"Vanity" press? Why the hell not?

I had an idea this morning in the bathroom, where many of my most illuminating thoughts come to me.

All my life I’ve been agonizing about my failure to become the kind of “professional” writer that it was my goal to become when I was about 17. In my youth I dreamed of becoming the next Hemingway. But with the death of Norman Mailer recently, we have all pretty much acknowledged that there aren’t going to be any more Hemingways; the age of the celebrity novelist is over. Yes, there are still a handful of serious writers around, but I would bet you a double soy latte that if Cormac McCarthy or Don DeLillo walked into Starbucks, nobody would recognize them. Philip Roth maybe, but even he wouldn’t be recognized by anyone under 40.

For decades it has been a source of head-bashing frustration to me that I could never get past the gate, never get anything I wrote in book form published by a legitimate publisher, paid for and marketed by that publisher. In other words, that I have never in all these years of writing been able to gain access to “the country club.”

I’ve discussed the reasons for this in my journal ad nauseum: I majored in the wrong subject at college. I didn’t attend graduate seminars in creative writing. I didn’t do the networking necessary to make the connections in the publishing industry that you need to get a book published. Publishers and agents receive 10,000 manuscripts a day. They’re not going to look at all of them. Naturally they’re going to gravitate toward the ones that come from people they already know, or come recommended by people they already know. A manuscript by an unknown author, unless it comes with the imprimatur of John Updike, has about as much chance of getting published as a fourth-year student in a state university dramatic arts program has of landing a leading role on Broadway.

But it suddenly hit me this morning…so what? What if, at age 52, I change my whole attitude and decide to regard writing as a hobby? Sound silly? At first blush, yes. Jejune? Certainly. Unserious? Perhaps. But if I ratchet down my expectations and regard my writing – and, by the way, the self-publishing of my writing – as a weekend activity that I pursue purely for my own amusement and that of a few friends, that puts a whole new complexion on the subject. If I’m no longer striving to become the next Saul Bellow, what the hell do I care if so-called “legitimate” publishers look down their noses at me for publishing my books through iUniverse.com or one of its clones? Let ‘em get their noses hooked on tree branches.

Yes, publishing by on-demand services (P.O.D.s) is more expensive than it used to be. iUniverse charges about $600 now, roughly six times what they charged when I published my novel Tower-102 through them in 2000. But if I’m bringing out a book every year to 18 months, that’s certainly a cheaper hobby than say, skiing. And there are historical precedents for such things. William Blake printed his own books. Walt Whitman hawked Leaves of Grass door-to-door. And had it not been for the succes de scandale of Tropic of Cancer, who knows how much longer Henry Miller might have gone on selling his “mezzotints” on the street?

In 2001, when a fellow named Charlie and I joined forces briefly to see if we could whip up a few sales for our self-published novels, I found Charlie extremely bitter. He had gone to great lengths to try and get his novel accepted by a “real” publisher, even spending a considerable amount of money on an agent, (when anyone could have told him that an agent who charges you a fee is, ipso facto, a charlatan) and he had bought into the rhetoric of the so-called “real”publishers and of the sniffers you encounter at book fairs: if you published your book through iUniverse, Author House or any other P.O.D. service, it was just “vanity” publishing and you weren’t a “real” writer. I, more sanguine I suppose because all I had spent was about $100 and I was trying to regard the whole thing as a lark, tried to convince him that we didn’t need the approval of the extended-pinky snotbuckets. We were doing our own thing and to hell with them. My friend Lucia told him, over a lunch the three of us shared, that she came from a part of the world (South America) where there was absolutely no stigma attached to publishing your own book.

But Charlie wouldn’t be convinced. Deep down, he felt that he had no right to call himself a writer because someone else hadn’t published his book for him.

And deep down, I could see his point. Because, in all honesty, part of me felt the same way. I knew I was good enough for Scribner’s, and I’m sure Charlie believed he was too. But there comes a time when you have to face facts. If you haven’t gotten into the country club, you haven’t gotten into the country club, and there’s no point in banging your head against the wall because you’re never going to see yourself interviewed on Oprah or see your book written up in the New York Times Book Review. Eventually you have to make a decision as to whether you’re doing this for love or doing it for ego. (And what delicious irony, by the way, in being able to think of so-called “vanity” publishing as a repudiation of doing it for ego and an affirmation of doing it for love. But it is, in fact, possible to see it that way.)

Oh, it’s not that I’ve been entirely unsuccessful as a writer. I’ve written plenty of journalism, been paid for it, even won an award or two. But I’ve been unable, so far anyway, to make the transition from the newspaper-or-magazine page to the book between covers. The truth is, the age of the journalist-turned-novelist was pretty much over by 1945. I’ve discussed this in my notebooks, and if I had been aware of that historic fact when I graduated from high school in the 1970s, I probably would have majored in something other than journalism in college. But in 1973, the year I started college, my thinking about the writer’s profession was still back in the James T. Farrell era.

You can’t go back and undo the past. And even if I were to get into some university MFA program in creative writing, (I’ve been turned down for two of them in the past 18 months) at 52 I’m too old to become a “promising young writer.” So my choices are: (1) Bag it all and start keeping bees, (2) Resign myself to writing “for my desk drawer” or (3) Go ahead and make use of a P.O.D. service when I finish a book, post it for sale on my web site and those of whatever friends will do me the favor and just not worry about whether I ever become an accepted member of the “literary community,” which in any case is dissolving as the world goes digital and becomes increasingly compartmentalized by the Internet, the iPhone and 500 channels of satellite TV.

Samuel Johnson might have said that anyone who writes for anything other than money is a fool, but it could easily be counter-argued that anyone whose primary interest is making money had better be in some other racket besides writing, unless they happen to be John Grisham. There was a time when the word “amateur” (derived from the Latin “amat,” meaning love) had a positive ring, not a negative one. So what if I decide to just abandon the oak-and-calf routine and settle for treating the writing and publishing of my fiction and memoirs as a hobby, and to hell with the fact that I get ignored by the Washington Post Sunday book section? I don’t even read the Washington Post Sunday book section anymore. If I don’t read them, why should I care if they read me?