Somewhere Between the Gutter and the Closet Guest Blogger: Pete Tzinski

It's an interesting time to be a writer, these days, isn't it? Even if you don't follow the publishing industry all that closely – and I don't, because it stops being pertinent news and turns into a horse race pretty quickly – you cannot help but be aware that the times, they be a-changin'. That fact isn't argued. The argument comes from trying to figure out what on earth those times are a-changin' into.

Recently, I've been listening to a writer I know – the wonderful MeiLin Miranda – express her frustrations as she tries to get some promotional attention for a book she's put together. It is, if you want to call it that, a self-published work.

And that means that nobody is going to touch it with a ten foot pole. Thus her frustrations. The avenues for promotion for a book – news web-sites, book review web-sites, magazines, and so forth – all say somewhere on their site if you self-publish, you can go put your head in a bucket before you can send your book to us. (Sometimes, they say it more nicely, sometimes not). Everyone knows that if you do the book yourself, with a publisher, you're going to have to do the promotion yourself too. Sure, fine. The problem arises when you aren't given any real avenues to reach out and touch readers.

As we all know, it is a fact that every self-published book is absolute crap. There is no doubt about it. Just like all indie music is garbage, any piece of art that is not in a musuem is rubbish, and any product you buy that doesn't come from a Big Box Store is just junk.

Wait a second...

I hate the phrase self-publishing. It sounds cheap. It's lumped together with vanity press, which has its own connotations. So let us, for the duration of this article at least, refer to it as indie publishing. Humor me.

It's very odd, the self-publishing stigma, but it actually is perfectly understandable. It also needs to die. It's strange that the industry of stories lags so much behind other fields. In music, it is perfectly respectable and legitimate to make indie music. Put out your own disc, or put it out on a very teeny tiny label. Or just sell CDs at your gigs. Or, as Catherine AD did, sell hand-crafted individual copies of the disc. In the music world, having a major label is no longer the end-all be-all that it once was.

Indie publishing has only lately become something to be shunned and derided. As someone who loves reading about the history of pulp fiction, and just fiction in general, it wasn't uncommon for some pulp magazines to be self-produced, or produced by tiny publishers which could barely afford to put anything out. It was common enough.

However, it's Sturgeon's Law which, these days, makes a shunning of indie publishing perfectly understandable. As an editor myself, and having waded through my fair share of slush piles, I can tell you that the prospect of having a book review site and having to slog through every single thing that anyone puts up on a web-site and sends to me is...daunting, and exhausting, and 'orrible. And while some of them might be good...how am I to know, except by reading all of them?

When a publisher sends a reviewer a book, they are also sending a guarantee. This is as good as the rest of what we publish. If I get a book from HarperCollins, I know it'll at least be on the line with other HarperCollins books. Whether I like it or not comes later, but that assurance is built in from the get-go.

But there's no similar assurance in the world of indie publishing. This is as good as the rest is more of a condemnation when you are sharing space with, for example, very badly written stories in which Captain Kirk and Spock share their feelings and then have sex. You may have poured your literary heart into what you wrote, but you're metaphorically just down the hall from the guy who is slightly off his nut and is writing something that exists somewhere between a blog post, a confession, a story, and a transmission from whatever planet his brain is on.

And the reason it can be so frustrating is...you might have written a work of literary genius, full of rich allusions and themes and metaphors and brilliant commentaries on the human condition. You might have an audience – not a huge one, but an audience that sends you money, buys your books, supports you as surely as a crowd showing up at a gig supports the musician. You might not be buying tropical islands off your fan base, but you might be going out to dinner now and then. And more importantly, you are being read.

And yet...you cannot get access to any avenue that would be otherwise open to a small, un-promoted paperback novel out through Ace Books, which maybe only twenty people will read, and which the author will see very little money, and which might do so badly that it really hurts his chances to get another book published.

It's a major hurdle. It's a frustrating glass ceiling.

Full disclosure time: I started out writing free Star Trek fan fiction stories, posted on the 'net, because I took pleasure in writing them and took greater pleasure in having people read them. As my writing muscles built and grew and I could flex them better, I shifted into original fiction. I've been telling big science fiction stories, in serialized form, on the internet in various places for more than ten years now, off and on. I take a huge amount of pleasure in it.

But...

Recently, while writing a Star Trek article for SF Signal, I discussed at length my own penchant for writing fan fiction, and how it led to my original fiction on the 'net. And I realized that actually, I was slightly nervous to talk about it. And for no good reason. The gentlemen who run SF Signal are wonderful human beings, and I consider them both friends. They would hardly come at me with pitchforks and torches. And yet...I was made nervous. It felt overly revealing. I could just imagine the snickers that I was going to get. He writes stories on the internet. Must not be able to get published. Pathetic.

And of course, that's not true. I publish regularly, in mainstream avenues. But I like writing serialized fiction and I really like putting it on the internet, for free, for whoever wants to see it. I don't do that exclusively, I travel between the worlds and also sell short stories for money. I have novels that go out to honest-to-goodness publishers.

Why can't I release my main record on a big label, and then do a delightful other project and put it out myself? Put in music terms, that is not so foreign idea.

It feels like I'm coming out of the closet, if you see what I mean. Obviously, since I am not gay, I can only theorize what that probably feels like...but I can imagine. And it is the same exposed, nervous feeling that I get (to a lesser extent, I assure you; I'm not losing sleep over this) going out into mainstream avenues and saying “Yes, I do write fiction and put it on the internet for free, Bub.”

I was very proud of my serialized fiction and the places I was able to go in it, until I got very embroiled in some aspects of the mainstream publishing world....and then, I disowned it all, was deeply embarrassed, and would have denied its existence. And I stayed that way for several years. It's only recently that I've looked it again and said “This is where I learned how to do what I'm doing. This is where I had readers, and this is where I got better.”

These days, I'm doing all the angles. I write articles for mainstream promotional web-sites, and I sell short stories, and I work on novels for publishers. I have no interest in releasing the novels, for example, for free on the 'net. But I am also putting together a big web serial. Thousands of words in each episode, detailed and as complex and intelligent as I can make it all. Put out for free.

There's no wall between it and, you know, really badly written Buffy/Angel slash fiction.

Ah well.

As I mentioned above, I read history for pleasure. And one thing history teaches you is that your time will come around, for good or ill. The pulps were gutter fiction, and now some of them are classics (and many of the authors who we consider classics of science fiction wrote gutter-trash for pennies a word). Comic books were just funny books which were most useful as ballasts on ships heading across the Atlantic. Now, comic books are a big industry and called “graphic novels” and make up most of Hollywood's output each year.

The best example of it all are web-comics. Anyone can produce a web-comic and slap it up. I can, and I can't draw. They're silly. And yet...over time...they become a fairly big thing. You wind up with strips like Questionable Content and Penny Arcade and Sluggy Freelance who are doing just fine and dandy and supporting their creators. And no one says “Well, despite that, they're only doing these internet doodles because they can't hack it in the newspaper syndicate world.” Well, no, they're doing it because they can, for pleasure and art, and because the newspaper syndicate is increasingly a dinosaur.

By the same token, indie fiction is perceived as trash. But give it time, and fight, and effort...and the quality will rise above the garbage. I don't necessarily think that internet publishing, or indie publishing, whatever you want to talk about, is the sole wave of the future...but I think that it is a wave, and it will build and prove itself.

In the meanwhile, I would entreat anyone reading this to remember the funny books, remember the pulpy gutter-fiction, remember indie music...and take that knowledge and go out and find something self-published, on the internet or in book form, and give it a shot. And what you find may be garbage. 90% will be crap. But keep looking and see if you can't find the 10% that's pretty darn good.

And when it comes down to the respectable author with a book out who is making no money and may not be able to publish again....or the hack author putting out stories and bringing in regular money through the fans who publishes what he wants, when he wants it...well. Only one of 'em is laughing all the way to the bank. If you're going to write either way, why not be that one?

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Like a lobster in warming water, Peter Tzinski is an increasingly busy guy. He is working on a serial which he'd love to show you, but which won't launch until May 1st. He has fallen in love with Twitter and doodles on it, and can be found at twitter.com/tzinski. He lives in the parts of Minnesota currently not massacred by Road Construction Season.