Even as late as the late 1990s, submitting a manuscript to an agent or publisher was still a tactile experience. An exchange of letters was sometimes followed by a request for the Whole Thing, which was then carefully printed, packaged, and shipped to sit for a few months on some agent’s side desk, categorized and priority coded. I remember this well with my novel Rite of Spring. And I remember well the heart-dropping thunk of the manuscript on the front stoop as it was returned to me, more than once.
“Great characters; not enough plot,” they said. “We don’t know how to sell this.” Because of course they (the agents and publishers) needed to make money. I agreed with them; though many people would probably read and enjoy the novel, it wasn’t a money-maker.
“One of the main reasons that authors self-publish good books is that they have too few years left in life or too little patience to go traditional,” writes author Marj Charlier in a blog on the subject. (Of course this could be the same reason authors self-publish bad books.) But, yes—not so many years left, and too little patience.
I didn’t have the heart or stomach or funds or, yes, patience to continue sending my book out. Thinking about it all was taking up the few hours I did have to write. Suddenly I came up with the idea to make my book. That’s what I would do! Apply some of the word processing and desktop publishing skills of the previous decade to create a book. I settled on letter-half size for simplicity and bought some quality paper. Many hours were spent copying and folding at then-Kinko’s, and having tiny holes drilled in the folded signatures that I eventually hand-stitched together and hot-glued onto a spine over the two covers of hard cardboard and hot-pressed, lovely blue cotton fabric.
Oh crafty me! I gave away most of the 40 or so copies I made to friends, family, neighbors. Some writer friends were kind enough to purchase copies, which helped make up the cost of creating the books.
I moved on, and wrote on, and 20 years later found myself in a similar position with a completed manuscript, multiple queries over a year and a half (online this time), some good rejections, and a familiar thought (more like a full-body feeling): This (publishing) will probably never happen, and Why not me?, followed the familiar flagellation fest: You didn’t try hard enough; You didn’t work hard enough; You didn’t network.
(I’m grateful at this late date that the Your writing isn’t good enough is no longer part of the spiral of thoughts. There are so many reasons a good writer won’t get published. Timing and connections, temperament and trends.)
Whether the books are good or bad, they are certainly easier to publish: Amazon, IngramSpark, Lulu—many ways to make a book now after you’ve written it. Bowker, the primary provider of ISBN codes in the U.S., reported 1.6 million self-published titles in 2018 alone. That’s a lot of books.
So what did I want? I realized what I wanted most was to have the books in hand. And so, over these last many most-strange Pandemic Months, I put them together. I hired a designer to create the covers I imagined, formatted the familiar paragraphs of their innards into real and readable pages, dove head-first into online publishing and WordPress, and now I have the books. Here they are, physical objects-in-the-world, fruit of many labors. This is my satisfaction, my “vanity.” Of course I hope people will read and enjoy them and pass them along.
I have read that once you self-publish you will probably never pass through the narrow gate of traditional publishers. I know I will never be able to let go of wanting to be wanted by the goldarn Gatekeepers. Un-vetted (and perhaps carrying a small bowl of sour grapes) I proceed.