P.S.(I love JMS, so happy he’s doing Thor now

Writing for me is a creative outlet that God gave me. Whether or not the writing justifies circulation into the world outside my tiny comfort zone is another question.

The third person is the person who writes for a living. They write because they get paid for it. The process of writing for them may be just a job. My best friend is a lawyer who writes and reads contracts all day long. He hates the writing process and it is impossible for him to read fiction. It is too much like his job.

The second person is the person in between. It is the writer who must write and also desires to be published. This is probably the one person who is filled with the most turmoil and angst. You can be the first person and write your journals or your stories or your poetry and never share them with the world. Or, you may choose the self publish route and put together words just for a few friends and family. There is nothing wrong with this. In God’s eyes it is still a worthy endeavor. I put together a short book through lulu.com for Christmas. It was my mother’s hand written account of her life. She passed away three years ago. It was not a literary classic. But, it meant so much to my family. Their lives will never be the same after reading about “Mamaw’s” life growing up during the Depression and World War II. So, you don’t have to give in to the relentless need to be published. Just write. And, write. And, write and let God use your writing in the world that is immediately around you.

Because, if you are the second person, you must put on three entirely different hats. The writing is the easy part. It’s becoming the editor that is hard. You must tell yourself to cut those beautiful purple prose sentences and cut those scenes that kill your falling action. And, you have to rewrite that one character who seems false and forced upon the reader. Then, once you’ve done the editing, you have to put on a third hat and become a marketer. Because, folks, you can write the most compelling story with the greatest characters and hope to bless the world with the message that God has given you but if no one wants to read it, it’s “tinkling cymbal and sounding brass”. So, the question then boils down to how hard do you want to work?

Getting published can blind you to the beauty of the art of writing. Publishing is a business. Writing is an extension of who you are. Blending the two successfully is one of the most difficult things you will ever do. And in that blending is where many of us are lost to the world of the readers we are trying to reach. It’s like trying to swim upstream against a flooding current. Some of us will struggle and hopefully be noticed by some publisher standing on the safety of the shore. Some of us will be washed downstream to the ocean of discouragement. Some of us risk drowning and watching our art die.

I will continue to struggle against the current. If God truly wants my art to get into the hands of one person whose life can be changed for all eternity then the struggle will be worth it.

Thank you for reading my words and listening to my strange groans and moans. Thank you for providing a brief outlet for my own personal frustrations. Do not give in. Do not give up. My son, Sean, gave me a framed sign for Christmas. It is signed by J. Michael Straczynski, one of the greatest writers in comic books and television. It is a phrase from Babylon 5: “Never Surrender Dreams”.

Thought a few of you might appreciate that.

My Christmas present to myself this year was the 2008 Poet’s Market, an annual tome of listings for the small presses who publish poetry, known and unknown, general and specific. I’ve been going through the listings, reading each and figuring out which magazines I’d like to research more, get sample copies of, etc. that might be interested in my work. Frankly, it’s overwhelming, not just the options out there, but the consistently small amounts of poems any given magazine accepts for publication, often somewhere between 1% and 8% of their yearly submissions. That’s after you figure out which magazines may be interested, sending your poems under their often intricate and arcane individualized submission guidelines, many of them adamantly against simultaneous submissions, waiting anywhere from 4 weeks to 6 months to hear back from them, and then, just maybe, seeing your poem in print another 2-6 months after that. Most magazines have low numbers of subscribers, often with only a regional presence. The proliferation of many new poetry magazines in the past 10-15 years (and subsequent demise of not a few of them) has opened many doors to more beginning poets, but also made competition more difficult, not least because many new magazines have a narrow focus to go along with their narrow readership. This is how one gets one’s writing into the hands of an audience? Really?

On the other side of the coin, the web has caused an explosion of opportunities for writers of all kinds. Anyone with a website and a few spare gigs of hard drive space can be an online publisher. As we all know, this does not often lead to quality art, though certainly there are exceptions. Still, shifting the responsibility of separating wheat from chaff to the everyday websurfer does nothing to actually make it easier for them to find quality art on the net, and often makes it more difficult, because what does an average person actually know about artistic expression anyway? That may be an elitist statement, and God knows elitism is something I struggle with, but there’s a difference between wanting to surround yourself with quality art - something The Rabbit Room is expressly trying to offer to the average person through its reviews, suggestions, and contemplations - and simply “finding what you like” out there in a world only too happy for you to follow down its primrose path of oversimplification, oversentimentality, and proud mediocrity. We all know that Vanity Fair, of both the Bunyan and Thackeray variety, is alive and well and growing.

Then we’ve got the self-publishing route, the rim of the coin (if you want to extend the metaphor). The web publishers blame the print publishers for being stuffy gatekeepers; the print publishers blame the web publishers for the lowering of standards and making it harder for art in print to survive. And neither of them like those who self-publish, because they get cut out of the loop entirely. Something truly populist is never popular. So it seems to be a lose-lose-lose situation. Makes you think about “your Father, who sees what’s done in secret, will reward you” in a whole new way.

Because, really, what’s the point of making art, if not the making of it? Sharing it with others, giving it to God and hoping He may use it to nudge or shove others in His direction, is not only well and good, it is a true way to love God and love our neighbor. But art must be first and foremost an act of worship, a proclamation of God’s grandeur (GMH shoutout intentional) and an act of thankfulness for the gifts He has bestowed, not only on me the artist, but on the artists of all generations, recognized and unknown, of whom I am merely another link in a chain of witnesses throughout our world and history. When I think about that, I’m reminded of both my smallness and my blessedness, and so I throw myself once more into this messy pitch, grateful for the chance to do so. I think I’ve resolved to jump into this world of print publications for 2008, and see what happens out there. I may be casting talc instead of pearls, but also there may be eagles waiting out there instead of swine. Maybe nothing will happen, and maybe that’s okay. Regardless, there’s nothing that will change the honest, creative work I’ve done through the measure of grace and gifts given me, and if I can present my work as an acceptable sacrifice, there is no greater reward. …And I can always self-publish a book of poems someday and give out copies to my small circle of friends and acquaintances. Wink wink.

That being said, what is wrong with becoming your own publisher? Isn’t that what so many of the artists in the Square Peg Alliance have done? Haven’t they become jaded with the traditional record labels and wanted the freedom to write what they felt God was moving them to write?

The problem I faced with my fiction books was that traditional Christian publishers didn’t want to take a chance on a book that was too “secular” in its characterizations. Sorry, guys, but I write about real people with real problems in a world that is going to hell in a handbasket really, really fast. I want my books to get out there into someone’s hands who might read if for the secular angle but learn something about the Christian worldview.

That, to me, is the real problem with conventional Christian publishers. They don’t want to take risks and chances with new formats and edgy stories. Of course, the Left Behind series proved many of them wrong. My editor at Broadman & Holmon for my depression book told me the biggest mistake he made was passing on Left Behind series and a writer by the name of Ted Dekker. Go figure!

So, if these publishers aren’t willing to take risks, who will? Maybe what we need is a writer’s group like the Square Peg Alliance. Why not publish our own books? All that is needed is good writing and good editing to make sure the story is told well. Most writers realize that no matter how big the publisher, they still have to do the bulk of the marketing and promotion so why give them such a large chunk of your royalties? I don’t know. It’s a system that to me is broken and in need of major risk taking. But, the bottom line always is money, not art.

By the way, I sold almost one thousand copies of my first book in one year through iUniverse. I hope to sell more of that first book when the second one appears in the book stores! So, it can be done. The system can work but you have to work at it very, very hard to overcome all the problems and short comings of the POD (Print on Demand) label. That POD label is all but a death sentence for your book when it comes to getting it into a book store, so beware!

Still learning lots and lots
Bruce Hennigan

The first thing that comes to mind is that a musician can tour. Whether this means a tour bus and an arena show a night for three months or a homely VW and a gig at a local church, a musician has a forum to expose people to his music. Based on that, someone will decide whether or not they want to hear more and buy an album. A writer can’t really do that. Sure, you can set up book signings but unless someone knows your name and knows your style and genre, I seriously doubt you are going to do much to spread your work. Why? Because unlike music, the written word requires a significant investment of time for a person to decide if they like it and want to keep reading.

Because of the time investment a book requires, people generally buy and read books based on things like reviews, blurbs on the jacket, cover art and most importantly, I think, recommendations from other readers. Naturally music spreads the same way, but with the important difference that you can often listen to about ten seconds of a song a know right away whether or not you want to hear the rest of it. That doesn’t happen with a book.

So what I’m getting at is that I have a very hard time envisioning a successful path for a writer that tries to go the independent route. The exception would be for people that are speakers and sell books where they speak, and naturally guys like Andrew who can sell their books at their shows. The difference being that the audience already knows they like one aspect of an artist’s work and therefore can likely expect to like another aspect of it.

The ugly truth (as far as I’ve been able to learn) is that a writer that self-publishes, whether with a print on demand (POD) service like LuLu or a vanity press like Bruce is talking about in a previous comment, is likely to sell a few books to his friends and family and top out at around a hundred sales when all is said and done. On top of that, no publisher, magazine, or any other member of the writer’s market will consider anything self-published as a writing credit. So if you have any wish to continue writing in any kind of professional manner, you are pretty much shooting yourself in the foot by announcing to the community that your work wasn’t good enough for anyone to buy so you had to publish it yourself.

Is that fair? Well, sadly, most of the time it is. Go buy some self-published stuff and try to read it, you will be appalled. But then again, I’m just as appalled by some of the stuff that comes off of the bestseller rack. It’s a really weird and murky system and that’s why I titled this post the way I did.

That’s the lesson I’ve been learning from the independent music scene. Yes, radio is the way to expand your audience by leaps and bounds, but haven’t folks like Pierce Pettis and David Wilcox (obviously icons) among others, shown that you can prosper as an “underground” artist—that word-of-mouth, no matter how slow, thankless, and tedious, is still the purest form of marketing? That if you have the chance to consistently encounter people with your gift, does it matter that you’re not in the big stadium or the front-of-room display at Barnes-and-Nobel?

I don’t know. I’m just speaking from the cheap seats, of course, not having progressed in the way so many of you have. But, I think I want my life to be about quality and not quantity, about reaching people one-on-one, rather than gauging my success on how far-reaching my gift is, or how rich I get, but by how much I glorify God one person at a time, and how rich and authentic my community is, i.e., those who share a similar journey. I think God honors that kind of vision and will provide for me when that’s my pursuit.