Is It Vanity?

— Mark Paxson

I’m reading a book recently published by F.L. Rose, one of my favorite indie writers. The book is called The Point of Us. I’m waiting to complete it before I reach any conclusions about the quality of the story, but I’m pretty certain it’s gonna be a good one. I’m gonna skip the description of what the story is and go right to my question for this post.

One of the main characters in the story is a writer, a pretty successful novelist. At some point, there is a discussion of writers and why they do what they do and the conclusion is … that it is all about vanity.

So … that’s my question. Do we do this for vanity? Do we slave over our stories and put them out into the world for vanity’s sake?

I’m of mixed minds on this. On the one hand, I write strictly for my own internal reasons. I don’t believe it has anything to do with vanity. I write because I want to see if I can do it. Turn an idea that forms in my head into a story with a beginning, middle and end, and is … readable. I don’t know. I write because I want to and I want to see that idea through to the final words.

But then … when I post it on my blog or publish something via the Amazon monolith, why am I doing that? The story hasn’t been blessed by the gatekeepers. No agent picked it up. No publisher. I am swimming free and clear of the gatekeepers and still putting my words out there into the wide, wide world … and why am I doing that?

Why do you do it?

In our last video chat we began a conversation about why we read. Maybe a better question for us indie authors is why do we publish?

Years ago, before technology turned the publishing world upside down, there were vanity publishers. Places a writer could go to pay thousands of dollars to have their book “published,” which typically meant getting boxes and boxes of copies of their books that the authors than had to try to figure out how to sell themselves.

Now, vanity publishers have been replaced with KDP and Ingram Spark and SmashWords and countless other platforms that allow us to publish our books with almost no cost up front. (And there are still companies like the old-fashioned vanity publishers — places that promise to publish your book for a small fee of several thousands of dollars and then leave you hanging with no support, no marketing, no nothing.)

The question remains though, regardless of how easy it has become to publish, why do we do it?

For me, I want to reach readers and hope to grow my audience and get more people reading my stories. But why? What does that mean to me if they do? Why should it matter? Particularly in the modern world of indie publishing, where there are so many books getting published it’s virtually impossible to be seen and to be read by anybody other than those who already know you.

I think there’s some truth to F.L. Rose’s thoughts as expressed in The Point of Us. There is some vanity involved. The first definition of “vanity” is “excessive pride in or admiration of one’s own appearance or achievements.”

When I read that definition, I begin to reconsider the idea that I publish for vanity. I’m far from “excessive pride in or admiration” of my writing. But I typically do like the end result. My biggest reason for publishing and sharing my stories is to … just put them out there and see if readers like what I’ve come up with. But still, there is a feeling of confirmation when I get a positive review, there is still a good feeling in the cockles of my heart when somebody has something good to say about something I’ve written. If I were to publish and none of those good things were ever said or shared with me … if I just published into a void without reaction or response … I most likely would stop publishing. And if I stopped publishing, I’d stop writing. Because at the end of the day, I write to share and to get a reaction.

Is that vanity?

Is that why we write and why we publish?