Separating Good Writing from the Bad

by Patrick Mackeown
(UK)

The Expendability Doctrine

Webmaster note: One great feature of having a self publishing website is all the great authors I get to come in contact with.

Patrick Mackeown is one of the good guys of self publishing. His site, litarena, seeks to promote "outstanding small press and no press books."

What follows is something he wrote during our correspondence. I found it too valuable not to share. I put a lot of credence in his vision of the near future.

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People don't search for self-published books. No that's true, they don't. Partly because it didn't used to be possible. Bookshops don't stock them and there was no venue for them. And also because the general wisdom about the books is that they're the dross that the publishing industry turned down, so why would anybody want one?

But at least a couple of things are changing; one is the Internet/POD/lulu. So now you can search for them. And two is that publishers have started to sell celebrity books and cut down on their uptake of books by talented new authors. The trade knows this perfectly well. Ordinary readers don't, yet. So there's a growing field of talented writers who have the means (www.lulu.com), the method (the Internet), and the motive (publishers not accepting their work) to publish independently.

i.e. the field of independent/self-publishing is actually changing quite a lot. It will take time for joe-average-punter to see this because he isn't a publishing industry analyst, but people in the industry can already see it.

Now, the question is, what to do with the stream of talented, new writers who are getting wasted? There is no channel for them in the traditional marketplace. That's where litarena comes in. As you say, the first job is to separate the wheat from the chaff. And the second job is to publicise the fact that these writers exist. First it's necessary to inform joe-average punter that these writers even exist. It's not widely known.

At the moment the best way of doing that is to discuss individual authors in internet fora. I've done that in the reviews section of selfpublishersplace.com with one of the litarena five star authors, Christine Blake. Her book A Woman Redeemed is truly excellent.

I've also written a review of Ian Taylor's comic novel Spindle, which is like Red Dwarf and Hitchhiker's Guide, and that's been reprinted in James Bilodeau's, Xavier House independent publisher's magazine which is being distributed in bookshops. (I've also opened a topic at self-publisher's place called Xavier House Magazine is out.) The magazine has some of my own work in it too. So there's work to be done, (and work being done,) independently of litarena itself being known as a venue for talent. That will inevitably become known in good time. The first job is to inform people that the talent even exists.

And then, in time as more people become aware of the existence of this reserve of untapped talent they'll either find a book that they're interested in, like Christine's Woman Redeemed, a Christian biography of Mary Magdalene, Taylor's sci-fi spoof, or Teresa's Japanese Fantasy. One of the five star litarenas is selling right across America. he's featured on the website's front page, Tom Pace's Mentor: The Kid & the CEO.

The talent, the interest, the opportunity - it's all there in bucket-loads, people (mainly) simply aren't aware of it. And the common wisdom is that books not handled by publishers are rubbish. This propaganda is often spread by literary reviewers or other self-interested parties and helps to prevent people from examining independently-published books to find out how excellent a minority of them are.

Litarena sets out to change that culture. It's a tremendously daunting task. There are so many disadvantages to overcome and there is so much at stake for traditionalists who loathe the idea of change in the industry and don't want to see independent authors succeeding. But ultimately however much they try to criticise independent or self-published authors they can't prevent people who want to read their books from reading them. And the twenty million books sold of James Redfield's self-published book, The Celestine Prophesy, just goes to show that anybody who wants to read a self-or-independently-published book will read it, no matter what anybody says! Incidentally, the film Proof of Life was based on Tom Hargrove's self-published book, The Long March to Freedom, too. How many people know that?!

Litarena isn't saying that every writer is a Tom Hargrove or a James Redfield. But what it is saying is that there is a growing minority of talented authors out there who are being routinely overlooked and they are producing work of outstanding quality. Their work can be categorised as sci-fi, fantasy, Christian, or whatever style it's written in, and when an Internet forum reader is searching for a new book in that particular style he would do well to consider certain individual litarena books.

That's the urgent task, and Litarena has started it.

The difficulty for me is that there is a stereotypical self-publisher who can't write English correctly, can't spell and has an awful cover design. And I know those writers exist because I've met plenty of them. The trouble for me is that a noticeable minority of self-p writers are excellent.

They have their covers designed professionally.
They can already write excellently & they still have their books edited.
They have their books laid out by an expert.
They have their books blurbed and reviewed by someone who knows what they're doing.
(etc)

Now, the problem for me is that both types of book are still called self-published although there is clearly a whole world of difference between the first scrappy book effort and the second sleek and excellent book product. Yet they share the same name.

And it's that difficulty for the sleek book writers that litarena plans to address. Litarena is about saying this author or this one has gone on a quest for excellence in producing his or her book. And I believe that he or she has attained a degree of excellence. In my view almost nobody out there is willing to do that for s.p. writers. Not precisely nobody, (one or two people are willing, but nothing like enough.)

Patrick Mackeown

Visit Patrick's Litarena.

Patrick's other site, Bookscape, features his own writing. You'll learn about not only his novel, The Expendability Doctrine, but you'll find much more of his writing for free, including poetry, stories, satire and comedic vignettes.