(Sort of an early Halloween image…)
So, how are your plans coming along, for when you meet that great Editor in the sky? Everything all nice and tidy about your books, not just your conscience?
Sigh…
One great benefit about traditional publishing is that it is executed by an artificial entity – a corporation with employees and (theoretically) a more permanent life than your own. In reality, trad publishing entities can choose to not publish your work any time, be acquired by other entities with other goals, dissolve into bankruptcy, or simply go out of business by choice.
Just like you, when you go out of the living business.
Well, maybe you can just turn your self-publishing business over to your heirs. Surely, at the least, they can just passively track the revenues. Maybe they can’t step up to marketing and format changes and all the rest of that, but still… That last book you were working on might never get finished, or published in all the applicable formats, but they can coast along, right?
Well, yes, that can work for a while, but entropy is a fact of life. And death.
When I had just started self-publishing circa ten years ago and was approached by others to help them bring their own books out, I created a few more entities to hold different lines of books, envisioning a future among the world of self-publishers of roll-up businesses that had a longer collective future than the individual authors. But, in practice, this never actually materialized. The people who were interested in doing this with me were even less business-future-focused than I was, and I never wanted to be serious about that business when I had my own books to write. (Yes, I like building businesses and did that all my career, but now… it’s just more fun to do my own.)
So, I must face, as we all do, that the works of my hands will have no reliable permanence, any more than if I were a potter, or a machinist, or a farmer. The work I do is enjoyable and useful, and brings pleasure and worth to others, but it will vanish with all such, over time. Few of us can become immortals through the works of our hands, and even those lists of the greats are unstable. We can hope to leave a trace with our efforts, either to those who already know us, or to unknown future discoverers who stumble across our work like so many knapped flint arrowheads brought back to the light.
How do you come to terms with the (im-)permanence of your work? Is present-day utility enough for you?
Mad Genius Club 
4 responses to “And when I die…”
I’ve named one of ,my sons as my literary executor. He gets what rights I have on my work (a lot of it was work for hire) and the royalties. (He is the son who helped me with my books – mainly photography.) That said, he won’t get rich on them.
If people are reading my stuff 50 years after my death I’d be surprised. I will probably be completely forgotten by 2124. Sic transit gloria mundi,
I’ve gotten comments from readers that my work helped them get through really tough times.
I’d love it if people were still reading my stories decades later, but eh, who knows.
The moment is what we’ve got.
It’s not really a meaningful thing for me to worry about, honestly. I occasionally chuckle at the idea of some hapless scholar wrestling with my notebooks after my death, for reasons best known to his culture and not mine, but that’s as far as it goes.
If we are extinguished at death (which I do not believe), then whether the living speak well, ill, or nothing of us…does not impact us in the slightest. It’s just a way of keeping score of whether we did anything with our lives. Since one can do productive things without getting recognized for it, this is an unreliable scoring method, especially when we’re talking about recognition outside the circle of friends and loved ones a person had in life.
And if one believes in the survival of the personality after death, then you either believe that the living can’t impact the situation of the dead, in which case being remembered by loved ones is nice but mostly important for the time when they join the ranks of the dead and are reunited with the ones they lost, or the living *can* impact the situation of the dead(1), in which case, again, it’s primarily important that one is remembered by those one cared about in life.
I’m sure this all sounds like a cold-blooded way of putting it, but that “herp-a-derp, must be REMEMBERED” thing that was so prevalent in certain strands of Victorian and Edwardian thought annoys me, and this is a convenient occasion to pick apart why.
(1)I’m Catholic, so purgatory comes in here, but there is also a recurring idea in ancient religions all over the world (surviving in Chinese folk beliefs and maybe other places) that the dead somehow benefit from goods buried with them or somehow offered to them.
We’ve got our intellectual property listed in our will.
We’ve discussed it many times with our kids, none of whom are interested in being indie publishers.
Yet we have books (not the fiction, God knows which probably will never sell) that can find a more general readership. To that end, we’ve told them to break up the intellectual property in order to better sell it.
The film review books should be offered to one specialty publisher, the craft books to another, the collected (10 volumes!) vintage Sherlock fan fiction to a third publisher, other titles to yet another specialty publisher.
Will they do it? I dunno, but we’ve talked about it so they’re not ignorant of the possibilities.
We are even considering not waiting on my cloth grocery bag instruction manual. With an added chapter (because I refined my technique) we might be able to sell it NOW to a craft book publisher and earn a few bucks. We’d sure earn more than we’re making right now!
This topic MUST be discussed if you want your books to live on after your death and if you want your heirs to earn coffee money into the future.