Self Publishing Part 1: Think Before You Drink . . . er, I Mean, Self Publish

Let’s have a chat about self publishing, shall we? But first of all, a disclaimer: I am not considering, nor do I think I would ever consider, self publishing a book. However, my lack of interest in the self publishing game does not mean that I don’t believe that self publishing is a viable option for some writers—it just isn’t right for me (in large part because I make the majority of my money from teaching rather than writing and I want my writing credits to count for something on my CV).

This discussion will have to be a two parter, and I think I will begin with the downside of self publishing. I believe self publishing can be—I’m going to go ahead and say it—dangerous, for a number of reasons. I’m going to lay out my biggest problems with self publishing here, although there are probably many other potential risks that I’m not touching on.

First of all, to state the obvious, if a traditional publishing house—even a very small press—agrees to publish your book, that carries a certain amount of weigh to it. There are numerous presses out there willing to publish a wide variety of books, so it can look bad for you if you weren’t able to get your book accepted by one of the many options out there. It may mean that your book simply isn’t that good, and you need to try to be objective about your work and face that possibility. It may also mean that you yourself don’t have a complete understanding of how to really market your book to a prospective publisher, and if you don’t know how to do that, how do you expect to market your book to your readers without the help and credibility provided by a publishing house?

But let’s assume that your book is good and let’s assume, also, that you do know how to market your book, but you’ve chosen to go the self publishing route for other reasons. Usually, when a book is accepted for publication by a real press, an editor will then give you feedback so that you can revise and strengthen the manuscript, make it the best it can possibly be before it actually gets printed. While you can pay for editorial services on your own, it seems to me that the feedback coming from someone who you have paid to give you editorial suggestions would be different from the feedback coming from someone who actually has a financial stake in the outcome of the revision. I’m sure there are some professionals out there whom you can pay to give you solid feedback, but I still feel that this is a risk worth considering if you’re thinking about self publishing.

I think a lot of writers these days think that they can kick-start their careers by self publishing a first book. They assume that the public will immediately see what great writers they are and their careers will be set. The danger here is that without good editorial feedback and a definite stamp of approval from a publishing house, you may be attaching your name to something that is actually going to kill your career before it even gets off the ground. You may genuinely have a good book on your hands, but if you send it to press right now without revision it’s going to read like exactly what it is: a draft. Great books are not the product of the writer alone, but are the result of a collaboration between the writer, the editor, and often the agent or other trusted readers.

The reading public, of course, doesn’t really realize that, at least, not consciously. When they read a book that wasn’t ready to go to print, they just assume the writer isn’t a good writer, when in fact, the truth may be that the writer didn’t have the help that he or she needed to turn the book into what it had the potential to become.

This may all sound like I am absolutely against self publishing. I’m actually not. I think it’s a risk, but it has proved to be beneficial for some writers and should not be, I believe, entirely eschewed. I’ll talk next time about some of the pros to the self publishing game.

False Starts

In his recent Poets and Writers article about his experiences self publishing a couple of books, Steve Almond (who, it should be noted for the sake of credibility, had published several books with actual publishing houses prior to his foray into the self publishing arena) points out that “for most of us mortals, the path to publication is littered with false starts” (68).

Let me just say that Almond is so right.

The climb upward as a writer is slow going and is full of small successes, which don’t end up meaning much in the big picture but which sometimes may feel much more significant than they are. Your first publication, for example. Can you remember the adrenaline rush that one gave you (or will give you, if that milestone is still hovering somewhere in your future)? The first story “acceptance” I received was from an online journal whose editor, I very quickly found out, accepts almost everything that gets submitted to her. I felt, for maybe a day or two, like I could finally say that I was a “real” writer, until I figured out that all getting published by that site proves is that I know how to attach a word document to an email.

But that’s just an extreme example of the very common false starts we all experience. My first real acceptance was equally exciting, although the issue of the journal came and went and for all I know, nobody ever even read the story once it was published. My first acceptance by a paying journal was another of those false starts. It felt huge to me to actually be getting paid for something I had written, although since then I’ve sold a handful of stories for actual money, and I’ve learned that the paying markets aren’t necessarily any more well regarded or widely read than the non-paying ones, and the money never really adds up to much.

First manuscript request from an agent, that one felt huge at the time. Prior to that I firmly believed that if I could just get an agent to read my book, he or she would see how good it was and it wouldn’t be long after that before the book was published. That first post-manuscript request rejection was a reality check, let me tell you. As was the first (and so far only) time I was contacted by a literary agency asking me to query them. The result? The assistant requested a partial and then sent a polite rejection, saying that the novel was very well written but the story didn’t suck her in enough.

Pushcart nomination—yeah, but I didn’t win. Semi-finalist for Leapfrog Press’s fiction contest—again, I didn’t win, and that book is still unpublished and collecting virtual dust on my jump drive.

Don’t get me wrong, these small milestones still get me excited every time. I have this image of a writing career as a nightmarishly long ladder. It takes such effort to get one rung higher that it’s impossible not to be excited when you do, but then you look up and realize that there are still so many rungs to go that you can’t even see the top yet (probably because, in fact, there isn’t one, but don’t let your mind linger too long on that truth). And then you look down and realize that while you have made it a few rungs up, you’re really not that high yet. You could easily jump back down to the ground and not hurt yourself.

False starts? Yes, sometimes it feels like there’s nothing but false starts. But maybe the best thing to do is to focus on the writing itself and not worry about where you’re headed. What’s that old saying? It takes thirty years to make an overnight success? The truth is, individual wins and losses don’t amount to much in the end. In the end all that matters is that you never gave up.

(In case you’re wondering: Almond, Steve. “Self Publishing Steve Part 2: Making the Dream a Reality.” Poets and Writers July/August 2010: 67-70.)

Online Journals

A lot of writers are dubious of the value of publishing in online journals. Now, before I even go any further, let me just say as an editor of an online journal that online journals do get good submissions. They do. And as a reader I can honestly say that I’ve found just as much great stuff published online as I have in print journals. I don’t really know where that snooty print-only attitude comes from. It seems to me that online publishing is the wave of the future (in fact, one of the top literary journals in America, Tri-Quarterly, switched to an online only format a few years ago).

I realize, though, that since online journals aren’t as well regarded in the literary community as print journals, even writers who don’t frown on online publishing are still often wary about submitting to online publications. Will it even look good on my cover letter, you might ask, and might it actually look bad for me to have been published in these places?

Well in my opinion getting published is primarily about getting your work out there – trying to reach an audience. Of course, the best way to reach the largest possible readership would be to land a piece in one of the select few journals that have a huge circulation and an excellent reputation, but getting published by those places requires a heavy dose of luck. I’ve even heard that many agents don’t pay too much attention to those few major print journals because they assume that most of the writers being published in those venues already have agents.

A good alternative, I feel, is online publication. Think about it – when you’re dealing with the tiny little journals that don’t have a huge readership to begin with, which do you think is more likely to steadily build an audience: the journal that is free and easily accessible from any computer, or the one that you have to pay for and order and then wait four to six weeks for delivery? On top of that, online journals usually keep your work up in their archives forever (or until you ask them to take it down). For print pubs, once the journal moves on to the next issue, your chances of having that particular piece read in that particular outlet reduce dramatically.

The other thing about online journals is that they get your name out on the web – always a good idea for new writers. If I google your name, will it be obvious that you’re a writer? Will I be able to find samples of your work? My understanding is that many agents do look prospective clients up online. One agent interviewed recently in Poets and Writers, in fact, said that one of the main ways she finds prospective clients is by trolling the web.

I think online journals have been unjustly judged. Online journals offer great exposure. They get your work out there, and they help you to build a presence on the web. It probably is true that most online journals receive fewer submissions than print journals, but that doesn’t automatically mean that they aren’t receiving good submissions, and it definitely doesn’t mean that getting published online can’t be a very useful step in your career. It can!

Decoding Rejections

One thing that you gain from working on literary journals is an inside look at the acceptance/rejection process. This can be extremely useful because I think a lot of new writers – and I can remember a time when I was in this camp – don’t always know what to expect when they send their work out there or what to make of those half slip rejections they receive in return.

Especially when you first start sending work to journals, you might find yourself sort of surprised (and often quite discouraged) by the bulk of form rejections you receive in response to your hard work. You may have slaved over this piece for months and yet the editor couldn’t even be bothered to insert your name into the pre-typed “Thanks, but no thanks” response.

The problem is that form rejections are a necessity. Journals – even small ones, believe me – receive a huge number of submissions per issue, and there is simply too much else to do to spend time giving feedback or personal responses to every writer. But journals also have to reject a lot of work that is good – publishable, even – for a number of reasons (the issue is full, we just published something similar last issue, this doesn’t really fit with the other things we’ve accepted for this issue, and so on). So how do you know what to make of rejections, and does a form rejection always mean your piece isn’t there yet?

Many journals have different tiers of form rejections that they send. The base level rejection goes out to work that they weren’t engaged by at all (and this often means work that they didn’t read all the way through). These rejections are non-committal and offer no real encouragement to the writer: “Thank you for sending your work. Unfortunately . . .” Now, to the work that they did like but still have to reject, these journals will still often send a form rejection, they’ll just send a rejection from a higher tier: “Thank you for sending us your work. Although we enjoyed this piece . . .” or something to that effect.

Now all of these rejections are still form rejections, and yes, you’re right, there’s something inherently discouraging in the idea that the editor didn’t care enough to write you a personal response. Still, you can take it as a good sign if you receive a response that’s clearly a form but does say something positive, nonetheless. There’s a good chance that journal has a tiered rejection process, and you made the cut into the higher tier.

This doesn’t, however, mean that a base level form automatically means you’ve failed with the piece. It could mean the journal doesn’t have a tiered rejection process, or the editors just may not have given your piece a fair read, or there’s always the possibility that your writing style just isn’t the sort of thing the editors of that journal are into. Let’s not forget that writing is subjective. My advice is not to read too much into those basic form rejections, but the ones that seem to come from a higher tier you might as well take as a good sign.

And better still are the personal rejections. Now every journal is different, and there are a few (a very few) editors out there who make an effort to give personal feedback on every submission. However, in most cases, a personal rejection is a very good sign. Even in personal rejections, there is a huge range. Sometimes it’s a simple handwritten note telling you that the editor liked your piece and hopes you’ll submit again. Sometimes you get lucky enough to receive a personal critique of your piece: a concrete explanation of what they liked and why they had to reject it. Sometimes you even get a nice ego massage by having an editor tell you that they essentially loved the piece and are only rejecting it as a result of some variable completely outside of your or their control. But no matter what the personal rejection says (unless it’s coming from one of those places that send personal rejections to everybody) you should feel encouraged when you receive one.

I know, I know. But what we really want are acceptances. Well, of course. Of course it’s disappointing to get the answer when the answer is “no.” But “no” doesn’t always mean something bad about your work or your abilities as a writer, and I think it’s important to keep that in mind. If you educate yourself about those “no”s and understand what they really mean, you’ll hopefully have the strength to plow through them to get to those inevitable “yes”es around the bend.

The Big Picture

I spent last weekend in a state of delighted excitement. That Friday I had gotten word that a short story collection I had submitted to a book publication contest had been chosen as a semi-finalist. Only the winning book will be published, but it was inexplicably exhilarating to have come so close. This semi-finalist ranking came fairly close on the heels of my finding out that I had been nominated for a Pushcart this year, and I spent the weekend feeling like I had broken through to some new plane as a writer. I still hadn’t published a book, but I felt like it wasn’t unrealistic to think that book publication might not be too far off in my future.

Somehow I managed to pull myself back down from the clouds and get my grading done for the weekend. At the start of the new week, during the drive to work, something very interesting hit me: it didn’t really matter in any significant way. Not the pushcart nomination nor the semi-finalist ranking nor even the feeling that I had moved up a bit in my career as a writer. Even if I had actually won the contest, if I had successfully landed my first book contract, I would still have been in the car at that moment, on my way to teach. The basic facts of my life would have remained the same.

In fact, one of the finalists in the contest is a full time professor at Ohio University, in my husband Damien’s creative writing graduate program. She’s had several books published already and won several awards and contests, but she teaches to make a living. Most writers do, or they do something else to make money. Not many writers can actually live off of writing alone.

It’s not like this was news to me. I’ve long known that writing will never be my full time career. I’ve known I will always have to have a day job. But as I sat in the car on my way to teach that day, it really registered with me how little success as a writer actually means in the big picture.

While some writers might find that idea depressing, I find it oddly reassuring. There’s something both humbling and comforting about the thought that acceptances – and that means rejections, also – aren’t really that important in the grand scheme of things. Writing can add meaning to your life, but I think it’s important to stay grounded, too, in the fact that it’s not the end of the world if you don’t get something published, nor is it world changing if and when you do.

What Other Options Are There?

I want to talk a little about writers’ conferences and non-graduate school writing programs this week. One thing that I kept thinking about as I was at the Writing Works Conference a few weeks ago was how a lot of the ideas that you’re made to explicitly think about at a writing conference are pretty much the same ideas that you study and discuss in formal graduate workshops. Many conferences also offer manuscript critiques with agents, editors, and successful writers.

And if these conference critiques aren’t quite enough for you, there are also a number of intensive workshop programs, which can span anywhere between a single weekend to a couple of months, during which time you participate in workshops and are also given ample time to write. You also are likely to become a part of a community of writers, as enrollment in these programs is usually kept quite small and you have nobody to interact with during the duration of the conference but the other writers.

In other words, these conferences and workshop programs offer many of the same benefits that MFA programs do, but for less of a time commitment (and for some people, less of a financial commitment, although most MFA programs offer teaching assistantships so that students do not have to pay tuition).

There are, however, a few key differences between MFA programs and these other routes. One is that, while an MFA program might be quite a time commitment, spending a lot of time in a program might be precisely what you need to bring you from aspiring to full fledged writer. I know I’m glad for having had three full years to devote to writing, and I don’t think it would be the same to devote a month, say, or a couple of weeks.

On the other hand, while most MFA students do not have to pay tuition, the three (or sometimes two) years that you spend in an MFA program are usually spent well below the poverty line. You get a stipend as a teaching assistant, but it really isn’t much. It’s enough to live by, if you can learn to live frugally, but for many aspiring writers it might be unreasonable to even consider living in poverty for two or three years. What if you have children to take care of, or perhaps massive credit card debt that you will need enough income to pay down, school or no school?

Another consideration is whether the degree itself will open any doors for you, personally. One of the big things you get from an MFA program is experience teaching, and teaching is really the only thing that I can think of that an MFA degree definitively qualifies you to do. If you want to be a college English teacher, then you should go to a formal program. Writers’ conferences and workshops can be useful in a lot of ways, but they will not prepare you for a career in academia. If you’re not interested in teaching, however, then it’s possible that an MFA program isn’t the right path for you. Teaching can be stressful and it can distract you from writing, but if you want to go to school for free, most programs expect you to teach. You may end up finding (as so many creative writing grads do) that your writing ends up taking a backburner to the time and energy you must spend learning to become a decent teacher.

There’s also, of course, the question of life experience. If you devote yourself to writing for three years and are mostly surrounded by other writers, you may not come out of the program with as much interesting stuff to write about as you would have had you been working a regular job and hanging out with regular people during that time.

I guess what it all comes down to is that I think MFA programs can be great, and I also think these intensive workshops seem great, and I also think writers’ conferences are great. Simply put, there are many ways to study and hone your craft. The real question is what will be right for you?

Writer’s Block: Take Two

Last week I talked about the writer’s block lecture I attended at the Columbus Writing Works conference a few weeks ago. The lecture was extremely interesting and helpful, but I felt that, in general, the entire theme for the conference (or at least, pretty much all of the events that I attended) was how to handle writer’s block and the difficulty of forcing yourself to sit down and write.

Many of the writers talked about how difficult it can be, even for seasoned professionals with book deals and deadlines and no day jobs to distract them, to force the ideas to come. Julie Gregory, the author of the hugely successful memoir Sickened: The Story of a Lost Childhood, talked about going through a period of heightened productivity, during which she would wake up every morning with beautiful sentences in her head. This was the impetus for her writing career, but, she added, it didn’t last. After she actually landed an agent and a book deal for her first memoir, the muse essentially stopped visiting, perhaps having decided that she didn’t need it anymore, and she realized that writing this thing was actually going to be hard work.

This idea kept coming up again and again at the conference (as it often does when a group of established writers pass their wisdom on to newbies): most of the time, writing is not an ethereal experience. You don’t usually feel like there are angels whispering in your ear, and all you have to do is transcribe what they say. That happens sometimes (and when it does make sure you take advantage of the inspiration while you’ve got it!), but most of the time it’s not that easy. Most of the time it really is work.

I want to offer up a few choice quotes from the conference. These quotes say it better than I ever could:

“Writers hate to write, but they love what they’ve written.” (Julie Gregory, who said that most writers have to really force themselves to write, but that it’s worth it for the final product. This is not exactly the same, mind you, as the adage, “Some people want to write and some people want to have written,” which is more, I’ve always felt, about the difference between wanting to be a Writer, capital W, versus actually doing the work to put together a strong piece of writing.)

“Doing it’s hard, but not doing it’s harder.” (Julie Gregory. “It,” of course, being writing.)

“Writing never gets easier.” (David Rakoff, who pointed out that writing is not like some other endeavors, where you eventually reach a point at which it comes easily and you feel that you have mastered it. Writing, he said, continues to be difficult no matter how many books you’ve got under your belt. Your first drafts will, for the most part, never be very good. The quality of a final draft will almost always come down to how much work you were willing to put into it.)

And my personal favorite: “Writing is really, really, really hard.” (David Rakoff)