Longtime blog visitor, commenter, and solid writer Michael Anthony dropped by the blog the other day (everything here in South is always “the other day”, folks, and we don’t care whether it was two days ago or six weeks back) to check in on things, and was surprised to see me going the “self-publishing” route. He was curious as to why.

Well, the first thing you should know, Michael, is that I’m not self-publishing. I’ll explain what I mean in a moment. But am I releasing some of my fiction independently? Is that my main focus going forward? Yes, on both counts, for the foreseeable future, and that’s what you’re asking about, really, so I’m going to slay that particular dragon first.

Let’s have some fun for a moment and pretend you and I, Michael, are partners that have made a film called The Tyrant Strategy: Revenant Man. So we call up our backer, Big Honking Pictures, Inc. and tell them we’re ready for wide release. No problem, they reply, but they want a test audience screening first, just to be safe. Well this is SOP in the film industry, so we go for it.

And there, in the theater, we’re shocked to find not an entire test audience — but a single, tough critic. Here is a person that is not a typical filmgoer, but someone versed in the art of finding flaws. Even worse, they’ve seen thousands and thousands of movies before — have seen just about every trope one can imagine — so they’re already passively sitting there, chatting away on their iPhone or checking their email. Oh, and they’ve seen six other movies today. And fifteen yesterday. And twelve the day before.

And they greenlit one of them. And today, they don’t greenlight ours.

That’s traditional publishing, Michael. You and I, and everyone else, can write as fast and as hard and as well as we can, and the chokepoint is almost always defined as one or two people. And those people have the art of finding flaws honed to a knife’s edge. So fiction that could do well with a real test audience, comprised not of critics but of everday viewers, doesn’t get greenlit.

Understand that this is not a slam on the myriad of fiction magazines, or editors, or agents, or the like. All these folks are customers (except maybe you agents — I’m your customer, honestly). Almost all of them are giving, wonderful people who prop up fiction as we know it. They often work for little or no pay, and worse — from an author’s perspective — since many of them have fiction-writing aspirations of their own, they’re devoting time away from those aspirations to help move another writer’s dreams down-court, and to keep fiction markets alive.

But now we can go around them, and get right to the audience.

The bottom line with the fiction beast, as I see it, is that independent publishing — and all the new outlets, tools, and platforms that have opened up over the past few years — have presented a profound sea change, for the better. They have addressed the problem of throughput.

Clarkesworld Magazine‘s editor, Neil Clarke, notes in their form rejection letters that “Each month, we receive hundreds of submissions and while I may like many of them, I can only publish twelve of them per year.” That’s life in the traditional model of short fiction publishing. Actually, that’s life in traditional publishing, period.

Each month, Amazon receives an untold number of new independent titles. And they publish, almost without exception, thousands and thousands of submissions a year. And the readers decide what does and does not make the cut, and they’re not trained to find flaw. Well, not usually.

Looking over my own fiction career thus far, I have something like a 30-1 ratio in submissions to acceptances. But the tales that were eventually accepted did well in front of the readers, or listeners. So what interest could I possibly have in focusing the majority of my fiction efforts in a system that A) has proven it’s harder on my fiction than the audience and B) is slowing said fiction down from reaching said audience? (Full disclaimer: I might still submit fiction here and there, but not near as much.)

No, the problem is not an availability of excellent fiction. The problem is an availability of throughput. Via traditional publishing, right now, scads of great titles are going unpublished. The counterpoint is that scads of horrible titles are going unpublished, too, which is fair, but if there is one thing that YouTube, Facebook and Twitter proved to the world, it’s that the audience can be trusted to find and propel the unique, the odd — and sometimes the excellent — into the public consciousness.

This is to say nothing of the fact that I think a writer can be a solid novelist, but not necessarily enjoy or show great aptitude towards short fiction — and I say this despite having had some short fiction success and a few award nominations. Personally, I just don’t enjoy writing short fiction as much as I used to. The emphasis on narrative, too often at the expense of depth, doesn’t jive well with my own style; with my own preferred method of storytelling.

I am no longer as interested in bashing my head against the wall of the submissions/rejection paradigm. In true rejection slip-ese, I’ll just say: “This didn’t work for me”.

It might work for others, and that’s terrific. There’s nothing wrong with that. But this author wants to engage the audience, especially his defined target audience. This author has evidence that his fiction resonates when people, when it is allowed to be read, or heard.

This author has decided the old model doesn’t provide enough throughput.

And to circle back to my other point: “self-publishing” is a loose term. I have contractors for everything from book formatting, to printing, to promotions, to redesigning my site. I am supported by a team of people, and it would be a discredit if I didn’t acknowledge how much they help.

Thanks for the wonderful question, Anthony, and please continue stopping by.

Stay tuned.