"He Sighed Annoyingly": the Problem with Vanity Presses

I try not to be one of those people who peppers his blog with links to other people in lieu of content--it's an easy trap to fall into, and as much as I love writing I do not labor under the delusion that my commentary on someone else's blog/tweet/fan-fic/cat macro/animutation is actually important to anything that exists outside my ears. But then, there are things like this.

(For those keeping score at home, I received a rejection letter the day before I received this link. Let's count our blessings that I was in a good mood.)

If I had seen that link two weeks ago, I could have posted it and spared you all the trouble of my essay on urban fantasy and the definition of "epic". Books like The Shadow God (which retails, by the by, for more than most normal hardbacks) are the problem with my genre, and the reason that I have no problem with considering myself a "struggling author". Without pressure, a diamond is a lump of coal, a bicep never gets larger, and a waffle languishes as a blob of water and flour; likewise, without pressure, a person writing on a level that makes R.A. Salvatore look like a literary messiah becomes a Published Author (pronounced with your best mangled French accent) and doesn't bother to figure out that lungs can't fill with innovation.

I could, if I wanted to go a little bit into debt, easily get Done with Mirrors published; or, for that matter, the original, cartoonish version of Ether Street, or God forbid all 60,000 brain-mincing words of The Lay of Quinn (don't ask). I'm very grateful, and not just fiscally, that I haven't done this. I've grown as a writer in the past 5 years, let alone the past 10, 15, 20...and while there are all those obvious concerns of selling out and dumbing down that plague the artistic mind, I'd rather become a published author because someone with the power to do that decided I should, not because I paid $1000 to some guy who bought a printing press off Craigslist.

Certainly, there are documents better thrown out into the world via vanity presses--things that won't target a large audience or that are too short or unusual for most large presses to deign to vet them, for instance--and certainly there are authors who want to go that route, and I won't blame them for it (though I will also be very wary of reading their work). Certainly, also, what I'm saying sounds an awful lot like "selling out" to the way things are done now and ignoring possible innovations in publishing procedure or copyright law. I'm not saying that vanity presses are, across the board, of the devil (though the author of The Shadow God certainly seems to wish they were), or that those who choose to publish via vanity presses, the Web, or under Creative Commons licenses or what-have-you are somehow less "real" than authors who sign the standard deals with their publishing companies and agencies What I am saying is, I feel like the challenges of getting something published and publicized and into the hands and brains of those who would be your readership are potentially as much a valuable part of a writer's process as they are the enemy of creativity; and I think that The Shadow God, along with a few others I could name, are perfect examples of what can go wrong when that hurdle is removed.