commerce, self-publishing, and GHOST IN THE ASHES

Andrew Fox has an interesting post about the intersection of commerce with science fiction and self-publishing.

This amused me because in GHOST IN THE ASHES, Caina essentially becomes a small business owner. Opening the Imperial capital’s first coffeehouse isn’t an end to itself, but a method to collect information of interest to the Ghosts and the Emperor. (This has a basis in history, actually – when coffeehouses began opening in the Ottoman Empire and in western Europe during the Early Modern period, they quickly became loci of political intrigue.) One of the subplots of GHOST IN THE ASHES is that Caina finds she actually likes running the coffeehouse, and is worried that her assumed identity is going to subsume her.

But to more contemporary concerns, a self-publisher writer really has to think of himself as a small business owner. Essentially, you’ve become your own publisher, and you have to think of yourself like that. Even before the advent of ebooks, I never cared for the idea of a writer as this sort of “artist” disconnected from the concerns of reality, scratching away at a notebook in a coffeehouse (perhaps one owned by Caina Amalas).

Self-publishing is an excellent way for a writer to cure himself of that conceit.

-JM