Sarah Mankowski is the owner and editor of WordThunder (http://www.wordthunder.com). Her personal website is http://sarahmankowski.com. |
POD POV by Sarah Mankowski Back when my son was in the third or fourth grade, he was so excited to go back to school because he had a brand new lunch box with a picture from his favorite movie of the summer. But when he came home from that first day of school, he put away the lunch box, never to touch it again. Why? Well, it seems he got to school all happy to show off his new lunch box only to discover that lunch boxes with cartoon pictures were considered babyish now. His had been ridiculed and he wanted nothing more to do with it. I think something very similar frequently happens with writers who publish POD. They are thrilled to have a published book and can't wait to go out and tell everybody they are a published writer. Well, soon enough someone is bound to come along and remind this author that it wasn't REALLY published, it was merely vanity published. Suddenly the book has lost all its luster and the writer has lost the desire to promote. I have watched this happen time and time again. How do you avoid this trap? First and always, you have to love the book you have written. It has to be about the book, not your ego. Do you find yourself talking about being a published writer or about the actual book? Keep in mind that having the book published really only means that now you have a convenient way of sharing this work with other people. So this is why I say that how the book was printed or published is irrelevant. The book itself is what matters. If that is your focus, people can talk all day about how it was published and it simply doesn't matter. Only the book matters. Sure, I know there will be setbacks with bookstores and reviewers who look at the printing method and not the book. So bypass them and go straight to your readers! I know that many involved in the publishing industry will continue to look down on online publishing. That's because to many in the industry, it's all about industry. They get far more excited about the latest million dollar book deal than about the content of the actual book in question. Online publishing is easy to dismiss because their are not million dollar deals to make the topic "interesting". How/when will this change? I think it can only change with readers, when they begin to discover new voices that really excite them. How often have you been in a bookstore and overheard someone telling a friend, 'You have to this author's new book!'. When that changes to 'Sure this author's new book is ok, but there's a new author that covered the subject ten times better.' That's how books are sold. Back to the story of my son and his lunch box, he got himself in that plight because he was looking at the lunch box as something to brag about to the other kids. He was asking for trouble. If he had gone to school not with the attitude "Look what I've got', but with the attitude, 'I love this lunch box', I'll bet every other kid in his class would have wanted it. So keep the focus on your book. |
Sarah Mankowski is the owner and editor of WordThunder (http://www.wordthunder.com). Her personal website is http://sarahmankowski.com. |
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