F. X. Mathews is a man who has seen it all–at least as far as publishing and self-publishing is concerned.

Recently it came to my attention that Mathews, one of our self-published authors, has also had some success in the traditional publishing world. He is the author of the self-published The Garden of the Whale-Fishes, and is also the author of The Concrete Judasbird and The Frog in the Bottom of the Well, published by Houghton Mifflin.

Given Mathews’ familiarity with both sides of the publishing industry, I felt his story could be helpful and insightful to many authors who are curious about the “ins and outs” of self-publishing and traditional publishing. Like the contributors to the Writers’ Digest article that I wrote about in the last blog, Mathews explicitly says that being self-published is “not validation” for his writing; he must work “to print . . . the best writing [he's] capable of.” However, Mathews experienced the “well [drying] up” in the traditional publishing industry, and found self-publishing to be an opportunity to make his art come to life.

Not all of the questions I asked him were directly related to publishing, but his answers are interesting, so I thought I’d share them. Enjoy!

Please tell us about yourself.

I was born in Stamford, Connecticut in the depths of the Depression, studied at Fairfield University, and went on to graduate study in English at the University of Wisconsin, where I had the good fortune to show the manuscript of a work-in-progress to the visiting Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen. She recommended the novel to her publisher, Blanche Knopf, who read it, put three other readers on it, and wrote back to me that though they admired the writing, they all agreed that it was not a novel.

Spurred on by the Knopf rejection, I told the head of the department that I was dropping out of the program and going to San Francisco to write another book. (It was 1958 and the Beats were the city.) She argued me out of that folly, pointing out that since I was unlikely to write an important novel before the age of 30, I might as well get the Ph.D. first. I succumbed to academe and stayed on for the degree. The novel went the way of other juvenilia. I went off to teach at Colby College in Waterville, Maine for five years, until a new chairman there urged me not to lose my mobility.

The next 30 years I spent at the University of Rhode Island, where I taught courses in Shakespeare, Joyce, and creative writing, and published two novels with Houghton Mifflin, The Concrete Judasbird and The Frog in the Bottom of the Well. Now I’m retired. When not writing (which is much of the time) I like to empty my mind by digging up the acre with a ferocious joy that borders on madness and making junk sculptures to populate the gardens. I’ve long thought of the novelist as a dump-picker, hoarding scraps of unlikely stuff in the expectation that someday they will coalesce into meaning. And they do. It’s not the raw material that matters; it’s the transformation.

How long have you been writing?

Almost as long as I’ve been reading. My father, who never finished high school, was obsessed with language. (How many fathers go about the house declaiming Blake’s “The Tyger”?) The first item my parents bought after they were married was the complete unabridged Merriam-Webster dictionary on India paper. I remember as a small child being awed by the way my father dispensed words over the dinner table. Other people chattered; he uttered words and crafted them into sentences. I became a writer.

What would you say is the most difficult part of the writing process?

Starting, following through, and finishing. Starting a novel is scary because the world lies all before me, my characters have an infinity of options, and I know it’s going to be a long journey. Somewhere in the middle of a book I experience a crisis of faith and am at risk of becoming preoccupied with leaking gutters and sump pumps. The ending surprises me by coming faster than I expected: the characters have run through most of their options. But “faster” is relative. Because it takes me so long to write a novel, I’m not the same person at the end as the person who initially imagined it. That often results in a confusion of tone. The only way I know out of the dilemma is ruthless revision.

What were your experiences with traditional publishers?

Positive. I sold my first book, without an agent, to Houghton Mifflin, who bought the option on the strength of the first six chapters. When I ran into problems with the completed novel my editor (who was also the editor-in-chief) called me to Boston and we talked about the book. I rewrote the final third, changing it drastically, and the book came out to good reviews and was picked up the next year by Gollancz for an edition in England. My experience with the second novel was similar: a sympathetic editor, good exposure and great reviews in major publications (if less than great sales). What an innocent time that seems like now!

When I went to the well a third time it had dried up—not just at Houghton Mifflin but at all the other major houses the book passed through. The manuscript sits in my closet now, unpublished, and I think, in need of the courage of a serious rewrite.

Why did you decide to self-publish?

Actually, I was an early convert. In 1984 I had finished a book called The Kisses of Joannes Secundus, a modern verse-translation of the erotic poems of a Renaissance Latin poet, and shopped it around to traditional publishers, but let’s get real: what is the audience for a translation of Latin poems, however randy they may be? So I turned myself into The Winecellar Press and learned some of the craft. I designed a cover—front, spine, rear—to the exacting specifications of the photo offset process. I experimented with endless layout sketches (I had no computer), burnishing in each individual letter from transparent letter sheets, an exercise fraught with peril when you make a mistake on the final copy. I blue-pencilled margins on Bristol board and cut and pasted up the text (composed on an IBM Selectric typewriter) with rubber cement, tweezing tiny cut-out letters into place over any typos. I sent it off to a printer and what came back was a beautiful book—Smyth-sewn no less. It was laborious work, but I never regretted it.

My current book—The Garden of the Whale-fishes—is a scrupulously researched novel about the coming of the Black Death to Ireland in 1348. And its a good story; there should be an audience for it. It speaks to the times—both the mediaeval period and it’s set in the anxieties of our own time. But it’s probably not for everyone. I no longer have illusions about a best seller.

Do you have any self-publishing advice for other authors?

There are, of course, no self-published books any more than there are self-written books—only self-publishing authors. OK, that’s a quibble, but the point is that as an author, in a digital age of garbage in garbage out, I have the weighty responsibility of making sure that what I consign to print is the best writing I’m capable of. Publication is not validation; it simply makes the ink permanent.

I began by reading all the contracts I could find online, and decided that Dog Ear’s was the most author-friendly. I particularly liked their position that the digital files belong to [the author] if [he or she] want[s] them. It’s surprising how many houses believe they own the product that you paid them to produce.

Self-publishing is certainly easier now than it was in 1984. This time I was able to work up a cover in Photoshop, though not without some anguished tweaking. Of course you can let the designers handle that. But don’t just put everything on automatic. This should be a collaboration. A lot of things are best done (or at least explored) by the author. Pull the books off your shelf and take a hard look at what physically works and doesn’t work for you, staring with the cover. Measure the pages. Measure the margins. Would you be willing to pay a bit extra for more generous margins? Go to your computer and play with the fonts library; try to settle on a font style and size that best suits your particular material. Read jacket blurbs. For me the most agonizing part was writing the blurb—a trick of perspective, just enough distancing from my own work to describe it, I hoped, with precision yet with passion.

When you get the page proofs (and Dog Ear was particularly conscientious about providing them every step of the way) proofread. And proofread. Then, ideally, find an obsessive-compulsive friend to proofread after you. The problem with doing your own is that you tend to anticipate your own words rather than seeing the actual type. I did that, proofread my copy four times, and still had a few mistakes slip through.

When you get the finished book, and it’s exactly the book you envisioned, you pour a glass of pinot noir and stare at this art object for a long long time, thinking I made this! And it’s true in a deeper sense than if you had simply mailed off some typing.

Why do you write?

I am afraid of dying

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A big thanks goes to F. X. Mathews for sharing his interesting background, as well as lending his perspective on writing and the current state of the book business. If you’d like to learn more about Mathews’ work, click here.

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