Self Publish or Traditional Publish? Which is the right way?

Yesterday, my cousin, who is also an author, posted this on my Facebook wall and asked my feelings about it.

Self-publishing has become a cult@Salon.com

The writer has encountered something I've heard a million times: If you go with a big publisher, you're selling out. If you go indie it's because you're not good enough to catch a bigger fish. If you're at a small press, you're almost cool enough to sit at the table with the hip kids, but you have to wear a scarlet P and sit at the far end.

Every day at every writing conference, this plays out.

And it's all BS.

Trust me, I grew up in cow country and I know bull poo when I see it.

I think the idea that there is one path to print is behind us. In some ways, the self-publishing movement and small presses that have grown out of it are the AAA ball of publishing. Some resent being referred to as minor leagues because it hurts their feelings. I don't care about your feelings. If you wear your heart on your sleeve, keep your book in the drawer where it belongs.

Publishers are inevitable. If the Big Six fell tomorrow, a thousand small presses would fill the vacuum because most of us have no interest in doing everything ourselves. And when we do it all ourselves, for the most part, we turn out some pretty crappy, un-or-unevenly edited crap.

There are exceptions, but not many. Publishers play those roles. The middle man is not a freeloader, they provide a valuable service for reader and writer alike. There will be some who can only find a readership on their own. For others, they will never find an audience, certainly not a broad audience, without an army shouting their name until it is heard above the din.

Want to do it alone and hire professionals to edit your book and design a cover and typeset your pages? Congrats, you're a publisher. I know what I charge for covers and it means you're better financed than most and applying that level of hurdle for writers to leap before they can reach an audience leaves out a huge portion of the voices telling stories that need to be heard.

For every one truly indie author that rises from the unwashed ranks of free self-published, unedited e-books, there are tens of thousands lost in the tumult. This is the primary role of publishers. Is it always fair? No. Is it easy to get over the wall? No. Is it always good? Of course not. But it is a system that has curated our literary culture for a few centuries now and they've done more good than bad. Because while we lambast them for their Davinci Codes and their encouragement of the "Me Too" market that has turned the YA section into the "Hot Vampire" section, the dollars spent on that pap gives cover to books like The Bookthief and The Adventures of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation. And Davinci Code allows books like The Corrections and The Yiddish Policeman's Union a bit of breathing room to flourish and find their audience.

And while the midlist is frequently eulogized, it lives on in the smaller imprints that have risen up to take the slack and live leaner on smaller profit margins than the Big Six can sell to their stockholders.

Publishers are not evil. We just like to make them seem remote and uncaring and evil because it suits our personal narrative for it to be so. They're not the bad guys and we're not the heroes. We're all just trying to do the best we can to get our art made and in front of the people who want to read it.

The path for most will fall somewhere between. If you get your books in the hands of the people you want to read them and are able to write the next one, you did it the right way. If that doesn't suit someone else's vision of "The Right Way" to hell with them.

Extreme views in either direction make me stop listening. I don't have time for zealots.

tl:dr?
Watch John Green's acceptance speech for the ABA's 2013 Indie Champion Award. He's pretty darned close to what I wanted to say here.

Dumbo's Feather Revisited: Of Rituals and Writers

This is going to be a bit long. I apologize in advance.

I noticed recently that my coffee ritual has become rather sloppy of late. Rather than carefully monitoring the temperature of the water and the exactitude of my scoops of ground coffee, I've been sort of winging it -- phoning it in. Thankfully, the quality of your beans will save you to a point, but only just.

I've essentially perfected the mediocre cup of great coffee.

For those who think I might've sold out with that coffee cup logo, fear not. My favorite cafe has long since closed its doors and faded into local memory.

And whither goes the coffee shop, thither followed my writing ritual...

There just aren't enough writer-friendly coffee shops in the world any more. Speak not to me of the sundrenched sterility of the Starbucks lobby. I seek a dim place of creaky chairs and enthusiastically nerdy conversations. A place of fair-to-middlin' coffee and poor lighting. Lots of places to plug in a laptop are nice, but not required. Sketchy wifi is a plus because I get more done when Facebook's siren song is muted and unreliable.

How did I get so reliant on rituals? When did I teach myself that I can only fly while clutching a feather in my trunk? And why is there a mouse wearing a drum major getup in my hat anyway?

You'll note that this is one of those posts where I laboriously link back to previous posts where I told all of you not to do the very things I'm complaining about. That's because I call out hypocrisy wherever I find it, especially in myself. And I have to remind myself that I should practice as I preach.

And no, for the record, it doesn't help. Not one bit.

Why is my coffee so pathetically mediocre and why am I not writing regularly?

It would be easy to blame my current Big Crazy Project™ which is quite a bit more physical than my usual projects. I'm supposed to be making neat things and writing about them. I've made a lot of sawdust this year, and even knitted a stocking cap, but not much with knitting together the words. I don't really know why.

Speaking of big crazy, I just built a kitchen full of cabinets from scratch. My home is in a bit of an uproar as only a kitchen remodel can make it. Blame that!

It's not the kitchen's fault. It's not because I can't really get in there to make a decent cuppa; done right, all you really need is a clean sock, a kettle and some patience.

Yes, a sock. Not that I regularly use a sock, but you can. (And many aficionados swear by it.)  But you don't find me at the bathroom sink with my socks in the coffee pot any more than you find me at the computer studiously applying words to pages.

I could blame work.

In January, after a lengthy stint of under-employment, I began working full time at the writing center, taking on additional duties of marketing and graphic design atop my usual stints of database management and other jack-of-all-trades job duties.

It's taken some getting used to, this working full-time thing. But I can't really blame that. I work a solid 40 hours a week and then I'm required by union rules and state law to knock it off. I wrote three novels working 50+ hours a week (at all hours of day or night) for Borders.

The truth is, I just haven't felt like it.  It's a stupid and simple as that.

I haven't been feeling like putting that much effort into perfect coffee or perfect prose. Hell, even mediocre prose has been a bit out of reach of late. It's not writer's block -- as you know, I don't actually believe in writer's block.

So what is it? Depression? Lack of ambition? Stress? Too much sleep? Uninspired?

Sometimes in the dark watches of the night as I lay staring at the ceiling I seriously ask myself: Am I out of ideas?  Then I get up and jot ten or eleven ideas in the notebook I keep next to my bed just to prove to myself that I can and go back to sleep.

At the end of the day, I'm stuck with the uncomfortable truth: I've just gotten sloppy. With my coffee, with my writing process. Sloppy. I allowed myself to become over-reliant on a space and defined period of time set aside to do it. Too reliant on ritual and not enough on the simple steps of getting stories from brain to page.

I've long been an advocate of approaching writing from the standpoint that amateurs wait for inspiration while the professional puts their butt in the chair and puts words on the page.

So I'm flipping my advice on rituals on its head a bit. I'm going to have to accept at some point that there's a certain amount of ritual that I require in my life. It starts with coffee this morning. And from there, I opened this blog and actually typed out a blog post. Something I've been regretfully neglecting this year.

This afternoon, over a cold sandwich, I will update the Renaissance Artisan project on my progress in that project.

Later tonight, (after the counter tops are installed and I've put up a few dozen linear feet of bead board) I will sit down to my novel-in- progress and begin the first-half rewrite. Wifi disabled, I will write until my fingers seize up and I realize it's time for bed.

And let that be my new feather and my new mouse-in-a-silly hat.

I'll let you know how it goes.