From The What, How & Why Now Of My First Book by Adam Fike.
Part Three: The How & Why Now.
At the end of the last century, my Wife-To-Be and I were in the process of moving West.
I had a very shabby draft of the book together. So, I bought one of those publishing guides with all the New York and London addresses. The newest one that year. Thick. Pricey. Very specific about which places are looking for submissions and which are not. With very specific instructions about whether to send samples, and which ones, along with your polite pitch-letter, worded very much like a Beatles’ song.
Over a long period of time, there was a lot of printing and envelopes and stamps. Neat piles of paper across the carpet. I remember it as all very stressful. Then off they went.
Then they came back. Most of them, though I eventually stopped counting. Unopened, with angry red ink. Sometimes in stamp form, some in pointed handwriting: No Submissions!
I would hold the envelopes up next to the listing in the book and shrug. Enough of that. And into the drawer it went.
However, there was a lot to suggest that things would change in terms of publishing. To what extent and precisely how, no one could guess (except for, of course, some future Bond Villain I can think of, currently making our world a more magical place).
When my Dad started out in the printing industry in the 1960’s, in the Washington D.C. area, printing was as important as tourism and points were called picas. When I was a kid, he co-owned a large company that did pre-press and color separation for offset lithography. He had to start his own courier company to get all the elements around town. They owned an early computer system that could do basic effects, like put the texture of an orange on an apple. By the 1980’s, the loan on one piece of equipment, around the size of small car, started at a million dollars.
These days that’s called Photoshop. You could probably do most of it in your phone. The building’s still there, though.
Book publishing for authors traditionally breaks down to a writer convincing an agent to convince a publisher to add their words to the thousands of pages they’ll be printing next year. Because mainly their business is filling warehouses with books. They get paid more when the books sell. It’s a shame when they don’t. Either way, they also make money to produce them and write off any loses. Publishers are simply printers with snootier cocktail parties.
The simple market psychology of all this is rooted in the fact that life is short. People simply want somebody to sign off before they waste their time paying attention. So, the better the person vouching for the individual, the further they fly. As a reader, if the Big Publisher likes you, and the airport kiosk sells you in a big way, then how bad could you be? And the Big Publisher simply figures, well, that Fancy Agent likes this writer, and the Fancy Agent needs to make money as much as I do, so let’s give it a whirl. They pay themselves to do the art, they pay themselves to the do the marketing. You fly yourself to do the talk shows. And they make much more money printing text books.
So I guess I decided to wait until that all went away a little bit.
I’d spent my High School and College years learning to be a community newspaper reporter. Then that kind of reporter and that kind of news went away. I showed up in Los Angeles and spent a few happy years on independent movie sets, in offices making pitches, finding locations, feeding crews, renting equipment and navigating the world of post production, until technology, 2008 and a poorly-timed Writer’s strike drove independent film from the Earth. So I know how things end. What I started looking around for instead is something brand new.
And that’s Ingram and that’s Amazon. And that’s direct-print publishing.
My Bride now publishes a travel magazine which has an almost half-million piece run, twice a year, through POD printers. The magazines pop out, one at a time, from a big, automated, printer/binder system at a fraction of the traditional cost or time. And each one is fully customizable.
My first real job was sweeping the floor of one of my Dad’s printing shops. Those warehouses full of spinning metal plates are gone. The eccentric and expert press operators with gigantic overtime checks, gone. Cans and cans of ink. Huge pallets of paper. The scary machine with a big open blade that could cut through a telephone book. Trucks so full of paper they sink into hot asphalt. That noise. Those smells. Gone. My first newspaper job on a small-town daily, my chair a few feet from a pair of swinging doors and a whirring press spitting our words onto the street. Long gone.
The good news is, you may never have to buy a chatty lunch for an overpriced book agent ever again.
Full disclosure, here’s Amazon’s hustle, good and bad. Your book, even electronically, is an item for sale like anything else on Kindle Publishing, a corporation both benevolent and evil, sort of like fire. They give you a marketplace and access to remarkable technology that lets you format and distribute your work, yourself, directly to a reader all the way across the world. Not for free, of course. They take their cut on both your ebook and your paperback. And . . . (if you’d happen to like not disappearing into a vast abyss of competing products) they want you to buy their ads, per click, in a big way, on a regular basis. If enough clicks become sales, you win. Either way, pay up. Sounds fine. Except . . . Amazon. Those folks don’t make it easy. Again, that’s another essay for another day.
So, where does that leave us?
A traditional publisher does, and always did, look to the author to promote themselves, or at least have the decency to be famous in the first place. Which is why a celebrity chef or former actor or disgraced politician will always have a place and there will always be that industry on some level. Coffee tables need books too. This won’t change. These authors will always carry the full support of a giant, historically successful mechanism.
For contemporary fiction, however, for the first time since Guttenberg first published the bible, somebody writing a story really has nothing standing between themselves and the person reading. (And yes, this includes in airports and on beaches.)
Fine, but with this sudden rush of words into the marketplace, how will the cream rise, as it were? What about all the inevitable not-ready-for-an-audience nonsense?
Don’t worry. Turns out, everybody’s a critic. I am confident it will all find a way to curate itself . . . and so begins the next hustle.
Which brings us back to me. Hi. In my experience, making things is easy. It’s showing it to people that’s hard.
I pushed the publish-on-Amazon button on this book last year and headed to the airport for the holidays. The sensation was that of walking around with all of your skin peeled off. Terrifying, but, you know, brisk.
It reminded me of this one last story. At that printing shop I worked at as a kid, a guy came to the loading dock one afternoon, looking for a box of books they’d just put together. The book was, I think, a history of classic matchbook covers. They were his. Put it together himself. Paid for it himself. He had no real way to sell it or anything. This was end of the 80’s. Maybe flea markets or something. Fellow collectors.
There was real teenage dissonance for me in that moment, looking at that poor guy smiling down at the first book he dug out of the box, turning it over in his hands. I mean, it’s not like somebody picked him up and brushed him off and said, hey, come with me, my super-special friend, because you too are an extraordinary creator of thought, with a stamp on your spine that proves to all that you are one of us!
Isn’t that the way it is supposed to happen? Wasn’t he cheating somehow? Or pretending? Wasn’t this just a regular guy?
Yeah, Paul, so he was. And so am I.
For more info about: Lights Along The Interstate
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