Self Publish or Perish

When I moved to Bainbridge Island, Washington about twenty years ago, the isle was embroiled in a debate over home rule: whether to remain under Kitsap County control or break away as an autonomous municipality. I was on the home rule side, and pitched in with all the unseemly ardor of a newcomer, treading heavily on the toes of men and women whose families had been living there for generations. A lot of them preferred to be governed by a distant entity than by their neighbors, especially new neighbors like me. 


I still think I was right, and indeed as a municipality we were able to fend off a lot of development. But after Home Rule passed, Bainbridge turned from blaming its woes on Kitsap County to warring with itself. Civic meetings lost all civility, and became the stage for the batty and the truculent. 


I mention that because I have decided to experiment with my own version of Home Rule, although in this case the county is New York publishing and I am the island, entire of itself. During a recent visit to India, I was told of a man who made it a rule never to invite more than one writer to a party. "Too much rage," was the reason he gave, and he is a very wise man.


Generally speaking, writers make dreadul tablemates. Any host who expects writers to personify their best work when they get together and debate the larger themes of their books is bound to be disappointed, because all we talk about, or in any case, all we  think about when we're trying to fake an interest in what someone else is talking about, is how many books the other writers at the table have sold. 


I've been a writer for forty years and have published everything from books to newspaper columns. I've written documentaries, roamed the world on behalf of magazines and journals, and for my money I have in Ellen Levine the best agent in New York. But lately my interest in placing my work in magazines or even seeing something published between the covers of a book has lost its charm.


I owe this primarily to the failure of my last book, The Slaves' War, to capture a readership that came anywhere near to meeting my expectations. Though I had the great good fortune to have obtained a large advance and landed one of the finest editors in the business, I had the bad luck to see him fired in mid publication by a house that was falling into terrible disarray. The result was that publishing The Slaves' War wasn't like launching a rocket into the night sky: it was more like sending a toddler into midtown traffic. 


But I am as tired of my own excuses and my writerly complaints about the publishing world as I am of everyone else's. Not because they aren't justified, but because they're all dressed up with nowhere to go. So after a long talk with my prescient son about the current state of the publishing business, I have decided to experiment a little with the new dispensation by writing for this blog and self publishing some books that have been lingering on my back burner. I want to see if my work might thrive in the new landscape that's being plowed by the likes of Kindle and Google, Amazon and Lulu and MyPublish. If it pans out, great. If it doesn't, at least I'll only have myself to blame. And you, of course.