But I Have a Story to Tell

When I first started writing seriously – back in the dark ages when our memes were drawn in ASCII and our social media amounted to text-only bulletin board threads – the novel landscape appeared lush with possibility. If you wrote well and told a good story, you had a shot. Compendiums like Writer’s Market, which appears to have last published in 2021 (shortly after being acquired in a merger) listed literally hundreds of book publishers with multiple pages devoted to each genre.

Back then, not many people had computers, much less access to the Internet. (Do you see me in my rocker here, with my ear horn? Thirty years wasn’t that long ago in the scheme of things!) Sending out a manuscript to an agent or editor involved expensive printing and copying, shipping, then waiting for months, even years, for a response. If rejected, and lucky, maybe the manuscript came back so you wouldn’t have to pay to reproduce it again. You might edit it once more based on comments, but, well, printing and copying are expensive.

You had to be serious to pass the gatekeepers – agents, “slush” readers, or editors – who decided which words were worthy. Many publishers would still take “over the transom” submissions, but increasingly authors needed agents, another step that could add to the potential years of effort before a publisher might see the work and express interest.

The system felt like a double-edged sword. It locked a lot of people out based simply on cost and access alone. But it also kept out a lot of the chaff.

You needed dedication to send, re-send, copy and re-copy (because, invariably, your manuscript came back with a coffee ring, dog ears or stray marks on it). Immense benefits came with a publisher who marketed the work, gained press and reviewers’ attention, hired cover artists, copy editors, fact checkers, and type setters, and had distribution networks for placing works in bookstores and retailers.

The Stigma: Writer Beware

You wanted a traditional publisher because they gave it credibility. You wanted the editor to polish it and the marketing department to sell it for you.

“Self-publishing” had a stigma that stunk of shoddiness or “vanity.” That’s a route you might take for the family history or church cookbook. Not so much the next best-selling novel. Money flows to the writer, is the idea. The writer doesn’t pay to publish. But people who didn’t want to wait years for yet another rejection, or didn’t want to do the work to learn their craft, or who thought their idea would give them some kind of status as a published author, could be swayed by the publishers that claimed they were traditional houses, when they really aimed to make a buck off of a gullible author.

I’m proud to be among several dozen science fiction and fantasy authors who can claim to be “Travis Tea,” the pseudonymous author of Atlanta Nights, a 2004 book designed to unmask one such publisher. The book was written to be unpublishable, with an unintelligible plot line, a random-text generated chapter, and characters that changed their age, gender, race, and living status from chapter to chapter. Once submitted to PublishAmerica, which claimed to be a traditional publisher that only accepted the highest quality work, not a vanity press, and which dissed science fiction and fantasy writers, we proved our point when the company offered a contract.

Publishing, You’ve Changed

And once again, it’s a double-edged sword.

Evolving technology in the last 30 years and its impact on the industry combined with a flurry of mergers and acquisitions make the book landscape nearly unrecognizable from the past and in some ways it’s drowning in its own success.

According to an exhausting article in Publisher’s Weekly, publishing really began changing in the late 1990s. The article lists literally dozens of book companies that went through a series of being bought, sold, parted out, merged, sold again, spit out and reconfigured over a stretch that began slowly in the 1980s, ramped up in the 1990s and 2000s to result in trade publishing’s Big 5: Penguin Random House, Harper Collins, Hachette Book Group, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan. Some of these houses gobbled up literally a dozen other houses before they reached their current state, with each having multiple imprints under their umbrellas.

Books caught in the mix of a merger or acquisition might be orphaned. Series truncated. Authors basically left with books still under contract but out of print.

Along the way it became nearly impossible to gain entry without an agent. And those agents have fewer places to submit, while being overwhelmed with submissions. While smaller presses have stepped up, many of those have to compete with behemoths for shelf space and attention, with literally hundreds of books competing for each foot of space.

And speaking of shelf space, once you could find at least one bookstore in almost every mid-sized town, plus the mall chains like Borders, Waldenbooks, and Crown Books, which competed with Barnes and Noble in the days before Amazon began to flex. Amazon launched in the mid-90s, but its popularity grew as more people acquired internet access by the mid-2000s. By 2011 Borders, Waldenbooks and Crown were gone, and with them, many small independent bookstores.

Too Many Books?

The computer and internet are ubiquitous now, saving authors hundreds to thousands of dollars when it comes to the writing and submission process. But sometimes it’s too much of a good thing. While easier for the deserving who were once locked out, it also opened the door to a flood of computer-generated material that has overwhelmed the industry. The pressure on small presses without the staff to manage the high volume of manuscripts has made it even harder to wade through the pile of unsolicited submissions to find the gems, and forced some presses to lock the doors.

Enter the new opportunities with eBook publishing, print on demand and systems that help authors get their work out without gatekeepers. Some authors might be turning to Amazon’s Kindle Digital Publishing, Ingram Spark, Draft 2 Digital or others to get their out-of-print works back into readers’ hands. Or it might be small presses taking advantage of convenient platforms. Or it might be published authors tired of being at the mercy of traditional publishing for their success. It is often new authors frustrated by all those locked gates. And it might be the people who think that all they need to do is get that book in print and they will be rolling in the big bucks.

When the average US book sells less than 200 copies per year and less than 1000 in its lifetime, that might be a bit ambitious.

According to Bowker data (the people who issue ISBN numbers for books), more than 2 million books were self-published in the US in 2021 and that number is only growing, especially with the advent of AI. Add 500,000 to 1 million traditionally published titles and more than 4 million books are vying for attention annually, most of them literally sinking to the bottom of the Amazon. To put that in perspective, only about 280,000 new titles of traditional and self-published books, combined, were published in the US in 2005. Less than 7 percent of new titles sell more than 10,000 copies in their first year of sales (this doesn’t include eBooks).

Throw Another Log on the (Dumpster) Fire

I started writing The Enchanter’s Web series decades ago. I wrote a first (awful) draft of it for my creative writing undergrad thesis. It went through literally decades of re-thinking, re-writing, re-imagining. I like it. It’s beautiful. My characters are alive (in my head) and they live full and realized lives through the novel. It’s too long. While an epic fantasy, it doesn’t lean hard into some of the epic fantasy tropes. There are aspects of it that some might think aren’t all that commercial. But it’s my story. I had editors tell me they liked the writing, but it was difficult breaking in with an epic fantasy series. Someone suggested I should write a stand alone first.

So, I did that. I began Black River after a conference tour of Dugway Proving Ground, which sparked a short story (“Proving Ground”) published in Wizard Fantastic, most of which became the prologue. That book sat on an editor’s desk and followed him through three houses only to be left behind without a contract along the way. An editor at the original house found a partial of it in a pile and asked for the rest. It sat there, waiting for a decision for several years. He died tragically and unexpectedly. At the time, I was in grad school and unable to focus on fiction. The novel had just wasted a decade and gone nowhere. Full-time work sucked up all of my creative energy. It languished several more years. I took it out now and then, talked to a few people about it, but it was never really the right fit. And then …

I received a serious cancer diagnosis. I realized these novels, and another one that I’ve never submitted, would be lost forever when I die. Black River seemed to have interested editors before, so I submitted to the only open call for novels I’d seen: an independent press that said yes. It’s the kind of validation I needed to put my other novels out there.

Now or Never

But I don’t have 20 years. I may not have two years. Thirty years ago, I would never have considered what is mostly called “indie” publishing now. Taking the entire process into my own hands is daunting. It’s the author spending the funds on the things a publisher usually handles. Publishers take on those expenses, hoping their efforts in marketing cover the small advance they might pay to an unknown genre author. I worked with an artist, an eBook designer, a website designer, spent hours working through print design specs and proofing between editions. I had others read, edit, and re-read it and I went through it dozens of times, even reading it aloud (because, as I told my students, it’s the best way to catch some typos because your tongue stops on what your eyes might glaze over).

There remains a stigma to the “self” in indie publishing, though much slighter now that some of those books have gone on to do well. There is still a huge barrier for marketing, though.  “This is good. You should go through a traditional publisher,” my son said. Nice. But I want the books to see print before I die. I want those characters and their stories to live beyond the page, even if fewer than 100 buy or read my book. I have another “finished” novel that I’m re-writing, and another I’m 90 pages into but it may never be finished because, well, time is the unknown.

I have stories to tell. And they are best when shared. In some ways it’s easier. In some ways, the walls are just as high.

(Cover image of trumpeter swans by Meg Turville-Heitz)

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