Want To Get Back At The Big Boys? Self Publish Your Book!

Many authors regard traditional publishers as pompous, totally unfair creatures with little, if any, consideration for the feelings of another human being. And, in many cases, they are right. So forget 'em. Self-publish your book now!

When an author's work is rejected from some snobby NY firm, you can be certain the publisher responsible for this dastardly act will be blacklisted for eternity. Authors have even resorted to voodoo and witchcraft to bring about revenge, I am told.

It's true that many big money publishers regard authors with the same amount of enthusiasm as a shot of penicillin. That is, they realize they need a few of them to fill up pages of a book which they in turn sell for a profit, but somehow they can't shake the feeling they are being fed nothing more than fungus on moldy cheese.

Actually, authors are a hard-working lot. Many are very prolific, like Charles Hamilton, alias Frank Richard "Billy Bunter." He was known to produce 80,000 words a week of finished copy. His lifetime output was said to be more than 72 million words. The fact that Charlie never married might have had something to do with his many hours of productive labor. But who can say.

Erle Stanley Gardner of Perry Mason fame worked on as many as seven novels at one time. Before he died in 1970, he dictated up to 10,000 words a day.

Then there was John Creaset, the British novelist, who pounded out two complete books in a single week. (Talk about touch-typing!)

A few authors did get paid well. Consider Hemingway being paid $30,000 for a 2,000-word article on bullfighting for Sports Illustrated in 1960. That's $15 a word for writing about some guy throwing the bull.

And let's not forget that "Big Boys" often make mistakes. All you have to do is consider the people who turned down "Gone With The Wind" because they felt it was too long. Numerous publishers also rejected the novel "Peyton Place" before it was accepted and eventually sold 12 million copies.

But what publisher, or anyone else for that matter, would ever dream that six million people would go out and purchase a simple boy/girl postcard created by Donald McGill in the early 1900s with this caption:

He: "How do you like Kipling?"

She: "I don't know, you naughty boy. I've never Kippled."

This goes to show that an author must (for a better choice of words) stay the course. If he or she has talent and persistence, that author may eventually find a traditional publisher equally gifted and farsighted who will be quick to recognize these attributes.

But don't count on it. Instead, self-publish your book. At least that way you can see your book in print in a matter of weeks, rather than years. And no matter what you've heard, YOU will always be the one responsible for promoting your book ... unless, of course, you're James Patterson or Stephen King.