Gatekeeping at Backword

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009 | Posted by: Henry Baum

In my post on Self-Publishing Review about Backword, I say “Our niche is self-publishing,” which defines us as a group. This actually isn’t entirely accurate. Self-publishing is a huge niche and I’ve always contended that for self-publishing to be taken seriously as an avenue for legitimate publication more “literary” work is going to have to be self-published. Normally, I’m not a great fan of outright literary writing - it seems a shade too careful, a shade too in control of itself - i.e. it’s following rules in the same way a work of commercial fiction might follow the rules of plot development.

But still “literary” is closer to what I think we’re after at Backword. And by literary I mean writing that takes some chances or is not easily pigeonholed into any other other genre. Perhaps I should only speak for myself - this is what I try to do in my writing. My last novel, North of Sunset, has been called a “thriller,” but it’s not a straight commercial-style thriller. When it was sent out into the wilds of traditional publishing it was met with these dual responses:

1. It’s too commercial.
2. It’s too literary.

Which to me was exactly what I was after, straddling the line between the two. That’s generally what I like to do as a writer and this approach is often met with puzzlement by traditional publishing. I don’t just mean by mainstream commercial houses, but small presses too. I’m thinking places like Milkweed or Graywolf Press. Nice places, but my writing isn’t outright “literary” either.  It’s too pulpy. I don’t care. I like that. So I feel like I’m caught in a kind of no-man’s land: misunderstood both by commercial houses and small literary presses. A reason why I feel at home self-publishing.

My upcoming novel’s even worse - it’s science fiction and I’ve never written science fiction before. There’s no way I could be marketed as an up-and-coming science fiction writer because I’m not. I’m just a writer who chose a medium I like to read - I’m a Philip K. Dick fanatic, like many. And my book has a Tessa Dick blurb on the back (his last wife), which is very awesome - one of those nice things that unfolded by starting the Self-Publishing Review and further proof that if you get yourself out there, good things can happen.  All proportions kept, but I like the idea of approaching fiction the way Stanley Kubrick approached movies - he made science fiction movies, period movies, horror, political satire, etc.

But I digress. The point of this post was how Backword has a somewhat narrow criteria. That’s a complaint about gatekeeping in general, but I have no problem with a set of criteria if it’s not merely profit-based. Backword’s principal goal is to show that there’s good literary writing (or in other words off-kilter writing) being self-published. If we were to cover the entire niche of self-publishing we would have invited writers like Jeremy Robinson, author of the hugely successful self-published book The Didymus Contingency,  or other self-publishers who have had profound success self-publishing commercial-style fiction.

That doesn’t really interest me. I’ll applaud any time that a self-publisher is able to find success. Right now on the front page of SPR there’s a post about Boyd Morrison who got a two-book deal at Simon & Schuster after publishing his Da Vinci Code-esque book on the Kindle and becoming a Kindle phenom. That’s great, but someone who tries to sell a book in this category is going to have an easier time of it than a writer who’s put out a book that’s not as mainstream. The same goes for niche writers. Niche writing has always had an easier time of it being self-released because the audience is less cynical about the method of production and there’s less competition.

It’s literary writers who are having a tougher time of it in today’s climate. Not just reaching an audience, but getting published in the first place. The writers who are less immediately marketable, who don’t necessarily have some great hook - the hook is the writing itself. So it’s this wing of self-publishing that needs a greater push - writing that can’t easily fit into any one genre.

Year Zero

I just discovered a new self-publishing collective along the lines of Backword, and along the lines of everything I’ve written here, called Year Zero. It’s a collective of self-published writers writing off-kilter, literary fiction. From their manifesto:

The Factory: agents, editors, media arbiters of taste, publishers. A chain of filters that takes raw fiction, cuts it, sells it on, cuts it again until the street product peddled to readers is weak, toxic, and addictive.

YEAR ZERØ exists to eliminate the impurities and deliver prose in the pure and raw.

Pretty interesting to see another new self-publishing collective. The hope when starting Backword was that it would be one of many - that other groups of writers would band together and create a new model for reaching readers.  The old model isn’t working for a great many writers, so new models have to be invented.  When writers become the gatekeepers themselves, they will no longer have to write for the market.  They’ll no longer have to wait for possible rejection. Of course, the writing’s got to be good, edited, well-packaged, but this new model gives more power to the artist, where it should be.

Is this set-up ideal? No, I would never claim it to be.  The main challenge for self-published writers still remain: brick and mortar bookstore distribution.  Some of us have achieved this - but not on the grand scale offered by a book on Random House.  The hope is that we can generate interest in this new model of publishing and receive wider distribution.  But generally, that’s the most legitimate knock against self-publishing: not writing quality but distribution.

Still, this is a terrible climate for writers right now.  Stories abound - like historians who have taken to trying their hand at writing historical fiction because advances are dwindling.  Even if a book does get published, it can be a challenge for the book to get picked up by a bookstore if the last book has not demonstrated significant sales. So writers need an out.  Rather than dealing with the maddening criteria of agents/editors/and bookstores (including small independent bookstores which rely on past book sales as well), writers can be much more active in their future and become the gatekeepers themselves.