The Year of the Elm

If I had to pinpoint when I finally decided to head down the self-publishing road, there is no question that impetus occurred as a result of writing this collection of short stories. I wrote the first story decades ago, with no thought to writing a second, but then a second story showed up, and a third, and after a while I had a dozen contemporaneous stories about the same little boy. When I contacted agents and publishers about the collection, however, I invariably received the same response. No one published short story collections, and if I wanted anyone to sign me as a client I would have to convert those episodic stories into a novel to satisfy the demands of the market.

While I was grateful for that insight into the brute realities of the publishing industry, I also believed in the structure of the work as it was, and I didn’t want to lose the effect that my authorial choices had on the reader. I have never written under the flag of art because that banner is itself routinely co-opted by the whims of the marketplace, but I am a firm believer in craft, and I could not convince myself that a novel was the best form for those stories or that character. In another era my conviction would have consigned the collection to a desk drawer, but with the advent of self-publishing — as differentiated from what was then known as vanity publishing — I could finally convey the work to readers as originally intended.

The first edition of The Year of the Elm was produced in 2010 on CreateSpace, an entirely distinct subsidiary of Amazon. If you dig around on this site you’ll find all sorts of posts exploring and debating every aspect of that initial foray into self-publishing, from pricing to cover art to ISBN registration and everything in between. And that would have been the end of it, save two related events which transpired over the past few years. First, and most importantly, Amazon killed off CreateSpace as an independent subsidiary and converted the entire CreateSpace catalogue into KDP titles. Second, while I was thinking about moving The Year of the Elm to a new self-publishing platform, I made the mistake of reading through the collection to see if there were any formatting or publishing changes I might want to make. Which is when I also discovered several glaring and hilarious botanical errors that had previously escaped my notice.

Now, if you’re not a writer yourself you won’t know this, but no work is ever really finished. Instead, you just get to a point where you either stop or go insane, and for that reason, if you’re smart, you don’t ever revisit old texts. Having proven myself not so smart with The Year of the Elm, I went ahead and fixed everything that was broken, adjusted the formatting, tweaked the cover, and otherwise improved the work and book in a dozen little ways that most people never would have noticed in the first place. And hopefully that will prevent me from making the same mistake again — at least until the next round of corporate upheaval in the self-publishing space.

Despite all of the time and effort over the years, however, I don’t regret any of it because I learned a lot. I’m also glad I decided to protect the integrity of the collection, whatever that may or may not have meant in terms of writing as a career. And I say that because one of those short stories is probably the best piece of fiction I ever wrote, and if I had smudged and smeared the stories into a novel I think I would have inevitably diminished the effect of that story, and of the collection overall.

— Mark Barrett