REALITY: Head Trips

Posted on April 30, 2005 by Susan

We need the time to fly away, sometimes.  When-where-how and do we need the return fare? 

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2 Responses to REALITY: Head Trips

  1. David St Lawrence says:
    April 30, 2005 at 5:30 am

    I’ve been following your posts for a long time and have wanted to urge you to consider the incredibly liberating activity of self-publishing.

    There some incredibly persuasive reasons to look outside the resource-limited world of traditional publishing:

    1. I find your writing, in general, to be as interesting and thought-provoking as most material I read in the occasional literary journal I fall across.

    2. When you publish your own work, you gain an immense amount of real experience as to what your market is. You also get honest feedback that helps you determine what to do to get more people reading your work.

    3. Blogging is the first step in becoming a citizen publisher and you are already doing that. The feedback you get in your comments and from watching website visitor logs is instant and brutally or refreshingly honest. You can use this to good advantage in developing a public awareness of your work and a community of people who are interested in seeing that you succeed. They will buy your book and, more importantly, they will tell others about your writing because it is interesting information that they are the first to hear about.

    4. There is nothing so psychologically as inviting unnecessary rejection and this may be the most compelling reason to look for new literary outlets.

    Applying for a job where they cannot pay what you are worth is ludicrous. Submitting manuscripts to companies that are frantically searching for a viable business model is worse than throwing pearls before swine. If a publisher is doing well, it is because they have somehow found a customer base for whatever they are currently publishing. The only works that will interest them are clones of what they are already publishing.

    5 THERE IS NO SCARCITY OF OUTLETS FOR YOUR WORK!

    Get over the idea that your piece is only valuable if it appears in a traditional magazine, collection or whatever. If it is published, it becomes old news by next month. The only value of appearing in a well-known publication is the scarcity of slots to appear in.

    Traditional publishing is a zero-sum game. If a known author with a track record of sales has something to release, a traditional publishing house would be crazy to publish something by an unknown instead. If you were publishing, you would do the same, in a heartbeat!

    You can publish your work in small quantities as I did, or you can use a POD publisher. Either way, your work will be available for people to buy it and you will do the same promotional actions as if you had published through a main-stream publishing house.

    There is unbelievable satisfaction in having people say, “I heard about your new book!”

    Sometimes they even say, “Where can I get one?”

    Please take a hard look at self-publishing. You owe it to yourself to do so.

  2. David St Lawrence says:
    April 30, 2005 at 7:14 am

    #4 should have read:

    4. There is nothing so psychologically destructive as inviting unnecessary rejection and this may be the most compelling reason to look for new literary outlets.

    I still had more to say after leaving this comment, so I wrote a post which you can see by clicking on my name.

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