Lesson #3: How Self-Publishing is Ruining a Generation of Black Writers

Or:

Why I Am a Much Better Writer Than Omar Tyree. And Why Omar Tyree Is a Much Better Business Man Than I Am.


In 1994, I came back to Philly after a year traveling through Europe and Africa as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow. It was a far from triumphant return: I was heartbroken about leaving a London that I adored, had just ended a disastrous eight-month relationship, and had nothing lined up for my future. I landed back in Philly broke and depressed, and went from continent jumping to working as an underpaid temp at the electric company.

My sole plan for salvation during this time, for rescue, was to write a novel, then use the money from its sale to return back to my former life in Brixton, the one I was forced to leave behind. I had never written a novel before, nor published anything else. I wasn't intending on writing anything too edgy, just something commercial enough to get me one of those phat publishing advances I'd been reading about. My intended novel would have a lot of hip hop, some violence, sex, all the stuff that sells. Nothing too demeaning: something like the movie Juice, but as a book.

For the entire year, I worked on this project. I obsessed over it. I worked on it at breaks at work. I became depressed if I wasn't producing on it, and obsessed over page counts as if the day I wrote page 200 I would magically be beamed back to my old life in South London.

Still, despite my desperation, the more I wrote, the more I remembered how much I loved literature. The more I wrote, the more I wanted to be a real writer and not just a cynical profiteer. So about halfway in, I started trying to write something that was actually good. That wasn't false stereotypes and cliches, bullshit archetypes and slang. I started to try and write something that reflected my reality, comprised of real emotion and honesty.

Eager to get it moving, after I reached page 200 I had the thing bound at Kinkos and sent to the literary agent of a friend of mine. After that day, whenever I left the house I checked my voicemail obsessively, waiting for the call from the agent that would serve as my reprieve. Finally, I did get a call. The agent wanted to talk.

I went up to NYC on the Amtrak from Philly, so eager that I showed up at the agent's office a half hour early. Then the agent and I went out to lunch at a fancy restaurant in the Village. Mariah Carey and Tommy Motolla were at the next table, not talking to each other. They were divorced a month later, I think.

There at the table, in a rushed aside, the agent told me:

"Half of the writing in your book is really good, fantastic. But the other half is just horrible. Just complete shit."

"I totally agree. I know that now. That's why I'm going to go back and rewrite that first half completely and-"

"What? No, no. That first half is great: really gritty, really urban. It's the second half that's horrible. It's dull pretentious crap. That's what needs to be changed."

I was heart broken. My dreams of a major publisher seemed squashed. Not wanting to be a literary coon, I ignored the agent's advice. I worked even harder to try and make the manuscript the way I wanted it. I called the book White Chocolate Melts: I tell you that because I think that sums up just how fucking awful the thing was. It was hopeless. I learned a lot about being a writer when I finished trying to edit the thing, but no agent was interested in that book, let alone a major publisher. With my options running out, I walked away from it.

What I realized though, in the months ahead, was that the agent had been right: I was good enough to write shitty commercial pulp, but I didn't have the skills to write a serious work of literature. To get those skills, I applied to an MFA and began my own program of reading and writing. I started the long, still ongoing process of trying to grow as a writer.

For the next four years, my energy went into pushing my craft, raising my skill level, and generally becoming a good enough writer that mainstream publishing had to open its doors for me. The result was I become a much stronger writer, and eventually sold a novel to a major house.

Now, all this first happened in '95. The self-publishing craze was in its infancy, with writers like Omar Tyree just starting to make noise as they found success first as self-published authors. The World Wide Web had barely happened, and self-publishing sites like iUniverse didn't exist yet, let alone the print-on-demand technology that was just around the corner. If I had hit my wall just three, or even two years later, all of those self-publishing options would have been available to me. As desperate as I was, I don't know if I would have said no to the idea. I don't think I would have known to. At the time I was working on that book, I actually considered it good enough to be published. I might have jumped at any opportunity not to take "No" for an answer.

If I had chosen to self-publish, that four years would have been spent on learning book marketing, promotion, publicity, audience identification, and all of the other many aspects of the publishing world. My time would have been spent traveling around with boxes of books in the back of my car, hand selling the thing to black bookstores and barbershops and churches, attending every cheesy promotional event I could find just to get White Chocolate Melts out there, no matter how flawed it was. I would have created press packets and done mailings and been out there schmoozing, trying to sneak my way onto every local TV and radio station I could find.

And at the end of that four years, I would probably have several books, having written them in a month or two to expand my product line. And with no real time for craft and my attention completely focused on the market, each would have sucked roughly as much as the first one. Having spent the bulk of my energy on the commerce instead of the art, I would have remained the same shitty writer I was when I started. The moment I chose to self-publish, I would have ceased to make substantial growth. I would have virtually calcified.

This might sound like conjecture, but it's not. I say this because I saw a generation of black writers fall into this trap, authors that could have been original voices that added to the canon, who instead became literary canon fodder. They went pop, blew up, and then almost instantly started vanishing, their worth dwindling with their sales.

Sadly, instead of working actively on getting better, many of this crew instead try to falsely justify the merit of their work. Just like it was impossible in the early 80s to find a disco band that admitted being a disco band, it is rare to find a black commericial writer that will admit that they are a commercial writer. Instead, they often try to argue that their work represents the best of African American literature, on par with Ellison, Baldwin and Morrison. It would be funny, if it wasn't so sad. And so insulting to those writers they claim to emulate.

Sincerely,

Mat Johnson
www.niggerati.com

Next Up:
Lesson #4: How the Black Commercial Fiction Boom Can Save American Publishing