My mother rang me up on Sunday and caught me off guard by asking a question about self-publishing. I assumed, unsurprisingly as someone who hangs out with a lot of other self-published types, that everyone knew the basics of self-publishing if they cared to look about for those answers. Actually this is true. It is strange though, to move from the status of being a seeker after knowledge to being the one sought after. So I’m going to rehearse some of the basic questions here because it never hurts to explain something again, and it is an honour to be thought of as someone who is “in the know”.

The basic question the prospective self-published author asks when they consider the business of cutting out the orthodox publishers and going for it on their own is “will it hurt me with regular publishers in the future if I self-publish now”?

Well, the answer is yes and no.

Yes, if you publish something yourself and then attempt to sell it on to an agent or publisher key questions have pretty hard answers which are unresolved in the case of the totally unpublished. The implication of you hawking your self-published wares to an agent or publishing house is that self-publishing did not bring you the measure of success and rewards that you were hoping for. Agents and publishers are gamblers at heart. You have just told them that you are not a great bet. You have just told them you are less likely to be a good bet than someone who has never tried to sell their wares before. You have told them that you don’t comprehend the idea of First Serial Publishing Rights. In other words you are that most ghastly of things a newbie, and a naive one and one who might possibly think the agent or publisher was born yesterday.

Does that harm your chances of success? Hell, yes.

However, as with so many things it’s not what you do but the way that you do it.

If you have a few self-published titles which may or may not have garnered some sales, some reputation, whatever and you take your new work to an agent or publisher then your previous forays could be represented as “experience”. Let’s face it someone who’s delivered a manuscript for nothing other than love and seen it through to the point where it is in print by whatever means counts for a little, even if it is very little.

The advantage that confers on you when you hit the agent or publisher’s slush pile is minimal but it exists if you can be realistic about what you’re trying to achieve.

As so often is the case it seems the initial question may not be the most relevant. The real question is, realistically, what chances does one have on the orthodox road to publication?

The answer to this query is well documented. Virtually none.

The bottom line is that slush is produced not just in piles but in heaps, stacks, vats, mountains. To be the literary needle in the slush haystack requires excellence, brilliance and sheer dumb luck. And the latter quality in far greater amount than the former two.

This unpalatable fact is one that agents and publishers wish to downplay because it makes a comment about the unfair nature of the publishing industry that they wish to shield all participating parties from. There is no other system. There is no meritocracy. People who write awful unpublishable rubbish will not just step aside to let the more talented through. The mediocre manuscript of someone with the potential to be moulded by the right mentors into something more wonderful looks exactly the same as the mediocre manuscript of someone who can only ever aspire to mediocrity. The manuscript that just doesn’t hit the agent’s buttons despite really being rather good may never find a home. The represented manuscript that no publisher can pitch to the higher ups in any viable way will remain unpublished due to the fickle finger of marketing demographics. All of this is monstrously unfair.

But it’s the way things are.

So, if you are the kind of person who improves with practice and completion (like yours truly) the only way to get better today wouldn’t have even been available five to ten years ago. Reading back over my past publications I can honestly say that I am glad none of them ended up in a 3 for 2 at Waterstone’s. None of them are of a calibre I know I can produce. None of them show me at my best. But I might never have been able to appraise them as such if I hadn’t held them, bound in my own hands and leafed through the printed pages myself.

The process of edit, polish, edit, polish, go mad, edit, polish only makes more sense in retrospect. I needed to self-publish. Not because I wanted fame and fortune. Because I wanted to go through the process.

If that’s you then go for it. The manuscript you’re working on today may never be good enough for commercial release through a major publishing house. It doesn’t mean the process of producing it won’t help. Cope with people who don’t care enough to order a copy, flaky reviewers who have little time to catch up with PDF reading for whatever reason, cope with the geologically slow world of the self-published battler. If you ever do sell a novel to a real publisher things will seem to be moving too fast in comparison.

So to return to the original question.

If you self-publish with the wrong expectations and attitude it will sink you. Absolutely. If you have clear self-knowledge about what you are doing and you know what your agenda is it can’t hurt and it may even help, although in publishing, nothing is guaranteed.

I’m indebted to gaming Mike for the title of this post due to his offhand comment before playtesting the Serenity RPG that organising gamers was like “herding cats”.

The monkey can’t argue. That offhand comment would preface a journey into the world of roleplaying that would encompass excursions into the worlds of Vampire, Mage, Orpheus, Over The Edge and several homegrown systems (my own and those of others). Being a bit of a control freak when it comes to these things I started out the hard way by deciding to write my own system entirely from scratch. One way or another I’ve written six one off adventures in total and only one of those used a system other than the homegrown idea. In summary these were:

Incident at Edgwight: A very poorly plotted adventure set in my Binary Baby Universe which, on reflection, was wildly optimistic as a single shot one afternoon problem solver. It was really a campaign in disguise leading to many points where the players had to be mercilessly railroaded. Also the system was positively foetal and didn’t really work whatsoever.

L’Heure De La Bete: Basically the outstanding French bizarro movie Brotherhood of the Wolf boiled down into a quick exercise in being comedically French and breaking codes. The players vastly enjoyed being comedically French but had no interest whatsoever in breaking any codes. They blundered through to the end one way or another but I ended up having to explain what the plot really was to them afterwards.

The Dagon Racket: A surprisingly successful cross between gritty LA Cop show and Call of Cthulu. This was where I really started to get the idea of what was going on with the old RPG scenario writing. If I were to be honest I would say that this was very much a setting without a system of its own but, hey, that’s better than nothing.

Bad Day On The Legend Tripper: A one off in a very bizarre space opera universe. I wanted the scenario to be Silent Hill meets Alien with a healthy dose of psychic powers. It turned out the framing mechanism was far more interesting than the actual scenario. It’s a setting I may come back to developing.

Lurker On The Strip: Developing on from the Dagon Racket I expanded my setting, tentatively titled “LA Darkness”. There is a sense of the tongue-in-cheek about naming these one shots after proper Cthulu Mythos namechecks but actually the role playing scenario itself works very well even without the “bigger picture”. Something else that needs a bunch more work.

Con Of The Dead: This was a very flippant scenario born from a one line joke that I had with gaming Mike about having an adventure in which the PCs were all actors in famous cult TV shows who were suddenly beset by fans “gone zombie” at a fictional convention. It showed the power of the ridiculous quite well. I used a system based upon the use of playing cards called “Bust!” to run the scenario and it is the pinnacle of my GMing career to date. Maybe this should tell me something about constantly running my own systems.

Anyway, after that I started dabbling in other people’s systems when I picked up a copy of Over The Edge. I really wanted to give it a go and am now running this campaign for my own group in Nottingham.

Much apart from the joy of making contact with some new (local) gamers I’ve also finally run something for Mrs. Monkey and our mutual friend Scott. I was somewhat nervous about this prospect as I really didn’t want to be responsible for boring some n00bs to death. I can kind of understand why gamers huddle in clubs. If you turn up to play at an inconvenient time in an inconvenient location then you’ve really got no one but yourself to blame if it’s dull. I felt far more as if I was imposing my hobby on my nearest and dearest.

The fact that neither Mrs. nor Scott want to stop talking about the experience and the fact that Scott in particular is itching to get down for the next episode is very heartening indeed. This has propelled a silly prologue/OTE one off about messing around in the airport into the beginning of a glorious campaign and it will be my first campaign ever…

Apart from the obvious nightmare of writing the campaign the problem with gamers is that getting them all in the same place at the same time and ready to roll some dice is like… well… you know…

Running a successful session that I organised from top to bottom (with the aid of Mrs Monkey when it came to refreshments) has crystallised the whole process for me.

Looking back over these notes it looks like I’ve got at least three campaign settings and a couple of systems floating around half formed in my head. Add to this that I’ve also been toying with the idea of formalising a system to expedite the occasional Neverwhere game I enjoy playing (as a player) with my friend GM Alex and we have even more stuff to stack onto the slate. You know, the one which I realised I have to clear before I partake in next year’s NaNo…

And you thought that stack of paper in the banner graphic was ironic.