Musings on new age muse of high-tech lit
There are many compelling reasons why writers should consider self-publishing: if you can create a PDF document of the book you have written, you can learn how to send your work out to the international reading public just by pressing the PUBLISH option in a simple and cost-effective process over which you have total control. This enables a writer to choose their own cover, target their audiences to align with their chosen genre, and most significantly bypass the traditional barriers to publication, and the gatekeepers who operate to block them.
Traditional publishing is costly, both in time and money, and comparatively inflexible in the choices it offers authors who wish to micromanage their own work. Imagine being able to cut through the possibility of rejection by grumpy old publishing houses, fast track through the long waiting time for approval of your manuscript, avoiding the stresses of dealing with a nit-picking editorial process, and start pushing out your work into the world wide web, being able to track its progress every step of the way, cheered on by your friends and admirers.
People who follow this path to self-publishing glory speak using the language of action, conquest and violence: they ‘crack the code’, they penetrate the mystery, they ‘conquer’ the Amazon charts, they ‘kill’ the Goodreads ratings, their meteoric rise to fame makes waves that rock the known world, etc.
The narrative of youthful energy and forceful vitality is definitely an appealing one. And creativity itself is, of course, a direct line to God and Goddess. But in the rush to publish, made possible by the myriad options enabled by this digital technology, one of the pre-existing and most significant problems which has operated to block the rise of literary standards in Sri Lankan writing in English is likely to intensely escalate. That is: the lack of an editing process which could make a good book great, and a great book an enduring classic.
The fiery exuberance and self-assertive drive required to write a narrative, to bring an idea into form and into emergence, is a very different energy from that required to edit it: editing beyond the surface level of correcting spelling requires a trained and sceptical eye, sensitive appreciation of what the author is intending to achieve, patience, familiarity with the relevant genre, and sufficient time. In this country, Editors of fiction seem to be hard to find, and these professionals need to make themselves more visible and accessible. Authors, especially young authors, often feel that they would not be able to afford the skilled developmental and structural editing that their manuscript requires. These writers thus create reading groups of personal friends and beta readers who offer feedback and response without a fee, as a favour, and then edit their work themselves, with mixed results.
And they use digital means to create their own readership: via social platforms including Facebook pages, Instagram updates, Snapchat and Twitter. They self-create a community of fans by informing their followers of each stage of their writing process, from sneak peeks at their private notebooks and sketchpads, through conversations about their inspirations and research, through stylised confessions of their own emotional highs and lows, right through to interactive opportunities offered to their fans to choose the cover art, and the final ‘reveal’ of the book itself, in its multiple accessible formats.
This strategically creates empathy and goodwill, as the readership is invested in the outcome, ‘liking’ and ‘commenting’ interactively every step of the way. And then the birds and the bees come in: Tweet and Twitter updates, to generate buzz. More Snapchat and Instagram shots of where to buy the book, updates on how it is going, thanks to all the loyal supporters of the crusade, and screen shots of Goodreads reviews, truncated due to constraints of space.
Enticements and reader magnets are offered to ‘get the reader in’ – free short chapters, free prequels – which then make the reader want to come in a little further, and invest in your dream. It is a facsimile of friendship behaviour, and it works to create the peer acceptance and tribal identification that is crucial to publishing success in the digital world. True or false? Noise and brilliant branding obscure the substance of the matter, and gloss the text itself with apparent allure. Many of the awards we read about have been generated by peer approval, solicited support and recognition of an author’s profile: their creation of their own visibility via successful platform-building.
As one writer recently expressed it, who cares if the reader likes you or your work, as long as they buy it? At point of sale, it’s mission accomplished, and onto the next one. And then the awards, the long lists and the short lists and the ceremonies and the gold and silver stickers on the limited edition print copies. The marketing carnival with its crusade-like parading goes ever on. But the literary quality of the work often decreases in value, because the focus is on marketing rather than creation of a high quality piece of writing.
To misquote Aldous Huxley, in Brave New World, we are now seeing ‘the principles of mass production at last applied to literature’. It is notable that many of the emerging writers today are working day jobs in the fields of marketing, advertising and information technology. This certainly gives them sharp skills but also inevitably creates a mindset which commodifies the literature they produce, from pre-production onwards.
(The writer is an academic, editor, critic, reviewer and creative writer)