I’m going to play uber-hyprocite for a while (don’t worry, it’s not the first and won’t be the last time) and write a little bit about POD or Self Publishing. For those of you who don’t know, POD stands for Print On Demand, the new cyber-world method of instant gratification. It’s also called ego publishing.
A colleague told me a touching story about how she was using an online service to create a book for a family member, and I got to thinking about the whole process. Publishing a book should be a challenge, a working experience where you, the author, battles through the hoops, perils and pitfalls of whoring your art to the world of uncaring, cold, nameless agents, publishers, cruel mythical beasts and devils looking to bind your soul in exchange for a flaring five-minutes of fiction fame.
Ego publishing is quaint for old men and academics winding down their careers. Picture Professor Plum, a maple flavored smoke writhing upwards from a scarred pipe that rivals him for title of most ancient, creaking through his library, on a gnarled cane. He pauses near a shelf laden with heavy, black bound books. He squints his eyes and runs his hands over the embossed spines, The Tazmanian Campaign Vol. III. He chuckles to himself as he remembers first penning those pages, while his traveling companions mocked his studious nature. For posterity, he said, again and again.
Yes, POD and Ego publishing are for old men, already accomplished in their deeds, with names and titles, honors earned, and a clan of strong namesakes and heirs grown up around them.
You, twenty-five year-old college grad, should not be POD publishing your epic novel. As a writer don’t you need, nay, want, some objective voices in your career? Voices that will help you fine tune your craft, hone your trade, hammer your obtuse phrases into gleaming, icy sheets of bone chilling dreams? Don’t you want to write better?
Then, yes, keep your book of poetry to your self for the time being. After you catapult yourself to the dubious star status of the next generation’s Stephen King, then, why don’t you pull out Midnight and Me: Poetry and More. You can talk your agent into bringing over a bottle of Laphroig or Glenmorangie and suck the sweet sickness from chipped snifters as you laugh at how “great” your early works were.
You know, Jim Morrison, the Lizard King himself, published a book of poetry. It was called The Animals and the New Kingdom or some such shit, the collected works of Jim Morrison, rock god. I read it in my early twenties, pouring over each page, sifting through it was those magical phrases, sultry metaphors and violated logics that made Morrison’s music so brilliant. You know, I’m sad to say, I never found it. Sure, sure, Jim Morrison was brilliant, and I often find myself muttering in moments of duress “WWJMD?” What would Jim Morrison do? Believe me, you don’t want to know the answer – somethign to the effect of bottoms up, trousers down.
The point, needle-like as it is, is that even one of the coolest men to ever walk the earth…even his poetry sucks.
If yours is any good, some one will publish it. You *do not* have to.
That said, one can easily consider the blog a form of ego publishing. By my logic, these very virtual pages should likely be stricken from the record, zapped from the big bit bucket and never spoken of again. To quote one of my favorite philosophy professors (D. Canonova), “Sometimes I choose evil.” There’s a fine line between ego publishing, self aggrandizing blogs and the almost compulsive need writers feel to sling words together in patterns in an oft vain attempt to evoke emotion for the audience. And I intend to blur that line to the point total disruption.
Besides, wouldn’t Mom love a signed copy of your angst-ridden, drug-induced, pseudo-legible, convoluted pity poems?