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