Mornin’ my writing friends… I love a good old-fashioned grouch. Particularly a creative one. Most particularly a writer. And certainly when that person is David Mamet.

“Basically I am doing this because I am a curmudgeon, and because publishing is like Hollywood — nobody ever does the marketing they promise.” – David Mamet

David Mamet, bad boy of theatre, film and television — do you have any idea how many brilliant scripts this man has written? (Oleanna, Glengarry Glen Ross, American Buffalo, Speed the Plow, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, The Verdict, Wag the Dog, The Untouchables * … *Hill Street Blues) — has finally decided to self publish. As far as I am concerned this is big news because he’s basically an anarchist, and you know what that means…there never is just one anarchist (his latest play, The Anarchist, was panned on Broadway, by the way…)

Frankly, I never expected successful writers with traditional imprints to abandon the time-honored publishing world and take to the backstreets of digital self-publishing when digital was in its infancy. This would be like abandoning the country club to play golf on the Utah scrub with scorpions crawling up your pant legs.

But…when writers pour the contents of their creative spirits out onto blank page after blank page after blank page, Yes, they do expect to have some input into the publicity, marketing and selling of their books…and that input is often not welcome by publishers these days.

_”For certain clients, self-publishing “returns a degree of control to authors who have been frustrated about how their ideas for marketing and publicity fare at traditional publishers.” – Sloan Harris, co-Director, ICM’s literary department

Mamet is always exploring, pushing, testing, investigating. Never playing it safe. I hope this decision will be good for digital publishing. And all of the other talented anarchist writers who want to have a say in how their work is marketed.

BTW…if you are an actor, you should get Mamet’s actor’s handbook, True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor. Actually, you should get it if you are an actor or a writer…because Truth and Falsehood affect spoken and written words.

Have a grumpy day…

GM

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/17/business/media/david-mamet-and-other-big-authors-choose-to-self-publish.html?hp