Politician and author Michael Dobbs was a guest on the radio today. When discussing his career as a writer (he wrote House of Cards) he remarked that e-books are a boon for authors. The reason? Dobbs said he planned to revise some of his novels and republish them as e-books. So e-books, then, provide this new possibility of spinning out old work for new money — why go to the bother of writing a new novel when you can re-sell the old one with minimal extra work?
This is, after all, the age of recycling and energy conservation — so by use of the right buzz words, by using the right weasel words, Dobbs can even make what he is doing sound like a virtue, a task undertaken for the greater benefit of society.
I wrote an e-book and have sold a very modest number. I offered my book around to
numerous publishers and was turned down. I couldn’t even get an agent to
represent me, so going online was the only way to get my book out there.
The thing about the net is once something is out there, you never know who is going to
end up with it. I have no regrets going this route and am busy writing a second book.
If nothing else, my idea’s are out there and maybe someday, someone will see them and
see them for what they are. It only takes one person and I am waiting for that one person
to take up my case. Someday, I shall return to my book and revise it, but not today and not
anytime soon.
In Victorian times a favourite past time was the writing of pamphlets. The Victorians were prolific writers — of letters, of pamphlets and of larger works of all kinds from the improving to the protesting to the salubrious. Many of these people were self-publicists and they got read by simply handing their work out, putting it through letter boxes — use your imagination. You are suffering from techno-disability i.e. now that technology can do this or that for you, you have lost sight of the fact that people used to do this and that before modern technology was available. You have lost the imagination to see how you CAN do this and that without the technology. You’d be surprised how easy it is to build a printing machine (it doesn’t have to be perfect quality) and how you can find reams of cheap paper if you look — I’ve sometimes found it being sold cheap in charity shops or being able to get hold of rolls of paper for very little money.
Also, one book can be passed around. There was an artist who gave blank books to friends. He had filled in the first few pages and every person who received a book was asked to fill in a page themselves with whatever thay wanted and pass it on to somebody else. The artist left his name and address on the books (I think he sent out a thousand) and the person to fill in the last page was asked to return the book by post. That was using your imagination. Without technology, people use their imagination far more and added to the achievement of writing a book is the achievement of getting it produced and circulated.
In the Victorian times they had to print because they had no option to print. If you opted to print now you’re merely doing so either from being a kind of modern luddite or out of some fixation on the print. There’s really very little cause for a write to publish like that nowadays because the digital format and the Internet allow for much cheaper production and much greater circulation - which are proper considerations when publishing. Paper is a novelty. The only problem I have with the ease of use and accessibility of the digital format and self-publishing routes is that it basically allows for the proliferation of crap. Maybe there’s a reason the books that are being self-published weren’t picked up by a publisher, maybe they’re simply not good enough. However, I would also agree with the objection of the publisher being the judge of who or what is good enough. Another example is the artist you spoke of. I mean, really, if you think about the finished product of his project, is it really worth a place on your bookshelf? Its basically a compilation of random images that probably lack any sort of meaning or…structure. Whimsical doodles, a collection of. Sounds like a load of crap to me.
Is it really worth a place on your bookshelf? I think that misses the point. It is the doing rather than the spectating that I think is most important. Life is for living, not for spectating, but our society has turned that upside down — you get to sell more that way. It’s just a matter of business. So if you change your priorities and insist that art is for perople, not business, then the doing comes before the selling. And once one does get one’s priorities right, looking at such artistic oddities IS intereting and enjoyable and rewarding. Similarly this insistence on “structure” is artificial, and more to do with business than art.