Easier process isn't always better

“You should write a book,” someone says.

Yeah, right.

If ever there were a phrase that qualified for the title “Easier Said Than Done,” that’s the phrase.

Trust me on this. It ain’t easy.

And yet, at the same time, it’s way too easy.

Let me explain, or try to.

Just a few years out of college, I sat down at a typewriter with the intent of pounding out the Great American Novel.

Well, maybe “great” was a stretch. But I was, after all, an American, and it would be a novel.

Following the usual advice of “write what you know,” I wrote about young guys like myself dealing with the moral ambiguities of the draft and the Vietnam War and the 1960s.

I can tell you two things: It wasn’t very good, and it was a heck of a lot of work.

Back in the typewriter days, a manuscript for even a shortish novel was expected to be 200 typewritten pages or more, in other words more than 50,000 words.

That’s a lot of typing.

It’s even more writing, because that first draft — with all its scratch-outs and misfires and wrong turns — is a mess.

So, with all its revisions, that mess needs to be re-typed into something manageable. And in the age before Spellcheck, that meant you could repeat a spelling error in your final draft just the way you goofed it up in your first draft.

And when you had the finished product done — my experience dates to about 1972 — there was the whole crapshoot of trying to find a publisher. In those days, that meant spending time with Writer’s Digest, attempting to discern what in the world book publishers were looking for.

If you decided upon one, your next task was to box the manuscript up, send it with return postage and a cover letter off to someplace in New York, and wait.

And wait.

Unsolicited manuscripts in those days went into something called the “slush pile,” stuff that might never be glanced at, let alone read.

In the meantime, what did you do? You daydreamed.

You dreamed about getting that acceptance letter, the one with the big advance, the one that told you they’d never seen anything quite like this and that they were sure it would set the world on fire.

I never received that particular letter. I did get one early on that suggested my characters were a bit too radical and another one a few years later that suggested my characters were a bit too tame.

And when I say years, I mean years.

Six months was a good response time in those days when it came to submitting a book manuscript to a publisher. A year was not out of the question.

These days, with the world turned upside down, the process is different.

Different. But is it better?

Today, an aspiring author as naïve and clueless as I was in 1972 doesn’t really have to worry about cranky, overworked editors at publishing houses in New York City. Instead, that writer can self-publish with just a few clicks of the mouse.

Is it easy? You bet. I’ve done it myself something like a dozen times.

Using a website called Blurb, I’ve produced tiny editions of books for family and friends: A photo book on our trip to South Africa in 2008 to see my old buddy Gyles Webb, a book that collected the best of the Christmas stories I wrote over the years for our daughters, a slim volume of poetry, a book featuring the amazing black and white photographs my great uncle took in Asia in 1921 and an assortment of birthday books for our grandchildren. And that list is not complete.

But in my case, publication was intended for gifts. The largest print run was, I believe, 22 copies.

These days, thanks to Amazon and a host of others, it’s possible to produce print-on-demand books commercially. And tens of thousands of folks have apparently jumped at the opportunity.

Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

On the one hand, more works make their way into print. On the other hand, many of those works would have been rejected by any editor worth his or her salt.

As for me, strange as it might sound, I’m glad that manuscript back in 1972 was rejected. Had it been published, I would be embarrassed by it today.

And something tells me that today’s self-publishers might feel the same way down the road. After all, everyone needs an editor.