Print On Demand and Writers

It's astonishingly easy and inexpensive to publish a paperback book today. There are great advantages and also disadvantages to writers as a result.

An advantage is expressed by a writer friend, who recently wrote me about her desire to learn how to publish POD books herself.

I want to do just what you have done: get out of those corporate clutches, bypass their absurdities, get on with my writing and to hell with their agents and their bullshit. I'll judge my own work. And Amazon for me is a way to archive what I write. Thank you, thank you for leading the way on this. Now I get what you have been up to for the last ten years, shouting in the wilderness, sometimes, but the snails like me do get there. I feel liberated, thanks to you. [name deleted] evidently does, too.

It must be said that both this writer and the one referred to are seniors with traditional writing credits in their past. One, a well known poet, had a memoir accepted by a prestigious small press but publication delayed not once or twice but three times because of a shortage of funds. She gave up and decided to publish POD herself.

These writers, like me and so many thousands of writers of literary work, have been marginalized by changes in the marketplace dictated by the corporate takeover of publishing houses and a new "bottom line" philosophy. A generation ago, literary books were published by major houses in hopes they'd break even. Then why publish them? Because they were good, even though their audience was small. It was a publisher's duty to do this, to keep the literary culture healthy.

Ha ha ha ha! Boy are those days gone!

So in the new marketplace, writers of literary books that couldn't be marketed as something else -- a mystery, a memoir, a thriller -- found few places to go to get publlished. And then came digital technology. Today writers can publish themselves with very little tech skill required, except for cover design. But should they?

There is no doubt that POD technology is a great blessing for older writers who have a track record, or at least experience, in traditional publishing. The new tech lets their work exist. Existence of work is no small benefit. At least it's out there, at least it can be found. Many of us have experiences of an old work being "rediscovered" by someone after years of gathering dust somewhere. This would not happen if the work doesn't exist somewhere. Cyberspace is as good as a library shelf.

But for younger writers, I think POD tech is a temptation to avoid. This is when it flirts with being an easier clone of Vanity Publishing. Young writers need the experience of being edited and improved, and being rejected. Rejection is an essential part of the real world. They need validation despite this. If a younger writer starts publishing POD from the start, I fear the work will suffer from the lack of editorial input, feedback, challenges -- unless the writer is a rare genius.

I would like to see major publishing houses start POD imprints of literary novels. I have no idea why they haven't done this already.

I also would like to see the birth of an influential critical journal that focuses on POD and online work with the purpose of bringing the good stuff to a wider audience. There's too much stuff out there. There's too much bad stuff even as there is good stuff.

It's all too easy today. As Stein said to Hemingway, "Remarks, Ernest, are not literature."