Has any one tried self-publishing?
I was looking on Amazon.com and if you can produce the books it would be easy to sell.
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Has any one tried self-publishing?
I was looking on Amazon.com and if you can produce the books it would be easy to sell.
I'll be self publishing the first "X" number of copies of my first novel in the next year or so. How would it be easy to sell them? Do you set up a shop on Amazon like Ebay or something?
Ebay makes you pay for a sellers account and selling is an done in an auction format, so I wouldn't reccomend that.Quote:
Originally Posted by cows
Amazon lets you set up a sellers account for free, but takes a percentage of your sells. I would use amazon. You can display a synopsis and the first paragragh maybe more, so buyers can get a feel for your work. I think there might be less impulse buys on line.
Other thought I had: Try selling one or two to a used book shop and give one to the library, just to get it out there. It might be a good idea to put your email address in the book, so if someone really enjoys your work they can be refered to where you sell your other stuff online- maybe start a mailing list.
You can try and work out a deal with Barnes and Nobles, where they can display your books and you split the profits.
Thanks more than I can say for this wonderful piece of writing and for the debate it as generated. The title is what my rants are usually about till I get tired of arguing and stop. But this has really stimulated me- and I'm going to get down to a post- (long, very long- so be warned):DQuote:
Originally Posted by WolfLarsen
Not that I agree with you on all points, but those will come up in my post.
But there are two points with illustrations that I must make here right now- one that I agree totally with the person who remarked that grammar was not created by a bunch of lunatics. With regard to my personal epiphany about this, would anyone interested, ( and I hope lots of people will be) take a look at this poem by Thomas Hardy and if possible post a brief account of what you think it means and any grammatical peculiarities noticed?
Neutral Tones
WE stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod,
--They had fallen from an ash, and were gray.
Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove
Over tedious riddles solved years ago;
And some words played between us to and fro--
On which lost the more by our love.
The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing....
Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
And a pond edged with grayish leaves.
Thomas Hardy
Again, Though I can't actually remember who said it, my 101% agreement with the poster who said that the revolution is taking place, HERE and NOW. To give just two examples - WolfLarsen, have you read Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino or Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban? If those do not appear original, revolutionary etc etc then I really will have to fall back on the awful "Diffferent Strokes for Different Folks" excuse!! Oh, Gosh,I knew I would not be able to restrict myself to just two examples- but re the question of Genre - if someone can tell me how on earth to classify What Would Shakespeare Do?, 101 Answers to Life's Daily Dilemmas by Jess Winfield which I have bought from the Literature section, and taught in the Literature class as Novel, Essay, Short Story or Poetry, I would be both grateful and astounded. I won't go into the question of the revolution of texts taking place right now in several of the languages of India where I am from - but I must stress that they have mostly all been translated.
Since I mentioned teaching, I will confess that I am a member of the academia and the English Department at the university in Hyderabad, India where I teach at the Post Graduate and Doctoral levels, is regarded as one of the best in the country, as quite high up in world ratings even. BUT we do NOT throw out the baby with the bathwater- we do study the old, but we study them with challenging minds- I am a confirmed traditionalist in many ways , listing my anglophilic preferences from Beowulf and co, let alone Shakespeare. But during my Shakespeare class, one of the group assignments was to use Shakespeare in contemporary advertising- and no one who saw my students' perfomance coud continue to imagine that we are reworking on the tradtional as such. There is scope for much revolution in the canonical texts still if only we look for it optimistically and ask the right- or at least different questions. To give just one example, this line is from that freedom-loving poet Byron's pen, obviously intended to indicate triumph and Harmony:
"The White Man Landed! Need the Rest be Told?
My students did not require any prompting from me to answer immediately that Oh, yes- the rest NEEDED to be told, and they told so much that I had to call a halt in the interests of the timetable. New is not NECESSARILY equal to Revoltuionary, and the revolution should not, indeed cannot be connected merely to the production of Literature, there is a raging one ging on in the teaching, choosing, debating, understanding- acually just simply READING of literature. I taught Children's Literature as a perfectly respectable course last semester, something which would have been unthinkable even 5-10 years ago, and comic strips were discussed as literature and very profitably too.
And it is in no way the case that I am one of the honourable exceptions mentioned in the original essay, the exceptions are those who are keeping away due to imminent retirement or basic lack of interest.
Whew! That was supposed to be brief! Well, I'll wait for some comments before proceeding to the really long piece.:D ;) :argue:
It is not the job of a writer to break barriers, though there are those who always will, it is the job of a writer to write, true to themselves, to please themselves and no one else. Any time you try to be innovative and creative you come across as desperate, stale and trying. Innovation is instinct, it is the writers words, whether or not meant. To all of us out there who are simply trying to write, our work is nothing less for not trying to be innovative. I'm not bothered if I'm ever published, I'll have paper and pen prised from my rigor mortised hand, whether it's any good or not I don't know, what I do know is I write, for the pure love of it. I may not break through barriers, but I'll always write.
I think writing is much like art: there is no universal constant that when approached makes some literature better than other literature. The lasting appeal of something written is determined only by the readers. An inexperienced child may write a poor poem for his mother that is framed and kept on the mantle for generations, but a great author may write a nearly flawless book that is published and sold, but few readers ever get through the first half before setting it back on the shelf and forgetting about it.
My conclusion is this: write either for yourself or for your readers, no one will read anything else.
I'm not certain I quite get what the point of Wolf's initial essay/rant was. Literature as we now know is too limitted? True innovation is stifled by academia, the money brokers, and the other powers that be? Give me a break! When was this NOT true? And when were the strongest writers still not able to overcome it all a produce something of great originality? Certainly all art forms can be broken up into major genre. In music we have symphonies, concertos, chamber music, opera and musical drama, song and choral music, and solo instrumental music any one of which can be broken into historical or stylistic categories (classical symphonies, baroque concertos, late romantic opera). Any of the genres may also be broken into sub-categories. Under choral music we might find cantatas, oratorios, passions, masses, Gregorian chant, etc... We might also find that any number of artists "blur" the categories/genre. Richard Strauss composed works that combined the symphonic with the song (Four Last Songs); Handel's Messiah combined opera or musical theater with choral music. Almost any modern/contemporary musical entity will fall into one or more of the major genre.
The same holds true of visual art. There are but several major art forms: Painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, architecture, collage and assemblage, glass and ceramics, fiber arts, metalry... There are also but a few main genre/themes/subjects: portrait/figure, still life, landscape, histoire or narrative, genre scenes, and abstraction. Within these forms and genre the possibilities are endless. There are artists who combine the painting of the figure with landscape:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...a_callisto.jpg
There are paintings that combine the portrait with the still-life:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...ssys_001sm.jpg
There are works like William Blake's (painting? print? book?):
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...zen_7small.jpg
Joseph Cornell's boxes (sculpture? architecture? collage?):
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...ncesssmall.jpg
or Robert Rauschenberg's works (???):
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...rgMonogram.jpg
... all of which blur almost all attempts at categorization.
Literature is no less constrained than any art form is... It's no less constrained than the imagination and abilities of the individual writers. What exactly is Sterne's Tristam Shandy? To me it seemingly destroys every notion of what I thought an 18th century novel was. What genre does Finnegan's Wake fall into? What doe we make of Kafka's or Borges short "fictions"? What exactly are Baudelaire's "prose poems"? And what on earth was Norman Mailer doing in Advertizments for Myself?
The fact is that the so-called categories/genre/art forms are not limitations. Many artists choose to consciously work within what might seem a limitted format. It offers a certain challenge. How does one achieve something original within a very time-worn form? How does one achieve something natural within a very artificial structure? It also offers a certain contrast. How shockingly original Baudelaire's very modern and urban poems can be within the "constraints" of the traditional sonnet or ballad form. Other artist's consciously choose to tear the forms apart... or ignore them altogether. Neither approach is better or will more assuredly lead to something of artistic merit.
I find myself greatly agreeing with Derringer:
I appreciate that you want people to be original, but I really don't think you understand what original art is in the first place-- it has nothing to do with simply 'throwing away grammar'...
Certainly there are any number of artists who amuse us with their clever artistic novelties. I will admit to a certain begrudging admiration for Georges Perec's A Void (a mystery novel complete with hilarious parodies of Keats and Poe... in which the author has not once employed the letter "E") or William Gibson's Agrippa: A Book of the Dead, a book which included text that disappeared under exposure to light while other text or images would appear in its place as well as a computer disc with an elegaic poem that erases itself. At the same time I greatly doubt that such a work has any real lasting power. I'm far more moved by some of Cormac McCarthy's works (written in the traditional novel form) or the poetry of Eugenio Montale, Anthony Hecht or Richard Wilbur that are continually structured upon some of the most time-worn forms: sonnet, ballad, etc... There is most certainly a great gap between "originality" and mere novelty. The painter, Giorgio Morandi spent his entire career painting a few bottles and limitting himself to a rather subdued range of colors...:
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k2...esguild/16.jpg
His paintings might initially seem not to have strayed far from the works of any number of "old masters"... and yet what he achieved within such an apparent constraint (especially when seen in contrast to the then contemporary works of the Abstract Expressionists) continues to speak to generations of artists and art lovers... and will undoubtedly do so long after the clever novelties of such "clever, clever" artist/dilettentes as Damien Hirst or Jeff Koons are long forgotten. Literature... art as a whole... is not in need of a "revolution". The real revolutions of true originality will surely continue to come... most often quietly and unexpectedly... in the work of the strong individual artists struggling to express themselves as fully, honestly, and forcefully as possible.
When I tried my akward hand at writing, I discovered that when it came to fiction I had trouble sustaining a piece all the way to a proper ending. At this time I employed a method I called 'subconcious syntax', only to discover that Breton, Joyce and a few others had beat me to the punch, and with much better form. All of my work to this day is free form---the first short story I wrote was done in one sitting and after a few hours it was finished. I'm sure this is not unique. But since then I have produced a lot of exciting beginnings only to see them all fizzle into obscurity. So here's my proposal: How about a genre of fiction produced by Beginnerers(so to speak), Middlers and Enders. Then they could swap results and form an organic whole. I guess story tellers around the campfire have already done this (the old give a statement and pass it on bit). But I have yet to see it done on a literary scale. What? Stephen King and Peter Straub wrote a book together? This revolutionary business is harder than it sounds!:lol:
Surrealist played a game called the exquisite corpse that employed beginners, middlers and enders.Quote:
Originally Posted by Demian
Would you mind posting some of your one sittings?
Soon I was taken to a concert hall. He showed me the rapt audience and then gestured toward a man waiting in the wings, just opposite of us. "Who is that?" I asked him, but he kept his silence a while longer. I could see tears streaming down the man's face as the odd consortium of oboes and single flutes played their otherworldly fare. "I've never heard music like this before. What is the name of this piece?" He touched my lips and said gently,"It's A Requiem for the End of the World." I felt as if I was floating with those notes, far above this world to one far beyond and behind us as well. But here he was, still alive, he had made it--he was working again. And here was the world he was sure would come to an end--listening to his masterpiece. And then he touched my lips again and I could hear something else. Above those notes I could hear the sound of Rachel weeping and without comfort for her soul. She was weeping for her lost children...
What's great about this is that it works as a beginning and ending too.:thumbs_upQuote:
Originally Posted by Demian
I Think we always speak about past about old writer in all things
Ok The old literature we must go back to it but when we need it
But We need Revolution at all
I really subscribe to your ideas. I feel that a great writer must be above all these petty things, for price for a great book can not be paid. Ideas are invaluable.Quote:
Originally Posted by WolfLarsen
Not only that the government must provide books free of costs.
But unfortunately today writers are more commercial and all they want out of books is money.
Money is no doubt required in life, yet it should not the end of all.
Well, I can really tell one thing about the writer...
He's unpublished =p
Yes yes, smash the barriers - but the simple truth is that people and audiences have not really changed over the course of the entire body of literature, and that people love good ideas. If people don't love your work, it may not be a good idea.
Logic, no?
But keep trying.
There has been a revolution of language and book production and book selling.
Languages are mixing. Dictionaries and editors are no longer the last word.:)
Print on demand has made it far easier for someone to print small quantities of books.
And Internet book sales continue to grow, aided by increased online information and reviews at the point of purchase.