By: Simon Brooke :: 24 December 2024
The problem with creating narratives — writing stories, essentially, although it is a bit wider than that — is reaching an audience. If your narratives, your stories, are not read, or listened to, or otherwise appreciated by someone else, then creating them in the first place is essentially just masturbation. Or, if that word is too raw for you, then busy-work.
To write stories — to hone your skill at writing stories — you need an audience: you need an audience which does not just consume, but in some sense feeds back — whether that's through reviews, or through money. In a capitalist society, having money is nice of course; but if you've been reading this blog at all, you'll know that I'm not a believer in capitalism. I believe that the world would be a better place if we all just gave stuff away, to those in our communities who needed or wanted it.
Publishing under capitalism
Capitalism does provide a mechanism to get a text to an audience: you find a publisher who is willing to publish your text, often by first finding an agent who will find you a publisher and negotiate a deal with them (for a cut of the proceeds), The publisher then organises getting the book printed, and distributing it to bookshops, who sell it.
The merit of this is that the publishing industry are experts; they do this all the time, the process is relatively streamlined, it works. The downside is that there are far more texts that people have written and want to publish than the industry can make profit from; and that is a problem which will only get worse in this age of stochastic parrots. It is far more profitable to publish a 'best seller' — a book which engages a wide audience — than a book that sells modestly. For every J K Rowling there are a million authors whose works don't sell very well, or are not published at all. Such books make very little money, either for publishers or for authors.
Furthermore, a book is more likely to sell well, regardless of its own intrinsic merits, if previous books by the same author have sold well (which is not particularly surprising). For a new author, with no track record, a book is more likely to sell well if they are already famous (or notorious) in some other field, or if they are personable and energetic and able to personally promote it (I'm neither of these things).
So there is a strong incentive both for agents and for publishers to find books which seem likely to become best sellers, and to concentrate on those.
There is one great benefit to the consumer of fiction from this, however. This incentive to find stories likely to become 'best sellers' is a powerful quality filter. Stories which are in any way poor are unlikely to make the cut. A customer walking into a bookshop and picking any book from a reputable publisher can be pretty confident that it will be reasonably well written, and at least interesting.
Harem
I have had one novel published, a story called Harem. The publication of it was, to put it mildly, a bruising experience.
Harem is essentially a novel of ideas, and it is, as most stories I write are, a story about unconventional sexual relationships and about interpersonal politics at an intimate level. It also has, deliberately, a perhaps over-ambitious and unconventional structure. But, and this is essentially my mistake, I dressed it up with some of the trappings of a 'sex and shopping' novel, thinking this would help it sell.
The publisher designed a cover which was, perhaps, appropriate to a sex and shopping novel, but it was one I thought trashy and demeaning. I thought — and still think — that anyone who was attracted to that cover would find the text too unconventional for them to enjoy, and anyone who would enjoy the text would be repelled by that cover.
The book was published initially as an e-book only; the contract was that a paperback edition would be produced if the e-book sold well enough. But there was a problem with the e-book as issued by the publisher and sold on Amazon — it was misformatted and could not easily be read on some (not all) Kindle devices. This problem was never resolved by the publisher, although the Kindle version I produced myself did work fine on those devices.
In any case, I did little to promote the book, and, given Amazon reviews which (fairly) complained of the format problem, it didn't sell.
That left me with a contract with the publisher which entitled them to publish my next two works, and which they wanted me to pay them a chunk of money to get out of. I consequently haven't published anything since.
The publisher's website still exists, but hasn't been updated in a decade; their email bounces; their Companies House record says the business was wound up in 2015. So I guess, but don't know, that that contract is no longer binding. If it is, I may be about to get myself into a sticky situation.
Publishing under the gift economy
Samizdat
In the Soviet Union, where access to publishing for those not in sympathy with the regime was tricky, there was a practice of typing out literary works and passing these often hand typed or mimeographed texts around from hand to hand through covert networks of readers. These works were not bought or sold, but simply copied and passed on. This practice, and these works, were known as Samizdat, a Russian word meaning literally just 'self publishing'.
Literary works originally published as samizdat include Boris Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, so this was an influential movement.
Way back in the early 1990s I had an idea of collecting unpublished novel length texts (including my own) and publishing them as a CD, in the way that open source software was then being distributed; my title for this project was 'Samizdata'. No CD was ever produced because, with the rapid growth of the World Wide Web, the project became obsolete; and also, I became too busy with other things.
I did, at that point, 'publish' some stuff on my own website; it's still there, and it does still, occasionally, get read.
Literotica
Literotica is a site which was set up back in the early days of the Web and exists remarkably unchanged to this day. It's a site which allows people to upload erotic stories which, after fairly basic vetting, are published. The site is free to use, and it gets a lot of readers, who leave ratings and occasionally feedback. I used it in the early 2000s to hone my craft, and those stories are still there too. But although a lot of the things I write are about sexual relationships, I don't want to write just erotica, and by 2010 I felt that what I was writing was good enough to publish elsewhere...
Which means that, since the Harem debacle, I haven't really published anything at all.
Other free story sites
There are other free story sites, like Literotica but not concentrating on erotic fiction. One which seems to have a reasonably active reader community is WattPad. I've not tried this (or any other similar site); it doesn't feel like where I want to go. One issue with publishing things on the Internet is that once a story is out there, it will be exceedingly hard to subsequently find a publisher who will publish it, if you do later decide to go down the capitalist route.
ZLibrary
Finally, in the true spirit of Samizdat, there's ZLibrary, a project which grew out of an archive of scientific papers to aspire to becoming a free public library for the world. Because it does not respect the 'copyright' of abusive and parasitic academic publishers such as Elsevier, it is subject to legal harassment in much of the world, including the UK. You can access it, using Tor Browser, on the 'dark web' here, or using a normal browser (subject to being blocked by ISPs or spied on by GCHQ) on the public Web here. ZLibrary, being a library, accepts donations of texts.
I could upload all my fiction to ZLibrary. I probably should. But, being an organisation under continuous worldwide legal harassment, and securely accessible only over the dark web to which most people don't really have access, it's not really a good way forward.
Self Publishing
It's now possible and, indeed, reasonably easy to self-publish. You can, at the minimum, and, indeed, as I already have, simply place PDFs or ebook files on your website. I've literally never, though, in thirty years, had any engagement from a reader who had simply discovered my work on my website. It may be that all the work on the website — which is now pretty old — just isn't very good; but I don't think people who are looking for stories to read any longer, if they ever did, find them just by randomly browsing the web. I think if you want your stories to be read, you need to put them into places where people look for stories to read.
If you want to produce books which can be sold through bookshops, you'll need an International Standard Book Number, or ISBN. You can buy these. They're not cheap, but the price isn't terrifying.
You can get your own physical books printed reasonably simply and not frighteningly expensively. For example, Catford Print, a company which provides this service, will print 100 copies of a 450 page book (which is the length my novels seem to run to) for under £600, which is something I could afford. Obviously, if you're printing 100 at a time, you're not being serious about selling a paperback; and just having paperback books in a box in your loft isn't going to get them into bookshops.
Alternatively, Ingram Spark do a print-on-demand service and will also distribute to bookshops, but you still have to promote the book or bookshops aren't going to buy it.
You can self publish through Amazon, and they will print paperbacks on demand (which makes sense and I totally understand why it would be economic for them to do so), but they're a pretty toxic company and self publishing through Amazon won't get you into bookshops, either. However, Amazon do sell something like 50% of all books that ever get sold at all, so if I boycott them I'm missing a lot of the potential audience.
The point of being able to produce physical copies (apart from the fact that I'd just like to) is that I have a hunch that if I give away actual physical books to potential friendly reviewers I'm much more likely to get reviews than if I just send an e-book. Also, I have a half plan that I might take Odd, which is a novel set in a Wigtown bookshop, along to the Wigtown book festival and for that I would need actual copies. Whether I have the chutzpah to actually promote a book I've written in person, though, I don't know.
Also, being serious about self publishing doesn't seem to be cheap. People I know of who've done it — who had a degree of celebrity before they even started — have spent several thousand pounds up front, in editor's fees, printing, promotion, et cetera. Those particular people, with their celebrity and their communication skills, will make that investment back. But I don't have that money to invest, even if I had either the celebrity or the skills, so it doesn't seem to be an option.
Where do I go from here?
And where do we go from here?
Which is a way that's clear?
Still looking for that blue-jean baby-queen
Prettiest girl I've ever seen
See her shake on the movie screen
Jimmy Dean
I'm very shy about what I write. I don't have good social skills. I'm not comfortable with strangers. A lot of my stories are unconventional and challenging to accepted social mores. I write about unconventional relationships. I don't know whether I could promote my books in public. I don't even really have confidence that they're particularly good.
Even trying would be stressful, and my mental health, although better than it has been, isn't great.
Finding an agent, or a publisher, feels beyond me.
Getting a clear resolution to the legal status of the outstanding contract with my defunct former publisher feels beyond me.
Self publishing through Amazon feels like much more of a compromise with toxic capitalism than I want to make, but it also feels like my best way of reaching an audience. But it would still need promotion, and I'm not sure whether I can do that.
Putting files on my website, perhaps with a 'donations welcome' link, feels easy, but isn't really likely to reach much audience, and would prevent later conventional publication.
I'm not sure how to proceed.
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