Why Do We Publish?

In the year 2000, I worked as an assistant manager at Bookstar in Memphis.  Once a month, we scanned every book in the entire store to make sure it was shelved properly and to pull returns which were shipped back to publishers for credit.  Returns are books that the home office inventory control department deem as being overstocked or slow sellers.  That’s right.  The life of a book on your local B&N shelf is regulated like stale pastries being rotated in a bakery. Hardcover books about to be released in paperback might also come up as needing to be returned, which is how I came upon one book in particular one slow evening while scanning the fiction section.  It was a lone hardcover copy of Matthew Stadler’s Allan Stein.

I liked the way the title rolled off my tongue.  It reminded me of Frankenstein. Its pale gold color, white letters, and raised laced scrim on the cover caught my attention.  For being a hardcover book, it’s 7 x 5 size also appealed to me.  The book felt good in my large hands.  After reading the inside flap, I went to a nearby computer terminal to see why the book was being returned.  It turned out it had been released in paperback in December 1999 and since no one had purchased the last hardcover copy, the home office flagged it to be returned for credit.  I read the first page of the book and decided to buy it despite the higher cost of hardcover copies.

Although I have depleted most of the books on my shelves overtime, selling them on Amazon, donating them to community centers, shipping them to readers on BookMooch, this one copy of Allan Stein has been with me ever since I bought it back in 2001.  Sadly, I have never read Allan Stein…until a few nights ago when I came across it on a shelf.  I debated if I should finally part with the book.  Instead, I sat down and decided to read it.  I’m glad I did because I’m enjoying Stadler’s writing very much.  But this article is not a review of Matthew Stadler.

Like many books I read, thanks to the internet I like to research the book, or what it’s about, or learn about the author themselves.  Googling Matthew Stadler led me to a Wikipedia page where I found the following text and quote:

In a 2008 lecture in Vitoria, Spain, Stadler described publication as “the creation of a public … There is no preexisting public,” he went on. “The public is created through deliberate, willful acts: the circulation of texts, discussions and gatherings in physical space, and the maintenance of a related digital commons. These construct a common space of conversation, a public space, which beckons a public into being. This is publication in its fullest sense.”

This paragraph sparked me to write this article, asking myself, and wanting to ask you the writer, why do we publish? First, here are some of Stadler’s thoughts from the same seminar in Spain, which you can listen to here if you wish.

“In English, publication includes the word ‘public’…publication is the creation of a public. Publication is a political strategy.  It is not an attempt to make beautiful objects.  It is not an attempt to make an accurate record that can be stored and archived…  There is no pre-existing public.  The public that we hear about, which we think about often to our own discouragement, is itself a fiction created by political actors to lend moral authority to their choices. I am interested in publication because I want to create a public. I live in a culture, in a country, that uses the fiction of a main stream public in many ways that I find discouraging, negative, and disempowering but I don’t believe the notion of and the experience of a public needs to be that way… It is imperative that we publish not only as a means to counter the influence of a hegemonic public, but also to reclaim the space in which we imagine ourselves and our collectivity. We feel lonely and powerless when we accept the myth of ‘the main stream public.’ When we accept that fiction we relinquish our ability to form our own collectivities and draw hope from them.”

For me, Stadler’s “public” can be translated as being a writer’s audience. And your audience can be made up of a handful of friends and family, or encompass thousands of people across the country.  Your success should not be measured by how many physical copies of a book you sell, but by how many people make up your audience, your public.  If readers outside your circle of friends and family members are attracted to what you’ve written, your audience grows.  You capture the attention of more and more readers, and the public you have created can thrive with one thing in common:  they have read your words.

It is quite possible that some of those readers will tell others about your book, other people that you do not know and have yet to reach out to.  A new public of readers soon grows outside your personal public, as more and more people pick up your book and read it and tell others.  It’s a chain reaction that depends completely upon two things: the power of your words to speak to the reader, and second, for those words to be powerful enough to make the reader speak to someone else about them.

Publishing itself is a very large public, and as Stadler stated, it’s political.  Think about it.  Go to Amazon.com’s home page and what do you see?  Who do you see?  Walk into any chain bookstore and take a look around.  What books, whose books, do you see up front and center?  Chances are it’s a Dan Brown, a JK Rowling, or a Stephenie Meyer.  It’s not the authors we’ve reviewed on this site.  It’s not the books we have published ourselves.  What gives those books a right to be there?  Politics. So, why do we publish?  Like Stadler said, it is our responsibility to publish to counter influence that public we know as the “traditional publishing industry.”

As self-published authors, we have already disassociated ourselves from the “main stream publishing public.”  And as long as somehow, we arrange and form a public of our own along the way, we are destined to succeed.  As self-published authors, we are already “saving the earth”  by not wasting trees to make paper for huge print runs of books that may or may not sell.  We are not eating up valuable sale space on chain bookstore shelves where our books must be checked monthly for proper shelving or possibly pulled off the shelf, packed,  and returned to a publisher for credit as I mentioned before.  Our books are not eating up warehouse space, destined to become a clearance book and resold to B&N buying groups for people perusing the bargain aisle and buying us for half price while sipping an expensive latte. We are not wasting ink, paper, or payroll.

And yet, self-published books are frowned upon because of their price, their nonreturnable status, and often their poor editing.   POD is practically a Star of David a writer may or may not wear proudly. It can be the most discouraging, most expensive, most time consuming project to ever eat up a writer’s time, in the end preventing them from devoting time to their real craft which led them down this path to begin with.  And yet, more and more writers are turning to self publishing each year, snubbing their noses back at that “elite” traditional main stream public.

Print on Demand publishing is, in fact, like many art forms and is not bound to traditional rules and formats deemed necessary by well paid editors, publicists, and traditional publishing models who are out to appease their public in a certain way whether through wizards, vampires, or religious thrillers, or whatever else everyone thinks they need to read because everyone else around them is reading it too.  A traditional author may sit down and tell the story they wanted to tell, but it may not end up being the story their readers finally purchase in the end.  The essence of their story is whittled away like pieces of wood at a carver’s knife or like film strips on a director’s cutting room floor.

Though a certain level of formatting and consistency is expected in POD, isn’t it interesting that blogs and how-to guides everywhere teach us how to make our book look like everyone else’s?  We try to fool the main stream market into thinking our book is one of theirs.  And yet, self-publishing is the perfect way for a writer to publish when he doesn’t want to follow the norm, he wants to be experimental, and he wants to stand out from the rest.  And yet, the traditional public ridicules him for doing that.

Even Stadler was disappointed with the narrow interests of the big time New York publishers that published his books and the main stream magazines and journals (like the New York Times) which he wrote for.  He decided to go his own way and he started his own journals to focus on the writing he wanted to bring to a public. He co-founded Clear Cut Press as a part of that movement.  Suddenly.org, another of Stadler’s projects, developed out of his Using Global Media workshop.  This workshop focused on what he calls “the ecology of publication” (that is, the combination of printed texts with public gatherings and an associated digital commons).

Stadler self-published an annotated reader for Suddenly.org, and guess who he used to do it?  Lulu.com!  It’s called Where We Live Now. Here’s a quote from that Wikipedia page that states the beauty of self-publishing quite nicely for you:

Suddenly distributes the book by programming public conversations in many cities around the world, so that rather than having a large reservoir of printed copies that must be stored until they are pushed out through market pipelines, suddenly cultivates conversations that then draw the books out one-by-one from the printer, like sponges drawing water.

So, why do we publish? For me, it stopped being about the money a long time ago.  Actually, it never was about the money.  I never set myself up for disappointment by thinking that my self-published book with Xlibris back in 2003 would put me on the New York Times Bestseller list.  I said from the very beginning if I could walk into a bookstore and see my name on a book on the shelf, I accomplished what I’d set out to do.  And I’ve done it twice now.

For me, it’s a review on Amazon from a complete stranger.  It’s an email from a reader in another state I’ve never met before.  It’s being befriended on MySpace or Facebook by someone telling me they enjoyed my work.  It’s a book review by another author who offers me a serious critique.  It’s someone asking me when my next book is coming out, or what am I writing now. It’s that feeling of elation when someone tells me, “I’m reading your book.”  You’re reading me?  You could be reading Harry Potter or Twilight or The Da Vinci Code or anything else that any of us has heard of or read before, but you are reading me!?  It’s quite simply talking about my book with someone who has read it and learning how it made them feel.  It’s having the chance to learn what emotions my words evoked.

It’s lying awake at night in bed and envisioning the scenes I’m going to write in the morning.  It’s breathing so much life into a character on the page they make me laugh out loud, or even cry.  So much that I can talk about them like they are a real person.  It’s stressing over the perfect title for the book or for just one chapter.  It’s visiting a place or seeing a painting or reading about some event and being inspired so much by it I make a mental note to put it in a story.  It’s sitting down and creating a chapter or an entire story about whatever inspired me.  It’s so much more than this, but by now, you get it.  At least, I hope you do.  And for you, a writer, you know what it is that makes you want to write, what it is that makes you want to publish.  You’ve already started making a mental list of them while reading this.

Of course, in this technological age self-publishing has broken off into two formats: paper and digital.  For the sake of this article, I won’t discuss digital publishing right now. I still like the feel of that hardbound book of paper and ink and cardboard in my hand, no matter if it was the last one on the shelf or a copy printed on demand just for me or for my own public.  I think Matthew Stadler does too.  He says the internet lacks literary closure.  Like browsers in a bookstore, our internet browsers show us thousands of words everyday and we can never read all of them.

But a book, a published book, is much different.   It requires focus.  It requires attention.  It has a beginning and… it has an end.  Even now, that blue “Publish” button taunts me from the margin of this site’s administrative dashboard, eager for me to press it and publish these words for you, my public, to see.  Dare I press it?  Dare I publish these words, these political views of my own, for you the visitor, the reader, the public, to read?  I think I will.

After all, why do we publish?

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