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Blogs by Bill Flynn
Self Promotion 4/26/2009 6:39:53 AM
Get rejected first, then self-publish and self promote.
Is the literary world in a state of change? Heres what
I think happened...about twenty-five years ago the word processor came into use. Better than changing a ribbon! Voila! A vehicle for easy writing with spell check et al began to sprout among millions of would-be authors. They wrote and they wrote. They sent query letters about their work to the New York traditional publishers who just couldn't handle the traffic. Some of the ideas were original and yes, some of the writing was well done, but such a landslide of query letters and/or manuscripts just couldn't be sorted out by the understaffed editors and their helpers...So a hugh slush pile of query letters and manuscripts filled the offices of Little Brown, William Morrow and the like until they were returned in SAE w/postage as rejections or sent to that recycle bin. A thought...I wonder if the work of Hemmingway, Steinbeck and Anne Rand, if they lived during the Word Processor age, would've made it to print or would their manuscripts die in that big unmanagable slush pile.
Now,in this day and age these traditional publishers rely on their best selling authors, for the most part, to keep the book presses rolling. They stick with a winner and buy authors instead of books. Some are brilliant, some are mundane.
The business of self-publishing grew and grew...Those rejected authors found a way to publish through them. Some books were very good...some yes, they were horrid. The stigma of the "vanity press" panacea was used by the literary snobs to down grade self publishing. But like in any enterprise such as dairy farming, the cream comes to the top. So...some self-published authors got the idea from a spurt of book sales early on that their book was pretty good.
Next step...Self promote. They did this using web sites, trailers, newsletters, low pricing on Kindle, radio interviews, contests and every Twitter, Facebook, Book Town, Good Reads,Sqidoo, My Tube and Amazon with every free promotion.
Makes one wonder if those traditional New York publishers are monitoring the self-published books that are nearly sucessful. And instead of query letters and dog-eared manuscripts that lay in big piles around their desk, they might be reading and considering a selected few of those finished novels. With their massive distribution to Barnes & Noble, Borders and the like, a good book with some originality might be good business. Seems like it would make their work day much easier.
Some changes in the literary world are most certainly going to happen
Bill Flynn
Author of THE FEATHERY (self-published & self-promoted)
