Last week the internet went absolutely viral for Amanda Hocking. Of course the 24 hour webcycle announced that traditional publishing was in danger. You may remember this happening for the music industry during the Napster era, but now that we’re all sporting itunes accounts and CDs are still the top selling way that music is sold.
So what does this all mean? That we can be lazy, pop something on the internet for 99 cents and make a million? Well no, duh, even though some people feel that way and unfortunately Amanda Hocking fears that people view her in that light.
I see something entirely different. Let me give some back story. I, like Hocking, have been writing since before I could actually put pen to paper or finger to keyboard. Writing has been my life for a very long time. I can’t stop breathing and continue to live, nor can I stop writing and continue to live.
I, like many other writers, have been in this loop of trying to find something commercially viable. A catch phrase in a query letter/synopsis/cover letter that just maybe will get an agent/publisher interested in my work. Because let’s face it, there is no reason to buy a book and pay an author if the publisher/agent doesn’t think there is a $ sign at the end of the process for them.
What is the advice of published authors? Buy Writer’s Market. I often wonder if that little catch phrase gives them money, because I’ve used Writer’s Market, and I still haven’t gotten the attention of an agent or publisher, and most publishers require that a writer have representation before sending in a manuscript, which makes agents the gateway to the life we all want. What is that? A life where we don’t have to work as retail clerks by day and starving artists by night. I’ve lived that life for a long time, it sucks (I don’t anymore, but I know many people that live similar existences). The worst part of the agent/query marathon is that agents want the writer to let them review their work for six weeks at a time, but don’t promise to send a rejection letter. Now granted it is allowed to submit multiple queries at a time, but if you don’t tell the agents there is a risk that you’ll lose their respect, and really if you’re telling an agent that you’ve decided to multi-submit it doesn’t make them feel/think that you are picking them out for any other reason than they are an agent. Agents will say on their websites that they want to be addressed by name, and for us as the writers to (in as few words as possible) tell them why we’ve chosen them. See how this already is complicated as all hell? All I want is to write a book, have someone help me edit it and then help me market the thing. But this creates this strange world where three pages of who I am, what I think the commercial viability of the novel is, why I chose said agency or agent and then the synopsis of the novel. Tricky dance, and some people have mastered it, and still don’t have an agent. This whole deal is a lottery, and the lucky few that get publishing deals don’t even necessarily have to be good writers. This is proven by walking into any bookstore and picking up five random novels, I guarantee that at least one of them is bad, or at least bad to you (insert phrase about one man’s junk is another man’s…)
I’ve never read one of Amanda Hocking’s books, but I really respect what she’s done. Instead of wallowing in her own self pity, she’s decided to do things her own way and let her writing and ingenuity do the talking. She has a pretty large following on her twitter, blog and facebook pages. She seems from the outside to be living the dream and I applaud her for that.
Now I don’t think that print media is dead, and I hope that it never dies. I like the idea of the Nook, Kindle, Ipad revolution for reading books. I hope that this causes the strip process to die. What do I mean by this? After an amount of time passes the bookstores take paperbacks off of the shelf that haven’t sold or are deemed not to sell (I’ve seen an entire box of Moby Dick stripped so it isn’t just monthly romance novels) are stripped. The Front cover is ripped off and sent to the publisher I’m assuming to start a process where the bookstore gets some sort of refund for the lack of sales, someone in the industry will have to post a comment on that end of the process. The rest of the book is trashed. Sometimes a bookseller will take it home to read, or it’ll be recycled, but for the most part it ends up in the trash. What I hope will happen in the future is that print media will be for books with artistic bindings and print, cost a bit more, but will be mostly collector’s items. Huge warehouse bookstores will go away and leave room for smaller more quaint book stores like we used to have before the big boys stripped mined the retail sector. And for everything else that might have been stripped or for people that aren’t interested in collections-all that will go to our handy handheld devices.
As for the future of publishing? I think that what this all means is that writers can be writers. We don’t have to let our work collect dust or become lost on our computer. We can publish too. We can put in the work of editing, marketing for ourselves. The entire market has just been opened up for us to follow our dreams. And for consumers, we don’t have to wait for the publishers to determine what we want to read, we can peruse the store online and decide for ourselves from a larger library. This brings about so much more freedom for every one of us. It isn’t that print media or the publishing world is dying, it just means that a whole other market has opened up. Indie publishing just became streamlined.
So as artists let’s support one another, post each other’s blogs, read each other’s work. Create an online community to promote the effort we’ve put in. Over the next few months I’m going to be venturing into this market to see where I can go, but mostly my interest is sharing my work with others, because at the end of the day we write because we have to, and sharing that experience is what motivates us to continue.
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