Self-published authors: revolutionaries or weirdos who will die alone?

When asked by non-writer friends why I haven't self-published my writing, I answer adamantly that there is a huge stigma associated with self-published authors: those are the desperate kind, who didn't write a book good enough for it to be picked up by a proper publisher. A sort of cringe akin to being the only single person at a dinner party organised by your relatives who you have nothing in common with and who have already accepted the fact that you are a weirdo that will die alone but nevertheless still make a point to discuss it at every opportunity.

Despite overwhelming evidence of huge success stories that keep cropping up about self-published authors who have made it big by going solo, I still resist the notion of putting my work out there as a self-published venture.

Why do I still think the stigma lives on? Because it is an attitude I perceive in publishers who I really trust and respect--the ones who have brought me my favourite authors in beautifully, impeccably produced books (often with the help of state funding), and who obviously have good taste and know what they're doing and take literature seriously. And because there is a kind of systemic violence against self-publishing, particularly if your work is literary fiction or poetry: you know, just little things like how newspapers and magazines don't really tend to review self-published books, how literary awards don't consider self-published books, how self-published authors don't get the cooshy jobs, and how the Society of Authors does not consider somebody who is self-published as an actual author and thus cannot become a member, unless he or she has sold above an X amount of copies. (As if most traditionally published authors reached that target on a regular basis?)

But maybe, just maybe, it is only a matter of time before authors stop caring what old-fashioned dudes in linen suits think? Because ultimately, it's the readers who are actually going to buy and read the stuff. We maybe just need to work a little bit more at our 'marketing' strategies, what with the very unsexy label "self-published" that authors get, whilst musicians and visual artists who publish (i.e., make publicly available) their work on the internet are away being trendy and indie and all the rest. In our case it is the independent publishers who seem to have dibbs on the label "indie" so perhaps authors need to wait their turn for the spotlight or else be doomed for ever by publishing through newer means.

But writers can and should and do and will take advantage of this crazy world that is the Internet, just as visual artists and musicians have been doing for the last decade. Maybe self-publishing will even become cool, have its own kind of edginess? We admire the "home-made" qualities of indie records, the warm distorsion that comes with recording on tape, the spontaneity that comes with a live video posted on the go. Often records are produced to sound as if they were recorded using poor-quality or vintage equipment, when in fact all the modern cons were available. Why shouldn't a few typos and non-professionally-edited books emanate this same kind of "home-made" charm? The way cut-and-paste zines get a bit of street cred for being hand made?

And I think there will be space in this world for all, publishers and bookshops and self-published authors and indies and Amazon and all the rest. This is just the kind of shift in production and distribution methods which inevitably brings about a change in power structures. Which sounds pretty healthy to me. Almost like some kind of revolution.

Love books? Then love piracy. A tale about a land with no bookshops.

Back in the day, in the capital of North East Mexico, a city of no less than 3.5 million people, there was a distinct lack of bookshops. There were a few dusty second-hand bookshops on Calle Washington in the city centre: Librerías Cerda et al. And then there was Librería Castillo, in the shopping centre near my house, selling mostly Paulo Coelho and cookbooks, as well as a few bookshops dedicated exclusively to school textbooks. Growing up, this is what I had access to. There was no way to order books online. If you were lucky enough to be able to travel 900 km to Mexico City, then you could get anything you wanted. Otherwise, you had to wait for the yearly book festival, and gorge yourself. Spend all of your savings buying everything you found remotely interesting, making sure you had at least enough to keep you going for a whole other year. A stall dedicated to each publisher/bookseller. A massive conference hall full of books, spilling out into the corridors. Free to attend with free readings and events. It was paradise for one whole week every autumn.

In university, we had to read most of our books from the photocopy of the photocopy that our professor smuggled back from communist Russia. Or at least that's what it felt like. We even had our favourite photocopy shop, called Tecnocopias. They were so well organised that they had all our recurring orders on file: Bakhtin, Margarita Dalton, Foucault, the Russian formalists, María Luisa Puga, Deleuze & Guatarri, Hélène Cixous, Josefina Vicens, Susan Sontag, or even classics like Homer or Unamuno or Flaubert or Cervantes or the odd Icelandic saga here and there, ready to be photocopied to order. Most of the time, the front cover and the page with the copyright information were not included. We had no idea in what year it was originally printed or who had published or translated this stuff. It didn't matter. They had failed us. Half an hour's wait and about 100-200 pesos (depending on the length of the book) gave you a heavy folder full of bond paper; optional spiral binding and plastic covers for an additional fee. I always bought my books unbound. That way I could carry around only the chapter I was reading, or put the chapters in the order I required, or make my own tailor-made anthologies. I still have a few crates of these precious photocopy-books in storage somewhere. I wonder how many royalties these authors and translators lost because we had no bookshops? And who the heck cares? How many people went out of business because of us? What would copyright legislators have expected us to do? They probably would have preferred us to not study at all.

Was there another way? Probably. Some entrepreneurial student could have set up a small publishing house and re-printed all these titles, or the photocopy shop could have paid royalties to the authors (though they were selling at the cost of just ink and paper), or somebody could have set up a small distributor and ordered in the titles, if the reading lists could have been made available a year in advance... Did we have the time or money or knowledge to figure all this out? No.

Plenty of bookshops have since opened in Monterrey, and I'm sure a lot of these titles are now available to buy legitimately. But what about the rarities, the out-of-print, the obscure, the highly specialized? Surely these deserved to be photocopied again and again, or in modern terms, distributed online in electronic versions, for free. Funded not by the market forces or by the nearly empty pockets of students, but by the government. And the in-print, readily available should also be available electronically to people who can't afford it, so that no student in any country has to work 20+ hours a week while studying just to be able to afford to buy the books they need to read.

I am so happy that we broke all the rules. I hadn't realized how anarchist and DIY we had to be to earn our degrees. I hope many more students in universities in remote or not-so-remote communities around the world are doing the same. Love books? Then love piracy. There is no other way for culture to spread at the speed it's supposed to. Buying books legitimately is only for wealthy, first world countries who step on the heads of "underdeveloped" nations, mess with their civil wars, impose unpayable debts, and steal all their oil. Why should they have the right to hinder the "illegitimate" distribution of ebooks as well?

The problems with blogging

I need to write. I really, really do. And I miss blogging a lot. It used to be a way to keep me writing. Instantly publishing and getting feedback. What could be better? It's the future. It has been the future for me since about 2003, but for some reason I turned back, experienced some kind of cataclysmic soul-transforming emptiness and lack of success, and here we are back at square one.

I've been having a few problems with blogging:

1. Everybody's reading this, baby. When everybody* started using internet, not just a few hunch-backed geeks and my closed circle of friends but also my mum, my spinster aunties, my work colleagues, my clients, the random dude I met at the coffee shop six months ago... I realised how important it was to maintain a fairly respectable, well-groomed online persona. Like suddenly everything I blogged would be down in history for the rest of eternity, so I'd better not say any bad words or talk behind people's backs or say anything that may be perceived as racist or discriminatory or complain about my work or in general say anything that may be bad in any possible way. This obsession with political correctness sort of crushed my desire to write, like suddenly it was just too much to be normal and polite in the virtual world as well as in the real one. This is an interesting problem that I will address in a future post. 
2. I have some language issues. That should be a good thing for a writer, as it creates many avenues to explore, but I have so much fear of delivering some sort of solipsistic hybrid navel-gazingly Spanglishized mud brew that I often end up not writing at all. 
3. Kind of related to #1 again, and I'm sure many people are experiencing problems in relation to this. What are the rules for online sharing? I'm sure I've broken all of them. I haven't tended to my blog in about 5 million years, I kept an outdated blog template going for as long as I could stretch it, I can't figure out what to do with my Picasa account, I have about 20 online profiles and none of them are consistent with each other, and then I've gone and switched my blog to another language probably alienating my 8 loyal readers for ever. Oh well, c'est la vie, everything is always changing, isn't it. In a world of constant flux, I've decided to keep my old blog address and the old content there too. But with a nice new tweetable, facebookable design that doesn't draw too much attention to the fact that I've been blogging for a decade and nothing has ever come of it.

*All right not everybody - the actual growth I've experienced has been from 4.1% of the world's total population in 1999 (when I first started sharing my writing online) to close to 35% of the world's total population at the moment... if you don't believe me do your research, I refuse to put appeasing blue links on those numbers to make you feel like they're legit!

I'm back for a little while.

Sorry, Spanish-speaking friends, I'm writing in English for the moment.

Maybe eventually I will succeed in my ability to write in English and Spanish at the same time so that nobody ever gets disappointed. Maybe each post can include a little Babel fish that actually relays my voice perfectly in both languages, with all the cultural nuances and obvious poetic beauty (heh) that you would hear from me in real life. Until then, please bear with me.