 For the first time since the invention of the printing press, the publishing industry -- at least in America -- doesn't reflect the existing base of would-be working, professional writers. I personally know better than half a dozen writers whose work is *at least* of professional caliber who cannot get their books into print. At any other time in history, these working writers would have been the voice of their generation. But in a very real sense, our generation (the forty and under crowd) has been deprived of its voice. This is because the publishing business is now controlled by short-timers who are incapable of taking the long view. Large retail chains and other Keepers of The Bottom Line - NOT creative people - are deciding what will be available for YOU to read. As recently as the late '60s, publishers would take on a first novelist as an investment towards the future, knowing that they would suffer short-term losses but betting that talent would sell and make a profit in the long term. Usually they were right. It's the old Catch-22 game: lots of readers are willing to buy books by established professionals, but how do you become an established professional if you can't get your early work into print? M.J. Rose, a three-time unpublished novelist and ad-agency writer whose clients have included McDonald's and Harlequin Books, was told by her publisher that "We're not in a position to take a chance on a book that doesn't come with a built-in readership." Her book, an erotic thriller called LIP SERVICE, was then summarily dumped: the publisher had suddenly realized that she was a "first-timer." If it doesn't have an existing, clearly defined and easily pigeon-holed "market" it won't get into print. That's why celebrities and Star Trek hacks are the top-selling "authors" of our time. As Ms. Rose goes on to report, "My novel is commercial but -- and this is the scariest part -- the people at the big publishing company who loved the book said they were sure they could sell 5000 copies, but they no longer were using 5000 as a measure, if they weren't sure they could sell 25,000 they weren't buying. So I lost out." It's all so terrifying because it isn't just damaging writers as a group -- it's damaging the entire culture. Ms. Rose is one of a growing number of frustrated writers who have taken their work to the infobahn. LIP SERVICE (ISBN 0966433203) is available for download right now at http://www.readlipservice.com, with a self-published paper version available from amazon.com. Hers is just one of many similar attempts to tame the web to the needs of writers -- and thereby hangs a tale. Any search of writers, literature and web-based publications on the internet will turn up hundreds, maybe thousands of hits. Authors as big as Madison Smartt Bell and as unknown as myself have their own websites, while e-zines like CORTLAND REVIEW and CRANIA appear and disappear by the second. At least one web host, the remarkable etext.org, is the home of an innumerable stock of on-line magazines. Founded in 1992 by Paul Southworth, the totally volunteer-operated etext.org started as an archival project for political-based usenet groups and has since expanded to the point where it now offers free storage and web-hosting services for electronic magazines of all kinds -- my own magazine, MILLENNIUM (http://www.etext.org/Zines/Millennium) is hosted there. The catch is that most of these on-line books, magazines and writer's sites are free, which in a very real way means that they cannot replace paper magazines sold at bookstores and magazine stands. By not selling advertising or charging admittance, web magazines can't afford to pay their contributors: and, increasingly, publication-starved professionals are willing to take the loss in the vain hope that the exposure might increase their salability in other areas. Writing is a trade like any other. We need to find a way for writers to derive income from web-published work. Then and only then will the internet become a true alternative to paper publication. But there are other concerns. How much exposure does the Internet *really* afford us? Of course the potential is huge but with millions of sites to chose from and so little time, how many browsers will actually light on any one page? (Don't rely on counter applications to give you the answer: they don't work.) Democracy, more often than not, means the freedom to fall through the cracks. The web may indeed be the only answer for writers in future years, but I'm beginning to feel that if all of us continue to go our separate ways, each promoting our own efforts, each slicing the pie that much thinner, we're doomed to failure -- or at least to only limited success. It will take a collective, or a company -- say, the internet equivalent of Random House, publishing dozens of books each quarter to an established retail network (Amazon and the like) -- to finally establish web-based publishing as an alternative to print. So I'm making this column a call to action. It's time to circle the wagons. I see lots of good ideas and templates for internet publishing out there, with, at most, three people behind them. We need a hundred people. We need to meld those templates together into a kind of Internet Publishing Collective: a business run by its employees with the goal of establishing a viable, profitable publishing company on the internet. We need established authors and talented beginners alike to commit their work to one outlet. Then we need all of us to make a big damn noise about it so that someone will take notice. We need writers with a good head for business (not me) and others (like me) who can wield a mouse, type a press release, design pages and assemble product (and, as my friend and co-author of this column Bruce Canwell adds, we also need "writers with technical backgrounds who can help figure out a way to make fiction-on-computer less bothersome to read. In the long term, reading PC-based stuff has to become as easy as reading paper editions in order to compete."). It should be easy to organize a storefront for our collective on the internet -- what's more difficult is the marketing and publicity, not just to let people know where we are, but to create a product that our customers, the daily readers of the web, will find an attractive alternative to paper. My own model for that product is PDF, but we should look at the pros and cons of every format and perhaps try different things, with a goal towards producing sales. Does anyone else think this is a good idea? Does anyone have any other ideas? By making this call to action I feel a bit like Mickey Rooney cocking his fist in the air and saying to Judy Garland, "Hey! Let's put on a show!" But, you know what? "It just might work!" And anyway, what are the alternatives? My address is thornsjo@uninets.net |
