The Three Percent

I read an interesting statistic the other day on a buoy-me-up self-publishing picture: it said, in a contextual tone to suggest this was why self-publishing is awesome, that of all the manuscripts that are received yearly by traditional publishers, only about 3% are accepted. It also mentioned that, a few years ago, 86% of all books published were self-published. What it failed to mention was what percentage of that 86% found any kind of success. How much would you like to bet that it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 3%?

I don’t mean to bash self-publishing…really… What I do mean to bash is the notion that the 97% that aren’t accepted are just as good but not as lucky as the 3% that are.

It is true that many good stories are lost forever because a couple boneheads in New York City or Los Angeles think they know what everyone wants to read. Stories abound of books that were only begrudgingly and cheaply picked up, only to find huge commercial success; other stories talk about books that became overnight sensations with no explanation of why.

The stories that don’t seem to abound as much, even though they should, are the amounts of really, really bad self-published fiction. I’ve read five, so far, and previewed a couple more. One of them was good. It wasn’t as good as something professionally published, and it was perhaps only that good because the author did pay an editor to work on it a little.

The rest? One was labeled an epic fantasy: it was a novella that contained no more than six or seven major characters, none of whom used foul language, only replacement words – except one character who did use foul language, but only, it seemed, when it would decrease emphasis as much as possible. In another, the author hadn’t learned not to repeat himself – five times in two paragraphs, if I remember correctly. A third needed to be told a few more times to justify every single scene and cut whatever could not be justified – the fourth was their sequel, and they had obviously not been told enough times between book one and book two.

Sometimes it just isn’t worth the effort. If someone famous wants to write a book, and the publisher knows any book written by this famous person will make tons of money (Keith Richards, anyone?) they will bother hiring a ghostwriter and the extra editorial staff to produce this thing. But Joe Ego who studied engineering but “really likes to write” and has this “great story about a girl who goes to New York City and falls in love”? Why, yes, let’s dump time and money into this because, hey, it might be good.

Unlike many today, it seems, I don’t mind letting the best flutist have the best flute. I don’t think that just everyone who wants one deserves a flute, if they can’t use it to make good music – good music, after all, is the point and purpose of the flute. If I don’t get published, fine; I think by working hard enough, and I think I’m pretty good at it – it’ll happen eventually. But not because I kinda like to write and I think I have a good story; but because I’m passionate about language, and I want to be the absolute best writer I can be. If I do that in complete obscurity for all time, so be it.

But I also kinda think that if that happens, it’ll be no body’s fault but mine.