Why, late in a long career as a writer, I have taken to publishing my own work

I’ve been a lucky, lucky writer for most of my professional life, because publishers – of a kind – have tended to seek me out rather than vice versa. Mostly not for anything I’ve wanted to write myself, you understand, but rather for advertisements, press releases, sales brochures, radio and TV commercial scripts and all the other ‘copy’ the commercial world needs to generate in the course of its activities. The range is wider than you might think – from verses on greeting cards to customised videos or audio-visual shows for corporate events, even scriptwriting for live theatre on occasion. Far more soul-crushingly, I’ve also had to ghostwrite feasibility studies, project reports, user manuals, annual reports and a mountain of similar bumf, the kind of writing people literally have to be paid to read. Once I invented a board game to help greenhorn investors learn the ups and downs of the stock market; that, at least, was fun to do.
Advertising was my chief occupation from the beginning of my working life, back in December 1981, until I left a copywriting job at Impact/BBDO Dubai nineteen years later to take up the ‘role’ of ‘head of corporate communications’ for a Lankan software firm (and what a fiasco that turned out to be). By the mid-Eighties, however, I had also begun publishing articles in what are known today as ‘travel & leisure’ magazines, as well as in the odd prestige ‘glossy’ dealing with some branch of culture or the arts. Again, these were commissioned pieces; publishers came to me. They didn’t tell me what to say, as clients do in the ad business, merely specified what they wanted me to write about. And this was fine by me: a whole lot more interesting, to be sure, than writing about soap or life insurance. Now and then, as in the case of a piece for Serendib about Joseph Vaz, the so-called 'Apostle of Ceylon’, the subject was attractive enough to inspire me to write something of my own – a short story, a piece of verse or something of the sort, recycling the research I’d done for the paid article. These private indulgences never saw print.
Many of these commissions came by way of my good friend Dominic Sansoni, whose reputation as a photographer was already international when we met in 1984 and who has helped open a good many doors for me over the years. My first book-length commission came to me the same way: Sri Lanka: The Resplendent Isle was essentially a portfolio of Dominic’s photographs of people, sights and scenes from all over the country, with a novella-length text and about a hundred photo captions contributed by me. It remains the most successful book I've ever had a hand in – several editions and translations into foreign languages since its publication in 1990 – but I don’t delude myself that any credit for this is due to me; it’s Dom’s pictures that made people want to own that book, and gift copies of it to friends and relatives.
The other books I’ve published so far have been commissioned works too. My first Lankan patron was the John Keells group – whose directors were, sad to say, not altogether delighted with the results of their commission. I think they’d been expecting something along the lines of a giant PR fluff piece and were slightly offended by the rather matter-of-fact narrative I eventually delivered. Perhaps for this reason, most of the print run of Legacy: John Keells & the Story of Sri Lankan Business moulders to this day in a storeroom somewhere among the many properties owned by the group. I am content that it should be so; it’s not a piece of work I’m terribly proud of. Happily, recent patrons have been more comfortable with my approach than Keells were; I suppose people know, now, what they’re in for when they ask me to write something for them. At any rate, they seem, mostly, to be pleased with the results.
I have, of course, written works entirely on my own initiative: short fiction, poems, song lyrics, dozens of essays on every subject under the Sun, even a novel that I began in 1999 and abandoned very early in the millennium. I’ve not been very persistent, though, in trying to get these things published; the whole business terrifies me – and, it seems, with good reason, for whenever I have approached a publisher, the result has nearly always been polite rejection. Even the few ‘respectable’ works of mine that have seen the light of day were, for the most part, commissions: a pastiche inspired by Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills for Himal Southasian, a short story featured in a Penguin India ‘new writing’ collection, an essay or two in The Émigré, a literary webzine published by a friend. With a publication record as slender as this you might think I’d get the message and just give up, but that’s easier said than done; writing is what I do, the activity that gives my life purpose, and the question of whether anyone is going to read what I write is not as important to me as you might think.
Still, apart from those short essays for the Émigré, I haven’t taken on a writing commission since May 2019, which was when I delivered the final draft of Ceylon Tea: The Trade that Made a Nation to the Colombo Tea Traders’ Association. At that point I’d already been working on Thomia for six years, but only as a part-time project; since then, this history of St Thomas’s College and its vast, varied influence on the society, politics and culture of modern Lanka has been my full-time occupation – sorry, obsession. I finished the first draft around Christmas 2022; eight months later, I completed the final draft by fiercely telling myself that if I kept on tinkering with the manuscript any more I would end up ruining the whole thing. Long before then, of course, I’d begun searching for a publisher.
Well, that was the same old story, I’m afraid, all over again. After about five rejections – one or two of them quite encouraging, but rejections they were none the less – I gave up and started to think about publishing Thomia myself. Natania Jansz of Sort Of Books, who edited Shehan Karunatilaka’s wonderful, Booker Prize-winning The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, encouraged me (she was one of the encouraging ones) to do so; her argument was that I – as a member of the worldwide, elaborately networked Old Thomian community – could promote and market Thomia far more effectively and efficiently myself than any professional publisher or distributor possibly could. It was, in fact, she who suggested the idea of publishing by subscription.
And so, with great trepidation, I have taken her advice and set about trying to publish Thomia myself. I have worked in the book-publishing industry as well as in advertising, so the process isn’t altogether unfamiliar to me, but I’m hardly an expert in the field and I’m not finding it easy going. I’m an author, not an entrepreneur! I’m also more than old enough to be put off by the stigma that used to attend what we called ‘vanity publishing’, though I know that self-published works are a growth industry today. All the same, I persevere, hoping that I can scrape together enough by way of subscriptions to cover the cost of publishing and distributing the book. As for the expense of writing it – ten years of my life, numerous research trips including visits to libraries and archives in London, Oxford and Cambridge, sundry fees and subscriptions to specialist journals and archives, terrifying stress and anxiety, etc – I can’t even hope to do that. Happily, I don’t need to: that journey was its own reward.
Comentarios