I just finished watching Troll Hunter on Netflix, and that was fun. Bizarre, overblown, and understated in pretty decent proportions.
Recently I've had to do some Thinking about my Future, and while my Future as a Writer isn't the crux of my ruminations, I've had plenty on that subject to think about.
I checked back in on the Machine of Death people today. It looks like I will know the fate of "Burned at the Stake" at the end of the month. I'm bracing myself for a rejection, there being 1,958 submitted stories, and their declared intention being to reject between 1,923 and 1,928 of them. But they did come out with this neat word cloud poster of all the submitted titles, and I'll admit it's kind of exciting to see my title in the cloud, bottom center, the size of everything else that only one person tried.
Reading Kristine Kathryn Rusch's blog has churned my expectations for publishing rather thoroughly. Even if everything she's said about the publishing industry turns out to be wrong (and that seems unlikely to me), it's still probably for the best. Until perhaps a month ago I was still basing all my assumptions on advice published 15 years ago, not really considering that 15 years ago... you know what? Computers. I was going to list quaint things that were true in 1996 but you can do that yourself. A ridiculous amount has changed.
The upshot of what I'm hearing is that self-publishing has become something you can start a career on. There's also indy publishing, which is something I will have to look into.
What will I do with my writing? I don't know, exactly. But I've begun thinking in terms of what I can do for myself, and what I have to hire other people to do for me. I've spent the past three years proofreading and working with text formatting software--I begin to suspect that I have the skill set to format a book. I minored in visual art in college, and I think I can handle the cartography that should go in the front of Hengist & Undine. I have had the support of smart and talented friends throughout the writing process.
What can't I do? I can't produce cover-quality artwork--at least not the quality I would like. And I don't know anything about marketing. Managing marketing will be tricky, to say the least.
On the one hand I'm excited by the possibilities offered by self-publishing, but on the other hand, after a few conversations about the venue with certain friends and family, I realized that it doesn't lower the identity hurdle by that much. Even after my book was available online, I would still feel the need to explain, "The industry has changed. You can be a serious writer and self-publish now." If I bagged a traditional publishing contract, I wouldn't need to defend my status as a serious writer to friends and family, even if I didn't sell. Without a publishing contract, the only argument will be success, if I can have any. But, whether I can sell an editor on my work or not, I'll need to sell books to prove to myself that I'm a writer.
From my non-scientific and lazy research, my impression is that popular knowledge regarding indie publishing hasn't quite caught up with the industry. On the flip side, Jenn and I went to a writers' panel at GGC wherein there was some debate on this topic. The consensus seemed to be that you could, in fact, be a serious writer and self-publish, but that their recommendation was to seek out a traditional publisher first (for precisely the reason you laid out above, i.e. marketing.)
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