Note: The events spo­ken of in this arti­cle are near­ly 20 years past. The orig­i­nal ver­sion of the arti­cle is 15 years old. What has hap­pened with­in pub­lish­ing since then has cement­ed many changes that were pre­dict­ed. And while this par­a­digm shift con­tin­ues to flab­ber­gast a few of the indus­try fos­sils, the chang­ing of the guard a decade or so ago has at least acknowl­edged that it’s a brave new world.

Peo­ple will do web search­es on your name as soon as you are in the pub­lic sphere. Make sure they find some­thing worth find­ing.

It was my sec­ond-to-last semes­ter when I heard the best advice of my entire writ­ing pro­gram…

Nor­mal­ly, I wouldn’t be caught dead pay­ing atten­tion in a class, but for some rea­son my iPad was tak­ing for­ev­er to update the Phan­ta­sy Star II app, so I hap­pened to hear it. But I also noticed that the woman who was say­ing it was a work­ing writer who had bro­ken into epub through blog­ging and was mak­ing enough in only five years to work very part-time as a teacher and devote her­self to writ­ing.

And it was­n’t the first time I’d heard such a thing either.

Fif­teen years ago—when I was wrap­ping up my cre­ative writ­ing degree— pub­lish­ing hous­es, and even some small press­es, had their heads buried in the sand…

The sand that looked sus­pi­cious­ly like their own ass­es.

They did­n’t seem to know what the heck was going on with com­put­ers. Like old gen­er­als fight­ing wars with the last gen­er­a­tion’s tac­tics, in 2011 many were still hav­ing trou­ble fig­ur­ing out that the eight­ies were over.

There is a shift right about at peo­ple my age (maybe a lit­tle younger). And while now there are more peo­ple who are younger than me than old­er, at the time the oppo­site was true. This was­n’t a small change either. It was a huge, noth­ing-will-ever-be-the-same, “It’s a cook­book” change that rocked the pub­lish­ing world more than Lady Gaga and Bey­on­cé rocked Tele­phone. It was essen­tial­ly the same change that hit the record indus­try in the ear­ly 2000s—it just took a lit­tle longer to hit pub­lish­ing. Tech­nol­o­gy moves fast, and every shift makes new things pos­si­ble, plau­si­ble, cheap­er, more expe­di­ent, pos­si­bly even supe­ri­or to pri­or ver­sions of “The Way Things Are Sim­ply Done™.”

And still there are tra­di­tion­al pub­lish­ers who will sim­ply reject a man­u­script out­right if it is not for­mat­ted prop­er­ly, print­ed out, and sent in a manil­la enve­lope.

Though their pow­er fal­ters ever­more each year, the old guard pub­lish­ers still call a LOT of the shots in the pub­lish­ing indus­try. If you’ve ever… I don’t know… looked around a Barnes and Noble, you know there are still a cou­ple of books being tra­di­tion­al­ly pub­lished.

Sure, your local book­shop is start­ing to be more Shake­speare-bust elec­tric pen­cil sharp­en­ers (where you stick the pen­cil into his left nos­tril) and Mole­sk­ine jour­nals, but there are still one or two shelves of actu­al books behind the cof­fee shop, the CD rack, the used movie spin­ning dis­play, and the Jane Austen tote bags.

The old guard’s world was one of gate­keep­ers and sta­tus quo. It was a world where few had the pow­er, and they lord­ed it over the rest. A world where the only course to endgame was short sto­ry credits—>cover letter—>agent—>publisher—>book deal, and at every step some­one was judg­ing whether or not the work is of enough appeal (or “lit­er­ary worth”) to move up the chain. This “some­one” was almost always white, male, het­ero­sex­u­al, and upper-mid­dle to upper class.

Even in today’s tra­di­tion­al pub­lish­ing world, where such a gate­keep­er is only “sta­tis­ti­cal­ly like­ly” (rather than uni­ver­sal­ly true), those who are dif­fer­ent still over­whelm­ing­ly main­tain the aes­thet­ics and val­ues of the hege­mon­ic white, male, cis, het­ero­sex­u­al cul­ture. Some inroads from mar­gin­al­ized groups have been made into lit­er­ary fic­tion, but they often have to be a sort of “mar­gin­al­iza­tion porn” type of sto­ry to achieve notice, and main­stream is still often­times much more dif­fi­cult for such voic­es.

The old guard tends to love books as phys­i­cal objects. Its mem­bers talk a lot about the smell of books—so much so, in fact, that you’d think they need to grind wood into a pow­der, mix it with glue and ink, and rub that shit on their gums to test its qual­i­ty. They speak of com­put­ers as “new­fan­gled infer­nal con­trap­tions.” They seem con­fused, and I have to say maybe even a lit­tle befud­dled, by the impact of eRead­ers and blogs on the read­ers’ market.The old guard claims that the future of pub­lish­ing is “total­ly up in the air,” and that they have “no way of know­ing where the wind is blow­ing,” and with every inno­va­tion and tech­nol­o­gy, they seem caught with their pants down, cling­ing to the ves­tiges of the old ways like ice cubes in clenched fists that drip through their fin­gers in a hor­ri­fy­ing goulash of wind, pants, and ice cube metaphors gone awry.

But basi­cal­ly they were wrong about everything—especially the impact of screens.

They even (my hand to God) had not noticed by 2009—when I was sit­ting in my Busi­ness of Writ­ing class lis­ten­ing to a new pan­el of them blovi­ate every week—that their hand-wring­ing 15% drop in phys­i­cal book sales exact­ly matched the reports that eRead­ers now account­ed for 15% of the mar­ket share. (It’s way more now.) They just kept repeat­ing that peo­ple were “read­ing less these days.”

Like, how do you not fuck­ing notice that it’s the same god­damn num­ber? I’m not mak­ing that up. They stood in front of us, pre­sent­ed us with slides and… did­n’t see it. “Read­ers these days, amirite?”

Here’s what peo­ple my age and younger under­stand:

Paper books are on their way out (and com­put­ers are going to dev­as­tate the pow­er of the gate­keep­er mod­el).

Not all paper books. Not com­plete­ly. Not in our life­times. We love them WAY too much for that. And even fif­teen years on, this process is hap­pen­ing slow­ly, espe­cial­ly as long as there are peo­ple from a gen­er­a­tion who fetishize phys­i­cal books.

Nev­er will beloved copies or mas­ter­pieces go out of print. Not the mega-best­sellers that will always be finan­cial­ly viable to pub­lish phys­i­cal­ly. No, it will prob­a­bly shift slow­ly over the next few decades until it looks a lit­tle like Star Trek, where they read every­thing on their lit­tle pads, but still give each oth­er real books as gifts and have a few beloved titles in paper form in their quar­ters. But the books you gath­er up by the truck­load and con­sume like jel­ly beans… the books that my ex-room­mate has wall-to-wall, caus­ing a fire haz­ard in one entire room of the house… the ones that can’t hit an increas­ing­ly high cir­cu­la­tion num­ber to make their pub­lish­ing run “worth it”… they’re on their way out.

Twen­ty more years… maybe thir­ty, tops.

The con­tent will still be there, of course, but it will almost ALL be elec­tron­ic at that point.

The low-risk alter­na­tives of print-on-demand and epub­lish­ing are just mak­ing the old sys­tem not worth it any­more unless you’re Steele, King, or Brown.

But the thing is that the devel­op­ments in these tech­nolo­gies are not just chang­ing the pub­lish­ing indus­try. They are also chang­ing how a writer deals with that indus­try. Writ­ers don’t even need agents any­more. Writ­ers don’t need pub­lish­ers any­more. They can take their work straight to the press­es them­selves. Fuck, they can hit a but­ton and be pub­lished the same day elec­tron­i­cal­ly. It’s a major major game chang­er when the gate­keep­ers are being port round­ed, and the artists can take their work direct­ly to their fans. Sud­den­ly, the artists have pow­er again and don’t have to con­form to a vision of either “what sells,” or what a very nar­row demo­graph­ic of gate­keep­ers thinks has the lit­er­ary worth to jus­ti­fy tak­ing a loss on.

The old guard writ­ers we met through my CW pro­gram were almost always pro­fes­sors, edi­tors, pub­lish­ers as well, or had some oth­er day job. They made vir­tu­al­ly no mon­ey off their writ­ing. (Notable excep­tion: Dan Han­dler. That was a fun evening.) Small press­es can’t real­ly pay, and if they can, it’s a pit­tance. The biggest roy­al­ty checks I ever heard of those writ­ers got was when a class (usu­al­ly a cre­ative writ­ing class) picked up one of their books to study, and it became a required text for the course… and then the pro­fes­sor of the class would have THEIR book required for the stu­dents of the author’s class…. —

—…aaaaaaaaaand if that kind of strikes you as a bit of a con­flict of ethics, you’re not alone.

By con­trast, MOST of the younger writ­ers were able to be work­ing writ­ers after a few years at it. They cob­bled togeth­er ten dif­fer­ent income streams from web con­tent to free­lance work, or from erot­i­ca to be trans­lat­ed into Tai­wanese to choose-your-own-adven­ture apps. Some punched a part-time clock to shore up their defens­es, but they were doing it. They were writ­ing for a liv­ing, and not get­ting caught in 9–5 writ­ing gigs that left them sapped and exhaust­ed when fac­ing their own fic­tion. They were get­ting their cre­ative work out there with com­put­ers and tech­nol­o­gy. And a lot of them didn’t see agents and big pub­lish­ing hous­es as the goal. A lot of them thought that was one way among a dozen to reach endgame, but the real mon­ey was in extreme­ly cheap eRead­er-only ver­sions of their work (mar­ket­ed online) where they would pock­et MOST of the retail price.

And the most com­mon advice the young guard gave us was this: “Con­trol what peo­ple are going to see when they search your name.”

We live in a world where some peo­ple still sneer at online pub­lish­ing. They think it is beneath them. They think it isn’t “real.” They have noth­ing pub­lished online, or if they do, it is their sec­ond- or third-tier work. That poem or short sto­ry they didn’t think they could get pub­lished in a “real” venue.

Guess what comes up when you punch their name into Google?

That’s right. The crap.

The seri­ous­ly ter­rib­ad crap that they wouldn’t ever want any­one to see.

What’s even more dan­ger­ous is stuff you don’t even know is out there. A mir­ror screen­shot of your drunk text man­i­festos on Friend­ster from 2002 about peo­ple being too sen­si­tive these days. Your twen­ty-some­thing screed about how fem­i­nism hurts men. Your Pin­dar­ic ode to your pet that you thought was real­ly clever when you were fly­ing recre­ation­al­ly on Adder­al. You want to push that stuff onto page 23 (or lat­er) by replac­ing it if you pos­si­bly can. If you don’t, the first thing some­one sees of you, when they look you up, is some poet­ry you tweet­ed dur­ing your “EE Cum­mings Punc­tu­a­tion Phase” about how hard it is to be a white, het, male in today’s world.

So that’s one of the rea­sons this blog is here. Not despite the fact that I want to pub­lish fic­tion, but BECAUSE of it. Writ­ers should be able to exert some con­trol over what peo­ple see when they do a web search. So part of my mis­sion for this blog is to have fair­ly tight con­trol of what some­one is going to see when they do a search for my name—lest I end up with peo­ple know­ing about the Great Spumoni Inci­dent of Aught Two.

Not good.