Matt Bell, what does online publishing mean to you?

We’re four days into the season of light and our discussion by literary luminaries on the importance and usefulness of online publication and whether “instaneousness” trumps “sancrosanctity.”

Get up to speed on the conversation:
Monday, Rick Rofihe and Rick Moody began the discussion.
Tuesday, Matt Stewart lit up the dialogue.
Wednesday, Deltina Hay shined on.
Today, the conversation continues. . .

Matt Bell, what does online publishing mean to you?

Matt Bell answers:

I grew up in the middle of Michigan, in a small rural town situated between two small cities.

The only bookstores I knew of were in those cities: One was a Waldenbooks in a mall. One was a used book store specializing in paperback romances with an assortment of other genres around the periphery.

In high school, the most contemporary work we read was Grapes of Wrath, published sixty years earlier.

My professors at the small university I attended in one of the small nearby cities didn’t know any of the writers I was reading, so I thought people like Denis Johnson and Dennis Cooper and David Foster Wallace must not be very well known, even though they were better writers than anyone I’d ever read before. I didn’t understand why the books I loved were so unknown, and I didn’t know how to get more books like them, or what genre those books even were. I’d only managed to find out about these three at random: Johnson showed up in an interview with Chuck Palahniuk; Cooper’s Guide was given to me by a friend who had been given it by a friend; Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men I bought off the shelf on the strength of the title and that unforgettable cover.

What does a person who wants to be a writer do in a situation like that?

Maybe nothing. Maybe he never becomes a writer or an interesting reader. Maybe he keeps buying his books at chains and big box stores, choosing from the same twenty-five or fifty books everyone else is reading. Before the Internet, that probably would have been my case, but, thanks to the explosive growth of the Internet, it wasn’t. At the beginning of the decade, almost ten years ago, I found the online world of literary publishing, and what I found there was revelatory: all these magazines publishing short fiction and poetry and essays. I immediately started reading as many of them as I could.

Before this, I didn’t even know such a thing existed, because I had never seen a literary magazine. I was that isolated as a writer. Nowhere I bought reading material stocked journals and none of the instructors I’d had so far told me about them.

From there, I started finding out that there were other people reading the books I was reading, writing the kinds of stories I wanted to be writing. I started meeting some of them at places like Zoetrope, and others I came to know through their own websites. I got to discuss books I loved with people who loved them. I got to share my own writing with people who also needed peers and writing group partners.

It’s not exactly online publishing, but the Internet also gave me Amazon, and Amazon gave me entry to a world of books which I might not have otherwise been able to access. As much talk as there is about what Amazon’s rise has done to independent booksellers—and I agree, it’s not been good for them—it gave me access to books I could never have bought where I lived, so that I might continue to broaden my reading (and therefore my writing).

In many ways, you could say that without the Internet and online publishing, I never would have become a writer. It’s even less likely that I would have become a book reviewer or literary journal editor, as those worlds were even further away from where I was.

More than anything else, online publishing gave me access to the literature I needed to read, and also to the community of fellow readers and writers I need to do that reading with. If it hadn’t been for the online publishing world—and the web of personal connections that radiates from that world—I don’t know what I’d be doing now. Maybe I’d still be writing, but I wouldn’t be the same writer.

In the end, I’m not a person who enjoys the debate about whether online publishing is as good as print, or whether it’s the future of literature. For me, online publishing isn’t something mutually exclusive from print. It doesn’t necessarily have different goals, and it certainly reflects the same range of quality and aesthetics that the print publishing world does. It’s an option, but it isn’t the only one (and shouldn’t be).

The one place where online publishing inarguably trumps print publishing is access. Anyone with an Internet connection can read and publish online and—thanks to blogs and social networking and email and so on—can then participate in the community that surrounds that reading and publishing. Without a doubt, this access allowed me to become a writer and a reader and an editor in way that the world of print literary publishing alone might never have, simply because its borders did not previously extend to the places I called home.

Matt Bell is the author of How They Were Found, forthcoming in Fall 2010 from Keyhole Press. His fiction appears in magazines such as Conjunctions, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Gulf Coast, and Unsaid. He edits the online journal The Collagist and he’s the series editor of Dzanc’s Best of the Web anthology series. He can be found online at www.mdbell.com.

Check back tomorrow—we’ll be posting up new thoughts from writers on online publishing all week.