I suppose my freshest round of reluctance goes back to my time at Borders. I worked on the .com part of the business, and I was the go-to guy when a self-publishing author wanted to know how to get their book listed on our site. Some of them were legit, but I fielded enough calls from people who were either deluded in -- or oblivious to -- their obvious lack of talent that they were clearly banking on their ability to cram it down everybody's throat. One fellow who was having trouble with the process all but accused me of being part of a conspiracy to keep his book off the shelves. I all but told him it was merely that his book sucked.
At the last session of the writing workshop, I was the only student that showed up (I guess that's the danger of holding this kind of class in the early summer), but it gave me and my instructor the chance to sit and just talk about writing for two hours. She's a published author, and has been in the game for a while, so she had a lot of good advice to give. I took the class as a way to kick myself in the ass, to remind myself that I actually have a legitimate talent for writing, and in that sense it was a total success. I found myself voicing insights about my fellow classmates' writing -- and my own -- that showed me that I really do think in terms of storytelling and focus and detail and actually seem to know what I'm talking about. I even wrote some spontaneous pieces in class that I'm proud enough of that I'm going to post some of them here soon. Like I told my instructor, it's sometimes too easy to feel like I'm a writer only in my head, to make it just another one of the stories that I tell myself to amuse my own mind from time to time, and it's another thing entirely to drag it out into the real world and acknowledge that it's part of my waking life.
Another aspect I've been thinking about is that I have friends from high school that are successfully making a living at writing. I'm sandwiched right in between them year-wise, one graduating before and one after me. One has been a successful TV and comic-book writer in LA for over ten years, and the other is a well-reviewed author of a short-story collection and a large historical novel. (And outside that circle, there was another alumnus of my high school who now is a Hollywood writer so big that they use his name in trailers. Trailers!) I keep looking to them, and reminding myself that there is still opportunity out there. Before that last brainstorming session with my instructor, I was almost convinced that the prospects for an unproven author were dwindling, but now I'm realizing that they've actually expanded, just in unconventional ways.
The thing that bothers me about the proliferation of outlets for writing is the signal-to-noise ratio. When every thought that anyone writes down is equally available to everyone, how will a worthwhile author cut through all the clutter? Of course, when I worked for the book industry, I placed my faith in the publishers... they put their money where their mouth was and spent money printing and promoting only the stuff that people would actually want to spend money for, and some of the time that was something other than the legal-thriller/romance of the week. But now that publishers have had to downsize and restructure like everyone else, I'm starting to think that maybe the court of public opinion isn't as bad a proving ground as I once thought it was.
I’m not immune to chasing that elusive audience, either… I even tried to change my style to be more “marketable” once. When I started seeing all these paranormal romances come out (culminating in hits like Sookie Stackhouse and the Twilight novels), I made a conscious effort to write one, but what I ended up with is “Nadir”, a novel-in-progress which is essentially a love story between a demon and a human working their way through the different levels of Hell. It’s far from the dashed-off pulp masterpiece I was hoping for, but I wouldn’t trade it for one now. I like the idea too much, and the thought that I’m actually going to find out how it all ends is exciting.
Of course, there's always going to be Fifty Shades of Something that everyone is going to be grabbing at wildly, and may or may not stand the test of time, but what this sea change in book publishing has really done is to level the playing field for everyone, to lower whatever stigma still exists around any particular genre and really show our tastes as a society for what they really are. And isn’t that the ideal? To be free of the constraints of what we *should* be reading and figure out what it is that we *want* to read? How many more people would become readers if that were the case?
All this is my way of talking myself into publishing my own e-book. Years ago, Borders ran an internal contest, and employees could submit entries that would be considered for printing and promoting by the company. I submitted a short story collection. I took the process very seriously, the selection of my best stories as well as the order they should appear in. The file is still sitting on my computer, ready to launch. My writing instructor said that I definitely should pull the trigger and send it out into the world with a price point of my choosing. Who knows? I see dozens of interesting titles that I would never have heard of in while scrolling through the Kindle bookstore, and sometimes a dollar or two sounds like a fair price to try something sight unseen...
In the end, I guess I just have to allow my writing find its own way. I can accept that I’m never going to bully it into making money for me. Let the notice of others come as it will (and I have to stress that the only reason I would want to make money off my work is so that I’d be able to spend more time writing). First and foremost, I have to follow my muse. I think that’s my primary responsibility here. As it should be for everyone.
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