You have been reading all of the accounts of publishing on the web, POD publications, and the great success of  Still Alive, the novel about a Harvard professor with Alzheimer’s disease that no commercial publisher wanted to buy. The author went ahead and published it POD, that is self-publishing via a Web-based company (iUniverse) for $450, and after the novel received a few good reviews, Simon & Schuster bought the novel and now it is on The New York Times Bestsellers List.
It could happen to you!
My guess is that someday all books will be published POD. It will save a lot of trees, and with the world moving away from print, and depending on handheld electronic devices we carry in our pocket, soon books–as we know them!–will be a thing of the past.
Books are being “published” at a rapid rate on line. Since its beginnings in 2002, Lulu.com, for example, has digitally published more than 820,000 titles. They add about 5,000 book a week. (Who has time to read all of those books?)
There are plenty of digital publishers. iUniverse seems to be the favorite of RPCV writers; others have a corner of the market: Lulu, Author Solutions, and the ‘academic’ PublishAmerica to name three.
A few years ago BookSurge wanted PeaceCorpsWriters to start a line of “Peace Corps Books” that we would sponsor and promote, but I was reading too many books that I thought needed too much editing so I passed on that opportunity.
The bottom line is that very, very few publishers are interested in ”Peace Corps memoir” fifty years after the start of the agency. The  Peace Corps Volunteer is now a ‘type’ in the plot of some novels.   Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald famous line? “Begin with a character and you’ll create a type; begin with a type, and you will created nothing.”
Enough said.

If the Peace Corps did anything, it turned us into readers and we are better for it. But being a reader doesn’t make us writers. That’s the rub. Having a great (or not so great) Peace Corps experience doesn’t make us writers either, though it might help when it comes to telling stories late at night in some bar. Being an English major doesn’t make one a writer, and it can even hurt a PCV writer, having read (and then trying to write like) one of those great writers from lit classes.

Then there is the problem of too many books being published. In 2008, there were 45,000 novels published, up 17% from 2007. Altogether, there were 311,000 new titles and editions published in 2007. Add that number to all those POD books (print-on-demand) books that anyone can get published for a few hundred dollars and who has dreams of being an “author.”

What I see at Peace Corps Writers are a lot of self-published books that have very limited value and aren’t well written. For example, some RPCVs think that they can collect all those letters home, slap them together, add a few grainy black-and-white-photos, and have a book. Rarely, are those letters home worth reading.

The other Peace Corps genre, if you want to call it that, are journals kept and published as memoirs. You know, you really have to be a pretty good writer to make a book like that  be of interest to anyone beyond your immediate family. They do have value as historical documents, and might someday be extremely useful to someone researching the Peace Corps, but seldom are they worth reading for language or literature.

I can pick up a Peace Corps book and know within two or three pages if the book is worth reading. It has to be, first of all, stylistically interesting. It needs interesting sentences, new ideas, and vivid descriptions. I need to sense that the writer is in control of his or her language and in control of the story being told.

For example, here is an example of a good opening, written with vivid language:

It was nearly three o’clock in the afternoon when the train reached Awash station in the fierce African heat. The plain was white with dust. In the distance a few antelope and gazelle grazed on the dun-colored grass growing along the volcanic rock that littered the ballast bed. The steel rails shone like knives in the sunlight and bisected the plain as straight and true as a plumb line.”

This writing is something that cannot be taught. If you don’t have that gift, you can’t learn it.

That said, I have come across examples of self-published books about the Peace Corps that are fascinating in their simple narrative power. They prove the exception to the rule. One was a journal kept by a young Peace Corps doctor, Milt Kogan, in Ouagadougou, Upper Volta,(Burkina Faso) back in the early ’70s called Diary of Ouagadougou Doc. The other book is a collection of letters written home from Gemu Gofa, Ethiopia, by a young couple — Sue and Brad Coady — who spent the first three years of their married life in the remote southern region of the Empire. These letters were collected, edited, and self published with the title Three Years in Gemu Gofa by Irma Grigg, the woman’s mother, as a labor of love, as a gesture of pride in what her daughter and new son-in-law had achieved as Super Vols in Southern Ethiopia. (A copy of the book is selling on Amazon for $450.)

Both books came to me by chance and, I know, that out there in attics and basements, forgotten in back rooms of local libraries and small museums, are more tales by Peace Corps Volunteers or staff, all of them small treasures that someday, I hope, will find an audience. But if not, if they are read just by the sons and daughters and grandchildren, well then, we’ll teaching our own about the Peace Corps years before these children were only dreams in their mothers’ eyes.

There is an interesting front-page story in the New York Times today, Wednesday, January 28, 2009, about the growth of self-published books. The growth in self-published (or POD books, i.e., print-on-demand books) comes at a time, the article says, when “traditional publishers look to prune their booklists and rely increasingly on blockbuster best sellers.” A new study by the National Endowment for the Arts reports that while more people are reading literary fiction, fewer of them are reading books. According to Cathy Langer, lead buyer for the Tattered Cover bookstores in Denver, “People think that just because they’ve written something, there’s a market for it. It’s not true.”

The article has a few great success stories. Lisa Genova wrote a novel about a woman with Alzheimer’s disease. It was turned down by 100 literary agents. She paid $450 to iUniverse to publish the book and sold copies to independent bookstores. A fellow author showed it to her agent and she eventually sold Still Alice for a mid-six-figure advance to Pocket Books and the book has now made the New York Times best seller list. I see a lot of POD books. My guess that of the 1000 plus authors who are listed on our site: www.peacecorpswriters.org, some 800 of them have written ‘self-published book” about their Peace Corps tours. I’m all for these books. They capture a time and place and an experience and someday these books will be used by scholars who want to write about this experiment, the Peace Corps. I regret that most of the authors don’t spend time (or hire someone) to edit their books. When a book is published by a commercial, academic or small press a lot of time, attention and skills are involved to make the book readable. Many of the Peace Corps novels and memoirs I see have the look of first drafts. All of them would be better books if more time was spent working on the text. The next major problem of all authors (commercial and otherwise) is getting people to know you have written a book and that it is available to buy. With the closing of more and more bookstores, soon there won’t be anyplace to sell a copy but the Internet, at conferences or meetings.

To help the Peace Corps authors find an audience, we will have a feature on our new website: www.peacecorpsworldwide.org where writers will be able to display their books. The “Peace Corps Booklocker” is just one of the many new features coming with our expanded Peace Corps Writers site. The site will be fully operational on March 1, 2009. Peace Corps Day! If you’d like your book(s) listed in this special section of the site, let me know.