Thursday, April 3, 2014

When You're a Jet, You're a Jet All The Way


Up until a year ago I had a different website to promote (and I use that term ironically) a comic book series I was working on at the time.  On that now defunct site, the artist and I also ran a weekly webcomic in addition to our superhero venture.  Useless Degrees At Work starred ourselves and was all about trying to get a superhero comic published.  In one of our very first webcomics we brainstormed how we might attract traffic to our site and eventually become such a phenomenon that Marvel would come knocking with handfuls of cash.

Like most of the conversations we had in those early days, we can now only laugh at our childlike understanding of the process which we had embarked upon.  We didn't have the first clue about marketing online content.  I had some vague idea about needing to include words that are regularly searched on Google but that was about it.

USELESS DEGREES AT WORK (Cody Andreasen & Morgan Wolf)










I realized today when mentioning the title of this blog to someone, that I hadn't advanced much further since then. (Titling your blog after your proclivity for somewhat obscure punctuation marks does not exactly jettison you into the mainstream.)  I still have very little idea what needs to go into online marketing.  It is partly this complete lack of understanding that makes me shy away from the idea of self-publishing--because I feel unequal to it.  While I might be able to publish a blog post--I don't know that I have the skills (or personality) required to hustle my way to sales in the vast sea of self-published material.

Since my digital skills are fast being out-stripped by my toddler relatives, I have found myself consigned to politely knocking on traditional publishing's locked doors.  Does it have to be this way?  No, I don't think so.  The world is full of stories of people who defied the conventional path and through hard work and perseverance hacked a life for themselves out of an unfriendly wilderness.  While that sounds very inspirational--TED Talk worthy, even--it also means it is very hard.  As in, almost past the point of believability, hard.  Like, if my life were a movie, people would be walking out at this point because it was both boring and discouraging.  (That's why the hard work scenes in movies are always montages set to music--you've got to keep the audience upbeat about the protagonist's chances.)

The fear with self-publishing is that it is somehow settling for less. It is the implication that you couldn't cut it in the big leagues of traditional publishing--your work doesn't stand up to scrutiny--and that you are therefore having to resort to self-publishing after exhausting every other option.  You will certainly find this attitude expressed by many within the publishing industry.  There is also the fear that you will somehow damage your chances of becoming a successful writer by walking down the self-publishing path.  I know these attitudes exist, but I am beginning to wonder how justified they are.   It isn't as though traditional publishing hasn't polished its fair share of turds for publication, either.  And, just because something sells, doesn't mean it has met some high water mark for quality.  While there are no gatekeepers in self-publishing--you will certainly find a wide variance in quality--there are also no opinion makers.  No one else arbitrarily determines what is 'commercial enough' or speaks to the cultural zeitgeist.   The success of your work rides on the merit of your ideas and the value of your structural format.  Mostly.   Then there arises the question of marketing.  How do you get your work sampled by enough readers so that you can eventually support yourself? If you are like me, you joined Twitter because you read enough stuff online telling you should connect to those in the publishing industry that way.  I have seventeen followers.  I once hit eighteen, but I guess that individual got bored and left.  If I have to support myself off those seventeen, it's going to be a lean living for a long time.

I think writers assume that the marketing question will be answered by traditional publishing--by the budget and expertise of those already established in the industry.  This might be the case, but perhaps not to the degree that we might expect.  The number of literary agents looking for writers with established social media platforms (Read: a large following on Twitter.) speaks to the changing nature of the game.  Even traditionally published authors need to be their own promotion department to some extent.

The perpetual teeter-tottering back and forth over whether to self-publish or not to self-publish can really be argued sensibly from either position.  And, as a writer whose publishing credits are minimal, I am not equipped with the insider knowledge to understand the industry's complexities in order to make an informed decision about which way to jump.  Should I really be so afraid of the self-publishing track?  Because part of me has begun to wonder if the whole situation is really just a turf war between Traditional Publishing's Jets and Self-Publishing's interloper Sharks.  There's been a lot of name calling back and forth and pretty soon we're going to have to have a rumble.  Until they sort it out, I'll probably just be at my desk.




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