My sort of loose rule about this blog is that it’s supposed to be regional, but instead it’s acquiring a lot of subjects that ought to be on my “other” blog, merryscribbler.blogspot.com. But also part of doing this is to cut trail for other writers around here, especially Blackfeet, so I suppose I can justify writing about Lulu.com that way. I’ll just follow this cowpath or game trail or whatever it is. Certainly no superhighway.
The main confusion I see about using Lulu.com is that people constantly mistake PRINT on demand for PUBLISH on demand. Since their awareness of publishing was mostly a matter of pulling a book off the shelf in a bookstore, that’s the lens through which they see everything else. Writers, of course, cling to the moment in movies when the author gets a life-changing letter of acceptance for their manuscript. I thought “Peanuts” had a nice comment on that: Snoopy gets a letter of acceptance all right. It says, “We like your book and intend to print it. If anyone buys it, we’ll print another copy.” Snoopy is caught between triumph and despair. Aren’t we all?
Today’s publishing industry is a particularly complex and global phenomenon that needs a good deal of deconstruction for both writers and readers.
These are possible classical steps we read about in the biographies of writers, plus some comments which I make only as an observer so far.
GETTING IN THE DOOR
1. The publishing house actively seeks out writers. When I was teaching in Browning in the Sixties, the textbook rep actually came to me and suggested I write a book about Blackfeet for his publisher. Of course, in those days I didn’t BEGIN to know what I needed to about Blackfeet and would only have been able to produce the same kind of over-researched, under-analyzed and hackneyed work that already floods the market. But at least I had a sense of it being possible.
2. The slush-pile reader recognizes something in a manuscript and begins to play Maxwell Perkins inventing and shaping Thomas Wolf. This is one of the hardest fantasies to give up. “I’ll write a lot of off-the-top-of-my-head stuff, then someone more literate will give it shape, structure, decent spelling and grammar, and etc.” But these days that fantasy has been passed to the agents, often previously employed as editors and slush-pile readers. Some end up practically ghosting the book -- in fact, it’s a fine line. But one can always hire someone to edit one’s baggy old manuscript. (Few will do it for free.) THEN submit. Or self-print.
3. A famous writer will pick up one’s manuscript and make it all happen. After all, didn’t Carl Hiassen recognize “Aragon” and get it published? Hmmm. We may not be getting the whole story.
4. In the academic context, one’s submitted manuscript is run past a committee of three “impartial” scholars, sort of like a doctoral thesis. If you’ve ever tried to get a doctoral thesis off the ground, you’ll recognize the hazards. There’s no such thing as an impartial scholar -- the model is science, but even in scientific fields people are far less objective than they purport to be. If the field of the subject is small, one may be suppressed by a frank rival or by a person criticized in the text. “Given wisdom” trumps most everything. Even ordinary commercial publishers seem to operate as committees rather than insightful and dedicated individuals.
THE MANUSCRIPT IS COMPLETE AND ACCEPTED
5. I’m just learning about this. a) Copy editing -- spelling, grammar, fact-checking, redundancies and obscurities eliminated. b) Layout -- creating a decent-looking and readable page by combining pictures and words, setting margins, pagination, etc.
6. Then the actual printing, which in the past has been done in batches. Part of the art of publishing was estimating how big the batch should be. U of Calgary Press says they rarely print more than a thousand copies. The problem that crops up is that a mis-estimate means either having to tool up to print another batch or having to warehouse a lot of copies. Warehouses cost money and the government taxes the books. This has been addressed by persuading bookstores to load their shelves with books (another estimation problem), creating the practice of allowing bookstores to return all unsold copies. These become remainders or are pulped. Print-On-Demand has become a major breakthrough for regular publishing houses who want to avoid both over and under production of copies, especially when dealing with the “long-tail phenomenon” of having sporadic demand for backlist books that would ordinarily go out of print, be remaindered and/or pulped. BUT this puts those “long tail” books into competition with books that would otherwise replace them over time: why read an imitation Zane Grey if you can read the REAL Zane Grey?
DISTRIBUTION
7. On the model of commercial distribution, books have been sent to warehouses which supply the bookstores with microfiche for ordering. Google and Amazon, et al, have now created direct relationships between publisher and reader.
8. Shipping will become ever more important as gas becomes more expensive. However, print on demand means that there can be “Espresso” printing machines distributed through the country so that one goes into a kiosk at Starbucks or Kinko’s, requests the book, walks out with it in an hour or less. Ebooks mean that the books travel through wires and satellites over the Internet, lacking only a pretty binding. One can take the downloaded manuscript to Kinko’s and get it bound or put it in a 3-ring binder, or just file it. I predict that custom on-demand binding will become more important and that this can flower into an art form. But some kinds of reading are so ephemeral that they will never even be downloaded -- just read on a portable screen device and then discarded.
Other possibilities are that the book may be audio or that the print manuscript might be interrupted by video. How does one “lay out” a video? The nastier possibility is the IMpossibility of corraling the manuscript -- once digitized online it can be copied.
This tech explosion, which affects both formal publishing and self-publishing, is not confined to manuscripts. Writers and publishers should carefully watch the fields of music and film, both of which can be “self-published” now with very similar issues. The sharpest issue may turn out to be tech progress: the 8-track, cassette, CD, DVD, MP3 and... I know there are already other challengers out there. An actual book or painting or score never goes inaccessible, but these other media can be blocked by lack of the right equipment. I’ve already got material in early versions of Writenow software that I can’t open on a contemporary platform.
Distribution is dominated by the bar code and ISBN, at least in venues where lots of books are handled. If you’re selling a self-printed book at a fishing tackle store, they won’t mind so much. But then a self-distributor must establish a route and regularly check back by phone or in person. People who run fishing tackle stores expect that. It means you’ll have to keep careful records.
PROMOTION
Tech advances open ways of promoting writing, but they also shut out readers who only relate to paper books. (I don’t know what the percentage of the population is, but it’s probably higher than techies think.) Readings might reach them. Unless a person has built a reputation or relates to a specific group of people, it’s unlikely that a writer will be solicited to read, so you have to give them the idea. With liberal congregations like Unitarians, writers might be allowed to piggyback on services, maybe even "preach."
Posters, mailings, brochures, and so on might work. Websites for the tech-competent. Amazon is experimenting with several things: access to the first chapter or at least early pages, selling “shorts” for 49 cents to introduce authors. In a bookstore one does something similar by taking a book off the shelf.
Get on TV or the radio. Offer yourself to schools. Montana has a humanities “speaker’s bureau” that will book writers. Book festivals are good for promotion and also provide community with other authors.
You can pay someone to do promotion -- there are companies. Lulu.com lists some that they know will do a good job, which is in itself as important as the actual printing part that they do themselves.
So what I’m saying is that self-printing is only one step. One must do self-distribution, self-promotion, and -- what is much harder -- self-evaluation and self-editing. One must choose oneself and be one’s own agent, self-reassuring, self-networking, self-researching. It’s no longer possible to be a passionate inky wretch in a garret and expect much of anything, except to perhaps become a skilled, distinctive, very fine writer. How many of them are out there, undiscovered?
But if one does all this self-this-and-that, where is the time to develop as a writer?
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