On toward dawn late in December in 2007 I was in Paris and had been reading because I had awakened and couldn't get back to sleep. Every couple years during my times in Paris I read A moveable Feast. On this particular morning, as I was about to complete the book something that Hemingway said set off a chain reaction of thoughts and ideas that I had to write down. Since I had taken my computer with me to Paris, I jumped out of bed, turned on the ThinkPad and hammered out a few paragraphs. Then I got another glass of calvados, another book and went back to bed.
I read what it was that I had written after breakfast later that morning and was pleased to discover that, unlike virtually all of the apparently inspired things that I have ever been known to write on toward dawn, what I had written this time hadn't dissolved in the interim into mindless drivel.
That notwithstanding, I didn't draw any deep conclusions about the existence of the small document; it just felt good to have written something in an apparently inspired moment and have it stand up to the light of day.
Then something happened that gave it more immediate importance. Patty, my sister, sent me an email that sounded as if she had read what I had written. Her thoughts were eerily parallel to mine.
So I responded and attached the Word document that I had produced and asked her opinion. Being, I suppose, a loyal sister, she replied that it was good and had left her wanting more. Specifically, she wanted to know where my opening few paragraphs might ultimately lead.
So did I.
A year later, again in Paris, the thing had become 19 chapters of a memoir. By the following May it had been finished at 25 chapters. Since then I have put it through five revisions and have self published on lulu.com.
But there is more.
Suddenly possessing something that I had always believed I could produce, but having never gotten beyond drivel, I needed to engage the publishing establishment. During the majority of my life in which the existence of a book to be offered for publication had remained a pipedream, the publishing step had seemed a no-brainer. Over the last several months I have learned in depth the untruth of that belief.
That untruth can be distilled into one word: "platform".
Here is what I have been told about "platform.
"Platform" is what famous people have. If they can manage to put something on paper, or get someone else to put it there for them some publisher will publish it. "Platform" is also what experts in various fields have. "Platform" is what captains of industry or scions of the educational establishment have. "Platform" is what one who has had the bad – or good – fortune to be the pilot of a plane that has just flown through a flock of geese has.
"Platform" is what numerous agents and various publishing industry hangers-on tell me that I lack. And that lack makes what I have written by definition of no possible interest to the publishing community. "If you had written about vampires, perhaps; but a tale spanning the last sixty years, and you with no platform? Not possible."
"But", they say, "one can try to remedy that problem. To build platform get as many followers on Twitter as possible. Have hoards of friends on FaceBook. Be a blogger. Have a Web site. Write and submit learned articles to learned publications."
Does anybody really pay any attention to Twitter? Do the hoard of the self-absorbed who post their ongoing inanities on FaceBook ever read what anyone else except their proprietary inner circle of fellow cretins post on the site? Is a person with absolutely no platform going to have any better luck getting published in learned publications?
But I have a book and I am going to get the attention of the publishing community or go down in flames trying.
So I am on Twitter and FaceBook and I have brought up my Web site – noelmckeehan.com. And I am employing what amounts to guerrilla tactics by self-publishing. I have purchased a distribution package that includes distribution, not only on Lulu.com, but also on Amazon, BarnesandNoble and Ingram.
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