Writing and Publishing

Despite the weather (snow showers again today!), my calendar finally says that it is April and with the potential arrival of spring, I think it’s time to come out of the closet. I have been in my closet for some time now writing, but not blogging. With the exception of a little burst when I was in Florida, I haven’t been on-line much as my writing attentions have been elsewhere. Specifically, I’ve been novel writing.


I am coming up on a year of rest from chemo and as I have moved further away from the wash of chemistry, I’ve felt much better – fewer and fewer physical discomforts, the return of my flowing locks and better energy (although anything resembling a normal sleep/wake cycle still eludes me). But as I’ve felt better and passed the dreaded 21 month barrier last July, I have thought a lot more about what I can do to stay engaged and productive if I continue to fend off the big decline. It could be a while.

For me, the most difficult thing about cancer isn’t the physical discomfort. And with my happiness about coming this far, it’s less about the emotional side. Instead I have been preoccupied with this question: Okay great, you’re probably not going to die in the next year, now what? I absolutely hate the idleness and lack of productivity that comes with this illness. I also hate the fact that I am no longer capable of doing things that I did before or only able to do them in a much more limited way. So I set my mind on trying to find something meaningful, at least to me, that I can do when I have the energy but does not involve deadlines or obligations which I would fail to meet the next time I have one of my all-too-frequent physical drop-offs. So, I arrived at using my interest in reading and writing to write fiction.

Learning the craft of fiction writing is a challenge but is quite engaging and, in many ways, cathartic. I started on my goal of writing a novel last July and, with the help of a local writer’s group, my lovely wife and Vicki (herself an enthusiastic reader and writer), I actually finished a first draft about a month ago. It’s now being reviewed by several writing-knowledgeable friends. I hope that it doesn’t suck and the early feedback I’ve gotten has been quite encouraging. So, although I’m sure I won’t win a Pulitzer, I hope that I will be able to pull it together presentably enough to share more broadly.

And that brings me to publishing. In addition to the work of actually learning to write something worth reading, I have been doing a lot of homework on the publishing industry generally. And it’s quite fascinating. The industry is going through enormous change, driven by technology, and there is a wide variety of opinion about what’s good and bad about traditional, independent and self publishing. The rise of the eBook is also causing earth shaking change. As an economics/business model junkie at heart, reading the articles, blogs, websites, etc and parsing out the pros and cons of all this change for publishers, authors and readers alike is great fun. Here are a few thoughts for you on that:

- The Big Six publishers are losing their power to decide what is and isn’t worthy of publication. While they are deeply knowledgeable - no doubt - about how to edit, package and market books, they are rather pricey (from the reader/buyer perspective), slow-moving/unsupportive (from the author’s perspective) and overwhelmed (from their own point of view). By overwhelmed, I mean that they get far more material from would-be authors than they could ever handle and even the system created to get them on board (literary agents) is equally overwhelmed.

- Independent publishers and, notably, self-publishers have grown in strength and numbers over the past decade. The rise of the eBook, in particular, is making it easier for small fry to make their work available to the public. As a result, new authors continue to turn away from big publishers and go independent and even some established authors are going independent. After all, the effort it takes for authors to market their work to the Big Six is so similar to the effort needed to self-promote, why not go straight to the public and make more money?

- With the flood of books available in eBook only or Print-on-Demand services, the challenge for writers will be how to build your own audience (not please a publisher) and for readers will be how to find reliable venues for discovering what’s really worth reading (since fewer books will go through the filtering/polishing process of the Big 6).

If my “first attempt” novel isn’t too terrible, I actually have relatively inexpensive ways to make it available either as an ebook or a paperback, which literally did not exist at the same cost/quality only a few years ago. For many authors who are trying to make a living by writing, I think this is a fabulous thing. There are already success stories of people who self published ebooks, marketed themselves and have grown an audience for their work (and made significant money). In my case, I’m not dreaming about big money. I’d just like to learn to write well enough to produce something worthwhile. And the ultimate judge of that quality is readership. It would thrill me to no end if I actually wrote something that strangers enjoyed. Maybe I will!