ladamic's blog research on information networks and non-researchy random musings

2018/02/02

A year of being a self-published pest

Filed under: Uncategorized — ladamic @ 16:09

The first self(?)-published author I can recall foisting his book upon me was my 9th grade French teacher. He told the class he had written a book, praised it at length, and instructed us to order it. Shortly thereafter he brought in a tall stack of glossy-cover paperbacks and collected our money. The book did not teach us French, but a few of us did gain some new knowledge; I recall it was quite racy. The next person to unexpectedly reveal herself as a (self?)-published author was our nice travel agent. It was a thriller involving the Croatian independence war, a deep conspiracy, an obsessive romance. I couldn’t figure out in either case why they wanted me to read their books.

Looking back now I recognize all too well the need to disseminate one’s book to anyone within reach. With other hobbies, e.g. woodworking, I was content to admire my creations myself, or sometimes show them or give them to friends. But a BOOK… almost as soon as I started working on it, it seemed to start saying to me that it wanted to be read and printed. And no matter how sensible my initial expectations that there would be just a few copies of this BOOK, and that I would give it to friends and that will be that, the BOOK by its very concept messed with my head.

To make matters worse, due to some productive procrastination, I ended up writing three children’s books instead of one. I had wanted to create one picture book, that would be a special present to my son, of a story of a picky-eater prince by the name of Peter. But I had trouble getting an illustrator to commit to the project, so I (logically) decided to self-publish a chapter book (Poofthorn) instead that would not require illustration. After realizing that this actually did not bring me closer to the goal, I started to learn to draw and as practice self-published a picture book (The princess had to go #2) based on a story my grandmother had told me to cure me of my princess obsession. This made me recognize the limitations to my artistic abilities all the more, so I went back to trying to find an illustrator and found a long-lost friend. So Prince Peter came into existence too.

Each BOOK, as it developed and then was born, evoked new hopes. Rationally I knew that those hopes were unfounded. I had listened to dozens of episodes of a writing podcast, as well as books and blog posts on self-publishing. I knew that thinking your book was better than a majority of the stuff out there, besides being a delusion, also doesn’t actually qualify it for publication. I knew that even the most well-known authors typically wrote 5+ manuscripts before finally selling one. And that was the traditional publishing route. I expected my amateur “manuscripts” would not make it past an editor. But then I also knew that almost nobody actually managed to sell their self-published work. Even worse, there is a stigma around self-publishing. A friend reading the chapter book asked if I was not concerned that people could figure out who I was! The common-sense advice was to never put self-published work on your CV. And yet, as I wrote, or drew, or received new drawings, I fell in love with my BOOKs and wanted a future for them out in the world.

Each BOOK told me why it needed to have more copies dispersed:

  • The Princess could save little girls from the princess industrial complex.
  • Prince Peter would show an upside to trying veggies.
  • Poofthorn would get kids excited about botany (it worked on my son, he is pictured below taking notes at Foster Botanical Gardens).

I tried different things: self-publishing exclusively on Amazon and using Facebook ads to advertise (especially for the 5 days out of 90 one can offer them for free). I tried a free iBook for the Princess. Although I could pay via ads for a few people to download my books for free, that was that.

I gave copies to friends. I tried online giveaways. I sent Prince Peter as a “slush pile” submission to about a dozen publishing houses. Only one of the publishers allowed submissions to include an self-addressed, stamped envelope so that they could send me a rejection letter. This rejection letter read something like “We receive 3,000 manuscript submissions a year, we publish 10”. Or maybe it was 30,000 and the 10 are solicited.

At this point reason would say to give up. But just as I would resolve to do so, I’d want to try one more thing. I added illustrations to the chapter book, hoping that now the books would sell like hotcakes. They did not.

I tried to see if I could distribute my books locally. The local bookstore replied twice to say how their consignment program is “temporarily on-hold.” I wrote the “Friends of the Mountain View Library” association (whose member I had been) about their upcoming used book sale, and asked if I could peddle my books in that context, or if I could donate my books to them and they could distribute them. The answer was a rather stern no. I briefly contemplated approaching a librarian, but googling for info on how to that, I found a librarian’s scathing blog post that said pretty much what I suspected, which is that self-published authors are the bane of librarians’ existence, and that no patron has ever requested a self-published book, ever. Just as I scrapped that plan, I emailed the librarian at my son’s school. By the second email she agreed to “have a look.” I met her before the first bell at a container that was the school’s temporary library during construction. She took the book and held it gingerly away from herself, while saying a short “Thank you” and swiftly closing the door. Have not heard from her since.

When running Amazon ads, I found myself in an Amazon help forum, where someone was saying that he had self-published his book just for his own satisfaction, but that friends and family had said how great it was, and that he then felt encouraged to try to find a wider audience for it. I thought, hey, that’s me, my mom liked my books! By the way, on a writing podcast an editor said that mentioning your mother’s opinion of your book was just about the worst thing you can write in your inquiry letter. But if not our moms, who is going to lend support and encouragement to struggling self-published authors everywhere? So I tracked down this particular author’s book, and downloaded it, because all the snooty editors and self-publishing nay-sayers could be wrong. He could be an undiscovered Andy Weir! I’m still trying to get through the book. How can I put it? It just isn’t very good. It was time to look in the mirror.

In October I had concluded my last creative writing effort, the first story out of a hypothetical five of the Explorers who Toot webcomic. A webcomic, I thought, would be free of constraints a book had been subject to. But when I tried to tell people about it, nobody replied. Even my friends and family seemed to have had enough.

That’s it, that’s my year of being under the spell of the BOOKs and pestering my friends. Sorry friends. Sorry strangers who might find these in your “little free libraries” (What? Did I say that out loud? OK, I won’t do that… probably)

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