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Publishing is Not a Meritocracy
I was doing that most time-sucking of all activities earlier today — scrolling through Facebook — and I saw a post about self-publishing in one of my groups. The poster wondered what the group thought about self-publishing. She confessed that she hasn’t made any attempt to find an agent or land a deal at a small press, perhaps for fear of rejection.
As a self-published novelist, I was curious to see how the group responded. One reply stood out. A responder wrote that she believes that if the work is good, someone will publish it, and that if a traditional publishing path doesn’t happen, then the work probably isn’t good enough.
Please tell that to Lisa Genova, author of Still Alice, and Andy Weir, author of The Martian. Both of these authors began in self-publishing. I could name a whole bunch of self-pub-to-superstar names (Beatrix Potter, FYI!), but I won’t because I understand that these examples, Genova and Weir included, are outliers in the world of self-publishing. I know that the average self-published novel sells only around 250 copies. I also understand that some self-publishing success stories are truly crappy novels. I honestly don’t know how anyone got through the first fifty miserable pages of Fifty Shades of Grey.
My point, in a nutshell, is that you can write a great book, but that doesn’t mean someone will publish it for…
