And if you thought my posts were epic-length

Let's start off with footnote zero, which is probably the longest paragraph of this post and also probably the most humorous, if, that is, we share a similar sense of humor. (0) And now that that's out of the way:

This Grumpy Old Bookman has written a 72-page long treatise on what's wrong with the publishing industry today. It's called "On the Survival of Rats in the Slush Pile". He's posting chunks of it to his blog or you can download the PDF of the entire thing.

From his introduction to the essay:

This essay has two principal aims: first, to help writers, literary agents, and publishers to understand the full scale of the difficulties that face them; and second, to suggest strategies which will enable such participants in the book trade to survive and perhaps even prosper.

Which is a nice set of aims. Admirable, even. Except, well...okay, I admit, I haven't read all of it, but it looks like you could pretty much summarize the argument of the essay and the contained advice to struggling young naive writers such as myself thusly:

Man, the slush pile sucks ass. It's all totally random and there's no way to guarantee that good stuff makes it through and that bad stuff doesn't. So you know what? Don't even bother, you fool, because you're not going to make it anyways. Instead, you should give up now, and try self-publishing your stuff. But only if you really absolutely must.

Maybe someone who's read the whole thing can correct me if I'm wrong there but I think that pretty tightly sums it up. Two big problems with this have come to mind immediately, based off what I've read.

One: there's a pretty big jump between the essay noting that much of what does make it into slush piles is all crap, and it going on to suggest that everyone should go on to act as professional amateurs, self-publishing at professional levels and picking up little devoted followings along the way. To which I guess I can only say, yeah, all the middle-class white people are already doing that anyways, and it's called "blogging" and who's wants to pay for that? (1) (2)

Two: even with self-publishing, the essay only begrudgingly admits it as an option. Like, you know, even if in the face of the fact that trying to write a book might give you an ucler and you might get sad when nobody reads it, you still decide to write a book? Then you best consider this other option. Am I alone in thinking that's pretty unhelpful? (3)

So, while there's plenty of helpful information that I've found in the essay so far--it's good to have it re-affirmed that yes it's a tough industry to crack, no there's no guarantee of huge (or small) financial (or personal) success, and that yes, it really really is a tough industry to crack--what's not so helpful is to be told that these are all reasons, you know, not to try. Bollocks. (4)

All that said: the self-publishing thing has been brought up to me both by this essay and by a friend recently, and I know I'm just not interested in it, right now. (Outside of this "web" stuff at least.) I mean, I figure there's a reason they call it the "vanity" press, but if anyone out there cares to remind me of the other reasons to raise an eyebrow towards it, I'm all hears. Or eyes. Or whatever.