Self-Publishing Poll

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

ysabetwordsmith pointed out this poll on self-publishing, which I visited briefly. After reading a handful of the comments, I was struck by their violence: there's a lot of emotion there in the people denouncing the practice of self-publishing. ysabetwordsmith said about that: "Any instance of extreme hostility raises the question of why people are being so violent about it."

I think that's a good question. Why do you think some of the people opposed to self-publishing are so hostile about it?


Edit: Please note, I'm not really interested in debating the profitability of the publishing industry. What I'm trying to understand, primarily, is why there's so much vitriol leveled by writers and readers at self-published authors (as in one of the commenters who said of self-published authors that they can "call themselves authors" but they never will be real ones). This kind of extreme behavior strikes me a strange. Particular coming from writers to other writers. And readers—that makes no sense at all. If they don't want to read self-published work, they can just... not read it. Why the anger?

Comments

Re: Well...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

>>Vanity presses can be predatory.<<

Oh yes.

>>Strangely enough, the poetry editor of the current publisher of the collection stated that it was so polished, it could have been published as-is. So I guess I did a fairly good job of self-editing, and I might have been able to present a decent product had I self-published it.<<

Yeah, I've had people say that about my work too. I still would rather not work without a net. Happily I have an excellent first-reader in my house, who is frequently more use than some professional editors I've worked with.

>>I've heard of several poets putting together their own chapbooks. I see it as a form of self-publishing, but maybe there are some subtle distinctions I'm missing.<<

It is self-publishing. People just care less about poetry these days. There is very little market for it in the conventional press, so poets are likely to fall back on self-publishing.

Re: Well...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

>>To change the subject a bit...we gotta bring respectability back to poetry! We gotta make people care about poetry again. C'mon, we can do it!<<

Ra, ra, ra!

>>I've read a bit of your poetry, it's good stuff. It's certainly more readable and enjoyable than a lot of the garbage out there.<<

Thank you! I hear that a lot, actually, and I know a handful of other poets who have similar experiences.

The aspects of good poetry include:
* It should be clear and understandable. Most modern poetry is muddy and purposely obscured. Mystery and mud are not the same.
* It should use charming language. Something in it should tickle one's brain, feel good in the mouth, sound good in the ears. Poetry is like linguistic origami. Much modern poetry does not take advantage of this; it tends to go clunk.
* It should feature an interesting topic: either something familiar made fresh and interesting, or something new introduced in a compelling way. Much modern poetry chooses overly personal or abstract topics that do not resonate easily with readers.

The number of people who enjoy obscurist poetry is small, and when obscurist poetry is presented to most people and hailed as Great Stuff, a majority of students yawn their way through it and avoid poetry forevermore thinking that's all there is. It's not.

>>If we can get readers to realise that poetry can be readable, accessible, and even enjoyable, maybe we can bring back some of poetry's lost respectability.<<

When I wrote curricula for adult remedial education in prison classes, most of our students were black or Hispanic. I hauled out poems by my favorite black and Hispanic authors, among others, and assigned those. The guys were hooked -- they had never seen anything like that, had not realized that poetry could be about things they cared about. I said, you want to write poetry about how to hotwire a car? Fine, write what you know, but you better get the details AND the form right.

We averaged one or two total converts per class. I'm still proud of that.

>>(I'm no fan of much of the modern poetry out there, so I understand why people may not care much for or about poetry nowadays. If they only understood the beauty of good poetry...)<<

This is why I'm in favor of things like free broadsides. My fishbowl deliberately includes making a lot of poetry publically visible. I've also toyed with the idea of putting on my bellydance garb and writing poetry on my body.