Why do people choose to publish themselves, when they could certainly have been published “properly” (ie, by others)?
Matthew Butterick explains:
Before I set to work publishing this book online, a book agent got me a very nice offer to turn this material into a paperback for a name-brand publisher. Tempted, I was. But when I asked whether I’d be allowed to design it, her answer was swift. “Of course not,” she said. “Why would you think they’d let you do that?”
Oh, I don’t know.
I walked away. The agent was flabbergasted. To her, my job as an author was to produce a sequence of words that other people would shepherd to market. Perhaps if my topic was different, that would be true. But a book about typography necessarily involves showing, not just telling.
- The Economics of a Web-Based Book, Year Two
Butterick is a writer, typographer, programmer, and lawyer. If you visit his website1 you will find a menu of typefaces. Choose the one you like most to read what he has written.
The book he mentions was about typography. My own most recent book is full of illustrations made during my breakdown. It’s personal. And it’s visual.
I wanted the liberty to make all the decisions myself.
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Having discovered the pleasures of Matthew Butterick’s work, I followed a link here and there and ended up reading the work of one Joel Dueck. These were gratifying in too many ways to mention right now – perhaps I’ll come back to them.
But one of the most gratifying things I read on Joel’s various sites was his self-description as a Publishing Nerd. It deserves to be quoted at length:
I’m not talking about an editor. I’m not talking about a book designer or a web designer. I’m talking about a person who enjoys the activity of packaging and producing words in the same way that the writer enjoys writing words. This person’s interest probably includes things like editing, book design, typography, web design — even writing! — but is not focused on any one of them.
We have no ready word for this person. My first instinct is to call us “publishers”, but this doesn’t work very well: it suggests a whole commercial concern, not an individual enthusiast. “Publishing enthusiast” would be closer, but it takes too long to say. So I call myself a publishing nerd.
For a time I thought of myself as “a writer” because I like writing. But in an amateur way I got quite caught up in all these other things as well — coding and typography and bookbinding — because writing without full attention to the reader’s experience hardly felt like writing at all. The juice, for a publishing nerd, is in operating the whole system for packaging words, distributing them, presenting them.
We don’t talk about publishing-as-amateur-pursuit, Dueck continues, because we don’t have the words for it.
We probably don’t have those words because it wasn’t feasible as an individual pursuit until recently (yay computers), and because its activity is usually blended with the activity of writing. But now that the tools are everywhere, the pursuit is there.
A writing enthusiast can hope to make it as a proper writer — to get some recognition for their work, to earn a living at it. But as a publishing enthusiast I don’t know what to do with my interests. There is no cultural or economic market for them. Publishing nerds end up as inveterate yak shavers and one-man bands performing in their own driveways. Our ingrained preference to control all levels of design, and the facility which computers give us for doing so, tend to preclude us from cross-pollinating and collaborating, which for most of us is a big developmental hazard.
1 Visit his website. I knew nothing about Butterick till I followed a link shared by John Gruber. As I’ve noted elsewhere, blogs were the first social media, because they involved freely sharing other people’s work.
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