Bohemian Publishing

A study revealed over ten years ago that there are now seven classes of people in Britain rather than the traditional three.  When I did the test it revealed I fitted best at the bottom, the ‘precariat, or precarious proletariat - the poorest, most deprived class, scoring low for social and cultural capital’.  Reading further, I was told essentially that I was in a pit which I was unlikely ever to crawl out of, as long as the social system remained what it was.  The funny thing was, I didn’t feel at all that I was in a pit.  Sure, I was broke, but my life was rich, rewarding and certainly not deprived in social or cultural capital. 

I realised then that there is an eighth class unrecognised by the system, because it actually comprises of people who have dropped out of the system.  I don’t mean necessarily living without electricity, bank accounts, cars and so on, though that might be true in some cases.  Essentially this class that I call the Bohemian class has one essential qualifying factor:  that the system overall is questioned not just intellectually, but in the way one lives and breathes. Again, this doesn’t mean a compost toilet is compulsory, the Bohemian class is extremely flexible.  One month you could be drinking champagne in first class on a flight to the Bahamas, the next foraging for food in the Yorkshire hills.  This implies a richness lacking in all the seven other classes, I feel, with an unpredictability to boot, because there are no limitations.  There are definite clusters of Bohemians – Totnes and Stroud in the UK, Marin County in California, Byron Bay in New South Wales for example – but the denizens of this class are ubiquitous.  They could be next door to you, they could be you, and they’re often on the move.

Having convinced myself ten years ago this class existed, and I was part of it, it’s only recently I’ve reflected on how that affects my relationship with publishing.  Neither main nor specialist publishers have been interested in me, at least not so much that they would put their money where their mouths were, and I have tried that traditional route many times in the past.  In one case, a top literary agent informed me that my submission was the best thing on their desks that month, but they couldn’t handle it.  That was Secrets: An Oxford Tale.  A publisher told me the same thing.   

The only option was to return to self-publishing, which always had a bad rep in the past, known as ‘vanity publishing’.  Indeed, a publisher recently bemoaned the onslaught of self-published books these days, saying, ‘It’s true that everybody has a book inside them.  And in most cases that’s where it should stay.’  He had a point, because a lot of the stuff out there is dreadful.  However, it’s also a hypocritical stance because a lot of the mainstream books are dreadful too.  Not only that, I’m finding typos and grammatical errors in novels by hugely successful writers, and the lack of editorial care can be even more subtle.  In one popular detective series, the author uses ‘whilst’ all the time instead of ‘while’, rather than some of the time.  Superficially, the words can be exchanged liberally as they mean exactly the same thing (I recall an American professor wanting to ban ‘whilst’ as being archaic and useless), but any sensitivity to the sound of the words shows that you can’t just replace one with the other.  That this misuse of ‘whilst’ persisted in the whodunnits implies, to me, a lack of attention and care.  Similarly, I read a review of a science fiction book where the reviewer decried how the author persistently used the word ‘penultimate’ to mean ‘more than ultimate’, and nobody in the editorial process had spotted the error.  I’ll stop ranting now about the ills of the publishing business (and it is a business) to come to my main point.

Self-publishing is not what it once was.  Actually, I would add it was never what people thought it was as plenty of famous authors have gone down that route, Jane Austen and Walt Whitman being but two examples.  Nowadays a self-publishing author has more flexibility with which to work, thanks to modern technology, and is able to network with others to such an extent it doesn’t quite feel like self-publishing.  It’s certainly not such a lonesome affair anymore.  I for one have been fortunate to know top artists and designers who could work on my books, which as a member of the Bohemian class, has been one of the blessings of a rich social capital. It's also a lot of fun this way.  

Where I have been lacking is good editorial input, covering both the basics and subtleties.  I can’t afford to pay anyone to do that, it’s a lot of work, and also my books are a tad...peculiar.  Not everybody gets what I’m doing.  Hardly anybody to be frank.  So I decided to target drafts of texts that could appeal to specific individuals, and found that I got excellent feedback that way.  For example, I have been trying out some of my recent Decameron-like endeavours on a friend that I knew could handle the content, and she’s provided extremely helpful, spot-on reflections.  Everything’s Alright, which I wrote about in the last post, is a section from the larger book but is self-contained and deliberately meant to appeal to more people; so I’ve been giving copies of it out as gifts, or loss leaders as a business person might say.  It’s been mostly very well-received, and I’ve had the benefit of plenty of useful feedback.  In fact, because I’ve ‘sold out’ the first run I’m going to do another, improved one, thanks to all the helpful comments.

So this approach is not for everyone, but I would argue that whereas mainstream publishing favours commerce over creativity, with Bohemian publishing it’s the other way round.  Both are losing out ultimately.  A lot of art that might really matter gets disregarded by the established approach, and the chance to preserve and share one’s work with a larger audience usually remains out of reach for the other. 

Ah to live in a perfect world.