Long Live The Independent Revolution!

In case you missed it, USA Today did a feature this morning on how self-published authors are finding success, focusing on a half dozen specifically whose success stories are outlined. This is significant in that it brings news of the burgeoning independent movement to a mainstream readership, helping to legitimize the self-pub initiative and lay to rest the hackneyed and derogatory term "vanity press" with its outdated view of non-traditional publications as inherently worthless. As if it's somehow less effort to write an unsold novel than a million seller, or less admirable a struggle to fill 300 sheets of paper with words no one will ever read than to craft yet another story about a serial killer on the loose that is bound to sell because every other one just like it did.

I don't subscribe to USA Today, but I happened to be out of town and staying at a hotel when I had the latest issue laid in front of me at breakfast today. Needless to say it was a pleasant surprise, and welcome reading to see hard working authors (even of the serial killer variety) merit some well earned recognition, and the entrenched megalith that is traditional New York publishing receive an open challenge to its standard practice of deciding for the rest of us what we should be reading. By removing the middlemen who until now have been acting as our literary gatekeepers we, the readers, have been freed to decide for ourselves what merits our attention. In nearly every case mentioned in the story the powers-that-be completely missed what the readers understood by instinct: that a good story with interesting characters was lying in wait among those pages - pages which every agent and editor who "read" them consigned to the round file of oblivion, but which the readers then went on to buy in droves.

The great irony of this is that we live in a land and time where every voice is endowed by law and honor with the right to speak and be heard. And yet it has become all but impossible for the vast majority of authors to reach their destined readers. Only the chosen few are allowed to speak. The days when every pamphlet and treatise went to press regardless of how unorthodox or revolutionary are far behind us. The days of independent presses cranking out a stream of radical and even incendiary literature have been quelled by the pressure to deliver profits to faceless stockholders.

For too long has freedom of speech been hijacked by boardroom economics!
Too long have those with voices been silenced by corporate greed!
Too often are the needs of the many overridden by the interests of the few!
Too many are the pens laid to rest when their flow of words is staunched by form rejection letters!

But no more! The revolution has returned. Viva la ebook!

Long live true freedom of the press!