A Year End blog about getting started
By: Will Schmit
Tags: Blogging, Authors, Marketing, Books, Creative Writing

“The only thing an author ought strive to earn is the reader’s attention.”

photo by Kenny Luo at Unsplash

I’ve learned, or at least been informed, of a year end tradition for authors to list their publications of the previous year. As a saxophonist I have no problem with blowing my own horn but bellowing about literary accomplishment and recognition seems a bit gauche`. Perhaps I’ve swallowed too much mythology about writing for the joy of writing to appreciate the efficacy of posting a personal hit parade.

This being the first year of the Covid 19 pandemic any sign of creative life conveys a hope for better days ahead. When 2020 first turned the calendar page I’ll admit to being excited about the new edition of my book being released. It was scheduled for January 6, the feast day of Epiphany, and as it still hasn’t happened, due to the virus crippling the US Copyright office, it’s become an eye opening test of patience. Something my Mother told me never to pray for …

So today’s blog is less about postponing the blog that will announce the new edition is available, by request, at a bookstore near you, and instead addressing the labels of writer vs. author. The general distinction is of course publication. When my first book came out in 1972 “Woof dem Babies Down by Babylon Press, my Father read it and told me I “oughta write”. I told him I just did and that was the last discussion we ever had about my poetry though I’ve told myself nearly every poem I’ve written over the last forty years is for him.

The daydream of becoming a writer carried more staying power than the nightmare of not becoming one, the becoming part more attractive and mysterious than the actual being one. To be a writer the requirements are plain, but to become one invited the notion of response, a real audience, maybe an editor, a byline or writing credit. It seems strange to say now, but timely after four decades, that the becoming phases skipped entirely over the self identifying stage of being an author.

Author came to mean transactional proof of the writing. Semantic shenanigans aside there is something to the conundrum: every author is a writer, but not every writer is an author. The separation, the supposition that there is one, is a temporal perspective. It makes some sense after the fact, but not during the process of writing, of creating. The shock, to me at least, is that authorship does share a root of authority. Consonants have consequence. This thing we do in lines across a page can occasionally, like a deer trail along the ridge, lead to water.

A reader follows the thought, comes to a conclusion, gains perspective. It’s all about the reader and authorship is negotiating the time and space it takes to write as an impetus to entice, engage, and enlist the reader’s time and space in the test tube of experiment and experience. In short I can’t afford to waste your time.

In 2020 I wrote close to one hundred new poems. My editors tell me 20–35 of them are finished. Presentable as small collections. Chapbooks. The marketplace, such as there is, for poetry revolves around publishing a chapbook either by winning a contest, or answering a call for submission. The challenge, as I understand it, is to stand out among hundreds of other poets in the hopes of impressing a few dozen people with autographed copies. Admittedly there’s more to the industry than I am aware, for example it was just a few years ago I was initiated into the realm of submission fees.

I say all that to say I haven’t ‘kept up’ my blog for most of this year because I was chasing an announcement; a prize, a publication, a book release, and had unsubscribed myself from commentary. I gave up my authority as a writer, during a pandemic election year, to study better writers than I, to recalibrate the foundation of my writer’s platform, and to wean myself of the tenet I needed social media followers to get anywhere in publishing.

Shortly before I got banned from Twitter, for suggesting graphically the half baked seditionists in Congress face some terminal consequence, I came across a quote from a famous author I had never heard of either, to wit, “The only thing a writer ought strive to earn is the reader’s attention.”

Thank you if I have indeed earned yours. Folks tell me my website www.schmitbooks.com is inviting. Reviews of my book on Amazon ( which by the way my new publishing contract will give readers alternate ways to secure their copies) and Good Reads have been favorable. A handful of literary journals did accept some of my poems this year. And another group of anthologies told me publishing my own poems on my own website disqualified them from consideration.

I hope to write to you again soon, perhaps even regularly. If you’re reading this you are subscribed and will see Schmitty things in your email. For those of you following along at home, the Schmit hits the fan club is treading water at around 200 readers, of which approximately 25% have copies of Head Lines, leaving the vast majority of you in an anticipatory role for the New Edition. Trust me, you’ll be the first to know when it comes out.