In another forum, there was a question of “What did you publish in 2022?” I counted up a bunch of work there, so in the interest of plagiarizing myself, as everyone should for enhancing efficiency, here you go!
I think a lot of the world, myself included, have a fairly naïve perspective on what it means to “write” a book. Hell, I didn’t really have a clue what it all encompassed before I started these activities a few years ago. Like most people, I loved reading books and magazines, and I’m sure my thought process at some point was the same as everyone else who has ever curled up with a good volume: “This is awesome! I would love to be part of creating stories like this.”And thus begins the journey of many from infatuated fan to aspiring novelist, essayist, journalist, or creative memoirist. It’s a naïve position, one that, should it remain in that unenlightened state, might actually allow someone to continue to enjoy the writing process.
Writing is a creative, generative activity.
For me, it’s akin to the growing and birthing of life. First there is nothing, in fact there are two nothings, like two separate ideas, that eventually come together. Maybe, “What if there was technology that could dramatically extend lifespans? And that was applied to a prisoner who was in prison for ‘life plus a thousand years’?”
And then out of that nothing there emerges something, and then that something takes on a form and grows and grows and grows, finally resembling a thing, a reality, something concrete and solid, beyond just imagination or ideation.
Eventually, you have a thing! Just like you have a baby child, or a newborn kitten, or a foal, or a baby giraffe, you can see that the thing is there and you can have some general idea where it’s going to go in the future.
You might not be able to completely predict, and you might not be able to control, but you can at least be there to provide it the right values, offer boundaries and corrections if it’s off track, and encourage it as it takes ever increasing risks to discover just what it is, and cheer it on as it finally reaches its final form.
Publishing, however, feels less like a generative process and more like a reductive one.
Look, I get that there are developmental editors, and peer reviewers, and critiquers, and that’s not what I’m talking about. Those are more like the mentors and advisors that come into the story’s life during its young adulthood so that it doesn’t go off the rails, and it actually meets the goals it has for its own life and doesn’t completely disappoint its parents by doing something stupid, like getting addicted to pot or becoming a fan of the Cleveland Browns.
Instead, the publishing process that I’ve gone through, whether that’s via submitting stories to multiple journals or creating and publishing a book (which I’ve done thrice now!) feels more like you’re carving a finished product out of a big empty block of marble. Michelangelo’s quote about “removing everything that was not David” seems especially apt. When you’re publishing, you’re removing everything that is creative, and you’re basically inverting the pyramid of effort and emotional energy expenditure.
During submissions, you’re not being creative at all. It’s simply process, a decision tree that must be followed without any sort of thinking: Is this a market that takes my kind of story? My length of story? My aesthetic of story? Does this market pay what I want for the story? Is it open? Do I match the criteria for authors? Will it respond fairly reasonably?
When you’re working on publishing, yes, there can be some creativity, but substantially all your effort is devoid of that generative activity which gives me energy. Sure, you have some flexibility when decide on a cover design, but the vast majority is more rote activity: What size pages do you want? What font? Blank pages here and there? Header? Footer? Page numbers? Spacing of lines? Margins? Do you have an account set up with the publisher? Did you choose all the categories appropriately? Turn on all the right switches, and turn off all the others? Did you proofread every page? Double-check everything? Did you pay your invoices? Did you set up all your reminders?
I haven’t worked with an agent and traditional publisher, but I suspect the same kind of administrative headache saps your emotional energy: does this agent work with your genre? Are they accepting new clients? Did you send the right number of pages? Did you get formatting correctly? Did you sign all the dots and pieces correctly? Did you input the right account numbers? Did you set all the switches on the client portal right? Do you have the meetings on your calendar? Do you have all your accounting set up correctly? Fuckin’ accounting. Shit, man, I though this was about writing stories! Nobody wants to keep track of goddamn receipts, we got narrative arcs to tend to and emotional beats to ensure get appropriately spread throughout the second act.
Thus the end-to-end is heavily weighted towards the administrative, tedious stuff, and I suspect that what often happens is someone loves writing, does some of it, is willing to put in the effort to practice and get critiques and make it better and better and better, but when it comes to publishing eventually gets smacked in the face by the alternate reality. Hard. Like, brick wall at 80 miles an hour hard. And that’s when they quit.
I don’t blame them.
In my experience, it feels like writing the text itself is only about 25% of actually completing a book.
And the publishing is the other 75%. Which means that the vast majority of the work isn’t in the writing, it’s in the publishing. And therefore, it’s no wonder why I’ve spent so much of my time in the past years on writing for myself, and very little on publishing.
I’m fine with that. You know, it’s a maturation that I think all writers go through. And it’s an unspoken truism of the writing and publishing world that non-writers and non-publishers just don’t understand.
Maybe I should have joined those who quit while they’re still writing for themselves. Perhaps then I’d just be doing what I was doing for ten years, just drafting stories in my notebook and leaving them there, satisfied by my obeisance to the Muse and my cup filled with the knowledge that I’ve been honest to myself and my desires.
But I didn’t. And, through that, I’m glad I have persisted. There is value in publishing, certainly, and yet I’m not experienced enough in that to be able to fully flesh out all the value. I’m pretty sure it’s not a fair trade for all the administrative headaches, but I can’t be sure yet. Perhaps with a few more rounds to evaluate I’ll be able to create some greater objectivity.
Anyway.
I don’t really know how to finish off this exposition. Do I regret publishing? No. Do I wish it on others? Not on the unprepared, or those with weak stomachs who just want to enjoy the creative process or just appreciate the finished product.
This process exposes several undesirable elements that are quite easily glossed over in the pursuit of “Bestseller” status. If you’re fine holding your nose and putting up with them, you can get there. But if you’d rather remain indefinitely in the blissful ignorance of your youth, maybe better not to even try.
So that’s the major difference between writing and publishing. The WRITING is actual, real, exploratory development. It’s the storytelling that all of us fell in love with and which inspired us to pursue this kind of thing.
PUBLISHING is, to commandeer a phrase, the mind-killer. It’s the thing which, I would bet, turns more people off from actually putting their work out into the world than the creative process itself. It’s probably holding loads of us back, and, frankly, I don’t know how to solve the problem. Except by maybe, lowering our own standards and accepting that not everything we read is going to be superlative: it won’t be the newest, freshest, most intriguing, most-hyped, bestest anything. It won’t win awards. It won’t light a fire in our nether regions. It won’t move mountains, inspire thousands of ships, make us sit up and take notice, or even be worthy of commenting to our partner in the bed beside us.
But, still, it’s worth it.
Because it’s someone’s creation. And therefore it’s worthy of reading, even if for no more reason than to validate the effort.
There’s great advice about life, love, relationships, career, how to live a good life, finances, career decisions, even spiritual dilemmas.
Frankly, I think this should be within reach of every single porcelain throne, nightstand, and above the Gideon Bible in every North American hotel room. But since I don’t quite have the capital to make that happen, I’ll just go with this instead.
I would LOVE for you all to head over, pick up a copy, and leave a review.
The early 2000s saw revolutions in several technologies. There was the rapid expansion of internet access, the development of eInk and ePaper, and the rise of self-publishing tools such as blogging (WordPress, Blogger, and now OnlyFans and Patreon).
This perfect storm of technological advancements was supposed to be sounding the death knell for the publishing industry. Now that we’ve had eReaders like the Kindle, the Kobo, the nook, and even apps for our iPads and other phones for fifteen years, we’re all supposed to be reading everything electronically, instantly, wherever we go.
Books are supposed to be dead. Dead as the trees that make them. Deader than doornails. The publishing industry is supposed to be gutted, relegated to a slag-heap of has-been technologies like horse-draw carriages and the telegraph.
Yet books persist. Libraries still exist. People still read: old people, middle-agers like me, and even younger generations still read. They pick up two covers with a few hundred pages in between, sit down and stare in the general direction of their crotch for a few minutes or an hour, and then get up and go on their way.
Books are clearly not dead. Publishing is not dead. Books and eReaders and online blogs have somehow managed to find a sort of equilibrium of market share, wherein some people read only physical books, some read both physical and electronic (and audio) books, and some don’t read at all. But eBooks have clearly not eviscerated the market for paper books, much to the surprise of all those circa-2005 prognosticators.
Everybody’s got their own theories as to why publishing and books just won’t die. The cynics say it’s because there’s so much money invested in advertising that we just can’t help ourselves but to buy books. Others say it’s because we’re too old and set in our ways that we can’t adapt to the newer ways of life that would be better for us (more convenient! cheaper! faster!).
I don’t think those are the only reasons. I think there are several forces underlying our continued engagement with dead trees. Here are a few.
Books are tangible things. eBooks are not.
Sure, an eReader is itself tangible. But the book is a physical object. When you pick it up, you feel the weight and heft of it. You touch its pages. You smell the aroma of the ink, the faint tinge of memory that lingers on the pages. It’s something.
eBooks on your reader, on the other hand, are very fragile. Nebulous. They can come, and therefore go, with just a click. It’s almost like they’re not really there. When you have 1,000 books on your bookshelf, you can humblebrag to your neighbors about how hard it was to move last time, when in reality you’re swelling with pride that you’re so smart that you’ve read some of the titles that are on your shelf! When you have 1,000 eBooks, nobody knows. They’re all within that little half-inch slab on your desk, and you’ve got to do a hell of a lot more work to brag about that.
With a book, you can physically see and feel your progress through the experience. Your bookmark travels with you as you navigate the story. As you notice the end approaching, it’s unignorable how much is left because of how little is held in one hand and how much is in the other, and you can do the internal math to say, “Hey, this story isn’t going to finish in these pages,” or “Oh good! I’m almost done!” Can’t do that with eBooks. Sure, there’s that little slider sometimes at the bottom of the page or the side of the screen, but it’s not the same. You can see it, but you can’t feel it.
Books are real. eBooks just aren’t.
Books are permanent. eBooks are ephemeral and fleeting.
When you have a book on your shelf, it’s not going to change next week, next month, or next year, when the author suddenly gets cancelled for things she said twenty years ago. eBooks, blogs, tweets, and other “new media” are quite vulnerable to the tides of social sentiment, in several directions. Someone doesn’t approve of a chapter? Maybe it gets deleted or changed! Other people have asked for more on a certain topic? Well, just hit [update post] and now we’re exploiting the algorithms even more efficiently!
Books don’t have that vulnerability to changing externality. (Unless you’re in Oceania, of course.) They are what they were when they were printed, nothing more, nothing less. Yes, interpretations may change over time, but at least we have some permanent record of what was posited, and when, so that we can always have a fixed reference point to come back to.
That sort of permanence of idea means we don’t have to question what the author really thinks. We can just look at her words, and know.
Books are robust. eBooks are vulnerable.
In complement to the contents of our books being consistent, the physical thing of a book is also persistent. I can go to my library and read the exact same thing that my neighbor did a week ago, or the Mayor did a month ago, or my grandmother did fifty years ago. Physical books deliver a communal experience spanning space and time that you don’t get with eBooks. An eBook is a singular thing, a one-off instance, that disappears as soon as it is deleted. And it requires an external, electrical source to be able to access it. Sure, the content may be recreated, but it’s not the same thing. It’s a different thing. It didn’t exist before, and it won’t persist after you’re gone.
You can’t write a note in the margin or on a cover of an eBook that can be discovered by future generations and relate to. You can’t take an eBook with you on a hike on the Ozark Trail and trade it with someone you meet along the way, mingling ideas and their expression for a whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts experience that parallels how swapping DNA beyond a limited gene pool benefits future generations.
In short, eBooks are for the right here, right now experience. If you want to have any kind of relationship with your ancestors, or your descendants, in your own family, tribe, nation, or even across the world, you’ll read books and you will tell others about that experience. You will listen as others tell you of their reading, and you will commune with them when your fingertips touch the pages that theirs did not that long ago.
And these are all good reasons that books will stick around. The biggest, though, may have to do with signaling.
Physical book publishing send a vastly stronger signal than eBook publishing.
Publishing a physical book requires vastly more investment than publishing an eBook. With both, it starts with writing up a manuscript. The similarities end there.
If you’re publishing a physical book, there are many next steps: finding a publishing company, which may take finding an agent or going through the never-ending saga of queries and rejections; editing; typesetting; cover design; interior design; paper selection; print schedule; marketing plan; and more.
It can be anywhere from a few months to a few years from the time the author types THE END to the day that a reader first sets eyes up Once upon a time…
For the eBook, though, it’s almost nothing. They can push [PUBLISH] and it’s done, whether that’s hosted on their own website or even a marketplace. There’s very little barrier to entry.
And yes, I know that many well-produced eBooks are clones of the physically-printed books. The publishers do all the work up front for the physical book, and then just port it over to eBook format.
See, the thing is, readers aren’t stupid. They know that there’s such a low bar for many eBooks that they lump those well-produced volumes in with the slipshod ones, and taint the whole format with their simplicity.
I don’t mind. It creates, in the mind of the reader, a much higher barrier to entry to be able to publish a physical book than an electronic one. Which means that the readers care much more about physical books than electronic books. They know the signal that publishing a physical book sends, and they respect that commitment to the cause.
Because they also know, even if it’s only subconsciously, that the author must have a stronger conviction of their message, if they’re willing to go through all that effort for something that cannot be changed later, cannot be rescinded, and will potentially (hopefully!) last for hundreds or thousands of years. The author’s belief, and the parallel commitment from the publisher, signal to the reader that, “Hey, this is something you really should pay attention to.”
Yes, some of that higher barrier to entry is being lowered every day, through print-on-demand capabilities, freelance cover and interior design, and the opportunity to self-promote through social media. Instead of reducing the signal for physical books, I think such ease of use contributes to the greater differential signal between externally-published and self-published volumes.
The vast outweighing of signals between physical books and eBooks persists. I’m confident that physical books will never go away, because readers don’t want them to. They want someone to be able to sort through all the multitude of potential messages on their behalf and tell them which ones are more likely to be good. That’s what the physical book does. That’s why we will continue to see them as so valuable. That’s why we’ll never, ever, ever give them up. And that’s why, in a hundred years, physical books are likely to echo Mark Twain’s apt quote:
The rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.
So, yeah… A while ago, and pretty recently, I wrote stories, and this year I put them together, edited them, formatted them, got a cover, went through the rigamarole of signing up on Amazon, added things like bank account numbers for payment, ordered proof copies, marked them up, resubmitted texts for print and ebook, reordered proof copies, marked those up, re-resubmitted texts, ordered more proof copies, got e-mails from Amazon that my cover was wrong by 0.05 fucking inches!, stressed out, freaked out, ordered a new cover from my cover designer, got antsy, did it myself, reuploaded the cover and resubmitted the book, got antsy and called Customer Service to see if I could expedite processing and approval, got shot down, had to learn how to sit on my hands to wait, RECEIVED APPROVAL!!!, ordered 50 copies for the Book Launch party, freaked out that they wouldn’t arrive in time, calmed down once they’d been finally shipped and scheduled for delivery, FREAKED OUT AGAIN when the delivery was delayed due to “inclement weather” (pfft – natural disasters, who the fuck cares?), called Amazon already like seventeen times [yes, I exaggerate. It’s a coping mechanism] this morning to learn that indeed, the delivery is scheduled for today, FREAKED OUT YET AGAIN upon learning that the delivery window is anytime between 8 am and 9 PM {FFFFFffffffffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu………….}, took a deep breath, and said, “I believe it will all work out.”
And so, there you have it. That’s how you publish a book, my friends. Thirty-seven simple steps, and you only have to freak out like nineteen times! Why wouldn’t everyone want to do this?
PS: Never in my life have I been prouder to be ranked #6,846! (as of 8:35 am Central Standard Time, Monday, March 4).
Stephan Writes 