Thunk

Imagine being published by “The Big” (Random House) and not having one book sell — not one.  (REF: http://bloggasm.com/did-random-houses-free-online-book-releases-affect-sales) Were I that science fiction author, I think I’d be just a wee bit depressed.

I keep seeing an ad on Google, paid for by a purported literary agency. It screams out:  ”Do NOT Self-Publish!” In fact, here it is, sans link,

DO NOT Self-Publish
Literary Agency Submits Writers to Publishers. They Pay You. No Fees.

Hmm.  What are they saying?

Here’s what I think: Nobody, not even the most illegitimate literary agency, not even the most desperate, is going to pay good money to beg authors not to self-publish unless they feel threatened.

Are they feeling threatened? Well, I would be were I they. Authors — and I mean good authors who know how to spin a tale, who know how to write excellent fiction — are fed up. Dianne Salerni of http://www.HighSpiritsBook.com, author of High Spirits, self-published after who knows how many years of rejections, and now she’s sold the film options to her very excellent book.  That’s money no agent can claim.

That’s one example, and I could cite more…but won’t bother because that’s not the point of my post today.

I’ve watched author upon author spend years, sometimes decades, trying to find an agent, trying to get a big or even a small house’s attention. Regardless of how good their novels, though, they fail…unless they just happen to get a break in timing, nicking with present industry desires. I’ve also watched how very bad books get published during this same time period, novels written by either celebrities who couldn’t sign their name, or crap written by pap sucking hacks whose only virtue is an ability to catch the right fad or rave. …Like vampire books for soggy-pantied, panting teen girls, books that reek of the same rank stench that rises from the comic book pages of teen boy fantasies where those skinny, 4D-cupped scant-clad, drooling, sword-dueling wenches spread legs to scream like a cheap whore as the hero penetrates their slit.  I’m sorry, but that’s not good fiction.  That’s called “pulp,” and “pulp” was printed on “pulp” because it wasn’t good, but simply designed to satisfy a market — a cheap thrill of the moment market.

Fiction that deserves publication — fiction for readers, not stuff for horny teens or sicko thirty-something never-beens who hide in their rooms sucking sodas and eating junk food, devouring cheap thrills — mostly isn’t getting there unless an author just happens to hit the right editor of a small press, has some clout, or is a lettered celebrity. So it’s being self-published because authors are TIRED.

And authors deserve to be tired — tired of the run-around, tired of the hard-ball games literary agents and publishing houses play, agents and houses that never really read what’s sent in because they’re too calouse and too jaded to give a damn unless it smacks them in the nose with a barn-sized banner that screams, “This is going to make you a lot of fast money.”

So, yes, I think authors should self-publish.  If they’ve given agents their time and queries, and agents snub them, screw it. Get that book out and get on with the next one and the next one.  Follow your dream; screw the obstacles.  Do an end-run, instead.  And watch literary agents and publishing begin to sit up and whine because, suddenly, they ain’t making the money, honey. The authors are!

Just my take.

I’m back. While I was recovering some little bit of health and sanity after having my car totaled, I had time to think. And what I thought about, in between the recurring nightmares, was about The Deepening. (Fancy that.)

Focusing on ‘purpose’, I started with The Deepening’s defined goals — to get people who aren’t yet addicts to explore the wonderful world of adventures available in fiction, and to promote great fiction to that ever-widening audience of folks who already enjoy it.

So, who is our audience?

Readers.  

And, since we’re promoting reading and listening to fiction, we have to offer the fiction we present on The Deepening for free as a reward to folks who take time from busy lives to visit and explore.  We at least have to offer it for free for a certain length of time before charging for it.  That gives folks incentive to come back regularly…so they don’t have to pay for the content they’re enjoying.

And who benefits from our promotional efforts?

Again, one could say ‘Readers,’ because they find good books to read here, but, also, it’s the authors and publishers whose works we promote who gain a great boon and benefit, because we’re advertising them and their books…which means that folks are buying their product. And I have proof that folks are buying the books we promote.  That means that The Deepening works. That makes me quite happy.

Member authors can link their feeds directly into their author pages. So can publishers. Just another new benefit of membership.

I have to laugh. Last week on the IAG message group, Nan Hawthorne posted a response to me, saying, “You haven’t convinced me.” Now, this is a writer who sent me her book to read and review…which I did. This is an author who I then sent my review for her approval before posting…which she ignored and never acknowledged. (I never posted my review, which I wrote off as a hugh waste of time and effort to write.) Informed that she was a “featured author” along with her self-published title, Nan Hawthorne emailed me rather dismissively, as if it was just so much nothing to be featured on The Deepening. I let it pass and kept her “spot” up. With the “convince me” post, though, I’m afraid that, gee, golly, I’d had enough, and I told her so.

I’m finding too many fiction writers, especially self-published ones, have an attitude that doesn’t nick well with self-promotional opportunities. They act as if it is some sort of favor they are doing me when they promote themselves and their literary endeavors on The Deepening.

I’ve little tolerance for haughty attitudes. I’ve less tolerance for willful disregard of honest opportunity. If you are serious about promoting your novels, then you’d best take advantage of every solid opportunity available, whether it is a press release, a radio interview, or an opportunity to contribute your thoughts and perspectives along with your promotional spots on an online or print venue.

Convince you? I’ll let the enterprise itself do that. If you declaim it, go elsewhere. If you think it worthwhile, you’re welcome.

The question of “why” has come up over and over. So I’ll tell you why.

There is just a whole lot of excellent fiction that’s not being published. I got exposed to it when I was responsible for keeping a writer’s group’s web installation running for something like a decade. I got exposed to even more superior fiction — fiction I liked, I wanted more of — when I ran ISSN 1559-7733. The authors who wrote those stories also had novels — excellent novels — they had written that were failing to find publishers…and still are.

Well, enter the year that POD came into its own — 2009. I saw it coming when I ran the ISSN. I decided in 2008, it’s really time to DO SOMETHING. So I took The Deepening out of mothballs and began to build it specifically to promote good fiction that was being overlooked. I want that good fiction read, whether it finally makes it into print under a major publisher’s imprint, as part of a small publisher’s catalog, or whether it’s self-published by an author who just got tired of the run-around from literary agents and publishing houses too elite or too myopic to grab something worthwhile.

So that’s why.

I can offer you a list of books published by major publishers and small presses alike that I’ve bought and thrown into the fire. Here’s one you all know: The Da Vinci Code. That’s not good writing. That’s not good story. That’s not even nominally good reading. And, believe me when I tell you that I have bought racks of books I’ve wound up never reading beyond the first couple of chapters, even though they seemed good when reading the back cover blurb and thumbing the first chapter.

What The Deepening does is promote good fiction in all its forms. It PROMOTES good fiction. It promotes reading good fiction. As a consequence, it also promotes the authors who write and the editors and presses that publish that fiction, but that’s not our fault. It’s just a consequence.

Most folks who visit The Deepening don’t realize that it’s a relatively new (a few months old) project.  I use that word “project” because it is a work-in-progress, not a “done deal,” poured in hardened concrete.  It may, in fact, never turn to stone, but always be a work-in-progress, simply because the business of fiction evolves constantly. That’s the nature of creativity and its result.

For decades, publishing was rather strictly institutionalized.  (It still is in a lot of ways.)  As it became more and more monopolized, it also became less about good books and more about block-buster bottom lines, so much so that, today, if you are a celebrity, famous or infamous, haloed or criminal, whether you can write or not, you are guaranteed to land a top agent and, with that, a hefty, and I mean million-dollar, advance for your yet unpenned literary venture.

Enter the age of the Internet, e-books, PODS, and the independent publisher and author. Enter into the chaos as well as the power of the masses to sway what will and what will not fly.  Oh, certainly the industry moguls work their muscle to influence what the consumer “should” buy, but, more and more, it’s a whole bunch of “little” guys and gals — you and me — who make or break a novel’s chances to hit best seller status.  This is a good thing.  But it’s also fraught with problems…like, as Cory Doctorow so pointedly observes, “obscurity.”

The Deepening is here to help battle obscurity. It’s here to help readers find good fiction.  And, of course, if readers are helped, so are authors and their book publishers, so therefore we’re here to help authors and publishers, too.

Want in on opportunity?  If so, stay tuned.

Well, it’s a series of three book drafts–a marvelous supramundane space odyssey. And, long ago, I bought this domain to host the release of those books. But, publishing being what it has been for decades, the first book, a prequel of a series that precedes The Deepening books, never saw print. So the domain languished.

I’ve had offers to sell thedeepening.com–some nice and some ludicrous, ludicrous like the one this year by the folks who made that horrible D movie–but never felt like parting with it. So a couple of years ago I thought, okay, I’ll start an online glossy fiction magazine…which I did, with an ISSN and everything. What a GREAT BUNCH of stories by a GREAT BUNCH of authors we had…and no readers…except a few dedicated supporters and fiction writers wanting to scope out the ‘zine in order to get published in its pages.

When my eyesight as well as my bank account gave out, I tossed in the towel on the fiction magazine.

But it really bothered me that my very favorite entertainment, fiction reading, was losing ground, losing market share, in the entertainment world. It also bothered me that good books kept going unpublished. What to do? Well, it isn’t for lack of publishers or the ability to get books into hands of readers. It’s about getting readers’ (and non-readers’ attention.) So The Deepening, stage two, was conceived.

What was conceived? Something that was fun for me, not a lot of work (except for set-up, of course), and provided readers, authors, publisher–anyone, really–the means to promote a good fiction read–novel, short story, fiction magazine, hyperfiction… .

So, here we go. And if no authors come to promote their books, so be it. I read enough to fill its pages regularly, so you, our visitors, won’t have any reason not to check out the new articles here every week! Book mark it. It’s going to be exciting!

Reading takes you away into a secret world. It’s the only way you can get there.

How do you go about finding good novels to read? Read reviews? Try one? Stick to authors you know?

I know what I do mostly: Pick up the book, read the back cover, read the front and back flaps, Start reading chapter one, go to some arbitrary spot in the middle, scan down the page with my eye, go to the back of the book — not the end, but somewhere in the last half inch of pages, and scan down that, too, to see if the writing holds or if it has reduced its quality to “trite.” If I like it, if the story intrigues me, I’ll buy it.

I like handling books before I buy them. I don’t particularly like buying online…though I do. I enjoy idling away hours at a good book store. Unfortunately, the only new bookstore we have locally is an indie whose children’s section is larger than all the rest of the store. (Owner is a grandma, probably a great grandma.)

So, the question stands, folks: How do you go about finding good novels to read?