The Bodhisattva

There has been recent discussion about the pros and cons of Vanity publishing, and I’m going to apologize for how short this thought is, but it’s related to how much I care about the subject itself. I don’t think anybody is vehemently against vanity publishing. Quite frankly there are enough authors out there that I think are absolutely awful that are published traditionally and most of them that I think this about are authors whose future published works are insured with virtually no quality control, I mean let’s be honest - there is no way the third Paolini book will not be published, and it’s pretty much assured it will blow. The major difference is that a Paolini will actually profit from his work I’m not surprised or even against the practice of vanity publishing, simply because being so would make me a bit of a crusader, and crusading against something that I have no personal stakes in seems to be a waste of my time.

What I never understood was the adamant desire exhibited by those who employ vanity publishing to defend the practice. It’s like being the hot girl’s in schools second best friend - you’re not the best friend because your not even getting indirect play from the critical mass for your association, and nobody really hates you, it’s just nobody even notices you in that company, and for most of them - and this is the realization dagger - the same would hold true if you were the only girl in a room full of pork. This reaction is not antagonistic, maybe we don’t want to chill with you but we also aren’t out hunting you down (we are much to busy hunting your friend down). So what occurs is a kind of circling of the wagons when the danger is self-created shadows - because being ‘underground’ is trendy and offers a rallying cry, but the ‘underground’, the real underground of genre publishing has so much talent and is so competitive you can’t even make a comparison between the various small presses (I love them - and hope all of them make it to big pay days soon) and the Vanity presses.

I’m not questioning the passion of the vanity press writer, or how much work they may (or may not have) put in their work. It’s impossible to calculate, and I don’t think anyone writes something of length without genuine passion for what they are doing. The vanity press author is probably as consumed with his or her creation as any author with a contract in hand, but what has occurred is the circumvention of the most important factor - competition. Vanity press authors circumvent competition - the game isn’t fair because it doesn’t go their way, so they step out of the game and cry foul when people who are still playing - the people they want to play with - don’t pay them mind. You choose to play another game, but still want to be on the same scorecard and I’m sorry but there are no free throws in football. I don’t know about anyone else, but when I’m playing Poker and somebody opts out of the game and whines about inequality - I call them losers, but you know what? At least they played the game and they will be back at it next week.

I just think now with the advent of online communication, and the climate of the small presses and genre magazines, it’s and awesome time to put one’s ability to the test. The satisfaction a young author must feel to have a story accepted where their story may have been competing against an offering by legitimate talents such as a Richard Bowes or a Theodora Goss would seem to be the very point of writing to me. I’m not an aspiring author, and while publication is a natural goal, I just can’t fathom the satisfaction achieved by essentially paying someone to publish my work. They don’t believe in your work, they are not in the business of putting out what they deem quality work or work they believe, they are in the business of offering the service of printing your words (whatever they are) on paper.

So why do people self-publish? Jeff Vandermeer once said, ” I self-published my first collection–I didn’t feel I deserved real publication at that point“. Now, that could be revisionist in nature, but this is an author that you really can see grow with each and every book - and I thought his early work was dope to begin with. I hate to say an author is writing “ahead of his time”, but I think plenty of writers have written niche work in the past that really weren’t caught on to until some years later. You view the fantasy landscape and it doesn’t surprise you that the early work wasn’t published at that time - hell I myself probably wouldn’t even have called it fantasy at the time, but I think some writer’s work mature as the medium and the fan base itself matures. What I described is what every vanity press author perhaps hopes, but only applies to a fraction of a single percentage of them.

When a topic despised you are the subject of attention that may lead to discussion, but I don’t think the discussion of Vanity publishing is such a lightning rod. While certainly sometimes the target of a passing quip, the truth of the best permanent obscurity money can buy hurts more than being the subject of any watched attack, because what any vanity publication lacks (at he very least) is extracurricular dialogue. We don’t even spend the time to say how atrocious they might be like some do with Goodkind or Newcomb. Is the Vanity tag a death sentence? No, because there are at least a couple of those hot-girl-tag-alongs that I may have wished to invest at least a moment in the past to use as a current springboard of conversation to late blossoming laureates - but only a couple.