More of this Feature • Chapbooks and Zines • E-books and AvantGo • Conclusions and Zine-Friendly Bookstores

One of the truly great things about being a writer in this modern age is the opportunity to present your work directly to your audience, without the necessity of middlemen. Gone are the days when poets would sit with baited breath while the cultural elite -- gatekeepers of the holy academic journals and smartass urban rags worldwide -- sat in their ivory towers and single-handedly decided which contemporary writers were “worthy” enough to be introduced to a mass audience.

Today writers regularly sell up to 10,000 copies of their work armed with nothing but a pair of scissors, a well-worn glue stick and a shoplift-happy friend working the night shift at the local Kinko's. Add a thousand bucks and a basic understanding of Quark XPress, and you have a book virtually indistinguishable from the latest release by Simon and Shuster. Add a knowledge of HTML and a free Geocities web page and you have a virtual empire, disseminating your work to millions of literature-hungry readers around the world.

But even with the ease of production in our contemporary times, a question still often comes up which stops many self-publishing writers from achieving their true potential -- namely, how do you take your zines, your chapbooks, your Microsoft Word documents, and actually get them into the hands of your audience? The question becomes one not of self-publishing but self-distributing, a part of the process equally important but sadly overlooked by many in the underground literary scene.

Barring the opportunity to sell your work at live shows, on tour and out of your backpack (the power of which, incidentally, should not be overlooked. . . but that's a whole other article), and with the assumption that most people reading this online article are already familiar with the benefits of owning one's own Web site, I would like to focus on two means of distributing your homemade product directly to the masses. One is decidedly old-skool and has been around for decades, although it's no less important now than it was then. The other is pointedly new-media and takes advantage of the latest technological breakthroughs. Both have the power to radically expand the number of people reading and buying your work.

Jason Pettus

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