SquarePeg Books

This is a loaded question. Lots of baggage here.

Back in my carefree and foolish youth, I thought my writing was BRILLIANT! (It was not, but everyone starts somewhere.) I thought I was a damned GENIUS! (Once again, not so much, but there’s a learning curve.)

At the age of 15, when reality begins to gleefully run over your dreams on the highway of life using a semi loaded with elephants, my father informed me I would never be published because “you’re not that good and you’re never going to be.”

2 years later, he handed me a brochure for a vanity press, saying “this is probably the only way you’ll ever get published.”

Woo-hoo. Support.

It was tempting. I was 17 and a bit ignorant about how things worked in the publishing world. (It was the early 90’s, Okay? The map of the whole internet could still be printed out on a couple of pages of tractor feed paper, so just “looking it up” or “doing research” involved reading how-to books about the best way to spam agents and editors via snail mail and “the slush pile” with your work was all that was available, and even then, your library only had select volumes, some of them quite dated.) But the money I’d have to pay was a lot. Especially for a 17 year old who knows the ‘rents ain’t gonna pony up that money for “a hobby.”

Plus, I’d researched enough to know that vanity presses weren’t taken seriously by the reading/writing community. Even bookstores and libraries wouldn’t stock it. If you had to pay someone to print your work, it couldn’t be that good.

Time passes. My writing matures. (I think it matures, anyway.) I start researching “how to” again. It’s 2011 and times have changed. The publishing industry is no longer interested in nurturing the mid-listers (even agents were complaining about this) and were desperately chasing what they thought would be the next gold rush.

I write fantasy. This is not generally considered gold rush material. I’d fielded questions – Could I turn it into a YA? That was coming into hotness. Cut the length in half. Change the protagonist to a girl.  Add a dog or a cat as an MC companion. Humanize the villain so the readers sympathize with him. Etcetera, ad nauseum.

All the questions felt a great deal like I was talking to people who only wanted a machine that they could plug in a few parameters and I would churn out a cookie cutter desired product. Don’t get me wrong – there is a market for that. Lots of authors write to spec everyday and earn out their pay for it. But I also know me well enough to know that I would despise it with a passion and eventually come to hate all writing, altogether.

I looked again at the self-pub world. Vanity presses were still there (and still are), but I was hearing more chatter from more big name authors about self-publishing through Amazon or Smashwords. It was different than vanities, which I now understood as being a predatory trade rather than a fair shot. Sure, bookstores didn’t stock the books of the smaller names of self-pubs, but more and more bookstores were closing their doors and blaming the ‘zon, anyway. And e-readers had hit the market a few years earlier, making it easier to carry an entire library in your bag, unlike bookstores generally, with a finite amount of real estate to carry anything.

The internet of the 21st century made it easier to peek under the skirts of publishing houses and agencies. The more I saw, the more I didn’t like. Vaguely worded clauses that ultimately mean you give up all of your rights to a world you slaved too create – possibly never able to publish in that world again after the first year if sales goals aren’t met. The non-transparency of payments. The fact that all the advertising was now the author’s responsibility, but the author had no say in how or where the book was marketed;  sometimes they didn’t even have a say in cover art. The reality that the first thing an agent does is Google a prospective client’s name to determine how many followers on which social media platforms they had – not even reading the pitch first, but looking up the name on the inquiry to make decision about whether or not the author came with a ready-made audience of at least 10k+. Editors who only run a document through spell check, refusing to read because it takes too much time, so you end up with grammar errors from he’ll in what is supposed to be a professionally produced product. (Yes, I did that last grammar/spelling error on purpose.)

 These things bothered me. These were things I was not comfortable with. I began to understand why I’d started hating to read fiction anymore – it all felt the same, or worse, vastly inferior to what I’d come to enjoy. I felt my only chance, the only fair chance, was to follow the path of the self-pub, and hope the tide of possibility doesn’t recede before I can finally get my shit to the beach.