“When I first sold a story to Interzone I tried to explain the feeling to a non-genre friend. ‘It’s like getting a Peel Session,’ I said. John Peel’s Radio 1 show – irredeemably British but with an extraordinarily International passion – still seems like a good analogy to Interzone. Peel of course is sadly RIP, but Interzone is not, and long, long may it continue.” Daniel Kaysen.

Maybe mags like Interzone are more like The Cavern than they are like John Peel, but clearly the need for this kind of gig is felt by many writers.

But I stand by what I said about that site! I guess that being in the internet industry as my non-heroic secret identity, I’m a very harsh critic.

I think that, for self-publishing to be the literary equivalent of punk, it needs to take an ideological stance of some sort. ‘Publish it yourself ‘cos nobody else ever will,’ won’t be enough. Self-publishers would need to offer something more and be doing it for a reason that wasn’t just desperation.

Some self publishers really do believe they are taking a stand against a system that is failing them (like your chum Darryl Sloan) and these are the kind of people that a punk write movement could nucleate around. But I think that in itself won’t be quite enough either. The books they produce would need to be different – more energetic, more literate, more fun, more intelligent, more *something* – before people started to take notice.

Anyway, you’re always welcome to burble on my blog.

What muddies the waters for us as aspiring authors is that it is so hard to know whether our writing is good or not. We evolve, we grow, we improve, so it’s natural to like early writing less. Also, it’s ultimately subjective once you get past the easily measurable standards such as grammar and nuts and bolts construction of a novel.

Hrm, I’m starting to burble aren’t I? Suffice to say, great parallel you’ve drawn here, and yes, I like to think of self-publishing as the literary punk movement, if only to be able to think that there is some way to push against the system that might never let me in!

P.S. I saw the book expo thing – and nearly wept when I saw the site. Honestly, surely the first way to give it some credibility is to create a professional looking site? It gives the impression of being cheap, homespun and amateurish (in all negative connotations of the word) which is exactly what reputable self publishers want to change, surely?! Ooh it makes me mad!

As an aside, you might have seen the announcement today that a Self-Published Book Expo is being organised. It will happen in New York in November. More details in the Publisher’s Weekly post here: http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6651681.html?rssid=192

I’m actually quite conflicted about this topic. I know good writing when I see it and I strive to make mine better all the time. So I clearly have my own standards for what constitutes ‘good’ in this arena. It is the idea that the publishing industry is the arbiter of quality that really worries me though. Publishing is a business. It isn’t the English language equivalent of the Academie Francaise (please forgive my lack of accents – this software is too stupid to let me put them in.) Its standards are designed to maximise sales (if not, why not?) not to maximise quality. If the average reading age of its customers is 12, that’s the level they will want us to write at. If their readers are so illiterate that they can’t cope with unfamiliar words, we must leave them out. If their readers can’t ease into a narrative through exposition and discourse but have to have everything start with action and excitement, then that’s how we must write. If their customers want to be shown everything through action and dialogue – as if they were watching TV – then woe betide us if we use words to tell them things.

And that’s fine. If you want to be published, you have to make a product they can sell. There is no point in wasting their time with anything else. But, even if you want to be published, you don’t have to swallow the line that the publishing industry is the only arbiter of what is good writing and what is bad. ‘Good enough’ when said by a publishing insider, only means ‘Good for us.’

In some ways I do agree that blogging is almost writers punk. Occasionally I will go surfing blogs to read short stories, flash fiction, etc, and most of the time I don’t get past the first few sentences. But I do understand the urge for writers to get their work out there, to want people to read it, and I recognize that posting something on a blog or website is an outlet for that. I’ve posted a couple pieces of flash on my blog also, but those are pieces I’m not particularly planning to get published. That being said there are some excellent community blogs that post/publish excellent short fiction – but finding them can be a little difficult, just like finding a good punk bad .

And while I agree that we definitely need to have confidence in our writing and our ability to write, we also need to counter that with acknowledging the need for improvement and being able to take advice and rejection on the chin and learn from it. If we don’t acknowledge those needs, then our confidence turns into bitter arrogance and our chances of making it as a writer lessen dramatically. And I agree with terry – looking back at something we wrote several years ago and saying it wasn’t very good doesn’t reflect on us as people or on our writing now.

I do a fair amount of critique on the Absolute Write forums (or at least used to, and still browse the critting areas) and there are a lot of instances of people who have finished a novel and are shopping it to agents, but whose work is nowhere near publishable quality. The sad thing is, though, that when that is pointed out to them they are more likely to react in a huff and disappear, rather than taking the advice and learning from it.

And I also agree with you that in many ways ‘good enough’ is subjective, but I think in both of those quotes – and particularly Jane Smith’s one – the ‘good enough’ refers more to the basics of writing (prose, plot, pacing and characterization) than to subjective industry standard (though I don’t disagree that the industry standard is subjective and can change plenty in a short time, but businesses are like that and publishing is a business).

Anyway, interesting post. Thanks for posting it