Really, is this what the goal is, and/or is this what the goal should be? And if so, how to attain Google-ability?
This comes up as I have been preparing for the PAWA Submitting Your Work for Publication workshop. I have been asking other writers questions about what some issues and hang-up’s around publication are. Google-ability has come up.
I believe that’s beyond publishing, not necessarily a separate issue, but one that detracts from the core work and efforts of publishing.
That said, I do believe in maintaining a steady and professional web presence. This is why I have this website (and all these ancillary sites: FB, Twitter, Goodreads, etc. Really, look at all these places, though I can only realistically be active in one or two, and just have RSS feeds lead back here), which I should be updating more regularly than I do. I used to post here nearly daily, but that’s becoming impossible.
So I too work to achieve Google-ability through maintaining (and meta tagging) this website and blog, where I am responsible for its content, its being thorough and updated regularly with all things professional: teaching, writing, publishing, editing, curating. Talking to a fellow author recently, he told be he’s become wary of divulging online the details about his personal life, and we briefly discussed whether blogging about going to the movies was personal or professional. I said it’s cultural, akin to discussing what musical or literary offerings we are currently enjoying.
“Cultural” is a vast, sweeping category that also toes the line between public and personal, and can include food (farmers markets, Filipino home cooking, and restaurants), gardening, my fascination with LOTR, professional wrestling, superhero blockbusters, sci-fi, samurai films and Manny Pacquiao, i.e. pop culture phenomena. Sometimes these things are relevant to my writing, teaching, editing, and sometimes not so much.
I really do believe primarily striving for Google-ability detracts from the core work and concern of publishing. To me, this preoccupation with Google-ability speaks to what I mentioned in my previous blog post:
…there’s so much interest in self-promotion, in being recognized, so much desire to be given props and praise …
And that’s related to what Sunny Vergara blogged about “those people,” “the self-promoter, a schmoozer, a networker.” To be fair, the suggestion offered (to strive for Google-ability) was to focus only on submitting to online publications, never print-only publications, but the words “only,” and “never,” raise my eyebrows, especially when I believe in being ourselves diverse as writers, in reaching and connecting with various audiences and readerships in varied and various circles.
I am interested in finding/having a place within various and intersecting literary traditions — as an author that is a woman, a Filipino American, an Asian Pacific Islander American, a person of color, a woman of color, an American. I am also a writer of the Pacific Rim, of Oakland, of the Bay Area, of California. My poems are political, feminist, multilingual. I’ve dabbled in experimental poetry. My physical venues are local, national, grassroots, academic. They are indie bookstores, public libraries, universities, community centers, cultural centers, art museums. My publication venues are local, national, international; zines, journals, anthologies, chapbooks, books; print, online, multimedia.
These are no big, new revelations I’m making here as I state the obvious. I want to reach readers in various spaces. I want my work in classrooms and that is why traditional publication is important to me. I want my work accessible to anyone with internet access (and here I don’t mean necessarily owning their own computers, and also, folks may not be able to afford to buy lots of print publications — journals, magazines, chapbooks, books, anthologies), and this is why online publication is also important to me.
That said, aren’t our goals larger than Google and web presence? Or perhaps I should have first asked: Why publish? Why do you want to publish?
I want to publish because I find it preferable to writing for (speaking to) the walls of the room around me. Writing can, of course, be an entirely or mostly private thing, done mainly as a kind of therapy or private journal writing, to sort out ideas and feelings and experiences, etc. I’m sure my poems and other writing have elements of that, I tend to think everyone’s does, though that’s not the main reason I write.
And publishing (as distinguished from reading to audiences, which I also like to do) has the advantage of creating a record that can (at least theoretically) last longer than the moment of the writing. My feeling is that print publication still has potentially longer lifespan than online publication. Poems published in print may ultimately reach a smaller number of people than poems published online, though they (for now anyway) have a greater potential to stay in the world long-term. (The epic of Gilgamesh, what we have at it, still survives on the broken pieces of ancient clay tablets.)
Whereas poems published online have the potential of reaching a much larger number of people, though the ultimate lifespan of things published online seems to be a unknown so far. In general things published online seem to me to be surrounded by the inherent greater ephemerality of the internet and of computers as a medium in general.
I find that if I’m not intentionally going and reading what’s in someone’s website, the content of the website tends not to have much reality for me, tends to disappear or fade from my awareness. A print book is much harder to forget about.
A poet friend had her first book published some years back. She was walking across a busy street here in the city, and suddenly noticed that her book was in the front window of a bookstore across the street. She was so caught up in the moment that she stopped walking in the middle of the street, and a car passing close to her ran over her foot, broke her foot.
She recovered fine from the injury, and as far as I know she tells it now as a funny story. Still I can’t help wondering if she would have been pulled up short in a similar way merely from finding that her name came up in a Google search.
for me, it all boils down to one question: what do you want? and because i neither want to be unaware or an (accidental?) hypocrite, i also want to know why i want what i want.
we might think the pursuit of publication is a natural outgrowth of a deepening commitment to writing, but it’s not. it’s a decision we make and keep making. if on it’s own, writing was enough, then there’d be no need to subject ourselves to the work of researching/submitting/publishing/promoting/etc.
i’ve met writers who were in it for fame and money, for the ‘writer’s life’. writers who wrote to heal, who wrote to stay sane. writers who wrote to lie to themselves or to others. writers for whom writing is a spiritual practice. writers who write in order to speak for their ancestors, for their communities. writers for whom writing is activism. writers who fell in love with the written word and wanted to join their own words, their own books, to the larger conversation all books are in with each other. writers who wrote to escape. writers who wrote to invent worlds.
for all of them, i think publishing had a different purpose.
a long time ago, i was talking to a small circle of women writers, all of just starting to contemplate sending our work out. i remember how taken aback they were by how fiercely i said i wanted to be published, wanted a book,wanted fame and prizes. they could understand the first two…but the last part of that made them recoil. and i explained then–and it still stands as my reasoning today– they didn’t understand my position. they were women who didn’t work full-time jobs, already comfortably retired for a decade or whose husbands made a comfortable living. i was working two, three jobs. later, i had an adult dependent and medical expenses and other bills to worry about. i told them i wanted them only because they’d allow me to write more, maybe to work less at bread and butter jobs, and they’d make it more possible for me to work on other projects. in a very practical sense, i know every publication, every book, every prize, opens the door a little wider…to sharing my work, to having the time and opportunities to do more writing, to secure funding for literary/artistic projects, to travel, quite simply–to do more.
and that was way before considerations like– who am i going to seek out to publish my work? online…in print…community/indie journals…small presses…zines…big names only…domestic? international? what language(s)?
and as the publication credits grow, who accepted what? and as a writer of color, as a woman writer, as a non-mfa writer, as a bilingual writer–what audiences were you expecting and which ones were surprises and will more doors open to larger presses and well known journals as the CV grows?
nowadays, i’m thinking it’s important for the answers to ‘why do you write?’ ‘who do you write for?’ ‘why do you publish?’ to be aligned with one’s actions as a writer, as a public person. this may be an exercise in futility cause for all i know i’m going to die in obscurity or we’ll all be eaten by post-apocalyptic zombies….but if i’m going to say that i’m writing because i must, because i want to reach for individual/community healing/wholeness/conciencia, because it is a spiritual practice…then what does publishing mean to me, what does self-promotion mean to me, what will i do with any measure of speaking/influence/power?
and that’s something i wanted to touch on last week when i was Facebooking on the subject of rejections, acceptances, and the importance of not having one’s equilibrium/purpose rocked by the yes’s or the no’s. i’m not sure anyone but Oscar understood what i was trying to get at. i didn’t want reassurance after a bout of rejections–i wanted to talk about the dangers of publication/prizes/fame. i want them but i don’t want to overly identify with them. i am idealistic. i want my writing to be pure. i don’t want what i say to be affected by ‘the market’ and what’s on the best-seller list. i don’t want to be swayed by what i think major journals/reviews would want me to write. i’ve fought damned hard for the voice i have and for the writing i’ve done. and for me, it’s important to share it…and so, i created a website and i’m on facebook because i want to be found if anyone wants to look for me…imagined or real community of writers, imagined or real community of readers.
*thanks for the chance to share these thoughts….