Self-Publishing: Democratizing and very Punk Rock

This post about self-publishing was written for a contest on Goodreads.

The rules: We want to hear your thoughts about self-publishing – a blog post about the merits of self-publishing and how it might change the face of publishing in the future. What will self-publishing look 25 years from now, 50 years from now? How has self-publishing made strides in recent years? That sort of thing. Basically, we want to know: What’s your opinion about self-publishing?


I seem to have made a career in self-publishing, so it seems only natural that I would be a staunch supporter of it. I’ve always had a very do-it-yourself mentality about my writing. Self-publishing is very democratizing. It is in the spirit of punk rock, getting up and doing what you do because it needs to be done. It does not need to be dependent upon a record label or in this case, a publishing company. For me, it’s always been about getting people to read my stuff, and doing it in a way that made sense for me.

A little background: I have been writing for about 20 years now, and the brunt of my work has been in a 20-40 page photocopied and stapled book I call the Davezine. It has never been a big money-maker for me. There is a lot of expense involved and at times I have wished for the help of unpaid interns for the collating and stapling. But it is a labor of love. It has taken many years to finally come to a happy medium in re-producing these publications, and not letting my personal space become overwhelmed with too many copies of something when I don’t need them. Now I simply make them per order, keeping a small number on hand. Recently (here’s my free plug) I wrote and self-published my first book, building off of a model that I have been using for years: do it yourself, get it out there yourself. http://davecookson.tripod.com/thunderjohnson.html

Self-publishing, in either a zine or a book form provides an immediate avenue for readers, as well as being a fulfilling way to connect with readers. I may not have the largest audience, but I have a very loyal one. If it is all about building True Fans, people who will read whatever you write and go great lengths to follow you, that is empowering in a way that I feel cannot be achieved otherwise. People who have been reading my stuff for years are people that I know, people I have met, and people who feel an inclusiveness that they would not get out of a more polished and mass-produced work.

Self-publishing is limiting in that you can produce only so many items to so many readers, but it can also be a very viral thing--I’ve picked up many readers by having someone finding my ‘zine in a restaurant, coffee shop, or waiting room. Those people who find me then get to feel that inclusiveness, and then spread it to others. And that is what is gratifying about doing it yourself: it happens purely because someone out there picked it up and thought it was good. There was no heavily financed marketing campaign backing it.

Obviously, self-publishing has gotten easier over the years--the first zines I made were written by hand, later by manual typewriter and only within the last few years have I upgraded to a better computer and printer. I imagine that for people like me, the future is already here, with new programs and applications that I am still unfamiliar with.

We’d all like to be able to have someone sell our work and have nothing to do but write and count our millions. But writing is not so kind to everyone. At least when I make my own work and put it out there myself there is a chance someone will notice it. It has happened before with others who have made zines like mine (Pete Jordan of Dishwasher or Zoe Trope of Please Don’t Kill the Freshman come to mind ). I aim to produce work that is true to what I want to write, and have people (even a small number of people) actually read it. To that end, I self-publish.



www.backwordbooks.com

http://www.backwordbooks.com/2009/09/16/the-backword-books-contest-win-7-books-by-backword-authors/

My New Novel is Available Now!!!

Here!
http://davecookson.tripod.com/thunderjohnson.html


And at Atomic Books
http://atomicbooks.com/products/-/5933.html
And, if you live in Pittsfield...
At Rebel Sound Records!
http://www.myspace.com/rebelsoundrecordsthestore

The end of the road for Kyle.

I bought Kyle, my 1992 Honda Civic back in February of 2004. This was after my return from the land of Portland in a car that had traversed the nation twice, gone on many countless road trips to my homeland of Massachusetts, delivered many pizzas and rocked out to many tunes. The few months I spent mourning the death of this car were largely spent working two jobs to save up for the car we came to know as Kyle, a name I chose largely because I thought it was funny: “C’mon Kyle, you can do it!” Plus, while other more challenged men feel the need to assign female names to their vehicles, I also was okay with assigning a male name to mine.
Kyle was a two door white Civic, smaller than my first car but still the same old reliable brand. The previous owner loved it, telling me how much he liked the ease with which he could park, and how it never gave him any problems. I was ready to take it the minute I saw it. When the engine turned over on my very first try, I was sold.
First car, first love, they say it never comes again. But I grew to love Kyle, in spite of his many flaws (many of which were my fault.) Only a few months in, I was smashed into by a drunk driver at a blinking red light. The driver’s side was bent in, just behind the door. A foot one way, it would have been totaled. A foot the other, I would have been killed. I was so angry at the time at this irresponsible person who had ran the light, and even attempted to blame me for the accident, that I forgot to realize how lucky I was, and how lucky Kyle was to be able to drive away from the scene.
Later on, we broke down on the side of the road on the way to the racetrack. This would be the first of many breakdowns, and tows, the most dramatic being at a rest stop on the Taconic State Parkway, which forced me to blow over 1000 dollars on repairs, train tickets, a hotel, and left me without a car for three weeks. But he still kept going, as I kept making the repairs happen. I can’t complain too much--the little lady who drove me to the train station so that I could go back and pick up my car is the one who became my wife.
Later still, there was the time I was rear-ended on my way to (of all the fucking irony) Jiffy Lube. That was in fact my fault. This caused my hatch to be permanently closed on the bottom, but broke the latch on the top, effectively making my car a sitting duck for thieves to break in and steal my stuff. Someone stole my radio not long after this, by simply crawling in the back.
And then there was the many months where my door wouldn’t close, and I had to tie it shut with a rope. Ah, memories. It was during this period where I received my first notice for the Maryland Vehicle Emissions Test, which would soon become the bane of my existence….
I wrote a lot about this in the blog, about how my car failed the emissions test and then I had to keep coming back every month and try again. I did 16 of these $14 dollar tests and afterward I would fail and I would be given an order to re-test. At first I was really worried about what would happen if I kept failing. Then I just got annoyed. I vented my thoughts about the futility of the VEIP program, and how it doesn’t really keep polluting cars off the road, it just makes it a pain in the ass for people like me.
Then I went two weeks ago, where they told me that they could not test me because of a crack in my muffler. They gave me a two week extension for a test that was due over two years ago.
Lately, Kyle has been running poorly--stalling at stoplights, having trouble making it up the hills. So I’d hoped that maybe this muffler situation, if cleared up, would help the car’s performance. After all, the mechanic did say that Honda’s performance could be tied to the exhaust system; others in my circle indicated that my problem might just be as simple as this.
Alas, the call from my mechanic came back. Oxygen sensor, major tune up, spark plugs, muffler, right lower control arm…basically a plethora of problems, to the tune of $2000. For a car that cost me $1150 back in 2004. Whew.
I’d given up on Kyle many times over and watched him come back from the dead. But this was it. For one thing, even the cheapest of these repairs is more than I am willing to spend. For another, there is no guarantee that something else won’t break on an 18 year old car, even if it is a Honda Civic. And then there is the fact that I have been talking about going car-less for a while now--after all, most of my transportation needs now are very easily met with my bicycle. And it really all boils down to money. There was a time in my life when I would have barely thought twice about running up something like this on a credit card and just worrying about it later. But that time has past. With adulthood and corresponding responsibilities, so go my romantic notions of holding on to something beyond all reason. The adult in me says, Dave, it’s just a car. Move on. So I am. He’s getting picked up and brought to a better place. I hope that his engine and spare parts will bring happiness to a vehicle that still has a fighting chance.
I will miss having a car. I will miss having Kyle. I had a lot of good memories in that car--first dates with Michele, trips to the track (both painful and triumphant), strangers complimenting my car and offering to buy it, more trips to the homeland, the Davey G shows. On a day-to-day basis I don’t really need a car, but it has always been a security blanket, a way to supplement my biking, a way to stay dry on my way to work on rainy days. But as I drive it today, using up my last tank of gas, stalling out at every light, I tell myself: I won’t miss this. I won’t miss the emissions test or the inexplicable breakdowns.
But when you love something, it is still very hard to let it go.



NOTE: this post is still a work in progress--I’ll add more text and links and pictures later, I just really wanted to get this up now. Thanks for reading.

Books: The Great Derangement

The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire by Matt Taibbi


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The basic premise of The Great Derangement is that as Americans, we have no real leadership. We are so used to being lied to and screwed over that in essence, we are forced to create our own reality to deal with it. Matt Taibbi hilariously explores this world of derangement.
After he explains just how mind-numbingly pointless most sessions of Congress are--one bill “debated” is over whether or not to name a post office after Ava Gardner--he gets into how the Government is really run. The real business of politics, we are depressingly and shockingly reminded, is to reward donors, and is mostly run behind closed doors, far away from the floor of the House or Senate. Taibbi explores the world of the Religious Right and the 9-11 Truth Movement, and shows just how similar they really are in terms of their unwillingness to deal with reality.
I was moved by his depiction of the U.S soldiers in Iraq--Taibbi seems like he grew to genuinely care about these people in a way that transcended his feelings about the war.
There were parts of this book where I laughed out loud--his discomfort with being a zombie-like Christian in his secret infiltration of a Fundamentalist Church: looking forward to church, with the fellowship and off-key singing and speaking in tongues, all the while feeling remorse at his role in deceiving them for the sake of writing a book.
This guy can really write. Thoroughly enjoyable.




View all my reviews >>

Quick update on the new book/new excerpt

I've been doing a few pre-releases of my new book, The Best of Thunder Johnson, and in the coming weeks I am going to put up a web page with all the ordering info about the "official" release. Look for it later this month!

Here is another excerpt. It started as sort of a parody of the style of Chuck Palahniuk...

Asking questions and then not caring about the answers.
Moses watched the new guy in the days that he was here in the hospital. Maybe he could be his friend…
Moses, 38, fat, obnoxious, stumbled into conversations. He could stare intently at you and ask a question yet never hear an answer. In a bizarre way, he was the opposite of the narcissistic people around him, whose pathetic lives would consume them. The same stories, the same failures recounted in the same voices with only slight modifications in multiple re-telling. It was all good to him. They pretended to be interesting, he pretended to be interested.
Copacetic.
Symbiotic.
Parasitic.
Pathetic.
Places that were cold and impersonal became friendly to certain people. People avoided contact nowadays. But there were still people who needed it. Like Moses.
All around him, he saw people tuning out, with their I-pods, laptops, what have you. Whatever happened to people needing to talk? Why did people even bother going outside to be around other people if they weren’t going to even interact?
Moses didn’t like it so much. Out in the world. Which was why he came here so much as he did, to be with people who wanted to talk. Because he wanted to listen. Or at least pretend to listen.
Needy.
Oblivious.
Maddening.
Strange.
Moses tried to talk to women, but it never seemed to work out.
Too fat.
Obese.
Unlovable.
Alone.
He read books to try to learn what he was doing wrong. Books that would help him in conversation, books that would help him to talk to women. Listening. They liked a man who listened.
Self improvement section. He haunted this section of the bookstore, tried to find the right books for him, and while he was at it, he looked for women.
Still too fat.
Obese.
Wanting.
Needing.

So he learned to listen. Or at least to look like he was listening. He read books on listening.
Chapter 1: Smiling and nodding.
Chapter 2: Asking questions.
Chapter 3: “And how did that make you feel?”
And so on.
It was a gold mine. Moses ate it up. He couldn’t wait to try it out.

There was never a shortage of questions from Moses, the listener. But still he went home alone. It seemed that no one wanted to be around him, even when he listened to them. It made him very sad. Fat, alone, miserable inside but cheerful outside.
That was Moses.