Reading Bites

A few days ago the New York Times published an article about the trend of kids and teens becoming published authors thanks to self publishing and indulgent parents willing to fork over thousands of dollars for the cause. It’s an interesting article that in the end says parents paying for self publishing aren’t any different that parents paying for baseball camp or ballet lessons.

Maureen Johnson wrote this interesting blog with her reactions, and now I’m bringing my opinion here so we can talk about it.

Of course the first bit of the debate is, does self publishing count as “being a published author”? I’m self published and “traditionally” published. In my personal goals I really only count the non-self publishing works as credits. But I chose to self publish (in a different genre) as an experiment and found I really liked every aspect of it. From writing something wildly different than what readers expect from me, and having the challenge of making covers and formatting and everything else it’s fun, it’s different, and it makes me appreciate working with publishers on my other projects.

I think self publishing is different than being published by someone else. But also, being published by a micro-online-press is different than being picked up by Tor or Random House. There were already ranks of publishing before the big self publishing trend, so yeah, I think self publishing does count as being published, as much as being in a school newspaper or lit journal or local magazine does. If the work was still done it counts!

The next question is should we be spending thousands of dollars on this? I think no. First, many self publishing companies have a reputation for bad practices (like gobbling up copyrights, or putting out books that fall apart). I think it’s a parent’s job to do some research and make sure you’re going to get a quality service if you’re paying (just like making sure that sports camp really is taught by qualified people).

Second, it is totally possible to self publish without spending thousands of dollars just on the printing. I think if you are going to put that kind of money into it, spend it on a good editor and good cover art.

Then there’s the question of whether this is helping kids or not. If you didn’t know the publishing world can be, and often is, a very vicious place. It seems there’s some hubbub weekly about someone getting a bad review and not liking it. Which is why it’s also the job of the parent to explain (or find out if they don’t know) that putting your work up for sale to the public is completely different from writing it for yourself, or a teacher, or friends. The public is everyone, which includes people with no tolerance for beginning writing and people who will hate your book with a passion just because it’s got a girl on the cover, or because there are vampires in it.

Most ADULTS have a hard time handling the levels of apathy and vitriol that can be found in publishing for the public, so of course teens and kids are going to have a problem with it too. So they really should be prepared for that kind of thing. Well, no, because you can’t be prepared for the moment someone calls you a sexist slur and implies you’re better off dead than writing another word. But you should know that it happens.

There’s also the question of whether teens are capable of writing quality work or not. No one person can determine that. I know I got a whole lot better in the last 10 years or so. But in school I was “the writer” and already winning awards, so yeah, I would have loved to have been published. And you know what, looking back now at some of the things I was writing then (I still have much of it) I wouldn’t be embarrassed to have it published. Because I was a teen, and of course if you keep writing and keep working, you’ll grow your writing skills.

So now, a confession. My daughter (she’s and I self published a book together. It’s a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Halloween book. We wrote it together. And by that I mean, we brainstormed it together, chose the character names together, I wrote some of it, read it to her and then we talked about what else should happen and why. I did the writing, she was very involved in the process, including helping to line edit (for typos) and make the cover.

We didn’t write it for publication though, we wrote it to read in her class during their Halloween party. And after we finished writing it, we had 2 other people (one of whom is a children’s librarian) help us edit it. I turned it into an ebook and gave a free copies to the teachers at her school, then figured since we’d made it anyway, there was no harm in offering it for sale. We spent no money on it, just lots of time together. And selling it was not the primary reason we wrote it.

We had lots of fun, and have been working on other projects as well. But I’ve always been careful to keep her expectations realistic (no, she will not be the next R.L. Stine anytime soon.)

I think a lot of cases are missing this aspect though, largely because a lot of parents don’t know what to expect themselves. I think it can be done right, and can be a great experience. I can also see how it could go very, very wrong.

So what do you think? Would you, should you self publish?