Tag: self-publishing

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Kierkegaard: Self-publisher

Back in my college days, I spent time acquainting myself with the work of Soren Kierkegaard, a philosopher from Denmark who lived in the mid-1800s. Kierkegaard is considered the father of a twentieth-century school of philosophy called Existentialism, which was hugely influential to me. The Existentialists, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, argued that there’s nothing about human existence that is definitively the case – nothing you can know definitively about being human by virtue of, for example, membership in a given religious group. Basically, it means there’s no rulebook. Existentialism insisted that as a human being you have the right to make choices, period. In fact you can’t avoid making choices. And not only that; you’re also personally responsible for the outcome of the choices you make; your decisions.

Kierkegaard would have disagreed with many of the Existentialists conclusions beyond these basic tenets. He was a Christian philosopher, for one thing, explicitly, whereas the Existentialists largely rejected religion. The battle he fought with many of his own contemporaries, especially the religious leaders of the day, was mainly over what it meant to be a Christian. His detractors believed in establishment religion – they insisted you could be born into the Danish church, and that as long as you blindly accepted your place in Danish society, including the state religion, you were good to go. You were a Christian. 

Kierkegaard, though, insisted that being a Christian meant having a personal experience with God – an all-consuming, life-changing experience. He also believed you came into this relationship with God via the absurd, because religious belief couldn’t be reduced to a series of logical steps or conclusions. Religious belief required a leap of faith, which leap was at its root nonlogical. Not illogical. But not based on some inevitable logical conclusion.

I give this background on Kierkegaard to introduce you to him, and to say that Kierkegaard was in a way the first blogger and first self-publisher.  In his day there was no internet, of course. Electricity had barely begun to be harnessed. But, rereading some of his works, I’ve been struck how devoted to his writing he was, how carefully he wrote, how passionate he was about his ideas, and how masterful and entertaining at expressing them he was. Now, Kierkegaard wasn’t blogging on the ten recipes you can make in 20 minutes, or eight picturesque towns you must see in Portugal. He wrote about matters crucial to know about being human.

But, like a dedicated blogger, Kierkegaard wrote every day. He sat in his small apartment in central Copenhagen and thought and wrote on the subjects he cared most deeply about. And when he had finished his latest manuscript, he walked it over to a local printer – his publisher – and paid to have the piece printed, bound, and published. His fellow philosophers were his primary readership. On average his works sold a few dozen copies. He wasn’t even taken seriously as a thinker and writer until other influential writers and philosophers discovered him long after his death.

Kierkegaard didn’t have an agent. He didn’t have a large, influential publisher behind him of the type we think of today. Just a man who would set up and print his works for a fee. So, in a real sense Kierkegaard was a doggedly persistent, utterly determined self-publisher. His daily writing habits, and the passion he carried them out with, remind me very much of a blogger. Had it been available, I have no doubt Kierkegaard would have made good use of today’s technology. He would have been a Danish blogging, ebook-writing fiend!

I find Kierkegaard’s example heartening, and worth following. I’m working on my first novel – I’ve been working on it for years. And I know I’ll self-publish, because there’s no precedent for the book I’m writing, nothing like it that I’ve seen anywhere. I have no choice but to publish it myself. I’m actually excited at the prospect. One day soon, I’ll upload the book to Amazon and the other online bookstores. And the act will be very much akin to Kierkegaard walking his latest manuscript over to the printer, as he regularly and repeatedly did, back in Copenhagen a hundred and fifty years ago.

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A new kind of novel

Art never stands still. People change; tastes change. New generations demand new art, something different, fresh, more relevant to the current situation.

Technology dictates change, too, and technology changes art. Photography became an art form soon after is was invented. But photography also changed painting, by pushing artists from exacting representations of “reality” to impressionistic and then expressionist ones, then Abstract Expressionist and Cubist, followed by all the forms still being invented and explored today.

Music has evolved in a bewildering number of directions over the last hundred years; it’s exploded like a sonic Big Bang, with ever new concepts of what qualifies as music, in the concert hall, on the bandstand, and on stage. Those changing concepts have been fed and freed up by new discoveries in recording technology. Multi-track recording revolutionized what it meant to record and perform a song. Music has been highly influenced, it goes without saying, by the electric guitar, bass guitar, the drum set, and the synthesizer. Some claim those changes have nullified traditional musical values. But music, especially, doesn’t bow to tradition.

To skip around art forms a bit, let’s talk about reading technology. Reading has changed fundamentally over the past 20 years with the invention of e-readers and ebooks. Many, me included, still like to curl up with a physical book. But that’s no longer a requirement in order to interact with the printed word. Some e-readers and most browsers and tablets include the capability of playing back audio. The boundary between these two worlds–reading and listening–may be the next artistic frontier to cross.

Which brings us to my own work as a novelist.

Back before ebook technology had been invented, or before it was popularized, before EPUB3 and Amazon’s and Apple’s support of that standard, it occurred to me to write a novel that would contain both a story and some original music. Where the two, audio and story, would intertwine in the tale’s telling. I envisioned a story of some college freshmen back in the seventies who form a rock band. Led by a super-talented, super-confident singer-songwriter, the group would make a splash in the rock music scene of the next decade or two, or three. The music I was thinking of was songs I had already written, along with others I would write expressly for the book.

The twist was that I would author not only the novel but the songs as well, and they would form a significant part of the story, almost like characters themselves. All would be combined into one electronically delivered experience, in an ebook with audio.

Now, years later, to my knowledge it’s still never been done. There have been a few attempts, including a book by Laura Esquivel, the author of Like Water For Chocolate, who attached a CD of opera music to her book and wove the music into the story, though the music was famous Italian operatic pieces. And there have been collaborations between writers and composers, including a book by Jodi Picoult, a novel with music presented on a website, written by a collaborating songwriter. But no one has written both the novel and the music and recorded and presented it all in one package.

EPUB3, you may know, lets you insert audio and even video files into a written work, and they play when the reader clicks on them. In this way the audio or video can become part of the reading experience. So the technology exists. And, I’ll go ahead and say it, the technology has now caught up with my novelistic vision! This fall, I’m self-publishing Fifth Wheel: A Novel with Music.

A couple of side notes: I did earnestly try to interest literary agents in my concept before deciding to self-publish. The agents fled in droves from an idea which had never been tried before, that had no market track record. But I’m confident Fifth Wheel will live up to my high expectations. I’m also in the process now of doing the narration for the audiobook version — a second, even newer technology custom made for Fifth Wheel!

Leading up to publication, I hope you’ll take a look at the excerpts I’ll publish here. Please sign up if you’d like to be kept in the loop. I’m very exciting about releasing to the world, and to you, Fifth Wheel: A Novel with Music.