The Well-Known Author and the Crank

The Well-Known Author and the Crank

Who will take to the new means of publishing

In ‘the Commuter and the Misfit’ I told of two men who took different paths in life. Andrew liked people and lived a life like most of the men he knew. Zack didn’t like people at all, so he lit out into the wild where there are no roads. I tried to show how these two men are unlike in almost every way. Neither is perfectly happy, but on the whole Andrew is happy and Zack is a miserable soul. We can take these two men as models and see that there’s a bit of Andrew and Zack in each of us. Every craft will have its Andrew-path and its Zack-path as well. So let’s look at those two paths for talesmen today.

The Well-Known Author

Andrew the talesman, like Zack the talesman, has always loved to read and to watch and hear all manner of tales in their many forms, such as movies, comics, TV, radio, stage plays, and so on. Out of this love, Andrew began to tell tales of his own, as did Zack — and there the likeness ends.

Andrew studied tale-making in school. He joined other writers to share and help one another in their work. He sent his stories to magazines and got a few published. At last he wrote a novel, a tale that would fill a whole book all on its own. Andrew sent the novel manuscript to publishers, and after a couple of years he found one who would publish it. With a book deal at hand, Andrew got an agent who worked out the terms of the contract with the publisher.

The novel was published and sold well enough. It was no best seller, but it earned back Andrew’s advance and got some praise from critics. Andrew went on writing short stories, and he wrote some more novels in the years. Each book sold more copies than the one before it. In time, Andrew grew to be well known as an author. He had fans and a half dozen or so books in print at any time. He wrote no great number of stories an novels, but he kept at it and turned out a few stories and one novel every year or so through his career. He had to do this, indeed, for he had a family and mortgage to uphold.

Andrew was not the best known writer in his land, but he had won his way to a place very few writers can reach: he paid for his life with his tales, and wrote what he pleased.

This is a great success for a writer today.

The Crank of Yesterday

Andrew’s tale has not changed much over the last century. The way authors earned their bread in 1900 was much the same as they did it in 2000. the change along the way was a creep or crawl with a hop here and there. But Zack’s tale today is very different from what it was a hundred years ago.

A hundred years ago, Zack wrote his tales on paper, with a pen. He sent them off to magazines and publishers. Once in a while he got a reply that said the tale was not accepted. Most of the time he heard nothing. He went on writing all the same. It was a kind of frenzy, a madness that drove him to it.

Zack always liked tales, and he read mountains of them. He liked tales of men a lot more than he liked the men themselves. The first tales Zack put down on paper dripped with scorn for the well known authors of his day. He meant to show them all he could do it better. Later on he wrote all his tales with no thought of other folks at all. He wrote them for his own ears. They came out of the deep, dark places in Zack’s troubled heart, and they mirrored that darkness in a way that, far from easing his pain, only made it worse. The more he wrote down his weird odd visions, the weirder and odder they grew. Many of them had no start or end. Some had a start but no end. He wrote them at all lengths too, for he did not know nor care for the standard size of tales that were published. He wrote tales that were half a page long, mere fragments, really. He wrote tales that were too long for magazines but too short to fin in books all to themselves, and he wrote tales that filled thousands and thousands of pages and could only have been published as if they were encyclopedias.

Once, early in his career (if you could call it a career) Zack got a letter from an editor. The letter said that the editor might want to publish the tale Zack had sent him, if only Zack would make a few changes to it. A list of suggested changes came with the letter. Zack didn’t finish reading the list. He wouldn’t change a word of his for any editor’s fool concern for popular or critical taste. By then Zack had gone on to other tales anyway, and they were what inspired him now; as far as Zack felt, once he dropped or ended a tale he never took it up again.

Later Zack stopped even sending his manuscripts to any publishers. He made up his mind to publish his tales himself. He found a local printer who gave him a price on the job. Zack saved his wages from his job (of course his job had nothing at all to do with writing) and after a year he had enough to print a thin volume of some of his shorter works. He paid for a hundred copies. The book stores would not carry the book, of course — not when the owners read what was in it. And so the hundred copies in their boxes sat in Zack’s closet.

Zack went on to pay for more tales to be printed, a few dozen copies each — whatever number was cheapest. He never earned enough money at his job to do this often. The volumes lay fresh and still smelling of ink and glue in their boxes in Zack’s small apartment. No one ever read them. The local libraries would not take them even as gifts.

Zack died and no one knew his name but for a few, local men who thought Zack was a crank. At his death his books were taken out by Zack’s landlord and sent to the dump with the rest of Zack’s things, for (of course) Zack had no kin to claim his worthless estate.

And whether what was written in the few books and the boxes stacked with manuscripts was the work of genius or madness, who on earth could tell?

The Crank Today

Though the tale of Andrew’s career has but crept and crawled and hopped over the last century, the tale of Zack’s career has leapt forward in a few great bounds. First came the rise of the pulps that published millions of words a year of genre stuff. Then came cheap paperbacks, that also only helped the Zacks whose tales fell close by some known genre. But a later change helped even the crankiest of crank writers when the small press bloomed. And now the internet has come.

And the internet changes everything.

It is now open to Zack to publish his tales himself, and pay nothing to do so. I mean zero, not one cent. He can log on to a computer in his local library for free. He can use the computer to open a free account on line at Google docs or Zoho or one of a number of such web apps that let Zack write and save his tales online, for free. Once Zack has done with any tale, he can publish it online for free as well. He can even publish his tales as he writes them, day by day in a blog hosted online for free.

Where can he publish long tales online for free? He has his choice here as well. He can send them out to ebook newsgroups on usenet. He can attach the files to his blog. He can publish them at Amazon for their Kindle device. He can publish them at http://www.lulu.com in both pdf ebooks and as books that lulu.com will print out, copy by copy for anyone who wants to buy them.

All free for Zack.

Once published in these ways, Zack’s tales can be read by millions in almost every land on Earth — far more than the number of people who could have found Andrew’s books and stories in 1900, and more than the number of people who can find and purchase Andrew’s books today.

Sell or Give Away?

Zack now faces two paths as far as how he offers his tales. He can ask to be paid, or he can send them out for free.

Zack can sell his tales at amazon, lulu.com, or other print-on-demand publishers, and never offer any tale or part of a tale for free. In this way he will be better off than he would have been a hundred years ago, since he won’t have to pay his printer, and these online book stores will put his books up for sale. The sops of 1900, like the shops today, have only so many shelves to fill with physical books, and must pick with care which ones they offer. Online stores hold on their servers the files of thousands or even millions of times as many.

But Zack doesn’t need to sell his tales to eat. He works at other jobs, and he doesn’t write for money or for fame. Zack got neither money nor fame in 1900, and yet he went on writing then. He will go on writing today though his tales win him neither money nor fame.

And Zack hates to sell his books. it’s not the money he minds, it’s not that his books may have sold that he hates. He hates the selling in and of itself, and what it asks of him. He flinches at the mere thought of begging some man to please spend some cash to read Zack’s book. Zack hates the man and loathes the act of begging that man. He never wrote the tale to please others, he never sought their praise. Zack is more at ease when he gives his tales away for free, or offers them for sale with the unsaid words, ‘Buy it, or go fuck yourself.’

This, I think, is a part of Zack’s soul. Andrew may find joy in going on the road to pitch and hawk his books. He likes people after all, he writes tales he wants people to like to read, he enjoys public readings and book signings and talking to people about his tales. Zack loathes all of that. He could not bar to do it unless it were forced on him — and it is not.

So Zack, the ‘real’ Zack, the ‘pure’ Zack, may put out his books online for sale where the booksellers won’t offer books unless they are for sale, but Zack will also send the tales out free of charge in all the ways he can.

Here Zack still sticks to his ‘take it or leave it’ frame of mind. ‘This is my new tale,’ he might say to you, if he cared to say anything at all. ‘It’s the greatest thing I ever made. Read it if you want. I don’t care if you won’t. If you read it and you don’t like it, don’t ask for your money back — I didn’t ask you for any — and don’t come and whine to me about it. If you don’t like this then your taste is worse than I thought, and I never thought much of your taste in the first place.’

Oddly, paradoxically, because Zack gives his tales away, he now finds he can market them with ease. He would once have cringed to say ‘Here’s my new tale’ — just that alone would to him have smacked of selling, of pleading with others to deign to consider his work, of begging them and abasing himself. But if h gives the tale for free, all that is changed. ‘It is the servant who takes money; it is the master pays.’ But when the thing is given away and no money changes hands, then there is no servant and no master, only free men, equals.

Zack the Carver

I can show you the change between selling his tales and giving them away will make for Zack, when I tell you of the Zack who carves instead of telling tales. Alone in the wood, always on the move, going nowhere, Zack the carver halts now and then and chops at a tree trunk with his axe. He carves things out of the wood — a face, a beast, a shape unseen anywhere but in Zack’s own mind. He carves it and moves on. If it should chance that some other man come across one of these carvings in the wood, he is free to look on it for as long as he wants, to like it or hate it. None of that means a bit to Zack, who carved out of his own need, with no thought of any other man.

State of the World

I doubt if there are many Zacks. There must be far more Andrews. And most all of us will fall somewhere in between. We have some Andrew in us and some Zack as well. But I do think there are more of us on Zack’s side than on Andrew’s, in this sense, that we’d like to tell some tales, but the tales we tell wouldn’t sell. A hundred years ago, those many didn’t go far; they hadn’t enough of Zack in them to carry on. They told odd tales to their friends or children, they scribbled the odd verse or snatch of prose, and left it at that.

Today those many can go much farther when they use the internet. They already have, they already are, and they will go much farther in days to come, because the little praise they get will feed the Andrew in their hearts, and the Andrew will egg on the Zack at his side.

(Composed with pen on paper Saturday 23 February 2008)