Punk Rock Ethos & Self-Publishing

“If you want something done right, do it yourself.”

- Old proverb

I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to cover this subject for a while. Now, thanks to April Hamilton – a.k.a. @indieauthor – and a link she just posted on Twitter, I think it’s the right time to talk about punk rock and self-publishing.

Since I halted my career as an independent animator and started to focus on my writing, I’ve been reading everything I can find about the current state of affairs in the world of book publishing. One of the ugliest feuds right now is between the publishing companies and professionals, and the self-publishing companies like lulu.com that print and sell books without editing.

The link Mrs. Hamilton twitted pointed to an article by Rose Fox, a professional reader and book analyst, criticizing people who self-published books. Her article, entitled “I Don’t Want To Hate Self-Publishers”, starts with two quotes; phrases she hears all the time coming from people who publish their own books. One of the sentences read:

“I’d love to see self-publishing have a similar vibe to it as punk rock – anyone can do it.”

And then she adds her view of that statement:

I know next to nothing about punk rock and I’m still pretty sure that that “anyone can do it” line is not only wrong but offensively wrong to people who do know anything about punk rock.

I also can’t see how it promotes self-publishing in any way at all, as the idea of “anyone” attempting to play punk rock only makes me want to cringe and cover my ears, much like the idea of “anyone” attempting to publish a book.

There’s plenty to criticize in both the recording industry and the publishing industry, but there’s also a lot of value in putting your raw creative endeavors in the hands of people who do things like produce albums and edit books for a living.

I am glad that she started her comment by confirming she knows ‘next to nothing’ about punk rock. Being born and raised in punk rock, I feel in the position to enlighten her shadowy views on that remark about ‘anyone’ being able to do it.

This assertion is not by any means offensive to punk rockers. Quite au contraire, it is one of the pillars of the entire punk rock experience.

Black Flag always did everything by themselves. After leaving the band, Henry Rollins became a writer and... book editor!

When punk rock first appear with this name, in mid-197os New York city, it was basically a bunch of amateur unsigned rock bands who wanted to make music. Back then, Disco music was the norm, and studio execs didn’t care much about rock, unless it was something gigantic and popular like Peter Frampton, or elaborate and complex like progressive rock. If you were just an average lower-middle-class bored kid with close-to-none access to musical education, making music was not a realistic option for you.

But even so, punk rock was born. It didn’t start like an organized movement, but more like a philosophy of how to do things. Bands like the Ramones, the Dead Boys and the Talking Heads had to play in an almost abandoned music venue called CBGB (an acronym for Country, Blue Grass and Blues) simply because no other place would accept them. But they did, anyway, and a lot of people love them.

After the Ramones toured the USA and the UK in 1977, hordes of bored kids who wanted to rock bought or stole whatever instruments they could grab and started making their own rock music. They had no musical education, no media training and no producing values–but they sure had a lot of fun, and ended up creating timeless and enduring pieces of music.

The trick behind the success of punk rock back in the late 1970s and 1980s was simple: besides it being fun, thought-provoking and stimulating, you didn’t have to spend a lot of money or a lot of time to become a punk rocker. Clubs, tapes, instruments, magazines, records–everything was cheap, and felt very true to the soul. And also, at least in the beginning, on those long lost days of punk rock Alcion, you didn’t have to follow any rulebooks, or please the masses. It was a raw and free art form, and no matter what you were looking for (artistic expression, free beer, making new friends) you could get it out of punk rock.

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Self-published punk zines.

What does all this has to do with self-publishing books? Well, first of all, the very name of this thing called ‘punk rock’ came out of a self-published magazine. “Punk” was created by a cartoonist, a publisher and a journalist in 1975. All of them were independent, self-employed, eager and curious. Their fanzine went on to become one of the most important artistic statements of the late XX century, and is still imitated, revered and plagiarized.

Fanzines in general have also become a staple (no pun intended!) of the punk rock subculture, and thousands of them have been printed since then. I have been personally involved in many a punk zine, and my entire career as an artist spawned from my amateur experiments with self-publishing those little pieces of folded A4 paper I gave out for free or sold cheaply at concerts, clubs and gatherings. I am not an exception, and have met dozens of people who did the same path as I did, not to mention the literally hundreds of visual artists I’ve heard or read about who first became interested in graphic design and printing through punk or geek fanzines.

The thrill of it all? Exactly the same as with the punk rock bands. We did everything by ourselves, for ourselves, with no restraints other than the financial and technological. This led to extremely experimental solutions that became part of modern design language, xerox art, etc.

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The Mecca of Punk Rock in its heyday.

In Mrs. Fox’s rant, she says that “the idea of ‘anyone’ attempting to play punk rock only makes [her] want to cringe and cover [her] ears”. She is completely missing the point here: that ‘anyone’ who can play punk rock is not supposed to be some stupid person, but literally everyone–including herself! Why cover her ears, when she could pick up the guitar and play it?

That is the main thing about the “do it yourself” ethics. Instead of complaining, you can go up there and do your own thing. Do you wish there was a punk rock band singing about 1950s sci-fi movies? The Misfits did, and so they created their band, and became one of the most enduring acts in the history of punk rock. Some English kids wanted to mix punk rock with reggae, and also make its lyrics more politically interesting, and thus The Clash was born. Girls who couldn’t even tune up their guitars created The Slits and became the heroines of many punk girls around the world. Some people even thought that punk rock records should be released by punk rock labels, and so companies like Dischord and Alternative Tentacles came to be.

Some people always think that, as a rule of thumb, all open or free software is supposed to be faulty and difficult to use. Or that any independent band is supposed to be loud and irritating. Or that every self-published book is supposed to be bad. In most of the case, it is true, but this is not always true. And, frankly, most movies that come from professional Hollywood studios suck too, so just because something was released through a company or have been managed by professionals, it doesn’t mean it is good.

But the biggest problem with this mentality is the philosophical thinking behind it. People say that, in punk rock music, anyone can play an instrument. Isn’t that great? Isn’t that wonderful? Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone could make their own music, write their own books, paint their own pictures, just like they cook their own food?

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Before “putting [our] raw creative endeavors in the hands of people who do things like produce albums and edit books for a living”, it should be OK for all of us to have some fun and develop our skills in our art, with self-created and self-marketed works. Mrs. Fox’s rant sounds like she’s afraid of losing her job, specially because she ends with ‘for a living’. As if we should feel sorry about all the professional readers and editors who will lose their jobs if people start self-publishing their books. But everybody loves to say that their profession is absolutely necessary for the maintanance of Civilization, and that the entire world would crumble and fall apart if they lost their job. I hear that everyday from people of every single profession you can imagine, and I simply ignore it. Corporatism is very boring.

Instead of having such a bad attitude towards self-publishing, editors and publishing houses should be more positive about it. Let me put this in a more optimistic way. Every day I read dozens of blog posts and articles where editors complain about how they have to go through 100 book queries every day. They love to say how difficult their job is, how stupid amateur writers are, how hard they have to work to throw some paper leaves around their desk, etc. As if separating letters into piles was the most difficult job in the world, much worse than mining or mine sweeping.

Well, what if self-publishing drive most of these amateur writers away from editors? They will just look for an easier way of publishing their work, leaving editors with only a few professional writers to work with. No more stupid book proposals, no more gigantic and stupid query letters – only a couple good projects to read every day, and nothing more. Professional writers and professional editors, free to chat about their jobs, without all those pestering little amateurs getting in their way. Wouldn’t it be great?

Or do these people just love to whine and complain all of the fucking time? Because, seriously, from the last 20 blogs I’ve read, that is all they do with their lives.

The world needs less complaining and more people reading books. How can we achieve that?