Say you’re at a party. You eye the host’s book shelf, spot Interesting Title, and pluck it forth. You start to read and find yourself captivated. You can’t put it down; indeed, you wish you could run home with the book right then and there.

The host sidles over and smiles. Ah, yes. Renowned-But-Not-So-Renowned-To-Be-Uncool Author. Are you a fan?

Yes, you say, but I’ve never read Interesting Title.

It’s Author’s best book. I’ve read it a million times, and there’s always something new. Why don’t you borrow it?

You’re taken aback. An otherwise pleasant conversation has taken a sinister turn. One minute you’re innocently discussing Author, the next you’re being invited to commit a crime. Good day, you say and take your leave. After all, you’re no pirate.

All conversations about e-books inevitably lead to the subject of piracy. The Napster card always gets played. Remember all that peer-to-peer file sharing of MP3s? Even grandpa was burning CDs of ill-gotten music downloaded from the Internet! Music sales slumped, and only the combination of iTunes and thug-worthy litigation by the recording industry could save the day.

What about the e-book, though? How can we as a law-abiding (ahem) society prevent a Napster-like calamity in publishing?

Don’t get too distracted by the ongoing emotional debate about digital rights management (DRM) and competing reading device formats; Sony vs. Amazon vs. iPhone; how the soulless “electronic reading device” can never approximate the tactile joy of a physical book with actual pages; how to determine fair pricing and royalty structures; and of course, the piracy, oh the terrible piracy!

These and many other e-book debates, while interesting and not inconsequential, distract from the more profound, and possibly sinister, implications of the e-book. No, I’m not talking about any of those crazy, paranoid delusions about Amazon suppressing controversial content or even summarily deleting books from one’s Kindle.

I’m talking about the death of the used book. The shared book. The physical artifact that persists through time, across decades, availing itself to many overlapping generations of readers. Until now.

Used books. The very term conjures up rainy afternoons spent in the creaky aisles of funky stores with overstuffed chairs and resident cats, volumes on every subject imaginable stacked floor to ceiling. Our collective history, wisdom, and information; our mythologies and imaginations; our successes and our failures.

As artifacts, physical books endure through time. The books on those shelves have had many prior readers. Open a random cover and you’re likely to find birthday wishes, dates, names, places. A phone number. A special kind of currency, used books travel from person to person via stores, garage sales, and thrift shops, even the Lost & Found. Friends and lovers lend each other books and sometimes they’re never returned. And when someone dies, their books remain, ready to be dispersed and rediscovered by still others.

But don’t worry, those days are over. The e-book has given notice to this casual piracy!

Not piracy, you say? If you shared e-books with such flagrant disregard—if it was even possible—it would be piracy indeed.

Sure, such sharing has never been considered piracy, but only because the book as content and book as object were inseparable. Books were merchandise and piracy generally took the form of plagiarism, if only because photocopying an entire book was too time-consuming and costly to be worthwhile, especially if you could find it used.

But make no mistake. Used book sales have always represented lost revenue to the publishers and copyright holders–so much so that they’ve taken the trouble to calculate it.

According to a 2003 article in Publisher’s Weekly, used books accounted for $533M in annual sales in 2002. But wait, there’s more! The article also says that this figure represents as much as $1.5B lost in new book sales. Yeah, that’s right: 1.5 BILLION. In other words, every dollar spent on used books is a three-dollar slap in the face to the new book industry.

Now, read Part II.

By Andrew Dugas

It’s very hot in Sacramento, and the air-conditioning in our office is not impressive. Nonetheless, we’ve been spending more time together than usual, brainstorming and budgeting and writing endless copy for the new site and various press releases. We’ve been marking up our calendar feverishly and refusing to look at it for at least an hour afterwards in order to avoid panic. And if Hall & Oates comes on the radio, we all have to stop what we’re doing and listen, also in order to avoid panic. We have been sustaining ourselves mostly on Diet Coke and peanut M&M’s, and are very tired of looking at each others’ sweaty faces.

Why, you might wonder, have we been subjecting ourselves to this?

So many reasons. We were going to wait until we launched the new site to reveal our secrets. Like a pious bride-to-be a month before the big day, we have tried to abstain. But we can’t wait any longer. We’re too excited. Or maybe it’s just the heat. Either way, we’ve had enough with being coy. Flatmancrooked is pleased to announce the first of the highly innovative projects we’re undertaking with our new website.

It’s called LAUNCH. The idea behind it is that Flatmancrooked takes a writer we’ve published, whom we believe has a tremendous amount of talent, but, given the current circumstances of publishing, hasn’t received due attention. We set up a profile page on our site that features proof of the author’s talent–in the form of short stories we’ve published previously in our anthologies, along with an excerpt of a new piece that we’d like to print as a stand-alone book.

If our readers like what they read and are interested in seeing more of from the author, they can “invest” in said author and help “launch” his or her career by purchasing any number of the available shares. Each $5 share will go towards turning the excerpted story into a little book. Quite literally, a little book. Pocket-sized, if you will. A mini-novel, which is sometimes called a novella, or a novelette. Either way, it’ll be a satisfying piece of literature that you can handily read in an afternoon.

Throughout the investment period, we’ll update the LAUNCH page with the number of shares still available and all working drafts of the book design. For every share purchased, the investor receives a signed and numbered copy of the book (a book that becomes dearer and dearer as the writer flourishes). Not only will these generous Patrons of the Arts be demonstrating exceptional fiscal savvy (as the list price of the book will be equal to or more than the cost of a share), they will be responsible in part for securing the writer’s future. After production costs are covered, the author receives a 50% royalty of all investments and sales. That’s right. Fifty percent. Thus, not only will the book be produced out of a democratic, merit-based support of good literature, but our writers will also get to eat some food.

Based on the idea that LAUNCH authors will be writers we’ve worked with in the past who have shown tremendous potential, after a little discussion (talent, marketability, Facebook networks) we came to a unanimous decision: Flatmancrooked is very proud to present our first LAUNCH author, Emma Straub.

Emma received an MFA from the University of Madison Wisconsin where she was the Jay C. and Ruth Halls Emerging Artist Fellow. She is also the co-editor of Avery: An Anthology of New Fiction and is the E of M + E (www.m-plus-e.com). Her first story with us, “Hot Springs Eternal,” appeared in First Winter, and came to us as a cold submission. It’s a love story, and there are hot springs involved, and the smell of sulfur. We liked it so much that we nominated it for Pushcart Prize. When the time came to put the second anthology together, we immediately asked Emma for another story. “Snowbirds” is a story about vacationers, Floridians, and the way those things can mix unhappily. It appears in our Anthology of Great New Writing Done During an Economic Depression. Her stories are terrifically funny and subtle, and we think she’s one of the most promising young writers in the country.

Beginning with Emma, LAUNCH will feature a new author every four months. It’s our intention that in a time when traditional publishing is less and less able to provide writers with a way to earn a living, readers can become a direct influence on the careers of the authors they like to read–by investing in future works. A serious writer will write to write, but what’s a greater secondary impetus than the public demanding to see more work? Good faith begets a good product. LAUNCH is designed to facilitate that very idea.

In early August we will begin republishing Emma’s stories in our Features section. We will also unveil Emma’s LAUNCH page, with cover artwork, excerpts, and maybe even a little film. Just wait and see.

By Deena Drewis

In response to my two-part article on “art object first editions,” I received some interesting comments. As a sort of conclusion to my series, I’d like to highlight Aaron Davidson’s observation about the use of digital dissemination to encourage low-overhead sales. I’ll let him explain:

“The way you monetize digital sales is to create an audience that appreciates your product—then lead them to a non-traditional outpost where you control the price (and the majority of the revenue). That means not Amazon. This is why Scribd and MagCloud jumped out at me lately.

“Scribd is an eBook publisher that lets anyone publish anything. You set the price and keep 80% of the revenue. Magcloud is similar: they print your “zine” to order, meaning there’s a one time set up fee, then you set the price (on top of their printing costs, which is all they keep). The best part is they only print copies when someone orders your zine, keeping your mom’s basement/the dump free of unwanted bulk copies of whatever you’re printing.

“When I talk to people in publishing, it confuses the fuck out of me that they don’t leap all over e-publishing. They are submitting gorgeous and meticulously crafted PDF’s to far-away printers, anyway.

“Without the printing/natural resources overhead, the cost per unit is negligible, which means the price can (and should) be lower. I’m not proposing we give up on cherishing physical things. I’m saying we admit it’s possible to cherish a well-designed digital copy of something. It’s certainly easier to share, cheaper to obtain and create, and more accessible as an entry point for people who might not have the wherewithal to buy books with $20 cover prices.”

I’d heard of both Scribd and Magcloud, but I hadn’t looked into them deeply until Aaron mentioned them. Because of the variety and quality of our printed material, Magcloud is not necessarily a valuable resource. If we were a 70-page glossy magazine, I might claim otherwise. Scribd, on the other hand, is more interesting. They are quite simply a vector for uploading PDFs so that people can read them. Though documents are for sale through the site, the lion’s share is available free. The top bar of each PDF allows you to share the document via email or any number of social networks. Because they have no printing capabilities (deliberately), they operate as a near zero-overhead bookseller—a sort of Youtube for books, but with a real business model (If you think that Youtube’s advertising business model is worth any more than half a billion dollars debt annually, peruse Malcolm Gladwell’s article in the New Yorker).

As a publisher, it seems unwise not to utilize this resource. We at Flatmancrooked could host digital versions of the books we publish at our own site, but our network is limited to those people who regularly visit our page. On the other hand, placing manuscripts on Scribd increases our base network exponentially (at least theoretically). Even if we didn’t charge users to view a PDF on Scribd, we could help our own cause by disseminating both our name and our content to a wider readership.

We don’t balk at any profit-generating resource, no matter how small. But to use Scribd simply for the purpose of selling a couple hundred digital copies of a book (say we sold them for $5 rather than giving them away) seems shortsighted. A better model might be to employ the Scribd platform as a marketing tool. At Scribd you could go and view one of our “gorgeous and meticulously crafted PDFs,” to quote Aaron, that we, in turn, sell a hard copy of on our site. Imagine that this winter Flatmancrooked puts out a small run of a hyper-designed novel—think Damien Hirst’s edition of Snowblind—which we sell direct from www.flatmancrooked.com. The book’s cover, for instance, designed by Shepard Fairey, is covered entirely with gold leaf. Each unit goes for $100, and we print a total run of 300. In such a scenario, Scribd seems like an ideal venue for hosting a cheap or even free version of that same book. That way we don’t treat Scribd as a revenue source, but as I mentioned earlier, an advertising opportunity: people view the book for free, then come buy it from us.

Scribd is one in a growing number of opportunities for small (and even large) publishers to venture into digital publication. Whether their model is ultimately the most successful is impossible to say. What I can say for certain is that one of these approaches to monetizing electronic content will eventually prove viable. But as always, selling a product requires the conflation of quality and creativity; the venue is largely inconsequential.

Read Part I and Part II

By James Kaelan

If it was not winter, Eumenes of Pergamum, the early paper pioneer, stirred his calf pelts in a vat of fermented wheat for eight days; in January he stirred them twice as long. Then, having dehaired the skins, he stretched them over a wooden frame so that the fibers all ran parallel to the grain, and scraped them with a semi-lunar knife. He finished by rubbing the hides down with pumice. After they’d cured, Pergamum had vellum.

This was, until the 15th Century, how paper got made. Though Gutenberg printed many of his bibles on hemp, he issued a few on animal skins. Each volume consisted of 318 sheets, roughly 24 inches wide and 17.5 inches tall. The manufacturer of the parchment, assuming he stretched his calf well, may have produced three leaves from each hide. One of Gutenberg’s parchment bibles, therefore, required the pelts of more than 100 calves.

And yet people went to this cost and trouble for more than 1,700 years. They considered the product worthy of the effort. A bible was a tangible and permanent representation of the word of God. In the age of digital reproduction, however, even if words have retained much of their value,  the vectors are myriad. The Bible on a website is not qualitatively different, textually, than the same Bible printed on gilded pages. The only reason you would pay a lot for a bible, now, would be to keep it as a centerpiece in your home. Keep this thought in mind. I’ll be returning to it.

Long after people began consuming novels (in addition to the Bible) and long before the internet, publishers were churning out low-quality paperbacks. I recently picked up a first printing of Henry Miller’s Plexus. The cover is green. The title is in black set in a white rectangle. I suppose that it’s almost elegant in its simplicity, but Grove Press didn’t print a newsprint, mass-market paperback with a two-color cover for aesthetic reasons. They did so for financial reasons. In 1965, the book cost $1.25 at stores. Grove printed it for much less than that, but after discounting it for their distributor, who discounted for the bookstore, they may have cleared $0.21 per copy after funneling 10 or 15% to Miller. With that sort of profit margin, the only viable way to make money was to sell a lot of books.

In fact, selling a lot of copies has been the business model for presses since the advent of commercial publishing. You print as many copies as possible, place them for sale in as many venues as possible, and if possible, sell hundreds of thousands. This may still be appropriate for Penguin and Random House (though I’ll present evidence later this week suggesting that even the giants are reconsidering their approach), but for smaller presses, the cost of printing 20,000 copies of a title is prohibitive. A smaller run, however, increases the unit cost, meaning that the profit margin becomes negligible if you’re trying to sell the book at a standard market price. To give you an example from Flatmancrooked’s recent history, our first book—First Winter—cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $5.50 per copy to print and market because we printed only 500–and in Minneapolis. The list price on the back cover was $20.00. By deduction, you might think we profited $14.50 per copy, but you would be quite wrong. When selling through our old distributor, we earned all of 32% of the list for each sale, which works out to $6.40. That’s a $0.90 profit per unit, and at 500 units, not enough to pay a salary in Mongolia.

What, then, are the potential solutions? If we can’t afford the capital outlay to print in sufficient volume to reduce unit costs, is there another approach we’re not considering? Perhaps the solution is to figure some way out to monetize digital sales. But we know how well that’s benefited the music industry. More people acquire music, and fewer people pay for it. Where once a performer toured to promote his record, now he records to promote his concert tour. There may be some lessons we can glean from that arrangement, but unless authors can start charging for their readings (already under-attended when they’re free, aren’t they?), I’m not sure what it is.

There may be a way, though, to use a free digital download to promote the sale of a big ticket item, if the item in question is of sufficient value. What if you could charge $700 for a book? Better yet, what if you could charge $7,000? Then, giving away a digital copy would seem less of sacrifice. This sounds ridiculous, I know, but on Thursday I’m going to discuss three publishers who are employing successfully a low-volume, high quality model. It sounds like reverse economics, I know. But the three examples I’ll give switch the paradigm in publishing from quantity to quality. If you sell 100 copies of something at $7,000, you gross the same as if you’d sold 100,00 at $7. Get ready, kids.

Read Part II

By James Kaelan

Most Wednesday evenings, after the Flatmancrooked staff has grown weary of discussing budgets and arguing over copy on the latest press release, we usually abandon the office in favor of the back patio of the Old Tavern. Over drinks of varying potency (depending on who’s ordering (the bartender plays favorites)), conversation will, for example, start with mixed martial arts, move to rock climbing, to soccer, to the Red Sox, to Penelope Cruz, to the possibility of getting some food. Try as we may to avoid talking shop outside the shop, though, conversation inevitably arrives at the brilliant ideas our peers have had that we wish we had first, immediately followed by what we can do to top them.

Granted, our admiration is equal to if not greater than our envy; thus, I present the following– some of the greatest contributions to the impending short story renaissance:

1) If you happen to be among the tiny handful of people that isn’t friends with Todd Zuniga on Facebook and have otherwise managed to avoid the massive amount of press Opium Magazine has received recently—if you haven’t heard about the cover for Opium 8, in other words—it features a nine word story that will reveal itself at the rate of one word every century when exposed to sunlight. Yeah. Crazy.

Of course, whether any of the copies will actually survive a thousand years is sort of irrelevant. Paper isn’t terribly durable. The idea, though, is brilliant on several levels. Most immediately, the very novelty of this “infinity” issue has garnered press and sales far surpassing previous issues of Opium. This, in turn, leads to the actual stories and content within the issue being exposed to a much wider audience that would not have otherwise purchased an issue of Opium, as admirable a publication as it is. And lastly, the idea that people are, in theory, going to pass the book on for generations means that the authors and contributors in the issue will continue to be read. In theory. Whether that holds true or not matters less than the fact that the uniqueness of Opium 8 has re-energized the short story. All sorts of people, such as tech-geeks, Russians, and the Swiss, are really excited about it, and the issue has bridged a divide between the relatively small number of people who support literary magazines and (to some degree) the rest of the world.

2) Speaking of fancy covers, all the while every small press is stewing in their envy over McSweeney’s design, One Story, a paper-and-staple single-story publication that has, by literary journal standards, been hugely successful, is proof that it’s possible to sell something on literary merit alone. From their website:

“One Story is a non-profit literary magazine that features one great short story mailed to subscribers every three weeks. Our mission is to save the short story by publishing in a friendly format that allows readers to experience each story as a stand-alone work of art and a simple form of entertainment. One Story is designed to fit into your purse or pocket, and into your life…We believe that short stories are best read alone. They should not be sandwiched in between a review and an exposé on liposuction, or placed after another work of fiction that is so sad or funny or long that the reader is worn out by the time they turn to it. The experience of reading a story by itself is usually found only in MFA programs or writing workshops. This is a shame. Besides, there is always time to read one story.”

Since its inception in 2002, One Story has built up a subscribership of over 5,000 and has an impressive record of consistently appearing in Best American, Best American Non-Required, and winning O. Henry’s and Pushcarts. A subscription costs $21 and gets you eighteen stories, which works out to approximately $1.16 per story. The design is nothing to get excited about, but that’s the point—One Story places so much focus on the actual story that is being published that it has quickly become one of the most sought-after placements amongst short story authors. Earlier in this series, I asserted that our collectively shrinking attention span ought to contribute to the growth of short story popularity; One Story is a brilliant example of how there is in fact a demand for a good, portable, single-dose of literature, and they provide it quite simply.

3) If you and I happened to have had a conversation during the last year , chances are I’ve tried to insert a plug for Public Radio International’s Selected Shorts Podcast somewhere between “Hi” and “nice to see you.” The program began twenty years ago as a live reading of short stories by established actors at Symphony Space in New York. Since, it has since gone on “tour”—they were at The Getty and in San Francisco in May, amongst other locations—and been turned into a podcast. This is remarkable for two reasons: A) It’s an actor reading, meaning the piece is performed, rather than simply read, and B) it’s a hands-free activity, meaning you can do various other things whilst listening. Now, you may insist that nothing replaces the experience of actually holding a book in your hands (and I would certainly agree), but hearing Alec Baldwin read Steven Millhauser’s “The Dome,” or Steven Colbert read T.C. Boyle’s “The Lie” is utterly entertaining. Though it seems difficult to imagine improving a story like Eudora Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.,” Stockard Channing does it, and John Lithgow, whether or not you thought he was awful on 3^rd Rock From The Sun, will make you laugh in his reading of “Taste” by Roald Dahl.

Call me a sentimental optimist, but I’m a happier person because this podcast exists. That these actors participate—that they read and reread in order to prepare for the reading, and clearly love the stories themselves—is significant. What might be viewed as an inaccessible story printed on the pages of Harper’s is transformed into something that is pure entertainment. It’s why I make it a point, and perhaps obnoxiously so, to tell everybody I can about it–especially my non-literary friends. Sure, all the writers I know listen to the New Yorker fiction podcast, and we all giggle when we hear Deb Triesman call Tobais Wolff “Toby,” but the Selected Shorts Podcast approaches that level of being simultaneously high-brow and absolutely accessible.

We’re just bursting with admiration for these things, if it’s not clear, and they serve as reminders that there’s much to be excited about. If I ever feel myself lapsing into moments of panic about the future of publishing, I will, for instance, walk to the mailbox while listening to Alec Baldwin read a series of baseball haikus, to see if my new issue of One Story has arrived. Perhaps I will make myself a sandwich and try to stumble through the laudatory article on Opium 8 in Le Monde. What’s clear is that there’s a good deal of talent out there, and there are people coming up with brilliant ideas to expose those talents. For instance, as you might have read in Andrew Dugas’ article on self-publishing last week, Flatmancrooked is ecstatic to be a part of Shya Scanlon’s Forecast 42 Project. Shya (who’s also a contributor to the Opium 8 issue, coincidentally) is publishing all 42 chapters of his novel on the websites of 42 different lit journals and blogs, creating a narrative path from site to site. It has the potential to expand each site’s network exponentially, and exposes those readers to publications they might not have heard of otherwise, all the while promoting a free novel, and a good one at that. Serialization is an old idea, and self-publishing is a new one; Forecast 42 is taking those ideas and possibly creating a revolution.

As for us, know that we’ve got some great things planned, and I want to tell you all about them, but I can’t, because you, or Penguin, or Random House, will steal them. We are paranoid; the ideas are that good. There will be bikes involved, and dirt, though not dirt bikes. Dirty drawings and drinks and chain-letters. Most of all, good fiction. Attention spans may be shrinking, but the desire for good stories persists; if the future of publishing depends on adjusting the methods of getting those stories out there—whether it’s the technology of Opium, the minimalism of One Story, or the multi-media of Selected Shorts—innovation leads to further innovation. We’re so excited.

By Deena Drewis

Seth Harwood’s adventure in self-publishing was technologically driven. Unable to get traction for his novel, Jack Wakes Up, Harwood skipped text altogether and podcast his novel one chapter at a time. He did it on the cheap, recording in a home “lab” (equipped with the latest in sound-baffling technology that the untrained eye might mistake for bed sheets pinned to the ceiling) and mixing the sound files on his laptop. Harwood’s efforts paid off. His podcasts garnered a large following and yes, Jack Wakes Up was published in 2009 by a division of Random House.

Scott and Harwood’s paths to traditional publication were radical and shrewd. They both leveraged then-emerging technologies to deliver their writing directly to their potential audience. For free. Which is quite different than selling a printed book to a wary stranger on the street or in the subway, where the buyer is taking a chance with unfamiliar material. Scott and Harwood, on the other hand, had repeat customers, as it were. People came back and the audience grew. For the authors, this result is especially satisfying because the numbers speak not to successful marketing but to writing that kept readers coming back for more.

Even as I was writing the preceding paragraphs, another writer friend, Shya Scanlon, told me about his own brilliant plan to give away his novel, Forecast. He intends to line up forty-two online literary journals (including Flatmancrooked), one for each chapter, each linking to the next. So to read the entire novel, a reader would jump from lit journal to lit journal. How could a publisher resist? Scanlon’s scheme is sure to draw readers to journals they might not otherwise have known existed.

(Hmmm. My novel happens to have forty-two chapters also…)

When I began this article, I intended to reaffirm the advantages of the old school Agent>Editor>Publication route. Namely that the vetting process itself serves to hone the work itself, ultimately resulting in better writing—and a better novel. But now I’m not so sure. The publishing houses have, to a significant degree, outsourced the vetting process as well. Agents have long since become the established front line, but in an ever-tightening market, they are under the gun as never before to find the next Stephenie Meyer. And the pile of submissions and queries is higher than ever before.

Agents aren’t editors; they want to see refined work, not potential, meaning that the task of editing and refining is thrust upon the writers themselves. Sure, writers could hire a freelance editor directly, but as valuable as such services may be, the cost is out of reach for the majority of aspiring writers. Instead they must rely on feedback from their writing groups, class peers, and volunteer readers.

When I began this article, I intended to reiterate the flaws usually associated with self-publishing: poor editing, sloppy production values, and undercooked prose. I still saw publishing vs. self-publishing as an either-or dichotomy, despite the real-life examples I’d lined up in advance. And on some levels, that dichotomy is valid. There are plenty of badly self-published books out there, and their authors have indeed committed career suicide by jumping into print before the material was fully developed, fully seasoned.

When I began this article, I intended to justify my own decision to hew to the straight and narrow, the traditional route. Now I wonder if I’ve made a terrible mistake. All along I’ve presumed that publication was the goal, but that’s not quite right, is it? The goal, the ultimate objective is to get the work out there. Into people’s hands. Or laptops. Or iPods. For better or worse. To succeed or fail on its own merits. Or simply to reach those few to whom it speaks most powerfully.

Maybe that’s the real adventure.

(Special thanks to David Henry Sterry for his suggestions regarding
the writers mentioned in this article.)

Read Part I

By Andrew Dugas

Okay, so it’s last summer and I’m holding in my hands my first novel, Sleepwalking in Paradise. Time to sell this puppy. Being old school, I take the old school route, gathering up my humble publishing credits and shaking as many referrals from the networked connections tree as possible. The all-too-familiar cycle of rejections and query tweaking begins. Hope and help arrive in small but potent doses: a good friend drives me to boil my query down to a reliable formula, a bona fide best-selling author reads and blurbs the book, boosting results, and some decent agents request pages.

Nine months and a couple of dozen rejections and a major revision later, still no representation. I don’t complain. By some standards, I’ve only just gotten started. “Two dozen rejections only? Call me when it’s four,” a friend scoffed.

He may be right, but times have gotten tougher. In 2009, being an unrepresented novelist is like being a Chrysler dealer. Nobody’s buying, and if they are, they’re across town at the Stephanie Meyers and Elizabeth Gilbert dealerships.

The publishing industry is in upheaval. The old paradigm is dying and the next one has yet to take shape. Will it be Scribd ebooks? Electronic readers? Books printed on demand from a kiosk? Will listening replace reading as podcasting expands its domain?

So many possibilities, so much potential, so many media struggling to take form.

And that’s the rub. The tighter the old school route to publication becomes, the more options aspiring authors have for getting their work out there. Print-on-demand technology has dropped the overhead for self-publication to virtually nil. Even the most technologically challenged novelist can publish on a service like Lulu.com at no cost. For a few hundred bucks more, you can get an ISBN and have your book available on Amazon.

That’s the question I keep asking myself: at what point, after how many rejections, does one take the self-publishing route?

Self-publishing catches a lot of grief. The concept is laughable to most agents and publishing pros, viewed as a sure-fire way to not be taken seriously and possibly kill your chances at a publishing deal for future books. There is something to that, when you consider the often ridiculously poor quality of many self-published books.

But with the barriers to traditional publication rising and the increasing democratization of publication in general through the Web and print-on-demand, is the stigma wholly justified? In this inter-paradigm period, is self-publishing really so terrible? From another angle, recent history suggests another interpretation: self-publishing as a viable strategy for winning a traditional book deal with a bona fide publishing house.

Consider one of the biggest publishing phenomena of the 1990s: James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy . Lore has it that he sold one hundred thousand self-published copies out of his car trunk before getting a deal. Then there’s Heru Ptah. Unable to get traction with agents, Ptah sold ten thousand copies of his self-published A Hip-Hop Story. Every day he descended into the New York subway with the goal of selling fifty copies a day. One of his customers turned out to be Jacob Hoye, a director at MTV Books. Enough said (though it’s hard to resist calling Ptah an “underground” success).

The common thread in both examples is tireless pimping by the author. Hands-on tireless pimping. Let’s face it. It takes fortitude to peddle one’s own book in the subway or from the trunk of a car.

(Another thing I ask myself: Do I possess that fortitude? I have a full-time job, a wife and a son. I’m lucky I can make time to write.)

Kemble Scott’s adventure in self-publishing didn’t involve peddling on public transit, but it was no less ballsy. Scott doubted that his graphic tales of radical sexuality among the denizens of San Francisco’s SoMa district would find homes in the publishing landscape, so he didn’t even bother submitting to literary journals. Instead, he created his own online zine, The SoMa Literary Review, and populated it with his own stories, masking their authorial origin behind a slew of pseudonyms.

I suggest you reread that last sentence several times to let it sink in.

A funny thing happened. Almost immediately, Scott received not only positive feedback on the Review’s content (that is, his own work), but a flood of actual submissions from actual writers. Writers who were not him. That is to say, other people. Suddenly, Scott was a publisher. He went with it and another funny thing happened. In short order, Scott had established not only a respected San Francisco literary journal, but that all important thing that writers are told everyday that they must have: a platform.

In 2007, his debut novel, SoMa, was published by Kensington.

Next week: Seth Harwood podcasts his way to Random House.

(Special thanks to David Henry Sterry for his suggestions regarding
the writers mentioned in this article.)

Read Part II

By Andrew Dugas

Postscript

As soon as this series finished, a friend wrote to me and said: “I think the problem is that the sort of tacked-on near-afterthought at the end strikes me as the most important part: Everything is changing. Quickly. And most of this series seems to me to be addressing the current state of things as if it’s crystallized in some way.”

He sent me a link to an article on Wired.com—Bruce Sterling’s “Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literaturel.” Several people have already responded in the article’s comments to the effect that many of these items are not challenges but opportunities. I agree, mostly. First, I’d like to say a few things on the macro level.

Thinking of the current state and future of our literature in terms of what “problems” it is facing seems wrong. “Challenges” and “opportunities” are closer, but perhaps “challenging opportunities” would be the best way to think of it. But even these are limited. Most of Sterling’s items are, I think, irrelevant; that is, literature will transcend these “challenges” fluidly and without our even noticing, or will be unaffected by them in any major way.

Take Sterling’s first item: “Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot.” Modernism anticipated this trend 100 years ago. Pound and Eliot and Nabokov are all polyglot and multi-national. Ditto Beckett. Ditto Joyce. You might even say that Finnegan’s Wake is the ultimate form of this polyglot multi-national literature (though it’s mostly unreadable!).

Numbers 2 and 3 are irrelevant: Literature has no need to follow into the realm of cell-phones and streaming video, and the failure of intellectual property systems has only been a problem for those who are ossified in an outdated model of artistic production. It has only been a problem for the media conglomerates that, as Sterling points out in #7, are failing.

Numbers  4, 5, 6, and 7 are simply, as one commenter put it, problems faced by the “dead and dying aspects of print culture.” Literature will (and is already) transcending them via online publications (e.g. Wired.com or Flatmancrooked) and devices like the Kindle.

Numbers 9, 11, and 12 (literary heritage now a searchable database, collapsed barriers to publication, and algorithms and social media replacing editors) are all great new benefits for contemporary literature. Things will be slightly different, but hardly in a challenging or problematic way.

#13 and #14 are also not really problems for contemporary literature. Convergence culture may obliterate distinctions between some media, but that will only enrich and broaden what we now think of as literature, while the central core (literary text) will continue as it has. It’s not as if the arrival of the music video heralded the death of purely auditory music. As for “compositor systems remak[ing] media in their own hybrid creole image,” well, that’s the great thing about text: it’s so versatile. It can survive myriad minor transformations (of font and word per page, etc.) and still be uniquely itself; it is also not very susceptible to the sorts of transformations that compositor systems make to other forms of media (I suppose you could take the text of Don Quixote and put anime scenes behind it with a techno soundtrack, but that’s more so “remix” than repacking).

Sterling’s concerns with Scholars and Academia are also largely irrelevant. True enough that Higher Education is suffering from bubble-inflation (#16), but Academia will no longer house the intelligentsia (#15), so these two sort of cancel each other out. Access to vast searchable databases will only create more people who are extremely specialized, rather than destroy our traditional scholars “steeped within the disciplines.”

# 17 is also largely irrelevant to the current generation (and especially to the next one). As geographical location becomes more and more irrelevant to social networking and community, and as our culture becomes more and more pluralistic, this “polarizing civil cold war” will disappear, as it never really had much substance to begin with. There will still be conservatives and liberals and a thousand other dichotomies, but that’s the point: they will be part of a thousand other dichotomies and will no longer have any pretense of true representation or dominance, making them impotent.

#18 is a joke. Ross Brighton has already aptly explained so in the comments to Sterling’s article: “Poetry is not dying. There is more poetry being written, and published, than ever before. It is vibrant and vital. It functions as a kind of subculture, subeconomy. There’s no money in it (aside from grants and the like), so people write and publish out of dedication.”

Not to bash Sterling’s list entirely, however. What seem to me to be the real important “challenging opportunities” presented in the list are numbers 8 and 10:

“8. Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and fragments literary reputation.”

“10. Contemporary literature not confronting issues of general urgency; dominant best-sellers are in former niche genres such as fantasies, romances and teen books.”

The Long Tail is the idea that when distribution and inventory costs are cheap, a business (like Amazon.com) can make a significant profit by selling small quantities of hard-to-find items rather than selling large quantities of popular items. Sterling’s point that this “balkanizes audiences” and “fragments literary reputation” is insightful. This trend is here to stay (especially with digital distribution or even print-on-demand). But is it a challenge for contemporary literature? Well, it means that there will be fewer Stephen King’s and Vonnegut’s and more Paul Bowles’s and Edward Dahlberg’s. So, we trash our fantasies of mega-fame. This will disrupt our means of “canon-building,” but canon-building has always been so artificial and elitist to begin with. The biggest challenge here will be learning to think outside the terms of a traditional canon, in figuring out how to reformulate academic reading criteria in light of an organic canon that is sprawling and in flux.

In the comments, Rothstei speaks intelligently about number 10:

“We have a positive feedback loop for shit-lit, and a negative one for urgent works…But hasn’t this always been the case? Hasn’t good lit, with a sense of vital urgency, always been a flailing corpse, fighting to get up the stairs to the stage? There might have been a couple ages of light, when a small feedback loop of good lit seized the day and made their way (no doubt unread) to the majority of shelves…all the digital is really doing …is turning shit-lit into spam-lit…Or have I missed the point? Did we actually have a cultural …propensity for literature that has strangely evaporated?”

This seems right on the money to me. If anything is bankrupt, it’s the concept of “general urgency.” The problem isn’t that contemporary literature doesn’t confront urgent issues, but that contemporary society has no sense of general urgency, but a manifold and multiform sense of urgency. Again, the challenge here will be adapting our thinking to pluralism rather than adapting our literature to an illusory concept of “general urgency.”

And yes, believe it or not, I’m going to connect this all back to hip-hop. It seems clear to me, that more than any other dominant subculture (that sounds paradoxical, I know, but I think its right), and especially more than any other form of music, hip-hop represents the sort of thinking that will carry us past the challenges represented by The Long Tail and the pluralism of urgency. It contains multitudes in a way that indie rock or electronica do not: it always has been about a constantly shifting lexicon, a plurality of style and streamlined mode of transformation. In this, it is similar to geekdom or nerd-culture and I think it’s no coincidence that both of these subcultures (if you still believe that word means anything) matured together. Literature is, by far, the old man on the block and its ways and styles seem old-fashioned and out of touch. But when I read Borges on Kafka, or see how Poe influenced Mallarmé, or Homer influenced Joyce (or maybe as Borges would have it, how Joyce influenced our reading of Homer), I can only see Literature as a giant beast existing outside of time, whose scales are the size of small villages and huge cities (which are one and the same) and whose language is seemingly strident but in fact an infinitely melodious blending of all language; it is a true chimera, a polymorph, and its pace may seem behind the times, but its already ahead of them as well. That we presume to direct its course is arrogant and narrow-minded. It will handle itself if we continue writing, and that seems unavoidable, as we’re all more than fond of blathering out our opinions in a voice of ultimate authority.

By Christopher Robinson