Thoughts on Self-Publishing, Success and Failure

It’s probably a bad marketing idea to admit you are a failure.

“Hey, here’s my book. Over one hundred different agents and editors agreed it was crap. Want to read it?”

Yeah. That’s a big selling point. Not.

“So, having run out of all other options, I’ve resorted to self-publishing.”

You’re not winning me over here, Tara.

You don’t understand… I’ve been this close. I’ve had many agents ask for partials and a couple ask for fulls. Fulls, I tell you! And some of them paid me lovely compliments while declining to represent my book. Surely that counts for something.

Nice try. Thanks for playing

What if I told you that after every rejection I agonized over the book again, tweaking and tuning, fixing and fidgeting, trying and trying to find the secret, make it better, make it work. And it has grown and improved. Oh, certainly, there were stages where I tried too hard, where my additions and subtractions worked to the detriment of the story, rather than advancing it. And I had to go back and sift and shift again, sometimes returning to an earlier state, sometimes finding, unfortunately, I could not, and simply had to press on and make new changes to make the old changes make sense. If that makes sense.

Good on ya, then. Send it out again.

No.

No, I don’t think I will. And not because I’m tired of making changes. I do have some more changes I want to make, I’ve decided. But this time, I want those changes to be solely for the enhancement of the story I need to tell. Not for agents. Not for publishers. Not to meet the submission guidelines restrictions, which are broken all the time by successful books, but still shoved onto new novelists simply because they are new. I want to go back to my first duty as a writer, my duty to the book. Isn’t it ironic that I became so obsessed with trying to fit the story to the guidelines, I somehow lost the thread of the story?

A part of me still feels that the only real publishing is their publishing. I don’t want to go to the other extreme, and become one of those bitter writers who sit around decrying traditional publishing.

I don’t want my motive to self-publish be out of a sense of failure, neither that I’ve failed as a traditional writer, nor that traditional publishing has failed writers. Publishing is changing, that’s all. And I realized it makes no sense to paddle a rowboat to a sinking ship.

Sinking ship? Ouch.

Maybe that was too harsh. What I wanted to emphasize was not the negativities but the possibilities.