through specificity, and I hardly think our work would suffer if we practiced paying better attention to the struggles–class, political, social, and personal–closer to home. This could be my own frustration surfacing. In my own writing, I grapple with adapting foreign subject matter to a very Western form of storytelling; when I get stuck, I get antsy, and wonder if I am overlooking equally important narratives on my doorstep. Maybe so, yet I would not be writing about the Middle East if I didn’t believe that our country’s failures did not resemble certain other human rights failures abroad.
Speaking from a creative perspective, we writers receive our inspiration locally. By setting out to write local, too, we could expand our readership. From a human perspective, local literature builds community. Portland claims as heroes its local writers–Ursula Le Guin, Diana Abu-Jaber, and Kim Stafford, to name a few. From a business perspective, I believe marketing our books would be easier and more successful. Word of mouth is the best advertising we can have, and from a spiritual and ethical perspective, it serves us to let our best work speak for itself and to avoid the cheap language of marketing and self-interest.
Self-publishing, and likely e-publishing, remove several filters that separate writers from their audiences. I can’t help thinking that we can reinvigorate literature by writing more directly and urgently to a tangible audience–to the communities in which we already participate. I see many aspiring writers who write to agents and publishers, or to the literary canon. What good is that, really? It sets young writers on a path to failure and frustration, rather than encourage them to say something helpful to their readers about the shared world.
Tags: books, miscellany, publishing, Writing
I haven’t broke even yet, but it’s now conceivable that I will someday!
Adam, curious if you are working with other self-pubbed authors in your area. I am starting to think that strong local networks will be the key to raising awareness about quality self-pubbed titles–authors working together to promote their books and connect with potential readers/buyers.
The closest I’ve come to that is my Toastmaster’s Writing Group. One of the members is a self published author and is now working on a book with a traditional publisher. We’ve talked about doing signings together, but that is about it. I don’t know any other self pubbed authors and haven’t done any research on how to connect to them locally.
You can connect through conferences, sometimes, but I think right now the onus is on writers to seek one another out. I would love to start an online hub for you all to find each other; I have at least one other client in your area, and I know there are more. Self-publishing will become an even better alternative to the traditional industry as writers start working together and helping raise the profile of self-published books in our communities (online and geographical, both).
An on-line forum would be fantastic. I’d definitely participate. Thank God for people with lots of energy like you.
I’m going to try to set something up on Facebook in the next week or two. It’ll be temporary until there’s a dedicated site, but at least we can see if the idea gets traction. Stay tuned!
Interesting idea, Sarah. I read more articles about the criticism that publishers – if they accept your book – want writers to take on much of the promotional activities. So, if that’s the current trend, why not self-publish, if you have to do all the hard PR work anyway? I read a useful little book “Successfully marketing your novel” by Austin Camacho, a suspense writer in this area, who has done so several times. It’s an interesting experience with usful advice. I met him at a presentation at the American Independent Writers joint event with the Johns Hopkins Masters of Arts in Writing program last October. All the best, your snowed-in friend on the East Coast.