Print Book Update
One week until release! This post contains some links, and I also reflect on how I'm balancing professional ethics and my writing hobby.
The Village of Strong Branches has now been added in print format to the Amazon and Bookshop databases. If you prefer reading in print and are located in the United States, those are probably your preferred purchase locations. If you search for the print ISBN, though — 9781735740645 — you will see more ordering locations, and you will also be able to request it from local booksellers if that’s your preference.
You’ll notice that Amazon doesn’t show the book cover, but Bookshop does. You will also notice if you take a look at the Books2Read aggregator that the Amazon store is not yet showing up for the ebook version. It won’t be there until publication day (the 29th, if not a day or two later) due to how Amazon tries to deter people from giving buyers platform choices about their e-reading. I don’t publish through Amazon because I want to ensure that my work is accessible in multiple places. I’m not writing romance or self-help, so apart from the ethical issues I have with limiting the ebook to Amazon, it’s not in a category where it would see massive benefits from the Amazon program that limits you to that platform alone.
Self-publishing is an interesting experience. It’s fascinating to see the rules that apply when someone puts work out on their own. For example, I have to submit two copies of The Village of Strong Branches to the Library of Congress, but they won’t give me interior-to-the-book information unless they decide that the copies I send them are worth keeping and not to be discarded. Traditional publishers (and, presumably, self-publishers who go through Amazon) have previews of their covers. Those of us doing self-publishing through other means do not. I’m very happy that my first experience was a poetry book (Acts of Speech) with very low pressure. It taught me a lot. The lessons I learned then fed into many of the thoughts I was having at the time about balancing my desire to share my work with how my hobby intersects with my actual profession, librarianship, and the code of ethics we are supposed to follow.
Apart from the niche content in my fiction — the conlangs, the polytheism, the way I can do artsy and soft things with the plots because I like slow-builds and subtle-shift resolutions, even if they’re less common in American fiction — the fact that I am a librarian puts me in conflict with traditional publishers, especially given the ongoing lawsuit from publishers that may destroy the Internet Archive if the IA has to pay and gets completely wiped clear of cash, which would take down the Wayback machine and other content in addition to everything else unless a lot of money was raised very quickly. I stopped submitting my work to traditional publishers at about the same time Tor decided to embargo libraries from lending ebooks for some months after book releases — that was a huge topic in libraries when it happened.
There’s a common saying in libraries that if we didn’t already exist, we would not be legally allowed to exist as institutions today — we’re a legacy carve-out, and most for-profit entities have been increasingly hostile towards us. While I know that some librarians do publish their hobby work through them and are able to manage their cognitive dissonance or work in a part of the profession where they’ve judged they don’t have a meaningful conflict of interest, I would probably lose sleep wondering if my personal actions were undermining my professional integrity. For one, the only publishers I actually view favorably are nonprofits connected to societies. Those publishers are mission-driven, and the funds from publishing support the mission, not shareholders. In addition, I have to submit a conflict of interest form at my job because I make collections and acquisitions decisions. There’s no way I’m compromising myself by going under contract with a fiction imprint of a company we do licenses with, especially since I review licenses as part of my job. Publishing has been having mega-mergers for the past few decades, so that would be unavoidable with most speculative fiction imprints I know. The only exception is if I were to publish poetry traditionally or theological writings in my areas of interest, as those are (mostly) small presses that absolutely never publish in areas related to my collection management responsibilities. And I’d definitely prefer to publish with mission-driven organizations even in those carve-outs.
Many decisions people make have very messy ethical underpinnings. Now you have a better view of mine. I love my writing hobby, but I don’t love it more than I love the freedom to read and the mission of libraries.