A Game Changer
Earlier this year, I made a fairly big decision, one that I wrestled with for several months but now feel confident in sharing more openly, more honestly. So let me start with the obvious, something most of you have figured out by now. As a writer, I tend to read and tell stories the way most of us consume food or drink alcohol. I can’t stop. For me, the act of reading and writing falls somewhere between compulsion and obsession. And if you believe compulsion and obsession or basically the same thing, you’re right. I rarely type a word that I don’t second-guess or replay, a word I’ll stare at for six hours if necessary, contemplating how it will land, how someone else will read it on the other end. I can be a very pointed, offensive writer when I feel angry and I can be a very provocative, critical writer when I want to get inside someone’s head. But my preferred stance, one that I’ve embraced more recently over the last couple of years, is to write with a sense of hope and optimism, the kind of hope and optimism that some find hard to tolerate, especially of late, when human interaction seems far more pessimistic and argumentative. Frankly, I’ve been there plenty of times and it wouldn’t be hard for me to go back there again. Wouldn’t surprise me in the least if something happens on the news in the next two months, while I’m on summer break, that prompts me to write angry, to push buttons and piss a few people off in the process. But that’s not really where my heart and mind have chosen to be these days. Not as a writer.
So let me get to the real reason I’ve asked for your time today.
As a kid, one of my teachers asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said I wanted to be a famous writer. At the time, as far back as third grade, I was already stringing words and tales together on a typewriter, so it wasn’t hard to imagine that “becoming a famous writer” was a realistic dream, minus the famous part, of course. I just wrote because I had an imagination, because I loved to tell stories, some of them mine, some of them made up, and others that came about because I started listening and reading more, hoping I might put words to someone else’s missing narrative. Books were sort of the end goal for any aspiring writer of my age, but considering the advent of social media, I could just as easily have spent a lifetime writing shorter messages, everything from articles to posts, blurbs and reviews. It wasn’t until a friend asked me to turn one of my research articles into a book, back in 2008, that I entered into a new arena, the world of publication. And if this is where you want to stop, I completely understand. No offense taken if you prefer to peace out and read the next post on your feed. Still love you.
For anyone who doesn’t know, becoming a “published” author means one of three things, each of them on a scale of public respectability. The most appealing and the most rare form of publication is to be under contract, to be represented, to have someone paying you to write books, to hear your pitches, to pick up your new titles and splash them all over the New York Times. I’ve never been in this category, though it sure would be lovely, albeit unrealistic for a low-on-the-totem-poll teacher from Central Florida who happens to also be a history nerd.
The second category of publication involves something called novelty. For a writer to publish their work with a novelty firm, they actually pay someone to edit their writing, to create their cover, and to make it look, well, published. This is what I did with The Segregated Hour, back in 2008. I was fresh out of college, eager to hand the project off to someone, and get it out of my hands for the long haul. To this day, I’m enormously proud of the book, though I haven’t read it all the way through for years. I’m sure there are probably several things that don’t hold up. Considering that it was a book about the history of religious racism and I’m a white guy (admittedly, from the introduction), who knows. But it felt good to have a book in print, even if, and this is true, I didn’t make a cent on the book until this year, when I managed to pull in a whopping $25 in royalties from a twelve-year-old book.
When I started teaching in 2010, I fell into a box of mental exhaustion, not unlike something Stephen King once described as “jumper cables on his brain.” He kept telling people he was working on a book, but he’d only have a few minutes of brain power after grading, after meeting with parents, after writing and teaching lessons, after setting up and tearing down activities, after taking care of kids all day. That’s why he gave up teaching and focused on his writing. Seems he made a good choice (even though, if I’m being real, I can’t stand most of what he writes). But for me, that jumper cable fatigue lasted more than ten years, my hands dabbling in one book or another, but never quite making the headway necessary to dig in and finish. Until this year, when I reached the end of a two-year manuscript about teaching, about not giving up, about the challenges that impact this profession and the reason so many of us choose to stay. I wrote it because I wanted to remind my colleagues what makes this job, this work, this vocation worth every minute of our effort.
Alas, upon finishing that book during the first few days of 2021, I spent the next three months, from January through March, writing emails to agents and publishers, hoping for a bite. And honestly, I could have kept going. But begging to be noticed isn’t really my jam. I certainly don’t mind sharing stories and putting myself out there, being vulnerable, but asking someone to consider me worthy of their time, that’s not where I prefer to spend my energy. So I made a fairly big concession. To be more specific, I landed at the third and, in many respects until recently, the least respected form of publication, the dreaded stigma of “self” publication.
Considering the frequency with which unknown artists have learned to share their creations through social media over the last decade (musicians, painters, dancers, etc), I decided to dabble with Amazon self-publishing, figuring I’d play around with it, get frustrated, and then regret that I should have waited for an agent to write back, telling me they can’t wait to put my book title on the cover of the Washington Post. Ahem. Never gonna happen.
As it turned out, dabbling with Amazon self-publishing, a program known as KDP (Kindle Direct), I not only had zero regrets, but I managed to experience something I haven’t felt for years as a writer: liberation. For the first time, nothing was holding me back from putting a book on display and then moving on to the next project, whether five people read it or six thousand. Didn’t matter to me anymore. Alas, when I published Don’t Quit On Us in late March and shared it with my fellow teachers and non-teachers alike, I was able to turn a corner and start writing a four week project that I published for my students in early May, a comical, relatable children’s book that told the story of fifteen clever and courageous kids trying to make it through this pandemic. And over the last 24 hours, I’ve even managed to pen 45 pages of historical research for a book I suddenly decided to write for my students over the summer. If you think that’s insane, either you still don’t know me or you didn’t read the first couple paragraphs above.
So let me circle back to where this whole thing started. I don’t write because someone forces my hand. I don’t write because I feel an obligation to fulfill some lifelong goal. I write because I never run out of things to write about, because I keep finding stories compelling enough to share, topics and concerns and ideas worth addressing. These two books, one for teachers and one for children, were written and “self” published within six weeks of each other. And I’m already off to work on another project that I hope to have ready for the fall. That means I can finally do what I love without worrying about how I’ll share it or pitch it on the other side. I simply write, then share.
So here I am, sharing. If you haven’t purchased or read either of the two books below, I’d be encouraged and flattered if you chose to order, read, and share them with others, because I believe they both offer, in different ways, a sense of hope and solace at a time when hope and solace have been hard to find. If, on the other hand, you’ve already read one of these books, the way I get helped as an Amazon author is for you to offer your feedback through online reviews, even if those reviews aren’t five stars out of five. I appreciate honesty and it impacts the silly little algorithm they use to regulate book popularity. But if, after all this, the reason you decided to keep reading was because, perhaps, you’ve been thinking about the world of self-publishing, the possibility of putting out your own books in the future, I hope this post offered you some encouragement. Because yes, choosing to self-publish is the ultimate game changer for those who simply want to write.
Much love, my friends.
Beyond These Difficult Weeks
