Michelle,
I thought you (and others) might be interested in this Letter to the Editor I recently sent off (and yes, they printed it):
Monday, March 30
To the editor:
I am the author of a recent book on religion, spirituality, and American culture. Yesterday I learned that The Berkshire Eagle is unwilling to consider a review of my work because it is self-published. Needless to say, I am offended — and other artists, writers and readers ought to be offended — by this sort of archaic and superficial bias. Times have changed, technology has changed, and the marketplace has changed. A great many books are now being self-published.
Are there poor ones among them? Absolutely. But there are also gems. And the only appropriate way to determine a book's value is to read it, not to look at the publisher's name and jump to unfounded conclusions.
Earlier this month, the president of the American Society of Journalists & Authors, Russell Wild, wrote the following in a letter to the society's membership (you can read the complete letter on their Web site, www.asja.org: "(T)he publishing world has changed. It will continue to change. Today, the self-published work is no longer the avenue of desperation-for-ink that it once was. Rather, self-publishing has become a means by which some very professional writers, including a good number of ASJA members, are voluntarily choosing to market their considerable talent." (I, for one, had my first book published by a traditional publisher several years ago. They took forever, did no promotion at all, and paid a negligible royalty. This time, I chose to publish on my own).
Wild acknowledges that some self-published work "is clearly not worthy of the paper it is printed on," and the society is certainly not interested in endorsing second-rate work: neither am I, and neither should The Eagle.
But it is worth recalling that Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" had to be self-published, whereas, if any silly celebrity were to announce the intention of jotting down a trashy memoir, you can bet that traditional publishers would be lined up and salivating for the right to publish it.
In light of the ASJA position, and because it is just common sense and common courtesy, I hope The Eagle will reconsider and abandon this inequitable and unwarranted policy. In the meantime, if any readers would like to find out more about my books for themselves, you can certainly log on to Amazon or my Web site. A reviewer who did bother to read my work recently wrote, "This learned and inspirational book rescues philosophy from the mathematicians, sex from the hedonists, religion from empty sanctimony, and science from barren materialism. A must read for all of us who seek a guidebook for meaningful life in the new millennium."
ANDREW CORT
Tyringham