I have encountered a lot of angst regarding traditional publishing, aimed at both the companies and agents who seem to act like gatekeepers of good taste. I recently read a comment here on Substack which basically said perhaps the problem is not with traditional publishing itself, but with the crappiness of the writing. They put it in more polite words, but that was the gist. And it got me thinking.
As a writer, I don’t think I am too bad at it. I learnt a lot with the publication of NeoTokyo Dead as a book, much of it centring on my utterly blasé attitude to editing which persisted until about a month before publication. It was at that point, I panicked. It was a very fast series of editing runs through the whole story, and I finally had a version I could live with. I think NeoTokyo Dead is better than crappy, and the fact I went independent with it was due to a massive factor concerning traditional publishing and emerging authors, as I have experienced it.
One of the first novels I completed had the working title The Exiles. Weighing in at around one hundred thousand words, it was no light-weight, but was not exactly a neutrino star, either. Almost to see what would happen, I submitted the manuscript to the open submission slush file of a publisher on the other side of the globe. That was more than a year and a half ago. I checked with the publisher several months ago to see if they were still interested in the manuscript, and they told me the process would take longer. So, I am still waiting and not doing anything with The Exiles.
This is not a criticism of traditional publishing. Such time frames are the nature of the beast, so to speak. With thousands of unsolicited manuscripts coming in every year, the publishers cannot be expected to work small miracles with the limited staffing they have. Managers and staff checking and vetting manuscripts have a tonne of other work they also need to balance and complete, so emerging authors like myself have to learn patience.
And that was the problem for me approaching the publication of NeoTokyo Dead. I did not want to wait for more than a year for someone else’s decision. Not to mention it is a novella, which is not a format many publishers look for. The format was born of my choice to move the story of Killian Devon from online platforms to a book format, and it was a move in which I shot myself in the foot.
Perhaps my biggest issue with traditional publishing is not the publishers themselves, or the agents who gate-keep access to many of them. My problem is the persistence of the belief that traditional publishing somehow bestows some form of legitimacy upon writers and the worth of their work. It is true, some independent writers should probably not publish their work due to a lack of quality, as some people have claimed. However, in my experience, I have had only one book from an indie author which I found so atrociously written, I could not finish it. The vast majority of indie authors are putting out high quality work, and it is imminently readable. The idea that a company’s selection of a book is somehow more legitimate for the author, giving them added prestige in the marketplace of ideas, is flaccid and erroneous, at best.
Independent authors like Randolph Lalonde, Joseph R. Lallo, and a whole tonne of people on Substack, lose no worth through their choices to control their own books and destiny by keeping their works out of the hands of agents and publishers. I would even go so far as to say the empowerment and enabling of independent authors and self-publishing is one of the only good things Amazon has achieved in its miserably controversial life. With other companies emerging outside the Amazosphere, the independent industry appears healthy and vital. That alone should help move perceptions away from the bias towards traditional publishing.
The response of many independent authors to the influx and arrival of Large Language Model (LLM) generated books also torpedoes arguments seeking to undermine the quality of our work. The one book I could not stomach finishing, mentioned above, was written before LLM’s became a mainstream thing. On top of that, there has been a significant “human only” kick-back across a number of artistic industries, of which writing is only one. Such responses give us a fair indication that indie authors are, by and large, not going to indulge in using LMM’s to do any of their writing for them. And many of us refuse to use AI for any part of the writing process, from research to the post-writing preparation, like covers and blurbs. It has only been in the wake of independent authors taking a stand against LMM’s that publishing companies have started to take a similar position.
Is traditional publishing a good idea to go for? Sure it is, if it is a model that fits you, and you have a lot of patience and a thick skin. For those of us who lack either or both of these qualities, self publishing can make a lot more sense. I have not given up on traditional publishing, but I am more willing to forge my own path, and make my own mistakes along the way.
You might enjoy my cyberpunk novella, which is available on Amazon!
I just reached a turning point in my publishing endeavors. Not sure how it'll go from here. I could stop writing and let my head explode from the overload of ideas. I could keep writing and just let them pile up on the hard drive of my laptop computer. I could bite the bullet and try to self-publish (the first time at anything is always the scariest). Or I could start querying every publisher and lit agent who accepts upmarket fiction. I knew this day would come, but not this soon. Sigh.