Why self-publish? Your book's a startup company, that's why

As promised in my previous post, here's an exchange that offers some interesting food for thought to any writer searching for a publisher.

For Jim Rossi, the answer is simple: Don't look on the web or in a guidebook for a publisher. Look in the mirror.

That's what Rossi decided as he prepared his forthcoming book, Crucible: The Mojave and the Quest for Solar Power. A contributor to a variety of publications (including book reviews for the Los Angeles Times Book Review during my tenure there), he declined the traditional route -- and a traditional publisher's offer -- to self-publish his first book, which is an examination of the possibilities and implications of solar energy in the 21st century.

When he first told me that he'd declined a traditional offer, I have to admit that I was a little surprised: Doesn't every author dream of such an offer? Huh?

Sort of -- if it's the right kind of offer, as Rossi explains below.

The following remarks certainly aren't the definitive last word on the subject. But I hope that you'll treat them as a fresh starting-point for your own journey as an author -- a provocation that may whet your appetite and inspire you to start thinking outside the box when it comes to the fate of your own manuscript.

And, as always, my friends, your thoughts are welcome.

 What is your book about?

The title of my book is Crucible: The Mojave and the Quest for Solar Power, due out in Fall 2014. Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

I moved to UNLV from San Francisco in 2011 to study the evolution of the solar industry as it happens – environmental history and climate change, but also business, policy, and technology. How will the lessons learned here in the Mojave – with its ideal sun, open land, and transmission lines going to innovation-rich Southern California -- affect the future of energy around the world?

That's a terrific topic. Did you think of publishing in the traditional way – get an agent, get a deal, get published – or were you already thinking of the self-pub route?

Absolutely, yes. I initially thought of the traditional route.  Writers look forward to the day that they receive their first publishing offer for their first book.

What I never expected was that I would turn that offer down.

Why did you turn it down?

It was an academic publisher: small initial print run, high price, no e-book, and no marketing plan to reach the general reader – my natural market.

There are many fine reasons to write., but the only reason that ever turned my crank is to give as many people as possible the chance to read my work – to hopefully be entertained while learning something useful to them. The academic publisher could not offer that, so we amicably parted ways.

“Marketing,” said Peter Drucker, “is seeing the business through the customer’s eyes.” Once I started thinking this way – like a businessperson – self-publishing made more and more sense. What, exactly, could a publisher offer me?

Your decision makes sense the way you explain it. Your purpose and strategy just didn't mesh with what this publisher could offer.

Even so, I think it still takes courage and conviction to go it alone. What other factors were behind your decision?

Mainly, I spoke to four different people and found one book that helped me to make a business decision to self-publish.

The first person was Cosmic Ray of Flagstaff, Arizona. He’s a good friend who has sold over 200,000 copies of his self-published mountain biking and hiking guidebooks – headlined by Arizona Fat Tire Tales and Trails. He’s helped me with the nuts-and-bolts of selling books via Amazon and bookstores.

The second person was Dominic Marrocco, an e-commerce entrepreneur and Honorary Fellow at UNLV and another close friend. His advice, in a nutshell:  Treat my book like a start-up company. Why sell the rights when you can reach your customers yourself, selling them the exact book that you want to write, and keep the profits?

The third person was my buddy Jake Meltzer, a search engine optimization (SEO) guru in San Francisco. He’s taken a lot of the mystery out of how I can use internet search and social media to help potential readers around the world to find my book.

The fourth person was San Francisco agent Michael Larsen.  Larsen explained that big publishers market big names, and small publishers have small – or non-existent – marketing budgets. His advice, also in a nutshell: The publishing world has fundamentally changed. Why not publish Crucible on your own, market it yourself, and cut out the middleman?

Your strategy doesn't rule out eventually signing with a big, mainstream publisher, either.

That's right. If the book is successful, a big publisher can offer me a deal for an updated version or a sequel book. And it will be my choice.

And what about the book that you mentioned above? Which one inspired your decision? 

The book that got me thinking was Deep: The Story of Skiing and the Future of Snow by Porter Fox. Here was a writer with years of experience writing for big publications – just like myself – self-publishing his work of serious, journalistic nonfiction, and finding success. That was enough for me.

 RELATED:

• Author background: Profile of Jim Rossi at LinkedIn

•  Ebooks Econo 101: Cheaper is Not Always Better

Coming soon: Why you might consider self-publishing your book

The term "vanity press" is quickly going out of date -- it has far less to do today with ego or self-gratification than it does with practicality and an awareness of conditions in the publishing industry. Over the years, it's been exciting and encouraging to hear about many authors who have built successful careers and followings based on work that has been self-published. Once upon a time, self-publishing was considered a last resort, but now there are many advantages to this enterprise even though your work won't be attached to one of the big, laureled New York City firms. I recently talked to Jim Rossi, an L.A. Times book reviewer I worked with on many occasions, about his decision to decline a legit publisher's offer in favor of going the self-publication route. Jim's explanation is candid and insightful, and, if you happen to be a writer struggling to find a publisher, his solution might appeal to you.

Our conversation will appear at Call of the Siren once the upcoming U.S. holiday is over. (Sorry for the tease. I'm just too busy right now stockpiling firecrackers and skyrockets!)

Until  then, I'd like to whet your appetite for that conversation with a contrarian view in this embedded article by James McGrath Morris at The Santa Fe New Mexican, "Ebooks Econ 101: Cheaper is not always better." Morris is enlightening on the downsides of ebook publishing in particular, although the arguments contained in his article don't necessarily negate the choices that Rossi has made ... or that you might make one day,my friends.

The Wright choice for poet laureate

The Library of Congress exercised superb judgment earlier this month by selecting Charles Wright to succeed Natasha Trethewey as  U.S. poet laureate. There are few modern giants still standing in the world of poetry -- there's W.S. Merwin, of course, but I have a hard time identifying too many others (I welcome any and all of your suggestions, my friends).

Let's see ... Geoffrey Hill, Paul Muldoon, Mary Jo Salter, Carol Ann Duffy ... ?

Wright is undeniably a part of this group. He's not only prolific; he also practices his craft well within that shimmering notion of a "tradition" that T.S. Eliot described in his famous, foundational essay.

Which made me a little surprised with some of the announcements of Wright's naming, especially in the Washington Post, because they emphasize (and over-repeat) that Wright is a "Southern poet" who was born in Tennessee.

They refer to his Southern background so many times that it seems like they're surprised by it, or else it's some kind of novelty. I can't help visualizing him in some stereotypical way -- as having a drawl or listening to Carrie Underwood (I don't know, maybe he does).

It's not that: It's just that the geographic insistence gives the impression to unfamiliar audiences that Wright is some kind of regional talent, not the bearer of literary tradition in a grander, older context (which he is).

The Wright I know is the admirer (disciple?) of Dante who describes his experience of reading Inferno during a summer in Laguna Beach, Calif., in an essay included in the volume The Poet's Dante (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

Or else, for me, Wright is the speaker  who has an intriguing encounter in the poem "A Journal of the Year of the Ox":

Who is it here in the night garden, Gown a transparent rose Down to his ankles, great sleeves Spreading the darkness around him wherever he steps, Laurel corona encircling his red transparent head cap, Pointing toward the Madonna?

This mysterious figure has some advice for the poem's speaker about his craft, about life in general:

Brother, remember the way it was In my time: nothing has changed: Penitents terrace the mountainside, the stars hang in their                      bright courses And darkness is still the dark:                      concentrate, listen hard, Look to the nature of all things....

There are many works in which poets describe imagined meetings with other poets. Dante meets Arnaut Daniel in Purgatorio ... Eliot encounters a poet (Yeats?) in Little Gidding ... Heaney meets Joyce in Station Island .... and Wright speaks to Dante in the above passage. There now, do you see it? Tradition.

A full circle.

There's a linkage to the distant literary past that's vitally alive in Wright's poetry, as this passage might suggest, and I'm excited by the Library of Congress' decision for a simple reason: It may give an immensely important poet a chance to become even more widely known.

RELATED:

Paris Review: J.D. McClatchy in conversation with Charles Wright

Merwin the mighty

One of the great privileges of my life — aside from being a husband and a father, of course — was meeting W.S. Merwin. He was eager to get home to Hawaii, to his wife, to his gardens, but we talked for about an hour while he was visiting Claremont McKenna College a few years ago. I had my connections to the college, and my identity as a rep for a large newspaper, and that created the kind of opportunity that only seems possible in a dream. But I was also forewarned that he was leery of interviews and suspicious of reporters because they routinely mangled the currency of his craft and took his comments out of context. I was reminded of that warning after reading a comment included in a Huff Post article about a new film of the poet's life. Merwin sounds like a person whose life is characterized mainly by "I don't...":

"He said 'I'm not going to talk about Buddhism and I'm not going to talk about my writing process,' and on top of that, he's just a deeply private person," the filmmaker says in the article. Merwin  "put some creative parameters on what the film is."

Initially, I felt the same parameters. Especially when he eyed the digital recorder in my shirt breast-pocket. He told me not to use it. What could I do?  I tried so hard to keep up with the flow of his thoughts, but I couldn't scribble fast enough.

I knew his work pretty well, especially his Purgatorio translation and early poetry, and the lovely little book about his years in Provence. I asked him question after question. Maybe that made a difference.

I also started expressing my  frustrations over the fate of a manuscript, and he didn't hide his irritation at the whole marketing process, either. It was a revelation. The whole thing bothered him--Him!--too. When he talked about visiting Ezra Pound at St. Elizabeth's, it felt like a flash-bomb had gone off in my face -- Pound, for God's sake, he knew Pound!

He was as generous to me, and as passionate about his work, as the young Princeton student who once talked poetry with John Berryman:

I asked how can you ever be sure that what you write is really any good at all and he said you can't

you can't you can never be sure you die without knowing whether anything you wrote was any good if you have to be sure don't write

And suddenly I heard those words that I'd never expected to hear. He pointed at my recorder and said,  "ok, you can let it run a little."

RELATED: MERWIN AND ME

• Los Angeles Times: A Q & A with M.S. Merwin
• Call of the Siren: On poets and the poetry presses
• Los Angeles Times: Merwin in the South of France

The myth of summer reading

June is here, and so are the summer reading lists… and, always, as I scan these lists, at my back I hear, Time's winged chariot drawing near .... And I'm bored to tears.

Maybe I'm getting old, or too jaded from compiling lists like these for the Times for many a season, but nothing seems to spell tedium or wasted time more than the lists that media outlets want you to use to fill up your vacation time.

To borrow from another myth, I'd rather roll a boulder up a hill and down again, and then up again and … you get the idea.

What these tiring (and tiresome) lists and random sets of suggestions remind me of is something else:  how the old cyclical nature of publishing is completely gone.

Traditionally Spring and Fall have been the big seasons for the book business. That didn't mean that Winter and Summer were dark -- only that the titles with the greatest chance of spectacular success, financially and intellectually, usually didn't appear then.

I know what you're thinking: There are more windows of opportunity now. A writer who didn't appear in the Spring/Fall now has a better chance of finding an audience. You're right. I couldn't agree more, especially since I share that hope.

But what I'm simply responding to here is how dull and dry the summer reading lists look this year! Various newspapers, magazines, and online publications are telling us to indulge this season in wild, juicy, carefree reading like it's an adulterous affair or a drug habit.

The problem is, most of the lists that I've found -- aside from J.P. Morgan's interesting "billionaire's" list leaked recently -- seem far from offering anything wild or, more important, worthwhile. If you're a Stephen King fan, I suppose you have to read "Mr. Mercedes" -- but what I recommend is shunning the summer lists altogether. Do some research on your own. Search the smaller presses for something admirable that would otherwise fall below the radar and plunge into it when you're not plunging off a diving board or a dock.

And that gives me an idea for my next post: a list of small presses worth your time and consideration. Maybe some titles, too? Coming soon!

I'm sorry for the curmudgeonly tone, my friends, but what do you think? Am I overlooking any forthcoming titles that I should treat like the crack of the literary world?  Let me know. Onward!

RELATED:

• The Wall Street Journal on what the billionaires will be reading this summer