Sep 19, 2009

Hit & Miss in the World of Self Publishing

My first attempt at self-publishing came during an alcohol and type-writer fueled haze. I was working a second shift job, getting home around midnight and having several hours in my tiny studio apartment alone.

That is to say, my first attempt at self-publishing had nothing to do with self-publishing. Once my novel of sorts, Making News, was complete (in my mind, at the time) I proceeded to receive rejection letters from nearly every major and minor publishing house in the US. And a few in Canada. And maybe one in the UK.

Then I learned about self-publishing. I was living in Monument Square in Portland, Maine at the time, and directly across the square was Longfellow Books, a kickass little store if there ever was one. I spend a lot of time flipping through the books, trying to figure out what made a book a book, how authors were able to hook into the publishing world.

I found a lot of shitty looking books by local authors (self-published books of poetry and woe-is-me fiction) and I thought to myself, "Self - you can do that. At least you can't be any worse than these folks."

And I wasn't. I wasn't any better - but I certainly wasn't any worse.

In retrospect, the book wasn't ready and I didn't care enough to promote it because I knew it wasn't ready, I just wanted to have something I could put on a book shelf and say, "I did that."

I have since learned quite a bit more about all sorts of publishing - online, magazine, on-demand, mini-press.

I see a lot of potential in this thing called self-publishing. With tools like Twitter, Facebook - fuck - the entire fucking Internet, there isn't a place an author can't get to. Working into the Book Expo or a large city book festival may take a little work, but the book wasn't written without any sweat, and it sure as hell isn't going to sell without any.

I'm waiting for IndieBound to create a self-published author section (the indie of the indie) but all in good time, I guess.

My most recent book project, Rubes, Rakes, Rogues & Roustabouts started out as some pictures I was going to hang on the wall. It became it's own beast, morphing into some humor and typography-driven thing. While I was writing it and putting it together, I kept a list of all the ways I would market the book.

That's how this was different - I didn't think of a publishing house touching this one. Besides the fact that it's too difficult to categorize, review, or get into a bookseller, I just wanted to do it myself.

I designed the whole things, scrapped half of it and redesigned it again. And I loved every minute of it. I used some crowd-sourcing for cover ideas and content.

The future of self-publishing is not the authors with a desire to do it themselves, the future is having the full plan before word one is written. Writing is such a solitary venture by necessity, but by getting the word out that you're working on something, people want to know more about it. Let them interact. Let them engage you while you're engaged in your writing.

What do you think about self publishing? Let Backward Books know here.