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.