Many people — especially in this City of Literature — believe they have a book in them.
Usually their first excuse for not writing it is, “I’ll never get around to it.” The second is, “Who would publish it?”
The second excuse won’t wash, anymore. It has become amazingly easy and cheap to publish and market your own book.
I’m all too painfully sensible of the pathos and vainglory that must go into anyone’s decision to self-publish. When my first novel, “Willie Wilden,” came out in 2011, and I was asked, “Who’s publishing it?”
I got a vague understanding of how it must feel to be an exceedingly plain girl who’s never had a serious boyfriend, walking around with a big pregnant belly, having someone ask, “Who’s the lucky fella?” — and having to reply, “Uh … it’s complicated,” because you don’t want to admit that, being unable to attract a mate, you used frozen sperm.
My publisher, Rex Imperator, could be described as “a boutique company based in New York City.” That is technically true. My company (Dobrian, Frances, Bowie & Long) is incorporated in New York, and Rex Imperator is a division of that company — set up, specifically, to publish my books and those of my clients.
I’ve been making a decent living as a commercial writer for almost 30 years now, and not many people can do that — but I have something to say to the literary world, as well.
“Willie Wilden” was in ready-to-shop condition for three years before I decided to self-publish. I sent queries and sample chapters around to a dozen or so agents, and I didn’t get so much as a nibble from any of them — and I was not surprised.
I could come up with several reasons why an agent wouldn’t want to touch it:
• It’s a first novel by an author who’s utterly unknown in the world of fiction.
• It’s 160,000 words: about 540 pages.
• It’s not genre fiction. It’s neither a woman’s nor a man’s book. It has largely to do with academia, somewhat to do with love and romance, somewhat to do with college football and somewhat to do with poetry.
• “Willie” is unabashedly political — and politically incorrect. Most of the “good guys” are conservatives or Libertarians. The “bad guys” are liberals and progressives.
Naturally, I heard a pretty loud voice in the back of my mind insisting that those bullet-points were just lame excuses, and that the real problem was that “Willie” simply stunk. But if it did, I wanted to be convinced that it stunk, by overwhelming popular revulsion.
So, I decided, “Self-publish and be damned.”
And, guess what? “Willie” isn’t selling in the millions because I don’t have the marketing resources that a major publisher has, but it got good reviews. “Willie” will never make me famous, but it has passed the smell-test, and then some.
It’s a damn good novel — and it’s exactly what I wanted to write, exactly what I wanted to publish.
So, my advice, if you have that book unwritten, languishing on your bucket-list? Self-publish and be damned — but not until you’re convinced that it’s the best book of its kind that you could have written.
I’ll be reading from my novel, “Willie Wilden,” and perhaps from my collection of essays, “Seldom Right But Never In Doubt,” at the Self-Published Authors Fair, which is from 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday at the Coralville Public Library.
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