Ownership and Control

I've spent a lot of time since January revising things I've written (about 300,000 words). The process was more intense than I anticipated, but I'm confident that what I've come out with is stronger. There is a little way to go with it, but my mind is turning both to creating new stuff and figuring out what to do with the things I've written.

This post is to summarise my thinking so far, and also, because I'm going to email the link to a couple of friends, to form the basis for feedback to move my thinking on. My thinking has been conditioned a lot by the thoughts of musicians in analogous situations, especially 'legacy' artists with substantial followings, but adrift from commercial music companies.

I've been here before when thinking about creativity.

My model for this, oddly enough, is something that Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh said a lot about how the Grateful Dead went about creating music. Garcia talked about finding the form beyond chaos; Lesh talked about the search for improvised epiphanies. It's why I often say my first drafts need "less narrative and more weirdness." To the extent that I'm finding a voice, if I can say that without pretence, it is in stripping away my expectations of a narrative to let the story come through. Elsewhere I've described this as looking for something in the story to reveal itself to me, the ghost in the story, the presence behind the narrative, and then finding a way to make it manifest to a putative reader.

But this isn't about creativity now, it's about distribution and marketing of the end product.

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I'm now certain in my own mind that I will self-publish. Why? Various reasons.

A fundamental one is ownership and control. I watched Rick Beato's interview with Steve Vai where he mentions a piece of advice Frank Zappa gave him: own your publishing. Steve then discusses the importance to him of all revenue coming into his companies, and his insistence that his suppliers or service providers invoice those companies for payment such that all payments are authorised by him, with no intermediaries having anything to do with the money. This contrasts with what was, and remains, the usual model for musical artists signing to a label, whereby managers deal with the money and rights without reference to the artist, often with disastrous results.

This seems to me to be at least somewhat analogous to publishing.

I also had thoughts arising from another Rick Beato interview, this time with guitarist Joe Satriani, in which Satriani gave his thoughts on streaming and digital distribution channels and how he has made them work for him.

I like classic, physical things: I listen to records, cassettes and CDs in preference to streaming most of the time; I like fountain pens and paper journals and analogue film cameras; and I like books. This is a visceral, subjective thing, but, I've realised, it can also function as a preconception or prejudice. There is a romance to the physicality of a book, to its smell, to its weight when reading, to the book as a thing. Typically, of course, books come from publishers and, in the general case, it's therefore necessary to have a relationship with a publisher, either directly or through the agent as intermediary.

This makes sense when the primary technology is the paper book and things are built around distributing that product. It makes less sense when the physical book ceases to be the only option, and other means of distribution direct to the reader are available. Much as I dislike how they operate as a company, this is where Amazon score.

I don't agree with those who reject the value of publishers or agents, but I do think the relationship has to change, and I also think it looks to be better for me to do this as a cottage industry from my shed rather than chase my tail trying to break into an industry.

If the primary objective is to get my words to readers and I can achieve that in real time by formatting and uploading the writing to a server, with full control of any income and associated expenditure, then that must be prima facie attractive unless the industry can provide some counterbalancing advantage, including an appropriate commercial structure. As it is, publishing looks like an archaeological site of old technologies and business models. (I'm exaggerating to make a point, of course). 

My own preference for the analogue has for some time blocked my thinking on this--I've been hooked on the sentimental value of the physical. Do I want hardback copies of my stuff on my shelf? Yes, of course; is that the be all and end all? No.

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There are lots of reasons why writers don't get picked up by 'traditional' publishing. Many of these are entirely sound commercial decisions; many are aesthetic; sometimes (mostly, I guess) it’s because the writing is somewhere between mediocre and dreadful. I'm OK with that, but I also think it's irrelevant. What counts is getting the story to readers who (a) love it, (b) think it's OK or (c) hate it, in the hope that a subset will stick with it and let others know about it.

When I did a project recently listening only to music released in 1970, something interesting happened: I became conscious that my tastes were changing, and the things that made my ears perk up were things I'd previously ignored or dismissed, and often this was to do with where jazz met the avant garde. The culminating surprise was when I listened to both John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band and Yoko Ono's album of the same name, and preferred Yoko's by a long distance.

Yoko's album was resolutely uncommercial, as was most of the jazz and a lot of the rock music out on the fringes, but that doesn't really matter to me because I connected with it. Nor does it matter, in the abstract, that the audience for it was small while almost everyone else hated it: what matters is that there was an audience.

I make no particular claims for my writing, but I do believe that if I like it, and people whose opinions I trust like it, then other people will too. What I need to do is find them and tempt them to buy my stuff and read it. That is to say, it revolves around marketing and distribution.

I am not blasé about looking for best quality or editing or creating something I'm happy with, it boils down to the worker owning the means of production. And, in the long run, it isn't about money either. That isn't to say I don't want to be paid, it's to accept that the market I'm writing for might be as niche as me.

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Distribution and marketing naturally brings me to the dread subject of social media. I have two problems with social media: the first is my dislike of the platforms themselves, especially FaceBook; the second is that I mute and avoid writers and creators who use social media solely for marketing and 'engagement'. It follows that, if social media is unavoidable as a means of discovering an audience, and vice versa, then I need to find a way of using it that is effective without cheesing people off. This includes YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and Twitter, as well as a dedicated website.

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So this is where my thoughts are turning now. Once I'm satisfied that the product is right, which involves outlay on editing, cover design, etc., how do I get it out there in a crowded market in an effective way, building up a readership who will be happy to look at other stuff I've yet to write?