"Emergent" Books/Emerging Stories
Writing in Publisher’s Weekly, Jana Reiss recently lamented that “many of the books I’m receiving that bear the coveted label ‘Emergent’ are not, to my thinking, Emergent at all.” (Heck, we’ve got “not emergent” books, as well.) Tony Jones agreed. So did Mike Morrell, Anthony Smith, and others in the comments on Reiss’ article.
Writing on his personal blog last month, Thomas Knoll lamented, “I offered to write a book for Emergent™. They laughed, because I don’t have a platform. It takes a whole lot of promotion and potential buyers to get a traditionally published book to ‘tip’, and make a profit. So, I understand.
“But I did find out that they get about 6 book proposals a day. Of course no publishing house is going to take those on and even attempt to publish them. But we live in the era of the longtail. There is more value in the thousands of unpublished stories of life in the fringes, than a hundred published works by those with a platform.”
Knoll has launched an online campaign to get people to write their “emerging stories” on a wiki site. If 20 people to commit to the project, Knoll is offering to build the website for this “fringe publishing house” and have the resulting works available in print via Lulu.com.
Knoll’s campaign sounds quite a bit like the Wikiklesia Project that I had the privilege to be a part of (along with Andrew Jones and a number of other “emerging” voices). For anyone interested in participating in this kind of collaborative online publishing, a second Wikiklesia volume is also in the works.
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That is a great idea, Steve. And I hope Thomas realizes, that if they laughed it wasn’t a cruel laugh—just a laugh of resignation. Publishing books the traditional way can be tough—and in the end, not even the best route for many folks.
Heck, my friends started Windblown Media (http://windblownmedia.com) to publish The Shack, ‘cause publishing houses were skittish about the content—and now it’s sold over 200,000 copies! This doesn’t happen every day by any means, but if you have a book that’ll truly catch wildfire by word-of-mouth and you know it in your soul (and if people besides your spouse, mother, or best friend tells you so)—heck, in this new media age, I’d say figure out a self-publishing option. You’ll probably do better.
(And don’t bother pitching your amazing book idea to Windblown—they’re already inundated!)
And I agree, its quite similar to the Wikiklesia Project—maybe they should join forces? Working on Volume One was a blast.