(Some of this, together with other thoughts on self-publishing, may be found on the SWET (Society of Writers, Editors and Translators) blog in two articles here and here).
After finishing the first draft of Gray Skies, I felt I had a pretty good piece of writing. However, I also knew that the first draft of any piece of writing is not what should go to publishers or agents, so I looked over the whole thing and tidied it up. But… no agents or publishers seemed interested.
The traditional book industry is very old-fashioned, by the way. E-mail is not a valid method of submission, and all submissions must be made on paper (first 30 pages of a manuscript, etc.). When you live in Japan, and the prospective agents are in New York or London, that’s quite a lot of postage, and after the first 30 or so rejections, you wonder whether it’s worth it.
People who have been published say that it you just have to keep trying. Well, it’s time-consuming, and heart-breaking to keep receiving letters from agents you’ve forgotten you ever sent to in the first place, but I was lucky in that a local agent here in Japan took on the job of licking the manuscript into shape. Cindy found two professional readers to comment and criticize, and as a result of their efforts, Beneath Gray Skies is a better piece of work. Friends are all very well, even honest friends, but someone who doesn’t know you at all, and is not amazed by the fact that you sat down and wrote 110,000 words in a matter of months, is a much better critic.
Their efforts ensured that characterization and plot were much tighter, and that errors of style were checked.
However, even for agents, when you live in Japan, your publication options are limited, and we soon came to the limit of the options available to us.
I had considered and discarded the idea of self-publishing before. I knew it was difficult to get a novel published unless you had been previously published (I have been published, but not as a fiction writer), but somehow, I had the naive belief, as do all authors, I am sure, that raw talent would shine through.
I despised the idea of a vanity press, where the author pays to have his work printed.
Alas, after some thought and talking around, I realized why publishers don’t buy novels. There are few publishers left. There are simply publishing divisions of large international conglomerates. These are ruled, not by literary taste, or even a sense of adventure, but by the quarterly financial reports on which the management’s bonusses and the shareholders’ dividends depend.
Gone are the days when an editor could take a chance on a book, and say that it was worth keeping on the list for the sake of Art, even if it was only going to sell a few hundred copies in the next few years. Not that Gray Skies is in any way great literature (I hope it’s well-written, though), but it was my hope that someone would be willing to take a chance on this. Not so… It seems that from the three or four publishing conglomerates, over 80% of the USA’s fiction books are written by a handful of authors. The hundreds of thousands of other authors, published or unpublished, don’t stand a chance.
So I looked around – I don’t have long pockets, and the idea of paying to have my work published did not appeal, as I say. But print-on-demand means that the buyer, not the author pays, and if there’s an e-book option available, all to the good – we save trees and the buyer pays less.
Some of the print-on-demand places seemed to want quite a lot of setup charges – which rather goes against the whole idea of print-on-demand.
However, Lulu, which had been recommended to me previously, did not seem to require any kind of deposit, and had a site where it was possible for me to produce the book almost on my own.
But why do I say that is this the future of publishing? Because I firmly believe that there is still a large market out there for the printed word, despite blogs, despite Web sites, and despite broadcast media.
And, while the publishing world is ruled by short-term profiteers, there is little chance of the traditional publishing houses being the outlet for new creativity. Cookery books and how-to and lifestyle books always seem to find room on the list. There always seems to be room for yet another "Seven Easy and Painless Steps to a Better You" or "Easy soufflés from Patagonia" (do people actually read these once they’ve bought them, or does the act of purchase imply that you acquire the knowledge along with the till receipt?). But fiction? I think it’s now up to the authors themselves to get it out.
Of course, a lot of rubbish will come out at the same time as the good stuff, but the experience of the independent labels, who are often outselling the majors, should be an indication that there is a viable alternative to distributing original creative material. Unfortunately, economies of scale don’t kick in with this kind of thing, which means that the poor customer is saddled with a heavier bill than would otherwise be the case. But what the customer gets is something very different from the mass market pap that will balance the book factory’s accounts and swell the wallets of the owners.
And that’s how Gray Skies is right now – something different which you wouldn’t have had the pleasure of knowing about if the industry had had its way. Of course, it’s possible that a professional publisher will see this and buy a copy of the book, and will decide to buy the rights and publish it commercially – but it means that you, the public, are then doing the job that the publisher should be doing – that of taking the risk of reading an unknown author.
I’m not the only person doing this, by the way and there’s a list of such books out at BookDoggie , which may be of interest.
In any case, please run along and buy a copy right now, if you haven’t already. I make a laughably small amount of money on each sale – so why not buy two copies while you’re at it – one for a friend? Thanks, and thanks for reading this.
Hugh Ashton, Kamakura, Japan, March 2009
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