Independence for Writers

by Deren Hansen

Independence is a funny thing: with tomorrow's celebration of the independence of the United States from Great Britain we will hear a lot about freedom but not so much about responsibility.

The standard narrative often runs along the lines of, "Things were difficult in 1776 but the founding fathers were men of vision and courage—and look where we are today." We conveniently gloss over the first 100 years of the country's history when its viability and sometimes its continuing existence were more or less in doubt.

Independence is a consistently harder road than dependence: like investments, greater rewards are always accompanied by greater risks.

During the last five years we've heard various proclamations that writers can now stand independent of publishers. The standard narrative about independent publishing is similar to the narrative about American independence: heavy on the new-found freedoms authors enjoy but light on the new responsibilities they must shoulder.

My aim in sharing these observations is not to argue that either the old or new ways are better, but to point out the deeper challenge of taking responsibility. The principle of taking responsibility should come as no surprise to writers: offering a book to readers under your name means you've taken the responsibility to provide intelligible, error–free, and grammatically–correct problems that tells a coherent story that will entertain and/or inform. One of the comforts in the old way of publishing was there were enough people involved that if you needed to apportion blame you could exempt yourself—the publisher chose a bad cover, the sales force to promote the book properly, or some event distracted the public, none of which was your fault. The inescapable truth of independent publishing is that, rise or fall, the book's fate is no one's fault but your own.

Some of you may think taking full responsibility for your book sounds harsh. There is nothing wrong with finding partners for your publishing project, but even there you are still responsible for making sure they are the right partners. While we might throw around dichotomies like right and wrong or easy and difficult, taking responsibility is ultimately about maturity—something to think about tomorrow, both as a writer and as a citizen.

Deren Hansen is the author of the Dunlith Hill Writers Guides. Learn more at dunlithhill.com.

Traditional Publishers are Actually Trade Publishers

by Deren Hansen

Whether we call the new mode of publishing self-, indie, or artisan, the most consistently used label for the formerly dominant publishing model is, “traditional.”

As people who work with words, we understand how important it is to use the right ones. There are, for example, some circles where traditional means, “time-tested values,” not, “hopelessly stuck in the past.” But the real problem with the label, “traditional,” isn’t whether it implies the business model is good or bad but that it doesn’t accurately describe the business model.

Major commercial publishers are, “trade publishers,” because they published to the book trade. They sell their wares to booksellers, not readers.

“But,” you may object, “readers are still the ones buying the books, so what’s the big deal?”

Consider the problem of children’s books: children don’t buy books. Thanks to the inconvenient fact that very few children have disposable income, essentially all children’s books are purchased by well-meaning adults. This means that the book must appeal not only to the child for whom it’s intended but also to someone in the circle of adults with an interest in supplying that child with reading material. It’s not uncommon for the two constituencies (children and adults) to have very different reasons for choosing a book.

Booksellers, of course, want to sell books. The ideal book for a bookseller is one that every reader will want. Readers want to buy books that will entertain, educate, or provide an experience. The ideal book for a reader is one that speaks to his or her specific needs and desires. Absent that ideal book, readers choose the ones that seem to best suit their needs from what’s available. It’s not uncommon for the two constituencies (booksellers and readers) to have very different reasons for choosing a book.

Booksellers order the products they resell from trade publishers. Trade publishers don’t deal directly with readers. That means trade publishers are primarily in the business of convincing booksellers to offer their wares to the reading public. Convincing readers to read their books is at best a secondary concern for trade publishers.


Deren Hansen is the author of the Dunlith Hill Writers Guides. Learn more at dunlithhill.com.

What Matters Most: Readers

by Deren Hansen

The notion that the national book culture we once enjoyed—a consensus about the books everyone who considers themselves literate should have read—is withering under the assault of disruptive businesses and technologies isn’t simply an exercise in good–old–days revisionism: it’s actually one of the last gasps of the cultural monopolies created by trade publishers during the last half–century.

Through a complex web of bestseller lists, influential reviewers, English professors, and book clubs, trade publishers have attempted to create the commercial equivalent of a required reading list. The publishing ecosystem expends a great deal of energy trying to create a sense of urgency by making readers feel they are behind or missing out on the literary cutting edge.

While it is true that shared references are a cornerstone of culture, the idea that a book’s importance is best measured by the number of concurrent readers is one that benefits principally trade publishers and booksellers.

Tracy Hickman has been telling conference audiences for several years, “It doesn't matter if you're published. Being published is nothing. It is everything to be read.”

In the past, writers had to play the commercial lottery of getting published because it was the only game in town. Unfortunately, that system fostered an all–or–nothing mentality: your book was a failure if it wasn’t the talk of the nation.

Rejecting a manuscript because it wasn’t, “sufficiently commercial,” meant the trade publisher believed the book wouldn’t sell in the volume they needed to turn a profit. But that judgment took none of the needs of readers or writers into account.

An author needs readers, but he or she doesn’t need every reader. In fact, it is not possible to write one book that will appeal to every single reader. What is possible, thanks to the recent explosion in publishing opportunities, is to write things that will be read because the distance between writer and reader is now much smaller.


Deren Hansen is the author of the Dunlith Hill Writers Guides. Learn more at dunlithhill.com.

Jack of all Trades, Master of None

by Deren Hansen

For the vast majority of our history as a species, humans were content to live in relatively small groups and spend their time hunting and gathering—and no wonder: most hunter-gatherers work about twenty hours a week to get their living. Yet in the last 10,000-year blink of the evolutionary eye we suddenly have cities and civilizations exploding all over the planet. The culprit, according to a number of anthropologists, is the specialization made possible by agricultural surpluses.

The power of specialization is obvious to every writer who dreams of walking away from the oppression of the day job and devoting his or her full-time to the craft. Imagine the all books we could write—perhaps two or three a year—if we weren’t limited to an hour or two of writing each day.

If you think artisan publishing offers a shortcut to becoming a full-time writer, I have bad news for you: artisan publishing is actually a shortcut to becoming a full-time publisher.

The difference between a writer who is published and a publisher who writes begins with the contrast between the passive phrase, “a writer who is published,” and the active phrase, “a publisher who writes.” One of the reasons for the traditional separation between authors and publishers is that it allows each partner to specialize: the writer delivers a finished manuscript and then the publisher goes to work.

There’s so much to do as an artisan publisher that you can’t afford to specialize. Serious writers understand how much time and effort it takes to go from idea to finished manuscript. Publishers understand how much time and effort it takes to go from finish manuscript to book for sale. You’ve got to be a generalist if you’re going to do everything that needs to be done between the idea and the book. Even if you engage freelance editors and designers you still need to understand enough of what they do to be able to review and approve their work.

But it’s worse than that. You actually need to become a serial specialist. Many of the nontrivial tasks—like writing and design—require focus and skill. And yet just as you’re getting the hang of it you need to move on to something else. In practice this means you’re constantly relearning things. If you feel like you’re being pulled in too many different directions when you try to write now, you’ll find artisan publishing more frustrating than fulfilling.


Deren Hansen is the author of the Dunlith Hill Writers Guides. Learn more at dunlithhill.com.

Short-circuiting the Great Chain of Rejection

by Deren Hansen

One of the down-sides of becoming an artisan publisher is that you must forego the luxury of getting rejected by agents and editors.

“A luxury?” you sputter.

Yes. Instead of the gentle buffeting you’ll receive from publishing professionals, who respond with a polite, but vague, “it’s not a good fit for us,” you’ll get slapped around by readers who have no qualms about telling the world they think your book is a piece of crap.

As hard as it may be to believe, rejections from agents and editors offer several layers of comfort:

• They readily acknowledge their opinions are subjective and that perhaps someone else will like it.
• There’s always the opportunity to revise: when you submit a manuscript to an agent or editor, you do so knowing they will generally ask for revisions.
• Agents and editors are always open to future submissions. Even if the piece you’re shopping now isn’t right for them perhaps your next one will be.

Compared to that, readers have no mercy.

• Most readers believe their opinions are objective, or at least representative: if they didn’t like your book, why would anyone else.
• Readers expect a finished product. If they don’t like your first version, they’re not going to read your book a second time no matter how much you revise it.
• Readers hold grudges. If they hate one book, they’ll hate the rest sight-unseen.

If you’ve turned to artisan publishing because you’re tired of rejection you’ve come to the wrong place. Electronic publishing does let you bypass the gatekeepers who in the past might have kept you out of the market altogether. But the price for that access is that you also bypass the safety net those gatekeepers provide. If you’re not careful, you open yourself up to getting rejected for everything from typos and grammar errors to characters and stories that don’t resonate with readers.

Offering your work directly to readers requires more courage and a thicker skin than letting a publisher bring out your book. If you have a publisher and your book fails in the marketplace, you can always take consolation—whether it’s true or not—in blaming them. If you publish your own work, you’ve got no one to blame but yourself.

If you can listen to readers rant that your loathsome book defiled the electrons used to store and transmit it and that the author should be hunted down and forbidden from ever putting pen to paper, and then return to your writing with full confidence and vigor you’ve got what it takes to become an artisan publisher.


Deren Hansen is the author of the Dunlith Hill Writers Guides. Learn more at dunlithhill.com.

A Propper Comeuppance

by Deren Hansen

When you began to believe your writing might actually be good enough to be published, you were determined to do everything right: you read writing books and blogs, went to conferences, found a critique group, polished your novel, researched agents, and sent the perfect query letter. And in return you got nothing but silence punctuated by the occasional rejection.

You did everything right and you weren’t asking for special treatment, so why didn’t you get any kind of positive response?

Even if you understand publishing is subjective, as time, rejections, and silence wear away your enthusiasm, it’s hard not to suspect agents and editors of conspiring to suppress your genius or being willfully ignorant.

Vengeance and vindication make a powerful motivational cocktail. Like many intoxicating substances, a little might help but a lot is a recipe for trouble: a desire for vindication may be good if it motivates you to finish and polish your project but leaping into artisan publishing because you’re going to show all those shortsighted publishing professionals how wrong they were is a recipe for frustration and failure.

To begin with, the people who rejected or ignored you will probably never know that your project has been published because there are simply too many things being published for anyone to keep track of it all. Should they hear of your project they will likely give it little or no notice: agents and editors are looking for new material to sell.

The only thing guaranteed to get the attention of the gatekeepers is to release a book whose sales go off the charts. But even that won’t convince an agent or editor she was wrong. Beyond subjectivity, there’s so much serendipity in the process of producing and selling a book that having different people involved could produce wildly differing results: a different agent—your dream agent—might have sold the project to a different editor whose sensibilities might have colored the story just enough to miss striking a popular chord.

At a practical level, the slow, laborious path of artisan publishing means that you must invest a tremendous amount of work and patience into something where the odds of it making a big enough splash in the market to cause the gatekeepers even a twinge of regret are extremely small.

But the deeper truth is that artisan publishing is about love and devotion, which makes it fundamentally ill-suited for revenge.


Deren Hansen is the author of the Dunlith Hill Writers Guides. Learn more at dunlithhill.com.

Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood

by Deren Hansen

I have been haunted by Robert Frost’s, “The Road Not Taken,” [http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173536] ever since I blundered into the poem in a high school English class. The final stanza should be familiar:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two Roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Is this a lament or an expression of quiet gratitude about the road not taken?

The notion of opportunity costs is a poorly understood economic concept for similar reasons. As part of an effort to quantify what it will cost to pursue some line of endeavor you should add in the cost of not doing something else. In the relatively simple case of an investment, the opportunity cost of buying stock is the interest you would have earned if you left the money in the bank. The analysis, however, rapidly becomes much more complicated as you move from the predictable to the unpredictable. For example, what is the opportunity cost of taking one job instead of another, or marrying one person instead of another?

Artisan publishing doesn’t preclude other kinds of publishing. There are certainly cases where an artisan publishing effort led to a lucrative contract with a major publisher. But a simple fact of life is that the more time you put in to one line of endeavor, the less time you have for others.

In the third stanza, Frost says:

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

Your good intentions notwithstanding, way inevitably leads on to way and the road of artisan publishing will take you to different places than the well-marked path of traditional publishing.

It isn’t simply that in addition to writing you will have to become skilled at production and marketing, it’s that as an artisan publisher the nature of the projects you undertake will be different: you may choose to go ahead and publish a manuscript that agents and editors say isn’t sufficiently commercial; you may produce a collection of short stories or a novella that would have stood little chance of being published in the past because it was too long for a magazine and too short for a book; or you may simply write more or less than a traditional publisher is willing to absorb.

The differences arise not because one road is better than another but because they simply go to different places. What counts as success for an artisan is different from what counts as success for a large organization. Making money is, of course, part of both roads, but questions of how and why have different answers depending on the road.

If, instead of being fascinated with the new prospects opening up before you as you go down the road, you find yourself looking over your shoulder and spending more time wondering about the other road—the one more traveled by, and better marked—perhaps artisan publishing is not for you.


Deren Hansen is the author of the Dunlith Hill Writers Guides. Learn more at dunlithhill.com.

Show Me the Money!

by Deren Hansen

If you’re toying with the notion of becoming an artisan publisher because you want to get rich quick, stop immediately. There are many other ways to make money that take far less effort and produce a more timely return. Some people have indeed made their fortune writing books just like others have become wealthy by winning the lottery, but neither approach offers a predictable, repeatable path to instant riches.

In a world where entire factories are optimized to produce as much of one thing as quickly as possible, the artisan’s handcrafted approach can never compete purely on price. Of course, artisans can make a living but they will never enjoy the profits that can be generated by the economies of scale in a large operation.

You might argue that the old economy-of-scale distinction between artisans and major enterprises doesn’t apply to electronic books because production costs have dropped to almost nothing: an artisan publisher can “publish” just as easily as a major publisher and, as a smaller operator with lower fixed costs, they can afford to undercut the big houses on price.

But the changes that have opened new prospects for artisan publishers have also given large organizations new ways to gain advantage. Specifically, established publishers continue to enjoy economies of scale in marketing and discoverability. Because they have been producing a great many books for a large audience they have the attention of an army of reviewers and booksellers. You won’t command the attention of as large an audience until you are as well established as they are.

Don’t make the simplistic mistake, as you’re dazzled by the prospect of a 70% royalty, of thinking all you have to do is sell 50,000 copies of a $2.99 book to earn a six-figure income. Even with a dedicated sales force and standing orders from bookstores, major publishers rarely sell 50,000 copies of a title. On average, books published nationally—which includes bestsellers—sell between three and five thousand copies.

You may sigh and ask, “Are you saying we should publish for love, not money?”

No. It’s simply that the money will not come quickly. Unlike ancient artisans, who were paid once for their work and depended on the next commission for their continued livelihood, an artisan publisher gets paid every time someone buys another copy of the books in his or her catalog. In web terms, artisan publishing is all about the long tail—the slow growth in the value of the collection of published work over time.

What this really means is that artisan publishing operates under a more traditional model than current publishers. Before most large publishing houses became divisions in even larger corporate entities they earned their ongoing income from their backlist—books published prior to the current year that were in print and on sale. Your goal as an artisan publisher is similar: because you can never compete with the major players on the number of titles you release or marketing to create a false sense of urgency your best bet is to supply a steady stream of high quality content which will, in turn, generate a steady stream of revenue.

There’s money to be made as an artisan publisher, but it won’t come all at once.


Deren Hansen is the author of the Dunlith Hill Writers Guides. Learn more at dunlithhill.com.

Be Careful What You Wish For

by Deren Hansen

The problem with asking a child what they want to be when they grow up is that they can only see the cool parts of the job—they have no idea how much work it takes to become something or how much drudgery there is between the exciting bits. Firefighters, for example, spend more time sitting in the firehouse waiting for something to happen than racing through town, lights flashing and sirens wailing, in their cool trucks.

As we grow, we learn that wishes often come with a price. In W. W. Jacobs’ classic 1902 story, “The Monkey’s Paw,” a family receives the titular talisman along with a warning that while it would grant three wishes it would do so, “to their sorrow.” They wish for a sum of money sufficient to settle their mortgage and receive that exact amount in settlement after the son is killed in a horrible industrial accident.

Publishing yourself looks easy—and glamorous—when you hear about ebook superstars laughing all the way to the bank.

The reality for the vast majority of people who release their own work is at best unremarkable and often disappointing.

Part of the reason is simply structural: much of our social and economic world is ruled by what’s called a power law distribution, where a few elements—be they cities, celebrities, or songs—stand out by orders of magnitude from their peers. Some things, for reasons beyond anyone’s control, become runaway social phenomena. But those blockbusters are always the exception, not the rule.

A more important reason—because it is a matter over which you have some control—that many people are disappointed with the results of their efforts at self-publishing stems from the weight of expectations they bring along with them. The electronic pioneers help inflate expectations because their experience comes from a time when demand exceeded supply. But the deeper and more pervasive problem is something akin to the gamblers fallacy: you believe that you will be the exception—even though sales of most books are best measured in hundreds of copies; your book is going to sell tens or even hundreds of thousands of copies.

But the deepest reason many people find the path disappointing is because they didn’t understand what they were signing up for. Beyond the straightforward matters of quality and integrity you make a commitment to your readers when you publish something. The nature of the commitment is nebulous—you generally have no further customer obligations after someone purchases your book—but it is real enough that businesses account for it under the heading, “goodwill.” If you want your books to continue to sell, you have to continue to market the book. In order to live up to the title, “publisher,” you have to periodically release new material. Continuing to show up in the marketplace reassures your readers that they have bought into a going concern. If you “fire and forget,” a few books, readers will return the favor.

Artisan publishing is not something to be undertaken on a whim, but in the full and sober knowledge that you may be setting out on a long, difficult road that will yield success slowly at best.


Deren Hansen is the author of the Dunlith Hill Writers Guides. Learn more at dunlithhill.com.

Halloween Warning

Artisan Publishing May have Unintended Consequences

 

 

Proceed at Your Own Risk

 

 

Gatekeepers and Advocates

by Deren Hansen

We often talk of all the gatekeepers we have to get past in order to get published. We even say things like, “vetted by publishers”—as if publishers where somehow the guardians of all that is good and true. Unfortunately our sloppy language leads to sloppy thinking about the role of publishers. Specifically, we confuse gatekeeping with advocacy.

Gatekeeping means choosing who will pass and who will be excluded. It also implies an endorsement: if the bouncer at the club lets you past the velvet rope you know you're one of the cool people.

Advocacy is an important element in maintaining the social fabric. Obvious self-interest makes us wary of both the promoter and the product. But if a nominally disinterested party champions someone’s cause, we take it as evidence the case has merit. That’s why we need lawyers and agents.

Publishers provide advocacy through investment. Talk is cheap. Backing up that talk by investing a substantial sum in a book says something. Of course there’s no direct correlation between the amount invested and the quality of the book. But assuming publishers are rational economic actors, if the publisher is willing to bet so much on a project, perhaps it’s worth our attention too.

Publishers are not pure advocates because they have a financial interest in the sale of the book. To compensate, the industry has developed layers of structural advocates. From the wholesaler, distributor, and retailer model of the distribution chain to the web of reviewers, booksellers, librarians, and teachers who promote books and reading in general, the publishing industry, which is just as commercial as any other, manages to come out looking like a cultural institution.

The new world of frictionless, costless e-publishing doesn’t change the need for advocacy. You may be able to establish a reputation by building an online social network. You may inspire readers to recommend your work. Regardless of the expression, the underlying pattern remains the same: to be credible you need independent third parties willing to expend their own time and resources to vouch for your work.

One of the few things you can’t do as an artisan publisher is be your own advocate. Clearly you must put a great deal of time and effort into promoting your work. But no matter how much effort you put into it, marketing can never become advocacy because you’re not an independent party.

If your artisan publishing effort expands to include other authors, you can become an advocate for their work to a small degree. But compared to the major publishing houses that have the financial wherewithal to lavish seven-figure advances on celebrities your own investment will hardly stand out.

The practical upshot is that in order to succeed as an artisan publisher you must nurture a network of independent advocates without any of the structural advantages enjoyed by large publishing companies. Moreover, you will have to compete with those companies for readers’ attention every step of the way. The only way to build credibility and to attract advocates is to keep showing up: to consistently deliver high quality content. You need to be prepared for a slow, patient game.


Deren Hansen is the author of the Dunlith Hill Writers Guides. Learn more at dunlithhill.com.

Why the Traditional Separation between Authors and Publishers?

by Deren Hansen

The broad-brush functional differences between the right and left hemispheres of the brain have become a mainstay of pop psychology: the right brain is the seat of creativity while the left brain has a monopoly on detail work. Some people personify the two as the accountant and the artist in your head.

It's hard to say whether that simple dichotomy will stand the test of our growing understanding of neuroscience, but it is a useful way to characterize the traditional division of labor between author and publisher. It's easy to caricature the author as artist in contrast to—and sometimes in conflict with—the publisher as accountant and business manager.

As with all common notions, this analogy has a kernel of truth: authors provide the novel (in both senses of the word) content and publishers take care of all the details involved in preparing, packaging, and presenting that content in the marketplace.

Of course, the divide isn’t between creative and non-creative work. Writing involves plenty of drudgery and the best marketing is thoroughly creative. But there is an important distinction between the kinds of creativity and detail work that are most effective in the traditional roles of author and publisher. And now that many authors are expected to provide a substantial portion of the marketing effort they find they need to master an entirely different set of skills.

As challenging as it may be for an author with a traditional publishing arrangement to switch writing and marketing hats, self-publishing means that you have to wear both hats all the time. Put another way, whether you know it or not you’re signing up to bridge the traditional right brain/left brain split between authors and publishers in your own little head when you self-publish.

If you think that editing is an endless round of fiddly grammar details, wait till you're stuck trying to figure out why the formatting for your e-book is off on three devices but looks great everywhere else. Getting covers right requires attention to the art design, graphic file formats, scale and resolution for different platforms, and a host of conventions like including your ISBN as a barcode on the back cover and listing the book’s category. Then there are details like copyright statements, warranties, and metadata that all have to be both correct and correctly presented. Making sure all of these things right requires constant checking and double checking.

Setting aside whatever frustration with the old or fascination with the new that you may have, there are good reasons for the traditional division between producers and distributors in many areas of the economy. You need to understand both the reasons for and the substance of each role if you want to walk the path of the artisan publisher because you’re signing up for both jobs.


Deren Hansen is the author of the Dunlith Hill Writers Guides. Learn more at dunlithhill.com.

Know the Rules before You Break Them

by Deren Hansen

In her manifesto for correct punctuation and grammar, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, Lynne Truss said this about comma splices (i.e., independent clauses joined by a comma, creating a run-on sentence):

“… so many highly respected writers observe the splice comma that a rather unfair rule emerges on this one: only do it if you're famous.... Done knowingly by an established writer, the comma splice is effective, poetic, dashing. Done equally knowingly by people who are not published writers, it can look weak or presumptuous. Done ignorantly by ignorant people, it is awful.”

One of the rules we throw at would-be writers is that they mustn't be bound by convention--they shouldn't be afraid to break the rules. The problem with this well-intentioned advice is that it leads many writers to get ahead of themselves by trying to break, “the rules,” before they understand them.

There are countless examples of authors who make the same, “mistake,” and one is lauded while the other condemned. On the surface that seems grossly unfair. The distinction, however, is simply a matter of mastery: if you’ve shown your readers you know what you’re doing, they’ll try to understand your intent in breaking the rules; if you haven’t, they’ll take it as more evidence that you don’t know what you’re doing.

There are many areas of endeavor where you need to show you know the rules before you can be trusted to break them. While nowhere near as critical as a licensed profession like medicine, publishing is structurally similar because in both cases you’re asking people to trust that you can actually provide what you claim to provide.

In the days of the craft guilds an artisan began as an apprentice, graduated to a journeyman when he had mastered basic skills, and became a master—and independent businessman—only after producing a masterpiece to prove he had actually mastered all facets of his craft. We are well past the day when the only way to learn was by doing, and it is neither practical nor necessary to apprentice ourselves to established publishers in order to learn the business, but the prerequisites of skill and mastery still apply if you want to be an artisan publisher.

Fortunately many of the skills you need as an artisan publisher are the same ones you need to live and work in the modern world: you need to know how to use the technical tools of your trade, particularly computers and the Internet; you need to know how to organize your time and work effectively; and you need to master both editorial and marketing communication.

But beyond that, you need to understand the industry in which you will be participating. Artisan publishing is about breaking the rules—at least the ones that held true in commercial publishing for roughly the last 50 years. Both as a matter of personal integrity and in order to lay the foundation for credibility with your readers, you need to understand how the publishing industry worked and how it is changing. Only when you understand the strengths and weaknesses of all the modes of publication now available can you, as Peter admonished the early Christians, “give reason for your faith,” in artisan publishing.


Deren Hansen is the author of the Dunlith Hill Writers Guides. Learn more at dunlithhill.com.

A Sense of Mission

by Deren Hansen

Richard N. Bolles is justifiably well-known for, What Color is Your Parachute?, his perennial guide for job seekers. It’s a shame, though, that he isn’t equally well-known for another book, The Three Boxes of Life. Where Parachute is about the how of finding a job, Three Boxes is about the why.

One of the most important lessons every skilled craftsperson must learn is just because you can doesn’t mean you should. The greatest works of art are exercises in restraint not excess. With the possible exception of tabloid celebrities, the greatest careers and lives exemplify the power of purpose and restraint.

Among the many mind-opening ways of living life by design, not accident, in The Three Boxes of Life, Bolles explains how a sense of mission can inform the thousand and one choices you’ll make in the course of a career and a life:

“There yet remains however, one still deeper answer to the issue of MEANING OR MISSION. That is to find, beyond meaning, some ultimate goal or mission for your life, that drives you on with the kind of sacrificial, burning passion. It is the kind of mission that drove Pasteur, Schweitzer, Einstein and many lesser names. It is the kind of drive that — in any or every profession — distinguishes some men and women from the rest of ‘the common herd.’”

The fact that so many businesses responded to the fad of creating a mission statement with platitudes and generalities doesn’t diminish the value of a genuine sense of mission.

Don’t be put off by the lofty overtones of the word, “mission.” While there certainly may be occasions when much is at stake, our mission is no more or less than being able to answer questions like, “Why are you doing this? What do you hope to accomplish?”

Artisan publishing isn’t a shortcut, or a way to get back at a publishing industry that failed to recognize your genius. Like the work of all skilled craftspeople, artisan publishing is a patient, laborious path. It’s not enough to have the skill, the aptitude, or even the inclination to publish your own material. You need to know why, both for your particular project and for you as an individual, the way of the artisan is worth all the time and trouble it will cost you.

A journey of 1000 miles may well begin with a single step, but your chances of completing the roughly 2,000,000 steps that comprise the journey are poor if you don’t know why you’re doing it. There are many poor reasons—one of the worst being because everyone else is doing it—and only a few good ones. The difference is that poor reasons wear away when the going gets tough but good ones will see you through to the end.

No true craftsperson undertakes a work lightly — not because their work has mystical significance but because the hallmark of skill is to act deliberately. In order to act deliberately you need to know why you’re acting: you need to have a sense of mission. Otherwise, you’ll provide yet another confirmation of the old aphorism that if you’re aiming at nothing you’ll hit it.


Deren Hansen is the author of the Dunlith Hill Writers Guides. Learn more at dunlithhill.com.

Artisan Publishing

by Deren Hansen

The food industry in the United States is a curious one. Some words that appear on labels, like, “organic,” are carefully regulated and may only be used if the food or the process by which it was produced meets certain requirements. Other words, like, “artisan,” may be used with abandon.

The word, “artisan,” long carried the sense of common practitioner, as opposed to the artist who brought genius and inspiration to the work. But as mass production, and increasingly mass customization, has blessed us with a collective and mostly uniform affluence, artisan has come to signify a means of production where low unit cost and economies of scale are not the primary objective. Artisan bread, for example, is made by hand even though there are bread factories that are far more efficient in purely economic terms.

Why, if we are rational economic actors, would we ever choose a product that is more expensive and less available than a mass-produced equivalent? People who prefer artisan breads may argue in terms of the varieties or flavors available nowhere else, or the virtue of supporting local production, but for most people it simply tastes better.

In response to sandwich chains that have recently began advertising their bread as, “artisan,” people who produce food products that actually deserve the label were asked to define it. Some answered in terms of small production batches and traditional, hand-made methods that invite skilled crafts people, who control the means of production, to take greater care in their work. Others spoke about love, attention to detail, a greater concern with quality than quantity, and integrity.

It was in the particular sense of craftsmanship and pride in the work that I realized what I had set out to do in publishing my series of writers’ guides was best characterized as artisan publishing. It certainly wasn’t about the money. While I hope in time to see a reasonable return on the effort I invested in the project, I have no more illusion that my efforts will lead to a publishing empire than an artisan baker believes they will be the next giant food conglomerate.

Artisan publishing isn’t simply a variation on the theme of doing it yourself. The large, well-stocked home improvement centers dotting our suburban landscape owe their existence more to naivety, false economy, and hubris than to a genuine and supportable conviction that doing it yourself is the best way to get the job done well, right, and in a timely fashion. The path of an artisan publisher begins with having something worth saying and a thorough effort to determine the best way to publish that material. As with our writing, where no character, scene, or sentence is too precious to come under scrutiny, artisan publishing has nothing to do with shortcuts or showing the gatekeepers how wrong they were about your manuscript and everything to do with what is best and right for the project.


Deren Hansen is the author of the Dunlith Hill Writers Guides. Learn more at dunlithhill.com.

Finding the Words

by Deren Hansen

Just as many of us suffer from innumeracy—the inability to think rationally about large numbers—many of us also tend to assume that if something has been a certain way for a long time that is how the thing is supposed to be. This is very much the case right now in the world of publishing.

For a substantial portion of the last century and most of the first decade of this, the publishing industry has been defined by the logistics of distributing books to bookstores and the companies controlling that channel. There were innovations, like mass-market paperbacks and book stands in supermarkets and big-box retailers, but none of these changed the fundamental distribution pattern. Setting yourself up as a publisher required a second-mortgage-level investment to print books and a tremendous amount of legwork to arrange for distribution.

Everything changed with the advent of electronic publication. The barrier to entry was reduced to little more than the time and effort required to write the book and some initial, minimal expenses like purchasing ISBN numbers. While electronic publishing doesn’t provide an easy avenue into bookstores, for a variety of reasons their importance has waned in the last few years. The number of new, e-book-only small presses attests to the viability of the new model.

Change is difficult for many reasons. One of the subtle but most vexing ones is that our ability to describe and define the change always lags the change itself. What we used to call simply publishing (or commercial publishing if we needed to distinguish between the standard pattern, where authors were paid by publishers, from vanity publishing, where authors paid publishers) now gets qualified with words like, “traditional,” “legacy,” or even, “dinosaur.” The swelling ranks of individuals taking advantage of the opportunities offered by electronic publishing use these terms to help define what they are doing differently. And now we're awash in terms like, “self-publishing,” “independent” or “indie publishing” (an attempt to align with the success and credibility of independently produced, or indie, films), and even arguments that trading a 70% royalty for a 15% royalty and recognition by a publisher is a new kind of vanity publishing.

The problem with all those labels is that they speak primarily in terms of how you are not publishing. “Traditional,” implies you’re not publishing through the new electronic media, or that you’re not using those channels well. “Self,” and, “Independent,” imply that you’re not publishing with partners.

So how are you publishing if you choose to do it yourself?

The label that fits best is, “Artisan Publishing.”

An artisan, according to Webster, “is one trained to manual dexterity in some mechanical art, mystery, or trade; a hand-craftsman; a mechanic.”

In its current usage, “artisan,” suggests craftsmanship and pride in one’s work, which of all the reasons bandied about for undertaking to publish your own work is the only one—as we shall see in the coming weeks—that stands up to scrutiny.


Deren Hansen is the author of the Dunlith Hill Writers Guides. Learn more at dunlithhill.com.