Indie Writing and Traditional Storytelling with Alan Dean

We have a Friday morning guest post for you today, one where indie author Alan Dean discusses the rise of self-publishing. Thank you for reading!

Indie Writing and Traditional Storytelling

When writers think about the book they’ve just finished their mind at some very early point turns in the direction of publishing, after all, writers are storytellers and a story needs an audience. Most new writers, however, do not have a clue how to go about getting published so they ask friends, email famous writers, Google or do some other kind of research, and soon discover that mythical creatures known as editors are gate-keepers of the printing press and that the most influential nestle inside large corporations with baffling arcane submission procedures that boil down to excluding anyone who has not already been published successfully, or doesn’t have an agent they have already worked with, or met at school, university or their children’s play group. Following this news, there begins a drive for “representation” that, for example, puts reproductive urges so far in the shade it’s surprising that unpublished authors ever get around to procreating.

From the outside an alien visitor would be forgiven for believing that writing a novel must impart such great and ever-lasting rewards and social status that the drive to “become published” must be encoded so deeply in the substance of human life that that the risks involved in the naked pursuit of a book signing are nothing in comparison to the rewards that follow. They might even regard us as perhaps the only species in the known universe to consider our own cultural artifacts to be on par with biological offspring, and somewhat above physical and mental health.

This, of course, would be a preposterous assumption, or would it really be so far from the mark? Evolutionary psychologists, well, at least some of them, tell us that just like any other primate, human beings have an innate need to groom and be groomed. As we all know, the other great apes do this all the time through various gestures, including combing through hair and picking off ticks. It’s their way of forging alliances, making friends and seducing each other. Until recently we’ve tended to think we are above this kind if thing, but now we know that we are just the same, except we use our voices instead of our fingers. We talk, and talk and talk and talk. And when the printing press was invented in 1450 we starting printing, and after some short delay while control was wrested from the hands various central authorities, we started publishing stories. And how could that have been otherwise, because even from the beginning we have been storytellers, something that was bound to arise as soon as talking became the way we groomed each other. The best groomers are the most popular; they get to mate more often. So naturally the best talkers get to be the most desired and have far more babies than anyone else; it’s called sexual selection, which is arguably way more important than natural selection (except when the climate suddenly changes, but that’s another story).

So, we’re a species of talkers and we love stories. After all, isn’t that why texting, facebook and twitter are so successful? Through these media we get to groom so many extra people at such little cost in time. But, hang on a minute, why isn’t everyone an author? Wouldn’t such a species be housed within a vast library surrounded by endless stories being chatted out in a vast, collective buzz of interaction? Well, yes, this is how it is, but it’s controlled by a few key sources. Our newspapers, novels, television programs, films aren’t things we’ve produced and shared, they are created for us to watch and read passively. You see, as well as being creators of stories we are also citizens of a highly structured, hierarchical society that controls everything, even life and death, from the top down. We have governments and, more importantly, corporations that control what we see, talk about, watch and even think. Don’t be shocked by this, it’s simply another primate characteristic.

That doesn’t mean, though, that we have to accept it, and back in 2007 a major event happened that is slowly redressing the way we express ourselves. In 2007 the Amazon Kindle was introduced and a revolution began that led in 2010 to Amazon ebook sales surpassing paperback sales. Almost in one tick of the human clock the means to bring the world of stories back to the pre-printing age of oral tradition became available for published work. We were given the means to publish our own books, to share our stories untouched by corporate interests and investment priorities. As with the internet before, speech was given back to the collective us. We can groom and be groomed by whomever we choose, and ignore any suggestions or hints that independent writing lacks status, that a conventional publisher will impart more prestige. There’s a revolution taking place and it’s giving us back our voice, returning us to our real home, the fireside company of a story well told by the self-determined voice of our distant ancestors. With the internet and independent ebook publishing we are finding our way back to one of the very deepest parts of who we are and what we really believe is valuable to share. This is organic democracy coming into being, and there will be no stopping it.

Alan Dean has authored three eBooks:

Spaceship over Vancouver. A humorous but dark portrayal of politics & politicians in a crisis.

Sangian: Returning. An urban fantasy and mystery involving an ancient sect finding its destiny in a 21st century world.

Magical Thinking. A collection of poems influenced by magic realism and surrealism.

He can also be found at: https://www.facebook.com/raincoastfiction