The fastest path to publishing

Before anything else this week, let me thank some old friends — Mrs. Pua and her daughters Terrie and Rose — for so warmly receiving me and my friends from the Fountain Pen Network-Philippines when we paid them a surprise visit a couple of Saturdays ago. (FPN-P, which now has almost 50 members signed up in its Yahoogroup, decided to mix pens with a Saturday lunch of chicken and pancit canton at the old Savory Restaurant in Chinatown. A great time was had by all.)

And who, you might ask, are the Puas? They’re the proprietors of Luis Store on the Escolta, the country’s oldest and perhaps only shop that specializes in quality fountain pens and pen repairs. Luis Store has been around since 1943, and it’s one of the few places in the world where you can still see row upon row of gleaming vintage Parkers and Sheaffers — many of them new old stock from the 1950s and 1960s — alongside newer pens, all of them for sale.

I hadn’t visited the Puas for over a decade, so I was delighted to see them all still there, waiting for the law student, the Supreme Court Justice, and the odd writer to pick up a pen or have one fixed. (They proudly mentioned a friend of mine, the lawyer and blogger Ted Te, among their recent customers.) I have a soft spot for people who engage in what we might call endangered trades (my vintage watch repairmen at Worldwatch in Shangri-La Mall near Rustan’s, for example), and selling and repairing fountain pens has to count among those occupations.

But you can sense it when people love their work, and the Puas conveyed that, and we had a pleasant chat about pens and time passing over fresh chicken pies that Mrs. Pua served everyone who came. Like a kid showing off his school medals to his mom, I displayed my trove of 1930s and 1940s Parker Vacumatics to Mrs. Pua, who nodded appreciatively, being one of the few people around who even knew what they were. In a completely unexpected gesture, she gifted me with a vintage Sheaffer engraved with my name, and I melted in gratitude and delight.

Indeed, you might find pens at lower prices online these days, but you won’t get the kind of personalized attention you’ll get from the Puas (and you can’t dip the pen to try it out before you buy, like Terrie will urge you to do). Next time you’re on the Escolta, pay them a visit or give them a call at 241-3484. Be nice to the ladies, and they’ll be nice to you.

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It used to be that the worst crime you could commit as an author — aside from writing atrociously — was to publish yourself, meaning, you paid to get your manuscript in print. The suggestion was that you needed to publish yourself because 1) your work was so bad you couldn’t find a decent publisher; 2) you were too proud and impatient to submit yourself to the usual publication process; 3) you had too much money, or at least enough to publish your own book and give them away to friends; and 4) all of the above. This was why the practice was called “vanity publishing” — you published your own book, and risked being its only reader.

Of course, we forget that there was a time, before the advent of the big publishing houses and even the small presses, when self-publishing was the only way to go. A self-publisher like Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau once lamented that “I have nine hundred books in my library. Seven hundred of them I wrote myself.”

But later, as commercial and academic publishing grew into an industry and established certain standards, vanity publishing fell into disrepute. It was seen, with some reason, as the recourse of the desperate and the gullible. Frustrated writers who just wanted their name in print forked good money over to “publishers” (actually little more than printers) who put out ads in the back pages of perfectly respectable magazines like The New Yorker soliciting “new authors.”

Willing and paying clients did get hundreds of copies of handsomely produced books delivered to their doorstep, with their names boldly emblazoned on the spine — only to soon find themselves sharing Thoreau’s predicament. (As authors quickly realize, printing is the easy part of publishing — marketing and distribution is more difficult.) It didn’t mean that all books published this way were bad; it was just harder for them to get serious attention.

But much of that is changing, and technology is the reason. Two years ago, Time Magazine was already saying this: “Self-publishing, the only real success story in an otherwise depressed industry, is booming, thanks to the Internet, digital cameras and more sophisticated digital printing. It’s also gaining respect. No longer dismissed as vanity presses, DIY publishing is discovering a niche market of customers seeking high-quality books for limited distribution.”

Just this January, Time followed that up by reporting that “Saying you were a self-published author used to be like saying you were a self-taught brain surgeon. But over the past couple of years, vanity publishing has become practically respectable. As the technical challenges have decreased — you can turn a Word document on your hard drive into a self-published novel on Amazon’s Kindle store in about five minutes — so has the stigma. Giga-selling fantasist Christopher Paolini started as a self-published author. After Brunonia Barry self-published her novel The Lace Reader in 2007, William Morrow picked it up and gave her a two-book deal worth $2 million. The fact that William P. Young’s The Shack was initially self-published hasn’t stopped it from spending 34 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.”

One key factor is print-on-demand (POD) technology, which, as the name suggests, produces supply based on demand: if you need just 10 copies for 10 confirmed buyers of your book, it will spit out just that many, sparing you the problem of unsold inventory. Per-copy costs, of course, will be appreciably higher. But without middlemen and storage to complicate things, you still might come out ahead this way.

During last month’s Taboan writers’ festival, Bacolod-based writer Elsie Coscolluela was telling us how her university invested P5 million in a POD operation that now serves all comers and is able to produce a book within minutes for around P300 per copy. That’s not too far from what the same book will cost you in the bookstore, markups and all.

And why even go to print? For some kinds of work that — let’s face it — will never really sell, like poetry, the Internet’s reach seems far more attractive, and it’s practically free. When a young man asked me at Taboan what I thought the best path to getting published was, I told him, “the fastest one.” If I were 30, I said, I wouldn’t think like a 50-year-old, waiting to be published by some university press. With talent and perseverance, all that respectability will come, but for now, getting that book or its digital equivalent out might be the more urgent imperative.

It was only after we had ended the session that I remembered something I should have noted — my very first book, Oldtimer and Other Stories, was essentially self-published in 1984, when I was 30. My friend Raffy Benitez had just started a printing press and had some leftover paper and ink; I had 10 stories that looked ready to go. And so they went.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com, and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.