|
BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES
I: THE PREMISE
The concept of self-publishing
is nothing new. Walt Whitman not only printed his own books, but
reviewed them. Other authors whose names can be found in discussions
of self-publishing are Melville, Thoreau, Poe, Crane, Eliot, Pound,
Sandburg, Joyce, Dickinson, and Frank Herbert. In 1955, A. R. Ammons
published his first book, Ommateum: With Doxology, through Dorrance
Publishing, which unabashedly preys on the writer’s naiveté
and ego. From their website:
Perhaps you've kept a journal,
recorded observations, gathered facts and figures, made notes of
tales you've heard and told. You've pulled it all together in your
mind, your computer, or on paper. You have a message to communicate,
an experience to share, a story to tell. Now's the time to look
into what you can do next.
In the past there was a clear difference
between a press such as Dorrance (offering pseudo-publication for
exorbitant fees, seldom printing the stated number of copies, then
claiming the remainders had been pulped) and self-publishing. When
you self-publish you pay for printing and handle everything, from
typesetting and layout to marketing and distributing the book, yourself.
Until recently, it was costly and time-consuming.
Enter the new technologies. Computers
can handle a myriad of fonts. There are any number of sites on the
Internet which offer affordable and professional-looking printing
and binding services to those who want to self-publish, for a fraction
of what this would have cost ten years ago. The turnover time might
be as short as two weeks.
Along with this, there's a new
sort of operation which has sprung up. Internet sites such as Xlibris.com
or iUniverse.com are at least straightforward: "You are essentially
self-publishing in the most efficient way possible." Because these
publishers make use of print-on-demand technology, the cost of warehousing
is eliminated. They also handle such aspects as copyright, obtaining
ISBN numbers, and getting the books listed in Books in Print. Looking
at their price lists, you certainly don't get the feeling they're
out to rip you off. At Xlibris, you can have a trade paperback published
for as little as $500, with prices increasing as more services are
desired; trade and hardbound editions with footnotes and the like
cost $1600. iUniverse will print the book of a new author for only
$99, through their Writer's Club imprint. But the big draw of their
site, for previously unpublished authors, will probably be their
$299 "Writer's Showcase" imprint, a joint venture with Writer's
Digest, where manuscripts are presumably gone over by an editorial
board and rejected if they don't think the work is ready for publication.
Also, and this seems to be a real coup, iUniverse offers joint ventures
with various author organizations, including The American Society
of Journalists and Authors, the Harlem Writers Guild, and The Mystery
Writers of America. Drool, my fellow writers. Drool.
But don’t take too long. To
show how quickly such services are evolving, when I first drafted
this piece last August, Xlibris offered a basic book for $200; iUniverse
offered a $199 "Authors Choice" imprint for published authors "who
aren't willing to wait for traditional publishers to get around
to their next book." The demise of the Author’s Choice
program at iUniverse is particularly frustrating. Are published
authors not members of the three organizations listed above supposed
to associate themselves with "new" authors, or submit
a manuscript for the approval of a Writers Digest "editorial"
staff?
At the moment Xlibris’ $500
basic program seems the best deal, and still incredibly cheap considering
all the money you’d waste as you shop a manuscript around.
Think about it. Unless you're Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates,
Saul Bellow, or Philip Roth, you're probably having trouble finding
a publisher. The number of literary books published each year is
shrinking. For awhile some of the mid-size presses took up the slack,
but with the elimination of many independent bookstores and the
returns that can be expected from the chain stores, the number of
books these presses can afford to publish is in jeopardy, not to
mention the fact that they're receiving more and more submissions.
I sometimes think that if
I could get five or six other previously-published and well-reviewed
fiction writers to go along with me, we could all publish through
one of these self-publishing programs, open up the market and make
it a viable means for public and review media to access our work.
And I've heard that other people have similar thoughts. But the
first book I'm holding in my hands by a writer I respect is Fall
Love by Anne Whitehouse, published by Xlibris.
II. THE BOOKS
No Kidding: A Novel
Wendy Tokunaga
iUniverse/Writer's
Showcase
620 N. 48th
St.
Lincoln, NE 68504-3467
232 pages; paper, $12.95
Fall Love
Anne Whitehouse
Xlibris
517 pages; paper
$16, cloth $25
I obviously don't have time to
browse through the list of over 1900 unfamiliar names in iUniverse’s
general fiction category, so I decided to review a book published
in 2000. I discovered a reference to No Kidding on one of the child-free
sites I'm drawn to every so often. (Ever since I began work on my
anthology, Bearing Life: Womens' Writings on Childlessness, I've
tried to keep up with all the books and articles published on the
subject).
The story's a familiar one. The
protagonist, Audrey, is 35 years old and her mother's desperate
for a grandchild. Her closest friend is pregnant. Every day it seems
there's another baby shower held at her office. She’s in a
secure relationship, and will probably go through with marriage
and family simply because that's what everyone expects of her. Until
a tall dark stranger enters her life and encourages her to do what
she wants, not what others expect.
Either Tokunaga read all the articles
on childlessness that I'd read and was attempting to embody them
in a fictional tour-de-force, or she was ignorant of the attention
given the subject lately and felt all her ideas were original. I
hoped the former but, the further I read, the more I suspected the
latter. The novel itself is reasonably well-constructed -- beginning,
middle, end, characters with pasts and futures, tension between
the characters. All the proper workshop elements. But I doubt the
author had the skills to even attempt parody.
Anne Whitehouse is an entirely
different breed of writer. Although Fall Love is her first novel,
she has a book of poetry out, and has reviewed for such publications
as The New York Times and The Washington Post. Understanding the
lead time necessary for reviews, she was savvy enough to send around
copies of the paperback as galleys and set an official publication
date a few months later. She also hired a publicist who pleads,
in her cover letter: "BE BRAVE, and review a book published by Xlibris
that should and, with your help, could gain a wide readership."
The publicist also pleads that
we just read the first chapter of Fall Love before deciding not
to review it. A bad move. The first chapter presents a writer desperately
in need of a close line-editor, someone who could point up repetitions,
someone who could remove didactic words and phrases. She says, for
example: "he had often been witness to Bryce's helpless anger at
having to live with the incurable disease of multiple sclerosis."
(page 29-30) Why not "anger at having to live with MS"? Sentences
such as this one appear again and again throughout this hefty book,
but after awhile one gets involved in the story and tends to overlook
them.
The story is a good one. Four characters
interact over a five-month period, each of whom has his or her own
life, apart from the time and memories they share. It's not easy
to take a magnifying glass to four separate identities, but the
task is made even harder since the unifying character, Paul, is
despicable. Perhaps the best portrait of him comes when Jeanne,
watching Paul's solo dance, describes it as "tinged with an egotistic,
possessive pride." (278) Or here's Paul with Althea: "He couldn't
help, when she hung her head, the sudden thrill through his heart,
the exquisite pleasure that came of seeing her suffer." (301) This
is not a sadistic relationship, this is to a woman who has befriended
him, permitted him into her bed, and watched him go off with her
best friend. Or are they still friends, now that Paul has not only
come between them, but encouraged them to meet as lovers? When,
three-quarters of the way through the book, Paul has an accident
which might end his career, I found myself cheering.
Was this Whitehouse's intention?
I'm not certain. She does not seem to be fully in command of her
craft yet. In too many places, the dialogue feels wooden. One becomes
frustrated with her explanations, her inability to trust the reader,
to let some of the wonderful moments she’s created have lives
of their own.
The only character who strikes
me as truly human, someone I can easily identify with, is Bryce,
Paul's lover. The scenes with his family strike me as especially
familiar. But other characters in the book, a lover Whitehouse inserts
for Jeanne, or members of Paul's dance troupe, are wooden figures
stepping forth to fill a vacancy.
Coincidences are carried a bit
too far. That Paul and Jeanne meet as strangers on a subway and
then again at Althea's is acceptable. But when Althea and Jeanne,
seeing each other for the first time in months, happen to be in
the area when Paul has his accident is stretching credibility.
Fall Love is, finally, a mixture
of frustration and anticipation. I was so caught up on the narrative
that I found myself turning pages ahead to see what was going to
happen. There are not many writers who can sustain a novel for 517
pages, and while Whitehouse displays none of the linguistic pyrotechnics
of, say, Robert Coover or Don DeLillo, she manages to hold our interest.
This strikes me as the sort of book that twenty years ago might
have been grabbed up by a good editor, whittled down to maybe 400
pages, and published to fanfare. Sadly, such editors no longer exist.
And even agents often want a manuscript they don't have to work
with. It's a never-ending cycle. What makes it all the more frustrating
is that this book is far more interesting than a lot of the novels
published lately by Doubleday, Simon & Schuster, and similar
presses.
It all boils down to the fact that
I'm glad I had the chance to read Fall Love, a chance that would
not have been offered me were it not for publishing ventures such
as Xlibris or iUniverse. But then, placed next to No Kidding, we
see all the inherent dangers.
To return to my original argument:
is it time for prolific, respected authors to take matters into
our own hands? If a book sells well, it might even be financially
beneficial. I feel like the speaker at the end of some 1950s low
budget film, throwing it all back on the viewers: you be the judge.
(originally appeared in ABR, Vol. 23, #2,
Jan./Feb. 2002, syndicated by Featurewell.com.)
|
