Having recently converted from the what's-my-wordcount-this-second school of interim deadline management, I've been reminded of a wholly different change in the works as far as literature on the whole is concerned.
But first, some exposition...
For those of you who haven't considered self-publication, I highly recommend it. Services like Lulu provide a relatively painless means by which to equip something you wrote in your spare time for massive global distribution with the click of a few buttons and at no personal cost to you.
That said, despite the allure of rule-my-own-destiny publication, I found I was still drawn to the old standard of hiring an agent, submitting a manuscript to a faceless editor and praying someone, somewhere, might buy my book. There's a certain validation that comes from a large corporate entity giving you the green light that is difficult to extract from the self-publishing game.
Odd as that sounds.
But the truth is traditions are seeded into each of us heavily and can be difficult to break on a personal level. That was why I started the 90-day ordeal of rewriting a previous novel so that it might be clean, crisp, and up to the snuff of the professional writing world (at least, as well as someone who has never been a part of said world can estimate it might be).
I had planned until very recently to then find myself an agent, submit the work for consideration and follow the trail of dots as they led me on toward the promise of seeing my book on a dusty shelf in the back of an Eddie McKay some day. But then I was offered up the ridiculous tirade of a published author slamming the publishing industry as a whole in an effort to dissuade new authors from even considering it.
While the article itself was based largely on unrelated causal conjecture and personal elitism, it brought to mind a few key points quite my accident that led me to consider the quest I had always intended to embark upon.
Over the course of the last few years, we've seen some incredible shifts in the delivery models of a number of media. It should cause anyone hoping to take a thing from their brain and distribute it en masse to minds worldwide to pause and consider if there might not be a better way than to cram a coffee-stained manuscript inside a manila envelope to start its week-long trek down the street.
At one time, the advantage to a publishing firm was the printers. A regular guy couldn't just hop down to Kinko's and make 300 well-bound copies of his work with any hope of turning a profit, let alone mailing them out to distributors or delivering them direct to customers.
With services like Lulu, that's no longer an issue: customers order your work and have it printed ad-hoc, or you can order a massive printing for resale. Distribution is no longer reliant on a massive central printer station cranking out hundreds of copies a seconds.
Add to that a publisher's second greatest draw: getting onto the shelves. The publisher handles negotiation with the ailing bookstores on a national (or international) level to get your copy added, sorted and sent out en masse to stores where hipsters sipping their mocha lattes can happen across your overdramatic cover art and be wowed accordingly.
Borders and Barnes & Noble, two of the best known print warehouses in the country, are teetering on the edge of oblivion. While there will likely always be a place where someone can happen across a paper copy of your work, there's a good chance the social meccas that are coffee-shop bookstores may be a dying breed.
Which brings us to the third and possibly biggest advantage of the pro publisher: marketing. Someone else will handle the selling and promotion for you. Someone else will whore your work out to the masses and make it known. Someone else gets to talk about you than you.
For most writers, that may be reason enough in and of itself to hand over your rights to the first publishing shop that will take them. That said, even the self-publishing quorum offer marketing services at less than the price of an agent. It may not be as intense as seeing the word "Penguin" stamped on the side of your book, but it puts your book where it will be seen, on the new shelves today's readers are wandering past.
The e-shelves.
Amazon and its Kindle have redefined the marketplace, and I don't mean that as a pun. People are taking the bookstore with them now, browsing online through an infinite web of related keywords and customers-also-bought threads of commonality. There's no more printing press, no more negotiation, no more cramming your paperback in next to Stephenie Meyer's latest affront to the cultural conversation.
Which brings me at length back to my original point: size no longer matters.
Not that it ever did, really. As many hearts have been tugged by Elie Weisel's Night and the works of Jack London as anything by the late Robert Jordan or Charles Dickens. 700 pages does not a master make you; nor are you clever for fitting a story inside a mere pamphlet of a book. Length is just that: the time it takes to tell your story: no more, no less.
That said, for ages word-count has been the final bell on the worth of a work. Minimums were required: people wanted readers to feel they had gotten their money's worth, and the more pages, the more worth, clearly. I myself fell victim to the old song of "it's not a real book until you crest X-many words," but words are not the wealth of a story: what they hold, what they evoke in you, the reader, is.
Like some surreal welterweight division, the novella has been lost in the overall fight of print publishing for decades. With occasional moments of brightness, the 100-page margin between a hulking short story and a pitiful paperback was a black void of emptiness reserved only for certain unique masters whose ways no one was willing to question.
With the sudden surge of the e-publishing world and the continued decline of print as a singular avenue of expression, the lines between length and size will, I hope, blur to nothing. Without an arbitrary mesh through which to pass all potential contributions and the revelation that more bytes do not cost more to print and send, stories can take as much (or as little) time as they like.
And given the overall predilection for not staring at a screen at length, there's a good chance the shorter, still-heavy works in the forsaken novella range may have their own heyday at last.
Why am I such a fan of the novella? I'm not. I'm eager to see it and its kindred labels of "short story," "novel" and "epic" vanish entirely, though I doubt that will happen any time soon. A story is a big as you make it, as rich as you make it, as deep as you decide to go with it. The dimensions should be fluid so that each writer can take their time (or get to the point) at their own pace.
It isn't a matter of simple comfort for the writer, it's about not stretching a round peg to fit a square whole. It's about removing the boundaries so that any peg, no matter the shape, can pass through unhindered and reach the reader for whom it was destined.
And if that's not enough innuendo for you, I don't know what will be.
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