Self Publishing

This is a response to a forum post questioning the merits of self publishing. It was a good question, so I decided to try to tackle it. The original may be found here:
http://www.purplewildebeest.co.za/forum/viewtopic.php?showtopic=1261

-------
Self Publication:

If you post a poem on poetry.com, the bitch will keep nagging you to pay a small fee, for whose sum you can be published in their next 'compendium' of poems, establishing yourself as a 'published poet'.

Currency is a cheap notion. Ron Paul wants to make it based on gold, but that is probably because he is secretly a freemason and an alchemist. I mean, they are making diamonds these days, after all. Who is to say gold won't be next -- then where will your gold-based economy go? And don't tell me that gold is an 'element', Watson.

Translating these concepts, the gaslight world of 'writing publishers' also just operates on a type of currency. You make an investment by spending time and effort to research 'How to get published'. Once enough cache is gathered, you start to spend and see what the outcome may be.

For bottom feeders, yes, there is a fear of being published. It is like any other economy. You will find these pasty, weaseling little scroungers, holding their purses or wallets ever so tightly, fearfully dropping one coin (poem or writ) into the Publisher hat, and ... cringing. Hoping that this will 'be the one'. Even though it is the first.

Smile Big boys and girls, however, know the nature of the game from the start. Mark Twain understood it due to some time spent arranging letters on a press at a local newspaper, as a child. So for these prescients, the publishing world becomes kind of just like the stock market.

Honestly, there are so many of them. If you try enough publishers, and are persistent, you WILL find one that will publish you. Then you can be a 'published writer', and feel proud of yourself. Jade brings up a good point about what a publisher actually is. It's just some person, or group, who decide to mass distribute the works of authors. Once established, the graph shows that a publisher will attain some sort of ... 'character'. "We are a publisher of Naughty Sciences". "We are a publisher of Desserts." "Over here, we only publish Infinity." But that character is simply an attribute used by said publisher to attain cache in the market.

I realize that I am being hard on the merit of the printing press. I am treating it as though it is absolutely nothing, like some common floozy. Please understand that this is absolutely not what I think. This kind of wonder did not exist a few hundred years ago. Those days you had to rely on the hands of scribes -- most of whom were probably morons, based on what I have read. I mean, come on -- are you really going to trust the product of some guy whose job it is to religiously transfer lettering from one medium to another? Surely this person has a life ... and what aspects of that life, I wonder, seeped into his religious writing? Nun porn, maybe. Porn with nuns in it.

So, as society slowly transforms, in its way, that bastion of hope -- the printing press, also changes. You used to have to order food and get a physical person deliver it to you. These days, my food arrives through my teleportation device. Yes, like the microwave, various fears will clog the arteries. "You'll get cancer by doing that." But I like being able to press the button and get my salmon and cream cheese bagel instantaneously.

I think the slow people are ones who should change. They need to realign their perceptions to handle the constant novelty of the general human condition(s). The real question, I think, Oscar, is about credibility. These days, it seems that the basis of credibility is that if I go to Barnes & Nobles, my book exists in their annals. If it is not physically present, it can be ordered, but it definitely does exist in their records. This is what credibility was twenty years ago, when I was young, what it was five years ago, when I noticed I was getting tired, and what it is now, in my twilight. But it *is* waning. I mean, if I was an authentic, published writer, it would be so weird to go into a book store, and come to realize that "This is what it means, to be made."

So fucking self publish. The market and history will decide your fate. But never pay poetry.com.