James Norton
Publish, Perish or Post it on the Web
It was New Yorker correspondent Abbott Joseph Liebling who said:
"Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one."
We should all be grateful this is no longer true. Thanks to e-mail, the World Wide Web and desktop publishing, the ability to mass-produce a work of literature has been snatched from the fists of wealthy, and passed around to anyone with a bit of persistence and access to a personal computer.
Unfortunately, however, Mr. Liebling's epigram can easily be tinkered with to create a statement that still (awkwardly) holds water:
"Freedom of the press is limited to those who have access to a professional PR person, a literary agent and the backing of a major portal site."
To some extent, it might be hard to get our minds around the idea that our access to the world isn't as unlimited as we'd once thought. After all, weren't we just getting used to the idea that when we posted Web photos of Fluffy the Cat anyone in the world could drop by and have a look?
And shouldn't publishing houses be terrified by the World Wide Web's rapid ascent and spread? After all, the Web poses a couple of important questions for those who control the creation and distribution of books:
First, the ability to make millions of paper pages isn't what it used to be. We can now make an infinite number of pages built from pixels on a monitor, with very little initial investment. Is there really any work left for Simon and Schuster, Vintage and Random House?
And, secondly, why should an author bother going through the demanding, arbitrary pool game of publishing politics, when she or he can publish instantly on the Web with absolute editorial control?
The answer is simple: in today's blizzard of information, the small, independent artist gets swept away by a torrent of pop culture, advertisements and other small, independent artists.
As a result, authors who self-publish on the Web are largely doomed to languish in obscurity.
When I asked Norwegian online author A.R. Yngve about the best books available online, he recommended, much to my disappointment, the Online Literature Library, a site dedicated exclusively to classic books.
"Currently, the best literature online is that which was written before the Internet existed," Yngve assured me. Probably true. But also probably a sign that many of today's great writers have yet to figure out a way to bring their best writing from their hard drives out to the monitors of the world.
Yngve is the author and illustrator of a series of respectably good science fiction novels called The Darc Ages, and has used the Internet to reach out to a broad international audience after some unpleasant interactions with a number of traditional book publishers.
"At one point (1996) I did manage to get an agent contract for one of my worst books, but the agent demanded a lot of rewrites that didn't work out, and the book ended up an incoherent mess," Yngve says. "She never sold it, and I'm relieved she didn't."
"What kept me going through the years was the fact that EVERY person who actually read the books claimed to enjoy them. This is still the case with the Web site readers who e-mail me now and then."
"Given this, it was more or less inevitable that I went for some sort of self-publishing eventually. The Internet was simply the cheapest format available, and it gave me complete editorial control."
But for every author with a coherent vision of their work and the drive to build a site to house it, there are many writers creating far more forgettable or unpublishable piles of text that are then launched haphazardly into cyberspace.
Disposable communication is thriving on the Web.
And the more disposable, the more it thrives. Thousands of online columns and articles (including the words you're reading right now) are posted every day. Millions of messages are posted in forums across the 'net, and uncountable, unspeakable reams of online chat are typed, read, archived and forgotten.
What's needed is a way to cut through the clutter.
"What us independent writers would really need is some kind of big-name portal endorsement," says Yngve. "Or a super-portal that links to ALL freely available quality fiction on the web."
For now, however, most online authors must make do with a small handful on online literature collectives. And with persistence, independent collectives may manage to make a dent. By setting a minimum standard for quality, coordinating marketing and advertising, and by building reliable core audiences, authors' collectives may be the next logical step for those who wish to see their work published on the Internet.
And while there's no doubt that sites like Fatbrain.com and DiskUs Publishing are a step in the right direction, there are clearly some kinks to be worked out of the system.
In general, the quantity of material on sites like these is limited, and the quality isn't exactly overwhelming.
When DiskUs Publishing's best-selling online book is a romance novel summarized like this:
"When city born-and-bred Jane Sorenson agrees to journey to a remote cabin in the Adirondacks to finish her novel, she doesn't realize that the ape-man who crashes into her cabin will also demolish her belief that romance is dead. Hunter Graham isn't actually an ape-man. He is the son of Jane's publisher, Reginald Graham, who makes a bet with his father that he can live simply in the forest-with only a loincloth, a knife and his quick wits," you know that independent online publishing may have to search a while before it finds its niche.