May/090
The Future Is Now
I love synchronicity. I've spent a bulk of the evening engaged in a free write with my writing partner, to get our heads together for a fiction chapbook of sorts we're going to self publish very soon and I've been spending the whole weekend researching non fiction book proposal etiquette for a book I want to pitch. Clicking around Twitter, I see Joanne McNeil just put up a great post on what she calls "the new self publishing." As a new writer, I think a lot about our fucked economy and how exactly I'm going to make it out of this alive, with the actual career I want in tact. And I think it's time to start thinking of new ways to get our work out -- evolve or die, as cliched as that is.
Anyway, in an experiment to open up to new distribution models, to open up to the future as it were, I've started by adding the RSS feed of this blog to the Amazon Kindle store to try out their new Amazon Kindle for Blogs Program. It doesn't work for the iPhone Kindle app or I would buy it for myself. I don't expect anyone to subscribe, it's more an act of symbolism of being open to what is going to happen to text.
I do like the idea of my blog on the Kindle. I've been casually putting together some of these entries in book form and it becomes so apparent how different blogs and books really are. Putting the words on a physical page completely changes it. What sounded fun & light on the screen becomes frivolous garbage when you are typesetting it into an actual document to be printed.
books by alex roman
Back to self publishing: the snobbery towards self published books is pretty substantial and unfortunately, there is a reason for it. When anyone can publish anything, you end up with the Yelp of bound books (as in, very few good writers and most repetitive junk). So, the general consensus appears to be that self publishing a book is a waste of time and you should just continue to send out query after query and wait until you get a real publisher to publish your stuff. Which is great for established authors with agents and multiple books or writers of genre fiction who are basically one people book factories. For those of us in the literary fiction world, good luck. I know it can happen, but do we all have to go through MFA programs to get there?
I want there to be a new zine revolution. I guess that is what is happening with blogs, but the truth is, the process of blogging -- the way people blog now, the "micro-blog", the sound bite version that is neither intensely personal or that significant, isn't going to cut it. The new culture of real name social networking has destroyed any chance of anonymity, so the long, chatty entries we used to write about everything are now stuck in the purgatory of Livejournal friends only or a blog where everyone is referred to as a nickname like "Mr. Mojito" (a blog that shows up frequently in my google alerts). And the rest of the Internet appears to be dedicated to teaching you how to use Twitter. I don't want this generation's amazing writers to be swallowed up because there just isn't enough room for them. We need to start making our own rules, having our own parties.
But, here's the other thing, I want us to get paid. And that's the problem. I agree with Joanne's post that the hard part is finding the audience and getting them to buy, which in some ways I don't understand. Support of independent media isn't really a far fetched thing. Look at film festivals, indie bands getting audiences through Myspace, web shows are becoming more and more common, we eat at non chain restaurants and shop at independent stores. (Some of us do, anyway.) But the point is that buying independently produced books shouldn't be that big of a stretch. I wish more people would do it, instead of waiting to be invited to the publishing prom.
(PS - David Carnoy of CNET wrote an extremely thorough, non haterade look at self publishing his novel. It's very helpful.)
Image: Alex Roman