I started a new project called “Monsterpede.” I plan to self-publish it, so I’m free to bore you with openly document the process here.
This first post in the series I make about “Monsterpede” is going to be about self-publishing, which I declare, right now, is one of the best things about living in the future! This advancement guarantees that even if “Leprechaun Proctology as a Cure for Irritable Bowel Syndrome” would only ever be purchased by one man, a Colombian ex-circus clown with forty cats living on a frozen rock off the coast of Greenland, that man can buy your book.
Self-publishing is a powerful tool. Like all power tools, people who want to use them should learn exactly what they’re doing. Randy Henderson recently made an excellent post on the subject, and you should read it, but I most especially want to draw your attention to this:
I certainly see how bad my early stories are now, though at the time I thought they were completely awesome. I would have self-published them if I’d had the option. And now I am so glad I did not, that they were rejected and I was driven to try again, to try harder, to do better.
Everyone is different, and the path you take should be what makes you happy–but it shouldn’t necessarily be what makes you comfortable. Comfort is a trap for an artist or writer, because it’s the place you go when you’re doing things other than learning. And learning is important, because your stories deserve to be made the best they can be, instead of the first thing they are.
People self-publish for a lot of reasons. Some of them I think are healthy; some are completely insane. It’s up to you to be well-informed about the choice you make for your project. To that end, I’m going to share the process I went through to decide Monsterpede’s avenue toward publication.
Here are reasons I should traditionally publish “Monsterpede,” by sending it out to agents/publishers:
1) I believe it will be good enough for people who don’t know me to want it. It would be a niche market of neon-haired children whose parents have tattoos and piercings, sure, but why reject myself? I should let editors and art directors do that. My job is to make something good and believe in it even when other people don’t! Punk parents might be a bigger market than I think.
2) I don’t enjoy children’s books and I have no intention of reading picture books as research. I hated most picture books when I was a kid, too. I remember being five years old and reading the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books on the forgotten shelf in our stairwell, because watered-down Mary Higgins Clark stalker stories were preferable to a stupid talking aardvark with glasses. Authors like me who refuse to research their market are clueless morons, and we need help from people who know what they’re doing.
3) An advance for an average picture book is between $3,000 – $8,000 (split between author and illustrator, but since I’m both, I assume I’d get it all). That is between $2,990 – $7,990 more than I expect to make. Cha-CHING.
4) I don’t mistakenly think publishing houses are evil. Want to talk about evil? Try the huge online retailer which most self-publishers use to sell their work. That company is a giant, dirty butthole. They throw their massive amounts of cash into bullying, which we don’t approve of in school, so why would we approve of it when it destroys jobs? And if I self-published this project, I would have to accept that part of championing this book would be to make it available on that giant, dirty butthole’s website. That makes me physically sick.
But in spite of these, I’m choosing to self-publish “Monsterpede” because:
1) I want total control over the project. I don’t want a publisher to discard my illustrations. Even though I’m not a children’s book illustrator, I am a trained designer & fairly accomplished artist, so it’s not like I’m using hideously misshapen anime line-art. And while I don’t have/won’t hire an editor, I have two kick-ass critique groups who I don’t have to pay! I’ve also done time in marketing (yes, honey, I talk about it like prison for a reason), so I at least know the basics, even if they’re not book-specific.
Hopefully, I’m as close to knowing what I’m doing as an amateur can get.
2) I want to do this at my own pace. Even if my book was accepted at the first publisher I sent it to, it would be at least two years before it came out. I hope to have it available in just over two months. (It’s okay to laugh.)
3) I want a learning experience. I’ve never put together a book all by myself before! I’d like to add it on my resumé right between “can wipe own butt” and “talented at in-store merchandising of sexy shoes.” (One of those is a lie, but it’s not like a prospective employer is going to follow me into the bathroom to check.)
I won’t let you down, “Monsterpede.” You are pierced with concrete rebar and strewn with gritty urban wreckage, populated by people who eat two-headed rats and used band-aids for dessert. You are amazing and horrifying, and I promise I will use all the skills and resources I gained from competitive publishing to make you the kind of unforgettable little book that you deserve to be.
