This fall, I will have been writing prose for thirty-three years. It is the one thing in my life that I have stuck with.
The journey as a writer began in college in 1992. I did not attend a fancy or prestigious college but a small, modest one, a community college, where writing prose found me through those mandatory English requirements.
I wrote, and I wrote a lot, a lot of bad prose from 1992 to 1997. They were the “apprentice years” as the late author, Paul Auster, called them.
I wrote novels then, miserably failing at the Great American Novel and having to settle for what I called “The Great American ‘Short’ Novel”.
In 2003, my first work of prose got published, a collection of three novellas through a semi-vanity press who claimed they rejected over sixty percent of the manuscripts they received. I had written entry-level fiction, I like to call it, by this time. Not Pulitzer Prize-winning prose but good enough prose to get published, or hoped to get published, and a publisher that rejection most of the manuscripts they received was good enough for me.
Very modest book sales followed. Not what I had hoped for. I was, sadly, naive.
Up until that time, I had a literary agent from Peoria, IL, who failed to land me a publishing contract with a traditional publisher for a collection of short stories I wrote.
In 2008, Clarion Books (Random House) request the first three chapters of a novella I had written. Suspense. Women’s fiction.
That ultimately fell through.
When you come that far and that close as a published novelist and look back at what you have been through, you cannot just turn back. For me, it was already too late. I had already fallen too deeply in love with writing prose.
I still wanted more than anything to become a traditionally publisher author. Can you only become an author through traditional publishing? Does self-publishing even count? Perhaps I am being too hard on myself.
Then the demon of digital publishing emerged. All you needed was a half-baked book and an internet connection, which I had and turned to. I felt I was proven enough, had paid my dues enough, to venture in this direction, and I have been published through that route ever since as, I guess you could call it, an “amateur author”.
But you have to be careful with the self-publishing platform. It can easily be mistaken for a “plank” as in “walking the plank”. Self-publishing, in particular through Amazon, makes it dangerously too easy to publish prose, prose that is not polished, and that, I believe, has been the reason I have not succeeded, why I have not been read by a wider audience.
So, I am trying to resurrect my career, being much more precise at polishing my prose. I thought, several times, about taking on a pen name, but frankly, I believe, it is both as hassle and taking the easy way out, and you are really starting over, throwing those thirty-three years away. Maybe if you are just a few years in, but not two thirds of your lifetime.
I am not saying that I am turning to the dark side of publishing with self-publishing; what I am saying, which I now believe, is that sometimes, the road to being traditionally published goes through independent publishing. Maybe an easier, more comprehendable was of saying it is that “you have to go through the minor leagues of publishing to get to the big league of book publishing or traditional publishing”.
When you choose independently publishing, you have to put your unpublished book through “book camp”, though editing it, creating its cover, in writing the book blurb, which, I think, can be way more difficult to write than the book itself.