Why the Heck I Published ... Part 2

In my last post, "Why the Heck I Published My New Book with Amazon," I ended on a hopeful note, stating that "the book world is getting a much needed shake-up." What I didn't say, in so many words, anyhow, is that I, among many other respectable established mid-list authors, have become collateral damage in that shake-up. And I have to admit that, even though I carefully designate myself as an Independent author, what I really have become is that once-despised creature, a self-published author.

Now, Walt Whitman was a self-published author. In his day, the road to being respectably published by the publishing establishment was blocked by the forces of American Prudery, rather than, as today, by the forces of Global Profit-taking. Whitman's way around the blockade was to pay for printing Leaves of Grass himself, even setting some of the type with his own hands. Furthermore, Whitman distributed the book to bookstores himself (although most of them wouldn't carry it). He even wrote fulsome reviews of his own book (anonymously), and had them published in the pages of newspapers run by his friends. Whitman was a bold, proud, and devious self-publisher.

Emily Dickinson, on the other hand, was a reticent self-publisher--with an emphasis on self. For Dickinson, publication was "the Auction / of the Mind of Man-- / Poverty be justifying / For so foul a thing // Possibly--" We'll never know why she refused to publish--and she did refuse. After all, the mid-19th-century saw the rise of print culture, and many women, some of whom she knew, actually made a good living with their books. But Emily Dickinson was a New England lady, and she was an extremely shy New England lady. To appear in print "hankering, gross, mystical, nude," as Whitman expressed it, would have been anathema to her.

However, after Dickinson died in 1886, her sister found both unpublished and "published" poems in a dresser drawer: the unpublished poems were scrawled on used envelopes, backs of recipes, brown paper bags, as if the poet had been waylaid by genius in the middle of her domestic working day. The "published" poems were, heartbreakingly, carefully transcribed on sheets of quality paper folded horizontally across the center to form little books, most of them stitched at the spine. Whereas Whitman had set type with his own hands, Dickinson had formed the entire book with her own hands, not for publication, but solely for herself.

I, surprise!, am no Emily Dickinson. I'm not even a Walt Whitman! (Relax, it's a joke!) Finding myself, unexpectedly, a self-publisher after nine traditionally published books, I may reconcile myself more easily to that status than some 21st-century authors do. After all, I know I'm in damn good company.

And, even given American publishing's current domination by multinational investment conglomerates whose principle concern is with profit rather than with literature, I have been able to publish The Kashmiri Shawl--the best novel I've written, even if it's not in a proven market category. I don't know how to set type. I do know how to sew, but I also know I would find it hyper-tedious to construct a delicate little individual book for each reader! I'm grateful to CreateSpace and Amazon for setting type for me, for constructing books for me, in short, for providing a 21st-century medium through which it is possible to publish an "unpublishable" book: a self-initiated, uniquely imagined, idiosyncratic, heartfelt novel written in communion with the Muse rather than with the Market.

It's not going to become a bestseller. It's not going to make me a fortune. Then why publish it? Am I naïve? Very well, then, I'm naive. But my life, and my two professions, as an English professor and as a writer, have always revolved around literature and reading. The Kashmiri Shawl is now in print and available to readers, who, judging by the Amazon reviews, written neither by myself nor by Walt Whitman, seem to like it.