Fried egg by whatscookingamerica.net. Licensed through Creative Commons.

This is the story of two books. It’s also the story of two centuries, two metaphors for industry, two marketing strategies and, most importantly, two different ways of answering the question, “What is a successful act of publishing?”

Let’s begin with my guitar book, but let’s begin way before I even thought about the guitar book. Let’s begin in high school.

I began playing guitar for the reasons everyone else begins playing guitar: I hoped it would help me be popular with girls but in the process I discovered it was actually a companion of a kind I didn’t even know existed. It became such a close companion that one guitar in particular survived an emigration, a re-immigration, another emigration, several changes of job, two divorces and the births of my two children. That guitar, and the guitar in general, was so close to me, so intimately under my own nose (and we’re getting to the point, here) that I never thought of writing about it. I can’t tell you how many nights I stayed up late pacing in agitation around the house trying to come up with a subject for my next book, but I didn’t think of writing about the guitar for thirty-three years, and even then it was someone else who suggested it.

That’s paradox number one: the book became my most successful book in terms of sales and critical acclaim because by then I knew the subject like a tree knows ivy, but that same under-the-bark proximity prevented me from seeing it as a book subject.

The book was duly proposed and accepted by a major New York publisher and written and published, but then the next paradox showed up, two paradoxes in one like a pair of conjoined twins who will walk side by side through the rest of this essay. On the one hand, my editor frankly admitted she knew nothing about the Internet, so the publishers would do nothing to try to make use of its growing presence. On the other hand, it never occurred to the publishers to make use of the fact that the guitar was an active part of my life, and might well become an even bigger and more active part in my life. No, and this is my point: my editor was not interested in her authors’ lives.

My job, as she saw it, was to produce, at regular intervals, a marketable book, like a hen laying her daily egg.

To shift the image sideways a little, if she thought of the book at all as a product of my life, then the book was a yellow yolk surrounded by a colorless larger concentric circle that was the circumference of my thoughts and actions. The white didn’t interest her. All she wanted was the yolk. Publishing was like a fried egg.

The egg was laid and fried, and in due course the book became quite widely bought, read, and listened to on CD. And as it did so, a strange divergence began to take place. The book began to enrich my life, and I was invited to guitar shows, guitar conferences, guitarists’ homes and recording studios. My own playing improved, and I found myself chatting with or even playing along with musicians of international caliber. I was in the houses of the holy. I couldn’t believe my luck.

My publisher, meanwhile, was heading in a different direction. She wasn’t interested in putting out a second guitar book, even though I was getting wonderful new material from all sides. She asked for other book ideas. I went back to staying up late pacing in agitation around the house, and she shot down my ideas one after another until she decided I wasn’t going to lay her another egg, and lost interest in me.

Around the same time, in what they call a not unrelated development, I began to lose interest in traditional publishing. I took over the writing program at Champlain College, and then started the Champlain College Publishing Initiative, busying myself as a kind of New Wave publisher-teacher. It was a more than full-time job, and I half-consciously decided that my days as a full-time writer were probably over for the time being.

Especially as I had discovered a new hobby or creative interest: out of nowhere, I’d started spending my evening carving endangered alphabets.

Talk about ideas that don’t seem like promising book subjects! I was actually half-convinced I was entering into a pre-senile monomania, like those old coots who hide away in the garage building scale models of Rouen Cathedral out of toothpicks. Still, after a while I got sufficiently interested in these strange scripts to start doing a little research into why they were so odd, or so hard to carve, or how the heck anyone had ever decided to try to write using, for example, an alphabet whose every letter looked like a variant on the numeral 7. And I got sufficiently interested in the subjective experience of carving that I began keeping a journal of these thoughts.

By May 2010 the first exhibition of Endangered Alphabet carvings was finished, and by then it was clear to me that (a) other people found this subject far more interesting than I’d expected, and (b) that this project was going to continue beyond this initial phase. By now I had my own tiny imprint, which I called Percentage Possibility Publications after the first book I self-published, Thirty Percent Chance of Enlightenment, and I also decided to self-publish the book as both a catalogue of sorts to the exhibition and also an essay on writing itself.

In other words, it wasn’t so much a conventional “book idea”—and it certainly wasn’t a book idea that would have attracted the interest of a New York publisher—as it was, like Guitar, an extension of my life.

Anyone who has published with a major New York house and then self-published a book doesn’t need to be told that the two acts are utterly different not least because of the relative gradients of emotion and expectation. A traditional launch fills the author with excitement, and it becomes only gradually clear that the number of copies shipped has very little to do with the number of copies sold, and everyone’s expectations are steeply scaled down until it becomes clear that the book is no longer even a modest priority for the publisher, the booksellers or one’s agent. The egg goes off with dismaying rapidity.

A self-published book has exactly the opposite emotional gradient. The dismay comes at first, when a week after the books have shown up online/in bookstores/in your living-room you still have sold only three copies. Yet, under the right circumstances, the publishing experience can be not only as successful as traditional successes, but in many ways much broader, richer and longer in life. And now we get to the heart of this essay.

I was lucky in that, despite having thought in traditional publishing terms all my adult life, I never thought of the Endangered Alphabets as a book. The initial exhibition attracted the attention of a fine local videographer, who made a documentary that we broke into pieces and put on YouTube, with a link, of course, to the website where the book could be bought. Within a couple of months the Alphabets turned up again at the local book festival, where I discovered what an astonishing set of questions they bring out in people, and what fascinating connections visitors offered me to other alphabets, languages, cultures and countries.

By the end of the year the exhibition had traveled to Middlebury, then Rutgers, and scholars and writers from all over the world were starting to pay an interest. I found myself corresponding in two and a half languages with people from Canada and Australia and the Netherlands and Denmark and Indonesia. The book began selling slowly but steadily.

One of my students suggested I try a Kickstarter, a perfect illustration of the difference between the old way of publishing and the new. The old way develops projects in secrecy and licenses its products; the new way busts down the doors and throws open its arms. I told the camera in the lid of my laptop that I wanted to take the Alphabets back to their countries of origin and use them to start discussions about the dangers of globalized culture. Anyone who sent me a donation got a book or even a carving. I sold more than 500 books and raised $18,000.

In the summer of 2011 I went to Bangladesh and came back with two endangered alphabets I’d never even heard of. In 2012 the Alphabets, which now consist of two going on three different collections of carvings, have already been to Yale and to colleges in Vermont and Wyoming and to several libraries. In June they will kick off a major international conference on endangered languages in Cambridge, England; in July I fly with them to Barcelona for an international conference on the future of the book.

In short, Endangered Alphabets, the project and the book and the iCloud of related continuing interest, have been in their own ways every bit as successful as Guitar: An American Life. In sales plus appearance/lecture fees plus the Kickstarter campaign, I’m a little behind what Guitar earned at the same point in its life, but while Guitar has slowly been tapering, the Alphabets are still growing vigorously.

They’re growing because they demonstrate a new dimension in publishing and marketing: the dimension of the author’s own life. The model is no longer the fried egg, the small circle inside the larger circle. The book and the project are spinning countless overlapping circles through the albumen of my life.

Every book I sell (and I sell every book personally, by hand, through my website or through public appearances) may lead to an invitation to show and talk about the Alphabets, which not only produces a modest income of its own but is always the best place to sell more books. Just as importantly, every showing of the Alphabets produces more questions, more contacts, more avenues to explore, more excitement about continuing the project—more material for a second book, or a second edition of the book. Everything feeds everything else.

I’ve expanded my carving to help out a campaign to revive the Balinese language, and I may be about to do something similar elsewhere. I constantly get new requests for carvings and new ideas, and those lines and connections not only expand but connect again: while I’m in Barcelona I’ll meet an Australian who is one of the few people in the world who can read and write the script of a small group of Philippine islanders, the two of us having both gone halfway around the world only to bump into each other.

Okay, let’s pull this all together.

The old model of publishing and marketing is based on a nineteenth-century industrial metaphor: the book is a product to be manufactured (or laid, if you’re the author), marketed, distributed and, with luck, sold.

Yet to separate a book from its author is to limit both, possibly even to damage both, and all the marketing in the world may not repair that damage.

The new model is based on a twenty-first century information age metaphor: the book is just one of many means (also including such modern inventions as the website and such ancient inventions as carving words in wood) to stimulate the flow of ideas and conversation.

An author, or an author-publisher, or a publisher, needs to revel in that conversation. It is not only the author’s life, it may be the life of countless other people. And that interconnected exchange, whether on the internet or in a classroom in Western Wyoming—well, that’s what twenty-first century publishing is. It’s life itself.

Tim Brookes

More of Tim Brookes’s essays can be found in The Story So Far: Essays on Publishing in the 21st Century.