– from The Artless Dodges Press
You know the joke: six writers, one designer, and a couple of their supportive friends walk into a bar in Cleveland. They each order a drink and after the bartender brings them he says, “Pardon me, but I couldn’t help but notice that you all look really, really depressed.” The writers and the designer reply, “We’re artists. All we have is our art, but nobody can be bothered to even consider it.” The bartender says, “Oh,” and looks around nervously. The supportive friends say, “Don’t worry, we’re paying.”
For several years out of college, that joke was our lives. We were writing and re-writing, critiquing each others‘ work, keeping pieces in the mail. Despite these efforts and a few small success, however, we weren’t getting anywhere: none of our novels were getting picked up, hardly any of our stories were selling, and the ones that were weren’t selling anywhere worth mentioning. We had no illusions that the path we’d chosen would be easy, or that success would come beating down our door. We knew that trying to hack it as writers meant years of rejection and plenty of disappointment. Even still, we found ourselves needled by a persistent and growing suspicion that the pieces we sent were being returned unread, weren’t even being considered: that we were being dismissed out of hand. Maybe it was just frustrated paranoia, but we couldn’t shake the feeling that there was some other game going on behind the closed doors at those magazines and publishing houses, some secret handshake we didn’t know, some password we hadn’t said.
This is not a paranoid diatribe about some suspected shadow conspiracy; it’s not even a self-glorifying rant about how unappreciated we are, or how much the publishing world owes us. It is, however, a small potshot against the myth that hard work will bring success, that quality will bring acclaim, that people get what they deserve. The fact of the matter is, there is another game going on behind those closed doors: for us, the focus is and always has been on the work, the words, the quality of the prose; we’d spent so much time talking about the work, in fact, that we naively failed to recognize the obvious fact that the publishing industry is an industry-focused agency that deals in fiction and not, as we all thought (without quite really realizing it), a fiction-focused agency dealing in industry. We thought that being a writer meant writing, and thought that good fiction would get – in fact, deserved to get – recognized. We held this belief so thoroughly that we didn’t see that artistry is beside the point: that these institutions only publish what is going to make them money. And ninety-nine times out of one hundred that means television tie-ins and pop teen lit, means hot-button genre fiction and Oprah-friendly “serious” fiction.
So where did that leave us? The stuff we were writing didn’t fit any of those marketing blocks. We found ourselves asking questions like, how did Camus’ publisher market The Stranger? How did Milan Kundera first get noticed? It seemed to us that the kind of philosophically-driven, existential and literary fiction we were writing might simply be out of place in a market dominated by Harry Potter and the Twilight saga, by Dan Brown and Nora Roberts. Maybe there was no way to pitch a Kafka-esque travelogue to a publisher or agent hoping to represent the next Stephen King. We were more than ever losing faith in the prospect of ever getting anywhere. More than that, we were all going broke.
Faced with the situation as we saw it, it seemed to us that we had three choices: we could 1) change our style, our focus and our aesthetic, and write what we could pitch, 2) give up writing, or 3) we could just goddamned do it ourselves.
It’s not a new idea: punk bands have been doing it since the 70s, promoting shows in basements with homemade flyers, recording demos on their own equipment, selling tapes and LPs out of the trunks of their cars. Now there are digital means to achieve the same ends, both for music and for fiction, but the idea is the same. The punk DIY ethos holds that no one is going to do it for you, that you can’t expect them to, that if you want something done for yourself then you should do it yourself, and not wait for permission or support from the powers that be. We knew that we could bang our heads against the same walls for the next decade and end up back in the same bar, with our novels in our desk drawers and with the same supportive friends buying our drinks and the same gloomy outlook. We’d had enough of that.
This isn’t about trying to jump ahead, to get away with not paying your dues. This is about refusing to play a game with one set of perceived rules and another set of actual rules, about a publishing industry more and more defined not by the search for quality but rather by the search for marketability. This is about the belief that good writing will find readers, and that readers will seek out good writing. And it’s about standing on your own feet and trying to do something. So this is us saying it’s nice to meet you, we’re The Artless Dodges Press. Since 2009 we’ve been bringing you some of the best that Cleveland has to offer. Please visit us online, check out our titles, read an excerpt. We promise that what we have to offer is unlike anything you’ll find anywhere else.
Check out The Artless Dodges Press
A question. Do you expect those in the business of selling books to sell your work the way they do the written word you consider published the conventional way? Do you go into B&N, indies, and ask for signings, for your book to be carried? If not, then you are indeed standing on your own against the industry. If so, you have decided that the publishing aspect of the industry doesn’t work for you, but the selling part should. I’m interested.
Diane,
We are pretty much open to any and every avenue, in terms of where we’re trying to make our books available – while we have been primarily concerned with building an online presence, the print-on-demand company we use for physical copies also makes our titles available to wholesellers, so interested bookshop owners should also be able to stock our titles.
We love books and bookstores, and are thrilled when someone wants to stock our titles. We are also of the opinion, however, that the connective power of the internet has democratized every aspect of the entertainment sector, and that our ability to reach our potential readers directly via online media has never been greater. Therefore, we will likely continue to focus our energies on building online awareness and online sales. So in that sense, yes, we are taking a slightly different approach.
Thanks for your interest in The Artless Dodges Press!
Tom Maven
Quite a good posting and best to you and yours.
I went to your website and was amazed at the old typewriter font used on quite a bit of the pages. At first I thought it was cute and then I tried to read it…
I was forced to press ‘Control +’ 3 or 4 times to bring the font up big enough to read and then the gray coloring and missing portions of the letters made it a tedious job. Very tedious. Too tedious.
May I suggest you change the font. Many people will leave the site rather than strain their eyes or brain. As said, it is cute, but cute goes only so far before people tire of it and leave. Use it here or there for short paragraphs but not for whole chapters.
Remember this. Black against a white background is still best in most people’s opinion. Shades of gray can get more and more difficult the lighter it gets.
I suggest that you go to fonts.com, type ‘typewriter’ in the search box and compare some of those fonts with what you currently have on your page. Check for readability. Most will not be the effect you want but there are many old style typewriter fonts that are much more readable and won’t drive potential customers away. – Paul – prying1 –
Hey Paul,
I had the same experience, very difficult to read – tiring on the eyes.
Tom – if you are trying to build Online Awareness, your online presence needs to be much more user friendly. I’m on the web all day – every day and the font selected (stylish as it may be) needs to be changed.
Bruce and Paul,
Thank you for the feedback. If you check the website you will find that, as per your commentary, the font has been changed to one a bit more reader friendly.
Thank you for taking the time to check out The Artless Dodges Press.
Yours,
Tom
Tom
No matter how you slice it, you’re still self published. It used to be called Vanity Press. I understand that the world of publishing has changed, that e-books are the rage, and anyone anywhere can publish whatever they want whenever they want, and say truthfully they are a published author. You and your fellow writers may be beyond excellent. If so, that’s the rarity in the self pub world, which makes traditional bookstores somewhat leery of carrying e-books, or self pubs. It’s difficult to do returns, the bookseller isn’t sure of editing quality, of typos, of just plain *quality” if the trend to come and stay is everyone with a few bucks can publish. What I’m describing is obviously not your group’s output, if what you describe is any indication. But how is a bookseller overwhelmed by e-books, decide which have been vetted? They cannot read every title.
If your main focus is online, who do you wish to reach? You see the connective power of the internet as democratizing something that isn’t elitist to begin with. Whatever you think of the publishing world, they still manage to have output to a spectacularly varying degree, not everything is Twilight, romances, and Stephen King–although most writers would be more than thrilled to have half of King’s talent, commercial as he is. Frustrating and lengthy as the process for becoming published is, somehow agents and publishers still manage to uncover the Dennis Lehanes, (if you haven’t already, read his short stories) etc.
I know that there are exceptions to every rule under the sun, and your group very well may be a shining exception to the e-book, publish on demand, vanity press world. But for this former bookseller, who also is pretty internet savvy, whether it’s in e-form, or paper form, a “published” author is one that has been paid *for* his work, not the other way around.
Strictly my opinion, and not held by some others.
Diane,
No argument here: we say right up front and center that we are a cooperative effort employing the new generation of self-publishing tools now available via e-book and print-on-demand publishing to produce and distribute our own work. While we accept that, for some, works produced in this fashion (i.e. without the “stamp of approval” of a major publishing house) may raise eyebrows and merit some doubt, we would like to point out that much of our works is available for free online perusal (through Google books, Amazon.com’s “Look Inside” feature, Kindle samples, and excerpts published on our website). That is to say: we feel that anyone with any such doubts regarding the quality of the contents of any of our titles can make an informed buying decision well before he or she makes his or her purchase.
Admittedly this does little to counter your point that the average reader (or your average bookshop owner) has limited time to read and judge everything that passes across his or her desk. But then again I might counter that certainly we’ve all been burned by some lemon of a novel produced by a “name” publishing house, and that the question of what is and what is not worth one’s time goes beyond the question of what is and what is not handed down from Manhattan.
As to your statement that the publishing world isn’t “elitist”… While we appreciate that the other side of that publishing hurdle is not all milk and honey, we have to insist that the subject at hand is a selection committee standing at the gates of a select cache: the very definition of “elitist.” We have, however, no argument with this: art is an exacting pursuit, and demands both dedication and militant adherence to equally exacting standards. But it seems to us that the criterion for entry beyond those gates no longer centers solely or even mainly on these standards, on artistic merit, on the quality of the work at hand: it seems to us that the content of the thing is less on trial than the politics surrounding it, the marketing possibilities, etc. Maybe we’re kidding ourselves, but as a bunch of kids from Cleveland with no connections and no angle to pitch we feel like we’re facing obstacles a bit more problematic than the simple question of whether our writing is good writing.
We hope you will check out our offerings, despite your doubts. We certainly appreciate your time in replying and your insight, both as a reader and a bookseller.
Yours,
Tom Maven, et al