I don't feel very festive yet and I think I should. The kids have got their Christmas tree up already and I'm being pestered to get one up this coming weekend and I think I will give in gracefully. I guess I had better finish off some Christmas shopping too. I still haven't got a clue what to get Eleanor for Christmas - she says I'm hard to buy for but that's the pot calling the kettle out for sure.
Something has been bugging the hell out of me this last week and it's taken me a while to figure out what it is. It finally dawned on me last night that it was the cover of The Monster Magnet - it is weak to say the least, so if you happen upon the site/blog while I'm changing it, apologies for any confusion but it deserves a better cover than a spooky looking tree. How many times have I sat here and slated publishers for going down the 'spooky tree' road? Harlan Coben, Michael Connelly, Linwood Barclay - and those are off the top of my head. If I went and looked I could probably find at least a dozen more. Anyway, I've got a real bee in the head over it as well, so I've sourced images for the entire series all at once. I guess this is the beauty of doing it yourself. Can you imagine how much carnage that would cause if you were in the hands of Harper Collins? Then again, Harper Collins wouldn't have let it go out looking second rate, but you know what I mean...
About a week ago, I read a fantastic blog post "Reasons Not To Self Publish" over at The Millions. While I disagree with about as much of it as I agree with, it's the wealth of knowledge, hatred and disbelief that follows in the comments that yields the good stuff. There are no answers to be had there. There are as many haters of self publishing/digital publishing as there are those that love it. There's all kinds of squabbling going on, but much of it appears to be about being validated as an author by a publisher putting money into you or how people view published books as real and ebooks as not. Money, money, money...
I thought about this long and hard. It really made me question my own motivations for writing at the moment.
1. I write because I have stories in my head and believe other people would enjoy them
At which point, the list ends because having talked to other authors/writers, there are two roads we can down at this point. The first is that I can either write because I have a story to tell regardless of commerce, the second is that I can write because I believe I can make a living out of it.
Regardless of the fact that I write for a living - because running a magazine has about as much in common with writing a book and washing cars does with building them - I fall into the first category. I don't believe I have the 'right' to be published. I would like to be pubished but I don't have any rights to it at all. That's not for me to decide. Publishing is a money making business and I'm sure if a publisher thought they could make a success story and some money out of me, I would be the first to know.
Meantime, I also don't expect a publisher to pay any attention to me at the moment. Why would they? I have nothing. Buying into a first time author with no track record is akin to taking on somebody ho left school last week and leaving them in charge of an entire department (yeah, it does happen, but they are few and far between). My own thinking on this is about the same as it was when I was playing in a band. If you haven't got a demo of your music for people to listen to, all they have is your word for it.
Am I the only one looking at digital publishing like this? I mean, every day above ground is a good day right? Why would you want to sit on something you had written until somebody paid you for it? Wouldn't you rather some people read it and then told some other people about it. Sure, getting paid is great but it can't be the end-game anymore - not in this climate.
Which begs the question that it must be time to differentiate, not between published authors and self published authors/hard copy books and digital books but between story-tellers and commercial writers. Those, I feel are the two categories we should be looking at. I think then, the word of publishing would make a lot more sense to people.
Following on from this, I thought I would go back in time and check out Amanda Hocking's blog posts from the beginning of time. From the era before she had sold a million. Her grammar and spelling are terrible but that didn't stop millions of people from buying her material. I find her a bit of a whiner and I also feel like she plays some bizarre sympathy cards a little too often as well, but hey, she is the one that shifted all of those books not me. She obviously knows her audience well and they identify with her.
The end result, she has gotten herself a decent deal and a good team behind her - there's even movie talk these days. She gets a raw deal when really all she did was grow up in public. It's no different from making indie movies until you know what you're doing. Look at Del Toro and Tarantino. It's no different from demoing songs until you're a fantastic songwriter and recording artist. Back in the seventies and long before that, music artists where given time to develop. Nobody expected anybody to sell a million on your first album. Everybody took some knocks to get the job done.
So answer me this, why isn't everybody playing nicely together? Why aren't the big six publishing companies using self published sales data to fuel their risks for the future? Or have I missed something?