The word “your” in that question refers to readers, but I
think the same question can be asked of publishers and the response of one of
the two commentators provides an answer as to why some authors, me included,
decide to self-publish.
In her response to the question posed, Zoe Heller, a regular
“Bookends” participant, related the following:
In my 20s, I worked
for a brief period as an editorial assistant at a publishing house in London,
where my duties included overseeing “the slush pile” of unsolicited
manuscripts. The task included glancing over each submission and either
returning it to the author with a snotty form letter regretting that the work
was “not right for us,” or (if I detected a glimmer of something remotely
publishable) sending it upstairs for further consideration by one of the
in-house readers. The important thing was to send back the manuscripts at a
steady rate and keep the slush pile low. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. Under my
supervision, the slush pile grew and grew until it became several tottering
ziggurats of slush. I’d like to say that it was the thought of dashing literary
hopes that paralyzed me. But I was quite heartless about that. What stopped me
in my tracks was the dread of having to make independent literary judgments. I
had never before been asked to evaluate writing that was utterly
reputation-less and imprimatur-less.
Avoiding the “slush pile” and gate-keepers akin to the young, insecure Ms Heller by self-publishing one’s own work
is no panacea. When I published “Manhattan Morning” earlier this year, I
likened the process to putting a note in a bottle, sealing the cap and tossing
the bottle into the sea on an out-going tide. Six months later, I would say
that I certainly got that aspect of the process right.
Going through a traditional publisher, if successful, guarantees that a certain readership will at least become aware of what
one has written and a review or two may be forthcoming. Not so with
self-publishing unless one makes a strenuous, creative, not inexpensive and
perhaps shameless marketing effort.
We live in a “distracted, superficial age,” the other
“Bookends” commentator, Siddharta Deb observed. In such circumstances, it is
easy to go for books written by authors “with carefully constructed reputations
that are vetted, marketable and safe – a writer as tailored to the reader’s
demographic as a cellphone plan.”
The history of writing is full of stories of authors who
persevered through many, many rejection letters before finally getting a work
accepted and then going on to considerable success. There are also any number
of examples of situations where writers who had one truly good book inside of them, were
encouraged or even pressured by publishers to write more because their name was
now a saleable commodity, resulting is a string of mediocre if commercially
successful, but soon forgotten follow-ups.
At the same time, just because a work has been
self-published doesn’t mean it has any merit. In fact, with self-publishing now
so inexpensive and relatively easy, one can argue that it is readers, not
editorial assistants, who are faced with assessing the slush pile.
Is there, or will there be, an effective way to get decent works of
fiction that are in all probability not broad-based “commercial” in today’s market to potentially
interested readers?
Hard to know. Perhaps the "Bookends" commentators will tackle that one in due course.
No comments:
Post a Comment