Traditional
publishing? Author services? “Vanity presses”? Self-publishing? The options can
be overwhelming.
When author Tanyo Ravicz of the independent author cooperative Running Fox Books wrote to tell me
he’d left an author services arrangement to release fully independent editions
of his books Alaskans and A Man of His Village, I asked if he’d be willing to
share his thoughts on that experience in this Q & A.
What motivates you to
write?
An irrational drive to
give lasting and meaningful shape to the experience of life is what motivates
me to write. The satisfaction comes from engaging other people with the result
of the effort, or, failing that, or in addition to that, in the consciousness
of having written the best prose I can. If my words cause people to smile or
grit their teeth or anxiously knit their brows or to ponder, that’s a rewarding
engagement. Still, apart from that, it’s satisfying to see something in your
own way and to crystallize that vision in penetrating prose.
What made you decide
to forego traditional publishing?
That feels like a
trick question. Honestly, whatever I offer about publishing has to be
understood as coming from someone who’s had the experience several times
repeated since the late 1980s of trying to “get” a literary agent and “get” a
publisher. From the manila envelope to the iPhone, I’ve seen the changes in how
things are done, but I’m not well qualified to speak about traditional
publishing from the inside. By the same token, of course, you wouldn’t expect
me to greatly lament the disruptions to the industry.
The first editions of
your books were published through one of the larger author services companies,
one that’s sometimes called a “vanity press.” How did you choose this
particular service? How did it work out for you?
In 2006 I published
the novel A MAN OF HIS VILLAGE through iUniverse, which was then a young
company and still independent. The results were excellent. I was in my 40s, we
had settled down in California after the years in Alaska, and I had been having
the unpleasantly familiar experience of not being able to convince anyone to
take on a manuscript of mine. There was a difference this time, though, and it
was called print-on-demand technology.
Absolutely
revolutionary. I went with iUniverse because I’d seen one of their posters in
the Barnes & Noble window and I liked the concept. They were also running
an effective whole-page ad series featuring pictures of Virginia Woolf and Walt
Whitman and other literary lights who had published their own work — effective,
I suppose, in normalizing, if not romanticizing, the idea of self-publishing,
or at least diminishing the lingering stigma, though speaking for myself I
never felt much of a stigma. To my mind, the scores of literary agents and
small presses I had tried with the book had made a mistake. A MAN OF HIS
VILLAGE went on to win the top prize in its category in a couple of open
national contests and by publishing it I was able to get out and do events and
sell some books.
Two years later, in
2008, still working with iUniverse, I brought out ALASKANS to coincide with the
50th anniversary of Alaska statehood. It was good timing: I got a bump in
interest in my book with the ascent on the national stage of Sarah Palin.
ALASKANS is a collection of ten stories, two of them Pushcart-nominated and
nine of them previously published in literary magazines, a circumstance I
mention to help to dispel the stereotype that self-published work is unvetted
and unprofessional.
Do people use the term
“vanity press” anymore? This is archaic terminology rooted in the protectionism
of the legacy publishers. It makes me think of those black-and-white ads
discreetly tucked in the back pages of print magazines in the late 1900s. True,
since the early days of print-on-demand publishing, an industry has sprung up
around peripheral marketing services for authors, many of which play to our
vanities; but what’s really happening here is a further closing of the gap
between self-publishing and traditional publishing, which after all is hugely
dependent for its advantage on its marketing machinery.
Recently, you’ve
re-released your books on your own. What prompted you to do this?
Yes, I’ve broken off
with iUniverse and I’ve brought out A MAN OF HIS VILLAGE and ALASKANS in new
authoritative editions under the Denali Press imprint. It’s a way of taking
ownership of my work and moving forward from here.
iUniverse has changed
a lot since 2006. Actually, I hadn’t been entirely happy with the contract to
begin with: I had agreed to a lesser paperback royalty percentage after
iUniverse had represented to me that the discounts would be passed along the
distribution chain. This was something it turned out iUniverse had no control
over. It was a misrepresentation I wouldn’t forget.
Meanwhile iUniverse
was swallowed up by Author Solutions, which in turn was acquired by Pearson, a
division of Penguin, which has recently merged with Random House. This
phenomenon of the old guard publishers getting into the author services
business is interesting. Authors should be aware of what’s going on here
structurally. A company of course wants to claim a share of the sales earned by
the best-selling self-published books, but the ironic bread-and-butter truth is
that these old publishers are partly evolving into “vanity presses” themselves,
establishing divisions to encourage and profit from the “vanity” they earlier
derided.
It’s not as though
iUniverse did a good job anyway. They mismanaged the rise of ebooks, and
speaking of my books in particular, iUniverse botched the ebook conversions. A
reader took the trouble to inform me of this, and this was really the last
straw as far as my attitude to iUniverse goes. Times had changed — the rise of
ebooks, Amazon, Apple, Smashwords — and it was time for me to examine my
options and to move on.
Personally, I needed
to take stock anyway. Every now and then we look around and consider where
we’ve come from and where we’re going. Finding myself again in the position of
finalizing a new book and reaching out to literary agents, I wanted to have a
strategy in place for averting the negative emotions that can come with the
process.
Denali Press (“founded
in Palm Springs, California, a publisher of quality fiction and nonacademic
nonfiction”) is the result. Going forward, this is the rock under my books. I
now have a direct relationship with Amazon, Apple, B&N and Kobo, a list
which may grow as I choose. I register my own titles and I set the look and
prices of the print books and ebooks. With drop caps, a matte cover finish, and
a 5.25 x 8 trim — my choices — these print books are beautiful products that
physically rival (at a more affordable price) the trade paperbacks of the big
players.
The transition has
cost me some months of concentrated effort, but I’ve become an exacting writer
and so I didn’t mind the labor of one last time editing these two books. Also,
the process of establishing a sole proprietorship, designing a logo, setting up
vendor accounts, and so on, teaches valuable lessons. Financially, I’ve
incurred switching costs — for example, I paid a pro to do my ebook conversions
— and I’m in the red again with my writing, but I expect in the long term to
recoup the losses.
Still, we all know how
hard it is to sell books. One-book and two-book authors might be better advised
to just stick with Amazon or an author services outfit and not to bother with
setting up their own imprints.
Let me say too, Deb,
that I had noticed what you were doing with your books over at Running Fox. You
cared enough about your out-of-print books that you weren’t going to let them
stay out of print. Emerging authors can look to you for an example of the
nimbleness and adaptability of today’s writer who doesn’t necessarily reject
tradition but isn’t bound by it.
What publishing
advice do you have for emerging authors?
By all means try to
work with a traditional publisher. A writer isn’t just a witness but also a
participant, and your story as a writer, not the one you write but the one you
live, becomes a part of the record of your time.
Remember that the
established book world, from its editorial reaches to its diminished
infrastructure to its far-flung superstructure (including bookstores and print
journals) has never been especially friendly to self-published authors. In my
experience, there are wonderful exceptions to this rule, but by and large I
find it true. Small publishers face very large hurdles in bringing serious
attention to their titles.
A third reason, if
you’re an emerging author, not to hasten into do-it-yourself publishing is
you’re probably not as good a writer as you’re going to become. Look at your
finished manuscript two or three years from now; I guarantee it won’t seem so
finished.
At a certain point,
though, a pile of rejected manuscripts is toxic for a writer. If you don’t look
out for your writing, no one will. Act.
Act. Act.
If you’ve internalized
the misconception that traditional publishing is somehow synonymous with
literary quality and that the rest is dreck, you need to get past it.
Don’t fear Amazon and Apple.
If as an author you’re a free agent, Amazon is your ally.
If you’re young, you
probably don’t sit around longing for the lost simplicity and glamor of an
earlier publishing era you never knew anyway and which may or not have existed.
Considering our relative freedom to write what we want and the digital technologies
that enable micropublishing, America in 2014 is a pretty good place to be a
writer if you really have to be a writer. And like I always say to my friends
who lament being overweight, don’t let them tell you that you take up too much
of the world. It’s the world that takes up too much of you.
Tanyo Ravicz
grew up in California. He attended Harvard University and settled for many
years in Alaska, mainly in Fairbanks and Kodiak. In Alaska he worked as (among
other things) a wildland firefighter, cannery hand and schoolteacher. His
novel-in-progress, Wildwood, draws on his experience of homesteading with his
family on Alaska’s Kodiak Island. Tanyo’s classic short novel Ring of Fire,
which explores the conflict between an Alaskan big-game hunting guide and the
Crown Prince of Rahman, will be released in a new digital edition in 2014. His
books include A Man of His Village,
relating the odyssey of a migrant farm worker from Mexico to Alaska, and Alaskans,
a selection of his short fiction.