{"id":10780,"date":"2016-03-01T21:41:15","date_gmt":"2016-03-01T21:41:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/punk-publishing\/"},"modified":"2016-03-01T21:41:15","modified_gmt":"2016-03-01T21:41:15","slug":"punk-publishing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/punk-publishing\/","title":{"rendered":"Punk Publishing"},"content":{"rendered":"

rhube<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

paulformulaic<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

<\/p>\n

Self-publishing has, it\u2019s fair to say, a bit of a chip on its shoulder. It\u2019s understandable, really, given the scorn with which the world of traditional publishing ladles onto it. If you\u2019ve decided to go down the road of publishing your works yourself, through the various avenues open to you, chances are you are doing it because you\u2019ve either tried the traditional route and failed, or because you looked at the whole trad world and thought to yourself \u2018well that doesn\u2019t make any sense.\u2019<\/p>\n

If it\u2019s the former, you\u2019re bringing you own sense of failure to the enterprise, which will colour your own judgement. I see this attitude all the time with writer friends of mine. \u2018I\u2019m going to shop it until I get X rejections, and then I\u2019ll think about self-publishing,\u2019 is something I\u2019ve heard a great number of variants of.<\/p>\n

If it\u2019s the latter, you\u2019ll get the same vibe from some of those other writer friends, but also from almost everyone else. A friend may ask you about your writing and you\u2019ll tell them you have a book coming out next month. They\u2019ll get all excited, and ask about who is publishing it, and when you tell them they\u2019ll cock their head to one side and say, \u2018oh, well, good for you\u2019 in the most patronising way they can muster.\u00a0Then they\u2019ll try and find someone else to talk to.<\/p>\n

You see, \u2018Self Publishing\u2019 has a fair few negative connotations. It\u2019s historically tied in with so-called \u2018vanity\u2019 publishing, the kind of thing you used to get by paying thousands of pounds of your own money to print out your books, in the hope you will be able to recoup your money by flogging them to your friends, family, and poor unsuspecting local bookstores. This practice was largely sneered at by the literary world, which explains why the Kindle explosion of Self-publishing is seen in the same way.<\/p>\n

The whole world of publishing has been set up in one way \u2013 a way that requires the book that gets to market to be somehow \u2018validated\u2019 by the system. You hear stories about classics that were turned down dozens of times, and marvel at what it must take, how good a book must be<\/em>, to make its way to readers. The assertion is that unless you\u2019ve been published, your book can\u2019t, just can\u2019t,<\/em> be any good.<\/p>\n

This means that the self-publishing movement of recent years has struggled, constantly, for its place. Self-published authors are ineligible for most awards, and the best seller lists have tried again and again to find ways to not let authors onto their lists without publishers. And woe betide the author trying to get themselves stocked in actual physical bookstores. Even those published by Amazon imprints (i.e actual publishers<\/em>) can\u2019t get their books into the shops with any regularity.<\/p>\n

The whole movement needs a new image. So,\u00a0what do you do when you need to change your image? That\u2019s right, you change your name, and hope a good, old fashioned rebranding will sort you out.<\/p>\n

‘Indie publishing\u2019 has been the go-to label of choice of a lot of Self-published authors, for understandable reasons. It conveys the spirit of independence that so many people love about going Self-Pub, but there\u2019s a big problem with it. It\u2019s taken. Small publishing houses, outside of the behemoths, are already known as indie publishers. So if someone asks you how you published and you answer ‘oh, I\u2019m an indie,\u2019 well, that could be one of two things. Which just seems silly.<\/p>\n

Now, we\u2019re writers, so you\u2019d think that if we could do anything with our talent, it would be using words. Plenty have tried to come up with a better label; in fact I\u2019ve heard whole episodes of shows like The Sell More Books Show arguing the toss over this. The phrase ‘authorpreneur\u2019 has been bandied about a fair bit, but that makes me want to set fire to things, so I\u2019m not using that. I\u2019ve even heard people refer to themselves as Artisan Authors (ew, no). But no phrase has stuck, so it\u2019s still some hybrid of Self-Pub or indie authors.<\/p>\n

So, *dons cape* let me throw my hat in the proverbial ring\u2026<\/p>\n

I have decided, once I publish my first novel in the next month, that I\u2019m not going to be an Indie. Or Self-Pub. I am going to be a Punk Publisher.<\/p>\n

No, this isn\u2019t just part of my ongoing battle to make music somehow relevant to every part of my life. Well, maybe a bit. But there\u2019s logic there too. Lookit the shiny logic!\u00a0<\/p>\n

The music world has a lot to teach us so-called indies about our nascent scene. Back in the 1960\u2019s there was no way to get your music out there, unless you got picked up by one of the labels. Then punk rock came about, and the rules changed. The Buzzcocks were one of the first bands to press their own records, and get them into the new independent record stores that were popping up, and so was born a revolution in the way we consume music.<\/p>\n

Suddenly, you didn\u2019t need to be approved of my a major label. Do we argue that the music that came out of the indie scenes of the 70\u2019s and 80\u2019s is worthless, because it wasn\u2019t picked up by the same people who were too busy peddling Abba to us? Do we argue now that the bands putting their music directly onto Bandcamp and Spotify and finding their own audiences, on their own terms, are intrinsically less artistically valid than Ed Sheeran, with his weird Fraggle face and insistence that your mouth ‘remembers the taste of his love\u2019? No.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s ludicrous to think that music that comes down that route is somehow worth less. In fact, we freely acknowledge that most innovation in music over the last forty years has come from the underground, from the people pushing boundaries, unconcerned by mainstream success. Sound familiar?<\/p>\n

Personally, when I first heard about this new literary movement, this breaking down of the traditional gatekeepers, I thought about Ian MacKaye of Fugazi, Minor Threat and more besides, who I consider to have the truest ‘punk\u2019 ethos of anyone on the planet. Here is a man who had plentiful offers to join the mainstream, but saw something in the ethos of doing it yourself, of keeping your art pure. Now, with the avenues of distribution freely available to all and sundry, we writers have the ability to follow in those same footsteps. We can hire our own editors, our own cover designers, and promote our own works to the world, and we don\u2019t even have to stand in the rain on a cold Thursday night handing out flyers to make our mark.<\/p>\n

It seems to me that there\u2019s something about this whole explosion of Self-publishing that is very punk rock, from the DIY ethos, to the threat it poses to the traditional publishers, to the fact that NOBODY CAN TELL YOU WHAT TO WRITE. We can find our own audiences, and it doesn\u2019t matter if we don\u2019t sell millions of copies of our books, or win awards. You want to write christian historical epics? Go wild. Dinosaur porn? Well, I guess that\u2019s probably okay? Apocalyptic horror that focuses on stoners from the North East? Okay that one I\u2019m hoping will do well enough to keep me in the custom to which I\u2019ve become accustomed. But you get my point.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s time to take the chip off our shoulders. We are Punk Publishing.<\/p>\n

If you want to know more about me or my books, you can <\/em>follow me on Twitter<\/a><\/em>,\u00a0<\/em>like the Facebook page<\/a><\/em>, or <\/em>follow me on Instagram<\/a><\/em>. For news, offers, and special content,<\/em>\u00a0s<\/a>ign up for the mailing list<\/a><\/em>.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I like the idea of Punk Publishing.<\/p>\n

Incidentally, I\u2019ve just read Paul\u2019s novel that he\u2019s putting out soon, and it\u2019s great.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

rhube: paulformulaic: Self-publishing has, it\u2019s fair to say, a bit of a chip on its shoulder. It\u2019s understandable, really, given the scorn with which the world of traditional publishing ladles onto it. If you\u2019ve decided to go down the road of publishing your works yourself, through the various avenues open to you, chances are you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[309,311,310,308],"class_list":["post-10780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words","tag-aesthetic","tag-decolonize","tag-diy","tag-punk"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-2NS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10780\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}