Metropolis magazine
James Hadfield
Published originally in Metropolis magazine, Tokyo, January 2010
Most aspiring writers spend their entire lives insisting that they’ve got a decent book in them. Hugh Ashton went ahead and published his.
A technical writer of over 20 years, the long-term Japan resident found himself “between engagements” awhile back, and used the time to pen a novel entitled Beneath Gray Skies. It was, he says, “probably about my third or fourth novel that I’d finished, but the first one I really felt happy with.”
Finding a publisher wasn’t to prove easy, though. “If you’re not writing about Japan and you live in Japan, it seems that a lot of publishers and agents aren’t interested,” he notes. And by setting his book in an alternate 1920s where the American Civil War never happened and Confederates are rubbing shoulders with the Nazis, he hadn’t exactly made life easy for himself.
After a string of rejections, Ashton turned to online print-on-demand service Lulu. While self-publishing used to mean ordering a bulk load of books that often ended up getting repurposed as household furniture, websites like Lulu allow customers to print one copy at a time. They can also take care of finicky details, from designing a cover to getting an ISBN number and obtaining distribution.
“I was making music in ’78, ’79, and that was the time of the independent record label,” says Ashton. “I think that we’re seeing the same thing with fiction. So I call it ‘independent publishing’: it sounds better, but I also think that it’s actually closer to the truth.”
Kathleen Morikawa, author of the 2006 guide Self-Publishing in Japan: What You Need to Know to Get Started, agrees about this sea change in the book world. “With the state of the economy and the publishing industry now, I think many people, both authors and readers alike, are beginning to realize self-publishing may be one of the few viable options for new authors,” she writes by email.
Morikawa founded her own company, Forest River Press, to publish her first book, The Couch Potato’s Guide to Japan: Inside the World of Japanese TV. While conceding that print-on-demand services are an attractive option, especially for work aimed more at an overseas audience, she stresses that the route she took also has its benefits.
“One is control,” she says. “You do it yourself, you are in control of every decision. That’s huge. You are not at the mercy of the fine print, not dealing with a company thousands of miles away, and you have an entire print run at your fingertips.”
Either way, there are some issues that technological advances have yet to remedy: “No matter how you decide to publish, the biggest hurdle will always be sales and distribution—finding people to buy your book and a variety of ways to get the book to them.”
Ashton has tried a number of methods to promote Beneath Gray Skies: he established a website to plug the book and discuss self-publishing techniques, and has been gently encouraging readers to post reviews on Amazon—where, as he puts it, “all books are created equal.” He’s also been holding reading and discussion sessions around Tokyo, where a copy of the novel is included in the admission price. “Once they’ve got the book, they’ll probably read it,” he says, perhaps a bit too optimistically.
The next time I contact him, he tells me enthusiastically about a new service that he’s discovered, Smashwords, which lets self-publishing authors create ebooks and distribute them via retailers including Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
“There’s an awful lot of crap there,” he admits. “It’s all too easy to slam out something which lacks structure, style or sense, in any combination you care to mention, and upload it.”
Such, alas, is the company that self-publishers have to keep. “If there’s a barrier to be overcome in independent publishing, it’s the one of quality,” he says. Well, that and finding time to read all the damn things.
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