To a student considering publishing
Considering self-publishing, or a publishing career? Here are five important things to remember.
In this special episode, Arthur speaks to a class of students who’ve been learning about publishing. He explains the five most important things for a young person considering publishing to remember: keeping making books, do hard things, publish in print, think beyond ‘books’, and don’t let others waste your time.
Links from the show:
Transcript
Arthur Attwell
Hi! And welcome to a special episode of How Books are Made, a podcast about the art and science of making books. I’m Arthur Attwell.
I was recently invited to speak to a class of students who’d created a book as part of their course, and because I couldn’t make it to their class, we thought I could record something to say to them instead. That’s way harder than speaking live, because what I say will stick around, much like a book sticks around long after you think of better ways to write it. Still, it was a chance to think really hard about what matters most in publishing, and that seemed worth sharing here, too.
Hi, and thanks for inviting me to speak to you.
So, you’ve almost finished your studies, congratulations! And since you’ve been learning about publishing, and you’ve created a book yourself, maybe you’re wondering what to do next with that. Should you self-publish it? Should you find a publisher? Should you look for work at a publishing company? I can’t answer those questions for you, but there’s no rush, and maybe I can help you prepare to answer them yourself when the time comes.
I’m also not going to tell you how to self-publish or find a publisher. I’ll give you a link to an excellent post by Kevin Kelly about that.
What I can do is tell you about the five most important things I think a young person should remember if they’re thinking about publishing a book or working in publishing.
Number one: Keep making books.
If you like making books and want to self-publish or work in publishing, then make your own books now. Applying for a job in publishing without having made books is like turning up at a marathon without training. And even for self-publishing, you’re going to need practice.
There is nothing stopping you, and you’ll only discover what goes into making great books if you make them yourself. Publishers deliberately hide the craft and complexity that go into making books, so great books look effortless, even though they took a whole team years to create with enormous amounts of time and thought and struggle.
Aim to make something as good as your favourite books. Then step back and ask yourself: how could this be better? Where is it not good enough? Then try again, and if you do this enough times, and get good enough, eventually someone will pay you for them, which is actually an incredible achievement. Making money should never be the aim, because most books don’t, there are just too many good books in the world for that, but getting paid for a book is a sign that you’re creating something truly special.
And while you experiment, you don’t have to publish entire books on your own. You can work in a team of friends where you write chapters; or edit someone else’s; or design covers; or illustrate stories; or raise money to print and sell them. If you’re into children’s books, go download source files from bookdash.org and create your own adaptations. Or get public-domain text from Project Gutenberg and design your own classics. And then it’s very important to put your work online so that you can show people what you’ve made.
It’s crucial to be able to show people what you’ve done beyond your formal education. I’ve employed many people over the last thirty years, and the best people all have one thing in common: extramural leadership. They’ve taken responsibility for more than just studying and getting good marks. They’ve led clubs, or run events, or captained teams, or made things like books or songs or films or plays or businesses. Publishing your own books is great for this.
And these days all the tools you need are free online. Just search ‘how to publish a book’ and then read everything by anyone who isn’t trying to sell you something.
Number two: Choose to do hard things.
Right now, AI is the cheat code for most work. It is amazing, and most days I use it to help me write code. But I also often choose to not use it. I didn’t touch AI to write this, because this needs to come from my heart, and be wrangled in my brain, for you to be able to trust that I really believe what I’m saying. I’ve been editing, rewriting and rehearsing it for days and days and it’s barely ten minutes long.
So when you do use AI, you mustn’t let it stop you from struggling. When AI makes your work easy, it also makes your work pointless. Hard work is important and necessary for two reasons: first, it’s how we learn. When you work hard, you get better at what you do, and that keeps your work interesting, and makes it harder for others to compete with you. Second, hard work is for creating something scarce, so that someone will pay you for it. Nothing AI does is scarce. AI is only useful if it gets you past one challenge so that you can struggle with another more important challenge.
The struggle and the strain are the whole point of hard work. It’s also the reason art is worth anything to anyone. If you’re not struggling when you make art, if you don’t feel the strain on your brain and on your body, then you’re doing it wrong, and you’re not going anywhere.
Number three: Print your books (when you can afford it).
Digital books are lovely. Digital is great for prototyping and for sharing widely, and the web is an incredible imagination machine.
But print focuses the mind by taking us out of the mad rush of the Internet. We humans are physical beings who touch and smell and hear, and art that triggers those senses is infinitely more powerful than anything trapped behind a screen. Just fanning the pages of a book means touching, feeling, hearing, even smelling it – and not long ago you were probably even tasting your baby books. When you sit on a couch with a novel it’s like your whole body is reading it: its weight in your hands, the texture of the cover, the thickness of the spine, the way light bounces off the pages, they’re all telling you something that you can’t get from a phone.
Think about the times you’re holding a book you love in your hands, especially when you’re sharing it with someone else: maybe sitting in a book club, or reading to a child, or handing a novel to a friend. We bond when we share these lovely physical objects. They are so much more than the story inside them.
No matter how many books I publish digitally, and how proud I am of them, I know that they are shallower versions of a deeper, richer art form. I have a new book here on my desk, written by a friend, and how amazing is this? It’s a whole story world, a whole maze of knowledge, crafted into a little sculpture out of paper and ink and glue.
As a book-maker, you should seize any opportunity you can to get your work printed. I only get to design print books about half the time, and it’s absolutely my favourite, most meaningful work.
Number four: Don’t stop at books.
The boundaries between art forms are fluid, especially in today’s world: when does a book become a game? When does a web-based textbook become an online course? When does an audiobook become a radio play? As you practice your craft, explore the overlaps between books, and games, and web pages – apps, recordings, performances.
Don’t lock yourself into thinking ‘I am making a book’ just because you think that’s what you’re supposed to do. Your creation has a job to do, whether that’s to impress someone, or change someone’s mind, or show your love, or make money. Ask yourself: what is this project’s job? What am I trying to achieve with it? What is it about books that will help it do that? And what can I borrow from other art forms to do it even better?
Number five, and lastly: Don’t let others waste your time.
The Internet is desperate for your time and attention, and social media especially is designed to tempt you into wasting it. It feeds on our weaknesses, our darkest thoughts, especially about ourselves. I’m genuinely sorry that that’s the Internet you’ve grown up with.
Because now you have to be the sensible one, and remember to stop scrolling and put down your phone. You have to choose instead to read. Reading is not going back to the olden days, it’s jumping ahead to a future where we understand how to be thoughtful humans. Humans that are full of their own complex, creative thoughts.
When you read, read anything longer than a thousand words: long articles, essays, books, long comics. Listening to audiobooks and scripted podcasts counts as reading, too. And when you’ve filled your brain with ideas from reading, then make something – books, pictures, music, games, sculpture, baking, performance, clothing, gardening, woodwork, mechanical repairs. And then go for a walk. That’s the cycle: fill your brain with reading, empty your brain into making things, exercise, repeat.
And trust this process. Be good about it for a few weeks and I promise that you will like yourself more. The people getting good jobs in publishing are the ones who’ve been reading, and making things, and taking care of their mental health by getting up and moving their living, breathing bodies till the endorphins kick in.
If you spend more than five minutes at a time scrolling social media, then you have not yet realised how precious your time is, and how precious your mental health is. How precious you are. And how precious your work will be, whether or not that’s making books.
Well that’s enough from me.
When I get to speak to a young person about publishing, I feel an enormous responsibility, because advice we hear when we’re young can stay with us our whole lives, whether it’s good or bad. But remember there’s no such thing as advice, really: there are just other people’s stories, and you get to choose which ones to take seriously.
In my story, I’ve made a lot of books, and a lot of mistakes, and they’ve taught me what I think matters most. And one day when it’s your turn to tell a class of young people what you think matters most, maybe some of this will have been true for you, too.
Thank you, and good night.