A Hierarchy of Authors, Part Three

When we left our examination of the Hierarchy of Authors (see Part One and Part Two), you might have been forgiven for thinking that the only step down from the Midlist was Unpublished. But noooooo. There are almost as many definitions of mere or non-success as there are pudgy-fingered writers, madly mashing keyboards in the hope that some random change to their manuscript will make it saleable. I've distilled these down to a few averages.

The Indie - When the publisher doesn't have a main office in New York. There are two kinds of independently published author: those on the way up, and those on the way down. There are also two kinds of independent publisher: those that started as a one-man operation out of a spare room, and those that still are.

Independents are a great venue for frustrated poets with an inheritance to play Big City Editor-in-Chief, gambling with the delicate aspirations of good-but-not-good-enough writers while he slowly realises that publishing involves many more decisions than "Wow this guy's the next Ginsberg". Independents are also a great venue for fallen Midlisters to wring out the last few dollars from their dwindling fanbase, re-releasing their early books as they fall out of contract in special "Limited Super Ultra Bound In Human Skin With All New Introduction" editions. When these two forces combine, the upper shelf behind the counter at your local comics shop will become the gathering point for pasty, salivating telemarketers trying to decide whether to forgo Batman or Legends of the Dark Knight for the next two years.

Independently published writers routinely break two of the Cardinal Rules of Publishing:

• Don't sell your book to a publisher if you don't own anything they've printed; and
• If your book has been rejected by every mainstream publisher, it's because it's shit.

The Short - The author of seven hundred short stories, eighty of which have been published in such luminous periodicals as Skokie, Illinois After Dark and Hard SF For People Who Love Diesel-Engined Locomotives. Also the author of seven novels, all of which are essentially four or five short stories glued together with a "framing device", more commonly known as padding. Has a filing cabinet full of contributor's copies, as much to prove to other Shorts that the magazines once existed, as to enshrine their bibliography for their children to giggle over in the decades to come.

You can tell a Short from their blog entries about how they "prefer the short story form" (Translation: "I've never had an idea worth more than twenty pages, or twenty bucks"). They desperately hope to become an Indie, as a temporary facsimile of success while they wait for Stephen King to publish On Writing II: Here's How To Write a Novel, You Dumbass.

And here we leave any pretense of real success behind, and continue down into:

The Vain - You probably think this one is about you. The Vain think that all agents and editors are fsckheads who couldn't recognise talent if it clobbered them over the head with the imagined object that will surely be the 2047 Nobel Prize for Literature. But the Vain will not lie down and take it up the slushpile.

No, the Vain decide to stick it to the man, and get their message out the old fashioned way - by getting scammed. They either pay through the nose to have copies printed by a vanity press that then sit in boxes in their basement until the next flood, or sign up to some print-on-demand mill who keep a digital copy of the book in case anyone ever orders it, which will not happen unless the Vain pays through the nose for "marketing". In any case, they demonstrate that their understanding of basic economics, and contracts, is as good as their assessment of the mainstream publishing industry. For every self-publishing success, there are thousands whose work, and cash, simply disappear.

Eventually the Vain will refer to their choice as self-publishing, to rationalise their colossal blunder and to pretend that they knew what they were doing in the first place. The Vain will forever describe themselves as a novelist, even though they sold exactly two copies to people they didn't already know. A few will learn the lesson, many will be doomed to repeat it, but most will eventually stop writing when they run out of discretionary income or basement space.

(Think we've hit the bottom of the barrel? Hardly. We still have to scrape it. See you in Part Four.)