Fidelity By Benjamin Dancer
Last week, I posted about the different routes of distribution available to writers -particularly in the world of literature. Above is a screen-shot of the page on Authonomy for Fidelity, a book written by my friend, Benjamin Dancer. In just over a week, he’s found an audience for what is a spectacular manuscript of which I have only partially read. To my readers, please check out this book and help support an upcoming writer. The more people that back the book on the site, the better the chances are that it will make it in front of the people at HarperCollins. To clarify, it needs to reach the top five in order to make it to the committee.
Much like we support and seek out the best upcoming bands, let’s seek out the cream of the crop of unpublished authors.
The New World of Literary Publishing
I started writing when I was about five or six years old, with my first “book” being a short story about an African princess -a story that was likely inspired by one of the countless books I devoured from the local library. The book won an award as an entry in the Young Authors Writing Contest back in the early nineties (1990 perhaps?) and thus, a writing practice was born. Over the years my writing has taken me through dozens of journals, poetry, plays, comedy sketches and a couple of screenplays. More hobby and emotional catharsis than anything else for a long time, it was not until the last couple of years that I approached writing with any lick of seriousness and there is an end destiny for every writer: getting your work published and in front of the public. After all, books are meant to be read instead of joining the pile of “crap” sitting in your closet.
I’ll be frank, I know little about what it takes to get your book picked up by, say, HarperCollins or Little Brown and Company, save for sending unsolicited manuscripts, acquiring an agent, and an editor. I know more about the old-fashioned way of film distribution than I do about the traditional method of the publishing world. However, that being said, we don’t live in the old world anymore. We have more access and more control of the exposure of our work than we did in 1990, compliments to the Internet and social media -and this goes beyond the scope of the literary world. This applies to everything and anything you might want to “sell” -whether it be music, a film, a webseries, an e-book, a product, a service, or simply an idea. Today, it is so easy to distribute these things and in a lot of cases, the most it will cost you is your time.
This new landscape makes the “dinosaurs” afraid. The executives that have been in the business (whatever business that is) are terrified of the fact that the new power structure will essentially redistribute the wealth -perhaps leaving more of it in the pockets of both the artist and the consumer. The notion of elevating the elite by excluding the masses is dying and some of the moldy-oldies get it. Even the publishing world is getting it and I’m not talking about the journalistic part of the publishing world. HarperCollins launched Authonomy in beta mode in 2007, but the site only went live in 2009. Authonomy essentially provides unpublished writers a platform on which to present their work not only to the public, but also to publishers and agents. Users can recommend books on the site, much in the same way that Digg is utilized, and the more recommendations a manuscript receives the higher its ranking. Regardless of the intentions of HarperCollins, its a branch into a world that so often elevates the elite while delegating the rest to the “slush pile”… and it’s the only publishing company that I’ve seen something like this from, so far.
There are other routes to getting your work published: Amazon, Lulu, scribd, writing contests, magazines, your blog, and other DIY publishing avenues. Regardless, though, the literary world seems to finally be catching up with the other fields in terms of the new road of distribution. So for people like my high school English teacher or me or the handful of other fiction writers that I know, we’ll continue to explore whatever options come along.
