Both Sides Now

I don’t think you understand a situation until you’ve been on both sides. You can’t truly understand the relationship with your parents until you’ve been one yourself. You can’t understand the merits and hazards of right/left politics until you were one, then evolved into the other. You can’t understand debt until you’ve both borrowed and loaned. You can’t understand inevitable totalitarian impulses until you’ve been both oppressed and oppressor.

You can’t truly grok the publishing business until you’ve been both an author and and a publisher.

As author, I want to write what I want and for the world to instantly and effortlessly worship at the altar of my ego. As a publisher, I crave playing a part in creating interesting work, but I also want the books I publish to sell and make money. Scads of money. Bushels of money. Endless piles of f—-you dollars as insulation from life’s harsh realities and to finance my shiny, 580 horsepower Maserati with Bowers & Wilkins Surround Sound audio system.

I started my publishing company out of anger. I had a stack of rejection slips literally an inch thick. Why was the world so slow to recognize both my genius and marketability? Screw them. I’ll start my own company, publish my work myself and show the bastards how this should be done.

It didn’t take long to realize I would not be taken seriously unless I published other people’s work, too. Great. Now what? I went on a hunt for other books to publish. It was vitally important to start off right. After a long search, I ended up with a collection of quirky short stories I was really proud of, but had zero market and ended up with nearly zero sales. Ghost Words and Other Echoes

One must start somewhere. That’s where I started.

One thing that worked to my advantage was a quick realization that I didn’t care if a book sale was mine or one of my authors. In fact, I liked it better when I sold someone else’s book. Why? I could be slightly more objective about the merit of other’s work. But, in addition, I felt no extra obligation to the reader. As writer, you are wholly responsible for entertaining and educating. I did not want to disappoint the wonderful people who invested precious cash in my work.

Publishing is a brutal business. No one with any sense would go into it. There are much easier ways to make money and satiate your ego. Not only do we have to compete with millions of new books, but we have to compete with every book ever written as they appear in immortal eBook form. Just to survive, big publishers have to exploit their authors—taking most of the money with bad contracts. Do you think they are happy? I thinketh not.

But, if you have a passion for the written word and think it’s important to nurture and create new titles? You have no choice. Jump in like me and take what pleasure you can from the harsh lessons you will learn.

I've looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down, and still somehow
It’s cloud illusions I recall
I really don’t know clouds at all

—Joni Mitchell