An Eldritch Epiphany
For as long as I can remember, I've considered self-publishing to be tantamount to failure. When your means of delivery is called vanity press, the implicit indictment is, after all, hard to ignore. In my mind, self-publishing was the place writing went to die when it lacked the legs to run the gauntlet of traditional publishing's editorial scrutiny. And while I haven't completely changed my mind about that, I've come to recognize that the options nowadays are considerably more nuanced.
Navigating the mire of traditional publishing is a frustrating endeavor. After some years of querying various projects, my progress remains measurable solely by its various degrees of inexistence. Those difficulties, however, have never impaired my conviction that the system is sound. The protocols are entirely straightforward: you write your book, an agent recognizes a sellable product, the agent convinces a publisher of the same, the publisher assumes the financial risk of producing your book, your book gets sold, and everyone gets paid. There is no incentive at any phase to turn down the prospect of making money. It's a system that feels fair and organized, an unassailable meritocracy policed by an army of editors. Not infallible—John Kennedy Toole would probably have some incisive insights to share on the topic—but certainly good enough for me.
And yet the old system is under siege. The established order that rendered the major publishing houses indispensable no longer exists. In a medium that is inherently pure data, technology has wreaked havoc on these paradigms. From online booksellers to e-books, browsing the shelves of a bookstore as I knew it growing up has become a thing of the past. The very act of physically purchasing a book has turned into a cult happening—a social event—rather than the simple process of looking for a good read.
Just how much my own habits had changed didn't occur to me until I purchased a book so atrocious, that to qualify its content as subpar would constitute an unparalleled act of kindness. Seemingly intent on adding insult to injury, it even brandishes an inexplicable, double-spaced formatting throughout, like a visual stick to beat you over the head with and remind you, at every page, just how much you are being taken for a ride. A horror of Lovecraftian proportions, I had nonetheless spent good money on it, and its purchase made me realize just how much my screening process has been reduced to the most pedestrian of actions. I log into Amazon, pull up whatever genre the moment craves, and scroll down a column of cover pictures. Even reading the blurbs has, more often than not, become redundant. A pretty picture and a familiar name is all that resonates. And while this minimalist approach could very well be an exception, I don't believe that it is.
In the case of this particular book, my utter absence of diligence had netted me an indeterminate amount (apparently numbering them was deemed superfluous) of pages slathered indiscriminately with mind-numbing boredom, and I had done so based on a picture that had little or nothing to do with the content to begin with. In my defense, I do feel I should add that it was a picture of a rocket ship... Fortunately, and unlike H.P. Lovecraft's haunting horrors, this literary abomination didn't send me fleeing from my home stricken with madness. If anything, its shameless repugnance triggered something of an epiphany. Never before had I been faced with a better reason to self-publish. If I could be so easily lured into acquiring $15 worth of kindling—and no, I don't BBQ—surely making a buck from publishing should now be wide open to anyone with a keyboard and half of her or his faculties. Years of qualms about the quality and viability of my own writing were tempered by a single, blundering blow of chicanery.
And so here I am, devising my own misguided blog—only because that's very much a part of the new paradigm—ready to push my very own mind-numbing ideas. I'm no industry insider, I possess no deeper insights into the publishing world than the next guy. My foray into publishing will, by default, be documented from a perspective of blissful ignorance, like the stumbling paces of a chemistry novice embarking on an exercise with a test tube of potassium chlorate and a bag of gummy bears.
And while I continue to find it entirely impossible to gauge whether or not my own work remains mired in second rate gibberish or has, at least, evolved to print-worthy mediocrity, the real question seems to have become: does this still matter, or do we now live in a world where these things are just details, minor impediments to actual sales?
Either way, as my gummy bears burn, their agony will be recorded right here—in all its smoldering glory.
