Border Crime Library

The Self-Publisher 

Ralph Waldo Emerson, who in my opinion is America's most important philosopher, once said in his Essays: First Series, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."  Such "consistency" is an issue of the editors of the large publishing companies and treats of political correctness in their censorship, or rejection policies.

Large book publishers are often owned by corporations that  own the same newspapers, television stations, newspapers and other media that make their books "best sellers."  One can readily see the monopolistic and catch-22 aspects of obtaining a conventional publisher.  Even if a conventional publisher had offered to publish one of my books (one did show an interest),  I learned that it might be up to two years after contract signing before the book would be published.  When you are my age, that is a big chunk out of your remaining years.  

Some of the more daunting challenges of self-publishing is that you have to be your own writer, editor, typesetter and publisher. In addition, to creating literary works, the self-publisher is burdened by publicity, marketing and bookkeeping.  I am fortunate to have a wife who helps me in some of these chores. 

Prior to POD publishing, making self-publishing affordable for almost anyone, I figured that none of my work would ever get beyond creative writing classes--where, back in the 1970s I used to thrill classmates --as well as be thrilled by their own politically incorrect efforts.  Reading and writing unedited writing by those who wear their hearts on their sleeves is as thrilling as reading a novel by Gogol (who invented wearing the heart on the writer's sleeve--he played a part in inspiring the current movie, Namesake,  for which I recently wrote a review for Amazon.com).  Self-publishing, as well as creative writing classes, are exhilarating experiences that the general public can share only by digging beneath the obfuscation of the giant media and corporations that want to guide your reading habits (and maybe even your thought processes).

 Although I do not know anyone who writes racist or bigoted material, many writers are suppressed and constricted to narrow scopes of writing delineated by the "requirements" of each publisher which they define in narrow terms.  They all fear that they might offend some minority or ethnic group.  This phenomenon was thematic in the movie, Amadeus, when the Austrian Holy Roman emperor, Joseph II, censored some of Mozart's best operas for fear of offending some of the multitudinous minority groups in the empire. 

One of the best novels ever written, Cervantes' Don Quixote, had to be read by an official "censor" before publication.  You can read Cervantes' censor's remarks in the middle pages of the unabridged versions.  In those days of the Inquisition, writers had to walk a fine line, but Cervantes somehow managed to publish this story, which is a satire on the stagnation of classic literature, and got it past the official censor. He did it by creating a pathetic character who was a product of the Inquisition and State censorship, a character too ignorant to recognize the fish bowl existence of writers in late the Sixteenth Century.  His protagonist, Don Quixote, a mentally unbalanced and delusional old man revives his personal concept of the erstwhile knight errant who, "in days of old, when knights were bold," demonstrates his fascination with the old, stagnated heroic tales of medieval times, and makes a futile effort to reconcile his current experiences with those of the past. Cervantes does not tell us his protagonist has a brilliant, but warped mind; he leaves it to the reader to figure out. The reader is taken along for a ride like someone trying to make sense of a narration by Cantinflas, or one who, for a while, is sympathetic with Nabokov's Humberto Humberto. It might be said that a good novelist exploits the same human frailties that a psychopath, a slight of hand artist, or even a Ponzi scheme operator might.  For example, as an Immigration Investigator,  I was once sent to Los Angeles' Sybil Brand female detention center to pick up an Egyptian prostitute named "Medusa Salaam."  I wondered how any mother could name a child "Medusa," and after listening to her lies and dissembling efforts for a short time, I determined she was a black prostitute from East Texas. When I disappointed her by telling her I could not deport her to Egypt, she wanted to know if I could just put her on the next INS bus to Tijuana! I began to suspect that she had a mean  pimp she wanted to get rid of. I went back to the front office to check out and told them that the woman was a U.S. citizen (and there-fore an LAPD, not INS, problem).  The young lady psychologist who had interviewed her for sanity refused to admit she'd been been duped; to her, the young woman was still Egyptian, Medusa Salaam, not Ruby Mae Smith of Carthage, Texas!    

Some of Mark Twain's best satire has come to light only in recent years as his old manuscripts that were rejected by editors (when he was not self-publishing) have recently been published.  A good example is his short story, The War Prayer, which can be viewed in its entirety (about 500 words, I'd guess) on several web sites by merely typing in Mark Twain's The War Prayer in your browser window.  It might be described as an expose' of religious fundamentalism and how the Old Testament scripture can be played against the New Testament to justify just about anything. 

In some  ways, since Twain, and perhaps even since Cervantes, social conventions have changed for the better, but there is much pressure for more censorship from certain groups,, particularly the fundamentalist religious groups that have in recent years begun to retrogress back toward where we were in the days of the Inquisition.  I believe that a good writer can write without obscene language, even when he is writing about people who use such language, such as some of the characters of which I write about in The Border Nightwalkers. 

Some writers do not understand the concept of viewpoint and the many ways in which it is applied.  I was fortunate to have the late Francis Fugate as my mentor in creative writing classes.  He authored what I consider the best book ever on the subject of viewpoint, Viewpoint: Key to Fiction Writing, which we used in his class.  Some writers cannot avoid the colloquial even when writing in the third person.  Pornography, per se, can be avoided even when the writer is depicting the dregs of society, as Steinbeck did in Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat. 

I once thought that self-publishing was demeaning to a true artist's skills until I learned that these great authors self-published:

• William Blake
• Robbie Burns
• Edgar Rice Burroughs
• Samuel (Mark Twain) Clemens
• Alexander Dumas
• Zane Grey
• James Joyce
• Rudyard Kipling
• D.H. Lawrence
• Edgar Allen Poe
• George Bernard Shaw
• Henry David Thoreau
• Virginia Woolf
• Margaret Atwood
• Tom Clancy
• Stephen Crane
• Wayne Dyer
• Carl Sandburg....

   

  That's company any writer can be proud to be a part of.  I hope that other self-published writers will take heart.  Understandably, self-published authors are scorned by the large, corporate book publishers, but they are not as oblivious as they might pretend to be.  More and more good quality publishing is coming into print by self-publishers who do not want to undergo the humility of rejection and/or extensive editing for political correctness.  If we are not getting their patronage, we are at least getting their attention.

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  (The above list of famous, self-published authors was compiled by the Trafford Publishing Company.)

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