Ed Gorman reports that he will now be sharing his terrific blog, Ed Gorman & Friends, with famed western author Richard Wheeler…and that Jon Breen, Jack O’Connell and Terrill Lee Lankford will continue to offer occasional posts as well. Wheeler’s first post is an interesting story about an established novelist’s foray into self-publishing in the days before print-on-demand made it easy.
In the 1970s my friend Stanley Gordon West wrote a splendid novel called Amos.
It was about a man in a nursing home who fought its corrupt and sinister
administrator. It was successfully published by Houghton Mifflin and became an
Emmy-nominated TV drama starring Kirk Douglas. (It was the reason Kirk Douglas
became an advocate of reforming old-people’s homes.)Then a funny thing
happened, one of those maddening things about the houses in New York. West was
unable to place another novel with an established publisher. For years he
patiently wrote novels, had various agents submit them, and was steadily turned
down. A few years ago he took another route. He organized his own company,
Lexington Marshall, and published one of those novels that had been rebuffed in
New York. ..
You’ll have to visit the blog to find out what happened next.
Reading West’s tale reminded me of what Philip Beard experienced:
http://mjroseblog.typepad.com/backstory/2005/05/philip_beards_b.html
“I knew that Clare Ferraro didn’t just “work with Jason Gobble,” that she was the president of Viking Penguin. And although I couldn’t imagine how a call from her could possibly be bad news, it just didn’t seem possible that, after four years, a novel of mine was going to find a home in New York on the same day I was finalizing plans to print it myself. Of course, that’s exactly what happened. By the end of the day, Jane Dystel had come to an agreement with Viking, and I had notified everyone involved in my self-publishing effort that Van Buren Books was suspending operations. Three weeks later, I was featured in the “Hot Deals” column of Publishers Weekly. A year after that, DEAR ZOE was named both a Book Sense and Borders Original Voices pick for April, 2005, and I was sent on a 12-city bi-coastal tour. Last month, Viking bought the rights to my first manuscript.”
After reading all the info to date about self-pub, I don’t think I’d opt for that route. It’s nice to know that it is an option, and it seems to work for some writers.