Be your own best publisher

Some of you may already be following my husband’s blog about his adventures in self-publishing — and the adventure gets more interesting (and inspiring) every day. Last week, The Tourist Trail was featured in the Kindle Nation newsletter and quickly soared to the top of the Kindle Store’s “Movers & Shakers” list.

Not bad for an author whose agent was told by editors that there was no audience for his book.

Fortunately, digital publishing and print-on-demand make it easy for authors to find their audiences — and these days it seems as if this is becoming a necessary first step. And there are no shortage of success stories out there: This Newsweek article highlights several self-published authors, among them Boyd Morrison, who was courted for his self-published book, The Ark, by the same publishers who had previously rejected him. This New York Times Magazine piece reminds us that self-published writers include Gertrude Stein, Anaïs Nin, and Edgar Allan Poe. And The New Yorker takes a good look at the industry through the changes that digital media have brought to publishing.

Self-publishing isn’t simple or easy, by any means, as John’s blog will tell you. And promoting yourself without a publisher behind you is even more daunting. But it’s well worth it if you believe in your book and want it to find readers. This NYT story is about a writer who sells his books on New York subway trains — and he’s sold more than 14,000 books over the last three years, one at a time.

Anis Shivani writes in this snarky article on the Huffington Post: “As for conglomerate publishing, the decision-makers wouldn’t know great literature if it hit them in the face.” Ouch. But this is an important article about the ways in which our experience of literature has been limited by the gatekeepers in the publishing industry — and how the gates are now opening up in a huge way. And this means that it’s the readers themselves who now decide what’s worth reading.