❧ On Self-Publishing ❧

Posted March 8th, 2025. Drafted January-March 2025 by hand, typescript, and Microsoft Notepad.

Part of my job is to support authors giving readings or talks about their work. I take care of the logistics: unlocking doors, providing bottled water, pointing the way to the bathroom, giving the introduction on stage, and helping facilitate the Q&A. Although a book talk or reading my seem evidence that an author has "made it," these events are usually not glamorous. While some authors, of course, pack auditoriums, most are likely to be disappointed if they think that a book talk with make them—or make them feel—famous. Attendance at these events if often small; in my experience, an audience of more than 25 people is a success, doubly so if most are not the author's family and friends.

Although small attendance can cause awkwardness—I've had to assuage disappointed authors while shooting them out the back door at closing many times—it is not the worst feature of these events. That distinction goes to aspiring authors. "Come out of the woodwork" is the best way to describe how these folks enter the room. They sit impatiently through the talk, use the Q&A to casually mention the book they are writing, and ask the author about the writing and publication process rather than the actual content of their work. They linger long at the signing table and leave their unsolicited card. Authors bear all of this with good grace, no doubt remembering a time when they had similar concerns, and wait until after the event is over before silently leaving the card on the table for me to throw away.

I behold the self-obsessed energy of desperation that characterizes aspiring authors with compassion, although it makes me queasy every time. I have vowed, for myself, to never be that person.

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Having spent all of my adult life surrounded by books and the people who write them, I take a long, lackadaisical view of writing, authorship, and publication. When I look at the history of literature, I see that the distinction between private writing and public authorship matters less over time and doesn't have much of a bearing on the quality of writing or its longevity. To use 19th century Anglophone literature as an example, there are a number of authors who were published and widely acclaimed in their time and who are still read today. Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Jane Austen (although pseudo-anonymously) are examples who easily come to mind. But others come to mind, too, who were not only unpublished, but were considered unpublishable. William Blake, Emily Dickinson, and Gerard Manley Hopkins are three of my favorite authors who fit into this category.

Blake was a tradesman, a professional illustrator and printer. Although he did have some patrons, he could not support himself by selling the poetry and prophetic books for which he is now known. Dickinson had literary correspondents, some of whom urged her to publish and others who discouraged her. Her poems were published a few years after her death to great acclaim, only after editors regularized her poems, changed punctuation, and made editorial decisions on her behalf like adding titles. Hopkins had a conflicted relationship with publication throughout his life. Already marginalized as a Catholic convert who likely struggled with romantic attraction to men, he had strong convictions about language and poetry that were viewed with hostility by the editors he tried to work with. Ultimately, he remained unsure if seeking publication was at odds with his religious beliefs.

Blake, Dickinson, and Hopkins were all brilliant writers who were not ahead of their time, but beyond any time, belonging wholly to themselves, never to be classed or categorized. Publication would have likely destroyed what makes their works great as much as it bolstered and shaped the greatness of a writer like Charles Dickens. In all three cases, the amount of self-promotion required and the lengths to which they would have had to go in order to make their works suitable for publication proved untenable. Blake had the tools and skills to self-publish, but Dickinson and Hopkins simply left their work unpublished and at the mercy of the universe after their deaths.

Literary history is full of unpublished geniuses and published obscurities. (Have you read Martin Farquhar Tupper or Edward Bulwer-Lytton?) Looking back at the last 300 years or so—the lifespan of modern publishing—it contains a lot more non-publication and self-publication than you would think. People left their manuscripts in trunks and under beds; they also had books privately printed, and they started their own magazines, newspapers, and publishing houses just to be able to have a reliable outlet for their work. Many authors did a mix of self publishing and traditional publishing, which hasn't changed.

Prejudice—intellectual and social—shapes our literary memory, as do the vicissitudes of economies and literary marketplaces. All literature is an accident of history. What survives and what is read by current and later generations is mostly up to factors that have nothing to do with the quality or content of the work. And there's nothing to say that even the greatest or most-beloved works will remain on record. Regimes change, tides rise, fortunes shift, obsolescence arrives unwanted. Better then, to let those dreams of publication and authorship step down from the prominent place that we often think they should have.

I want to talk about when being un-published, or choosing to self-publish (the two are virtually indistinguishable nowadays) is a choice rather than a failure to get published in a traditional sense. For myself, I was only able to create this website when I made the deliberate decision to not pursue publication elsewhere. This is a meditation on the relationship between writing, authorship, sharing, and publication and provides my thoughts on the overall ethos of this website.

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In this essay, I make a provisional distinction between authors and writers. An author is someone who has passed through various gates and gatekeepers—agents, peer reviewers, editors, publishers, or reviewers—on their way to the public marketplace. They are granted authority by institutions to speak on certain subjects or have been recommended as entertainers. A writer, by contrast, is someone who writes and shares their work, regardless of where they stand with gatekeeping institutions. For me, both of these terms are value neutral and do not exclude each other: a person may pass back and forth between being an author and writer many times over their career. The most meaningful distinction between them has to do with money: to be an author, one has to convince other people that printing and selling one's work will turn a profit. (Or, in the case of academic or nonprofit publishing, one has to convince other people that there is a market for one's work, even if it may not be profitable enough to sustain business.)

It is easy in our society to see the value in authorship; less so with writership. My purpose here is not to elevate one over the other, but to explore the trade-offs necessitated by each and why I, at least for the moment, have chosen the latter.

When I started my PhD program in English literature, I assumed that I desired to pursue an academic career. I love writing about literature and looked forward to a fulfilling career in which I would do just that. Although I had few illusions about the difficulty of getting a doctorate and finding a good job at the end of it, I figured that love of writing and researching literature would carry me far. What I didn't understand at the time was that an academic career doesn't have much to do with writing about literature.

In the middle of my doctoral program, I went though a long period of depression—a pretty standard feature of the process. The whole episode lasted about 18 months and at the end of it, when I had dug myself out through a combination of therapy, self-help books, and meditation, I found myself no longer able to do things that I didn't care about. The depression, it turned out, was caused by spending the previous three years in a high-pressure environment doing all kinds of things that I didn't want to do: grading, conference papers, sitting through insufferable Q&As, pursuing my research with the hope of hitting on a topic that would be fashionable in a few year's time so as to appeal to job-search committees. I had given control of my life over to the graduate program and did these things because I felt I didn't have a choice. But now it was as if something rigid inside of my had broken—in a good way—and I just couldn't make myself do it anymore. I disappeared from the English department into two different worlds: my local Zen temple and the office of my labor union, never again to do anything in the department not directly related to finishing my degree.

I had come to understand that I did not want an academic career, I just wanted to write a dissertation. So that's what I did. I graduated without publishing a single thing or applying for a single academic job. I did, however, make a few attempts—gestures, really—at publication. The process of publishing in academic journals, which is now necessary to land even a bad job in academic, was one of the biggest drains on my energy.

For those who have never been an academic in the humanities, let me tell you how the process of publication worked when I was in grad school. You of course spend months or years carefully researching and writing your article and then submit it to a journal. At this point, three outcomes are possible: the first, that it gets accepted for publication right away (this almost never happens), the second is that it gets flatly rejected, and the third is that you are invited to revise and resubmit. If this is the case, you will get feedback from peer reviewers about how to improve the piece (and if you are lucky this feedback is actually kind and constructive.) But you can only submit the article to one journal at a time, so your choice is to submit it elsewhere in hopes of success, or keep going through rounds of revision until it is accepted or rejected after all.

The kicker here is that all of this peer reviewing labor is unpaid, something academics are expected to do as part of what might be termed their lifestyle-job. So every part of the feedback process takes a minimum of three months. Yes, two rounds of revision and resubmission, not even counting the time it takes you to revise the piece, will take at least nine months. Because the work of editing an academic publication is also unpaid, once your article has been accepted for publication it will take the better part of a year to see it in print. So even in successful cases, it's realistic to expect publication of an article to take 2-3 years, by which time you are so sick of looking at the piece that you no longer want to think or talk about it.

Does this sound like hell? It was so to me. Academia is a wonderful machine for making people hate their own writing and intellectual interests. By the time I reached the fifth year in my PhD program, the prospect of continuing with an academic career felt like looking down a long, cold empty corridor, Jacob Marley's chains weighing at my elbows and ankles, every decision scripted for me, and nothing to do but joylessly work for not much money and the hope of that chimera: prestige. Some people thrive in this environment, of course. Academica is also a machine that rewards both megalomaniacs and people who are willing to sacrifice their lives and health for their work.

It wasn't the rejection of my writing that was a problem per se. I have never felt crushed or worthless when my work has been rejected because I know better than to over-identify with it. But whenever I visualized an anonymous group of peer reviewers and job search committee members looking at my work, the energy drained out of my body. These people were unknown to me, meant nothing to me, and yet I had been given the impossible task of trying to write something they would like. As soon as I decided to just focus on finishing my dissertation, writing became enjoyable again. Most people hate their dissertations—academics seek consent before asking someone about their dissertation as if it were a sex act—but I genuinely liked mine even if it was decidedly, endearingly mediocre. The word I used to describe it when all was said and done was "homely," like a granny square Afghan or a nice brown pot of lentil soup.

That didn't mean, of course, that getting a PhD didn't damage my relationship with literature, reading, and with my own mind; a brutal process under the best of circumstances is still a brutal process. It took seven or eight years before I felt ready to return to writing.

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When we assume that if something is written, its highest manifestation is to be published, what are we in fact assuming? While publication shapes an author's output so as to turn it into something marketable, it does not necessarily have anything to do with writing itself. Publication has only really ever existed in an industrialized capitalist context, although writing and sharing writing has existed much longer. To publish, there must be a market. While good editors can push authors to make brilliant work, let's not forget that the original editors were the ones who procured gladiators for the ring.

As I have slowly returned to a regular writing practice over the past few years, my thoughts on self-publishing have changed a lot, despite regularly coming into contact with those who give it a bad name. The folks who show up hungrily to author events, with their terrible historical novels and clean eating cookbooks, are painfully outcome-focused. They are more motivated by saying they have written a book than they are by writing. They desire to look like an author on the outside, not feel like to be a writer on the inside. I don't want to discount the hard work they put into writing their book (as long as they didn't use AI to write it) because even writing a bad book and going through the process of printing it is enough work to command respect. But it's the way they look at the world with greedy eyes, seeing each person as a potential reader or promoter, that puts me off. When I share my writing, I'm hoping to share it with a peer who will find it enjoyable or thoughtful, not a customer.

In her book Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott says two things that I don't think I have seen elsewhere in books of writing advice. The first is: write because you love it, and the second is: understand that no amount of fame or money will make you a happier person or a better writer. Having known a lot of successful authors and being one herself, Lamott knows that famous writers often struggle with self-doubt and self-hatred just as much as obscure ones do. If you haven't learned to love the process of writing for its own sake, no amount of success, money, or accolades will help with that.

Deliberately choosing self-publication is a way for me to create grounded expectations and focus on my writing for its own sake. This, right here, is what I would rather be doing than anything else—more than giving interviews or standing on a stage talking about my work or trying to get bookstores and libraries to carry my books. More than trying to invite myself onto someone else's podcast or emailing book proposals to dozens of agents or keeping a spreadsheet of literary magazines to submit to. I have the great privilege and blessing of being able to write. And I write for the sake of writing, because I cannot do otherwise.

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The elephant in this conversation is money: who gets it and who needs it. I do not need to make a living from my writing because I have a job that supports me and leaves enough brain space at the end of the day to write. Bec Evans and Chris Smith's book Written lays out quite clearly that accomplishing the dream of quitting one's day job to become a full-time writer is not always the blessing it seems. Many people struggle with having too much time in which to write. That being said: writing costs money. I am not charging you money to read this because someone else has paid me for other work. I don't begrudge anyone paywalling their writing, even though I don't. It's not true that the words you're reading right now were made for free, as the tools I use to write cost money and my time in our society is a commodity.

The current publishing marketplace is built on the model of scarcity: a limited number of publishing houses put out a limited number of books to a limited audience who have limited time to read and limited money to spend. Therefore, resources taken up by one author—publications, tours, interviews—cannot go to others. In such a system, I have a hard time justifying taking up space where I don't need to. I am aware of myself as a person of privilege who may be using resources that are needed by others more than me. It may be that people will take me, a white person, seriously, even if I'm just self-publishing stuff on the internet, but they won't take a Black woman seriously until she is published in the New York Times. Scarcity aside, different people publish for different reasons. Someone who is publishing an expose or time-sensitive work, or who is entering the field as an underrepresented voice, or speaking on a topic of great social importance, may feel an urgency to have their work published widely and be legitimized by newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses. And those are great reasons to seek publication.

But I do not feel the same urgency, even though I understand how short and precious life is. This winter I made a bold decision. Since I turn 40 this spring, I will spend my 40s focus on writing and self-publishing. Then in my 50s, should I be so lucky to live that long, I will turn toward getting published through traditional means—assuming I'm still motivated to do so. It's in part because I understand how short and precious life is that I don't want to work on getting published right now. I would rather be writing.

Now that the labor required to write, copy, and distribute has been reduced to very little (at least for me--the labor is often on someone else's back, or the ease at someone else's expense, nowadays) we have entered a new era of writing but have only half-admitted to ourselves. For myself, I have shifted the labor around in a strange way, making it more difficult and time consuming than it needs to be to actually do the writing, but by passing the time-consuming process of publication and promotion for more immediate gratification and accessibility. Technically, almost anyone in the world with an internet connection can view my writing, although only a very small number will actually find it. Furthermore, there is no entity with a financial stake in my success telling you that I am worth reading—you will have to read at the risk of wasting your time.

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Unlike past writers of private newspapers or literary magazines, I grew up as part of a generation where self-publication is as accessible as it has ever been. I did not have to raise money or hire printers or distributors to start my first blog. I didn't even have to handwrite, photocopy, or mail it. I could do all of it in my own home for the cost of a computer and internet connection, or pay a small fee If I wanted to keeps ads off of it. As I've already written about blogging and its relationship with online content overall, I'll say here that we take it remarkably for granted nowadays that anyone who wants to can have an online platform for nothing. As with writing itself, I have had to experiment with the amount of friction and therefore control that self publication gives me.

I have traded one set of inefficiencies for another and made a very strange bargain, I think: it's opposite of accessibility and ease, to make my writing both more difficult to produce and obscure to find. But thinking of it as poor bargain only makes sense in the context of a capitalist marketplace. From the perspective of personal creativity (which, in its purest form, is completely opposed to capitalism) I have gained quite a deal. I have retained my freedom as a creator and that dangerous substance known as total artistic control. My limitations come from me, my time, my skills, my tools, and my connections. My output, therefore, is very limited but in a way that feels generative instead of deadening. By removing publication and institutional support from the considerations that go into my work, I am free to just focus on the work as a practice. Sharing it is just that, sharing. I do not need to stake my career, self image, or self worth on a product that I produce for either a scholarly or popular audience.

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I'm sitting down to write the last draft of this at my old Smith Corona (well, new to me but still old) even though I don't want to. No matter how we glamorize it, some part of the writing process is always boring, inconvenient, and painful. Writing always disappoints one in oneself. I chose this musty, loud, and needy machine despite the extra work it entails. I think that's because a typescript is always a disappointment. One's mistakes and frailties are there on the page, they cannot be erased as if they had never existed, as can happen with word processing. The typewriter is a humbling instrument. The only more humbling writing instrument is my own hand with its tremor, but this does go a little faster and wears me out less quickly. Once I'm finished with this piece, I will code it myself, taking the trouble (and it is trouble) to open and close every p tag. Any error could break the page and will call out my ignorance or incompetence to the reader.

But I sit here because I feel that writing is something I must do. In reality, it is the best way I express myself, the way I think my thoughts most thoroughly. Existing without writing for a long time feels hollow to me. Not because I am failing to record what I want to remember, but that there is a part of life not being created within me if I'm not writing. Choosing these outmoded forms of writing and sharing keeps me in contact with the ground, and with myself. And for that reason, despite the extra time and energy they require, they make me more energized and excited about writing than I ever have been about publishing. Writing for its own sake is a power that, for a long time, I had forgotten I have. Because it's a reward in itself, the reward and the effort are commensurate—you don't "get something" out of self publishing other than what you already go out of making a creative work and sharing it with other people.