I'm Too Sexy for Your House

I have this terrible habit of discovering something awesome and then assuming without any doubt that everyone ever has already discovered it, is actively using it, and doesn't want to hear about it. On the off-chance that I'm wrong (more like the on-chance), I'd like to talk about why I chose not to publish my novel with a publishing house.

It started when I was rewriting my thesis for publication. Suddenly I realized that I didn't know what publication was. I could dimly glimpse an island of published authors across a deep abyss, and I couldn't find a bridge. There was just some dude with a flimsy para sail that read "Writer's Market," and you could pay him a hundred bucks to strap a few copies of your manuscript onto the para sail and chuck it across the abyss. If you were thrifty and clever, you only used a few chapters - enough to make the Loch Ness Publisher hungry so that he might come and feed on your words as you snap his picture for a chunk of change from Star magazine.

Basically, it's like job hunting. I won't apply, or seriously apply, if I don't see the possibility of a result.

The thunderbolt of self-publishing hit me as a serious option and not "something that people who just couldn't get published do" when I was in a meeting with a technical writer and a publishing house for which I was considering contracting. I was supposed to 'jazz' up the technical parts, to be digested by an audience with no attention span. Suddenly I realized that I was doing all this to get somewhere else, to be in the writer's or the publisher's seat, or both.

Since then, I have stumbled across a ton of useful information on self-publishing. While I started out on Lulu, I soon realized that there was little difference between them and other publishing companies. Lulu and MyPublisher are great for glossy family gifts and perhaps photo books, but functionally, they're a lot of trouble. Digitally speaking, Amazon's services and Smashword's ebook services are just getting in the way.

These services define the term middleman. For a control freak that can become playful once I get my playground set up, a middleman is a nightmare. The middleman is what says, "Wait. Don't do anything yet. We have to validate verify your work first." In the publishing industry especially, it's common to need a project completed yesterday, but not having the green light to begin work. I decided to work with the red light.

Making my own books can be a lot of trouble - gluey and messy, but it's worth it to retain complete creative control, to delve into formatting, and to be read. Just a reminder, you can purchase a copy of Crow Hunter - I start dishing out copies March 9, or you can download it for free today.