Anyway. My story is live and thanks to those of you who have already bought and read it - I know there are at least a few of you out there! I haven't got any solid numbers yet, but I'll let you guys know when I do. Can pretty much guarantee it's not a million, though. Not YET. You can download the entire Found Press Quarterly collection, that includes my story as well as awesome stories by Caroline Adderson, Dave Margoshes, and Maria Meindl, for just $3.75, at FoundPress.com/titles/summer2011.php too, which I heartily recommend. Four stories for the price of only three-and-three-quarters stories! A steal.
Let's get to the interesting, non-sales-pitch bit of the blog, though.
I got a press release a little while ago for a new novel that was "now available for review." I won't mention the book's title or the name of the author because I don't want to embarrass him, but as I was reading through the email the whole thing felt pretty familiar for some reason. It was a fantasy novel - and I like fantasy, don't get me wrong. I'm right in the middle of the third book in the Song Of Ice And Fire series (no spoilers, please). But I like GOOD fantasy. The title of this thing was in the form "Nearly-Unpronounceable Legendary Location Part One: Ominous Compound-Adjective, Spooky Noun." If I were doing a Mad Lib for this title, it could be, for instance, "Xkelsia 1: The Flintshock Wood." So that was the first bad sign. It went on to detail paragraph after paragraph describing the plot of the book, using phrases like "epic journey," "danger of insurmountable calamity," and "thirsty army of vampires." Full of names and places that hurt my tongue to try to say, and just dripping with cliche like blood from the fangs of a thirsty army of vampires. I literally, physically winced no fewer than three times for every sentence of this thing, and it was just the press release!
I looked at the author's name. I looked at the author's picture.
I knew this guy.
He was in a writing class I took a few years back. This was obviously the epic fantasy novel (first part of a trilogy, of course) that he was working on. He was that one guy in the class who was so absolutely convinced that he would be a huge success with his book, but who was such an awful writer that no one in the class could even think of any constructive criticism to offer. You don't want to say "This is terrible and you should format your hard drive and take up long-haul trucking," because that's just mean. But there wasn't even enough good stuff in there to damn with faint praise. It caused us physical pain to listen to him read his excerpts. Look, I wasn't the best writer in that class either, and I certainly wasn't the one I believed was most likely to be successful. But this guy. Yeek.
Yet here he is again. He hasn't quit, which I admire, actually. He apparently did complete his novel, which is not easy. Unfortunately it's also, obviously, not any good. The main point is that this novel is self-published. I don't know whether he had always intended to self-publish or if he just couldn't get it published through the usual channels (and God knows I've had more than my own share of rejections from the usual channels as well), but there's still a stigma attached to self-publishing. It seems unprofessional. People roll their eyes. "This," they say, looking at the ridiculous cover that looks like someone sewed one of the Twilight books to a Harlequin romance, "is what a self-published novel looks like."
But at the same time, the ability to self-publish, print-on-demand upon dead trees or do-it-yourself ebooks to download, to sell on your own website or Amazon or wherever, to anyone and everyone in the world, is having a real effect on not only the publishing industry, but on readers, writers, and pretty much everyone in between. How can you talk shit about self-publishing today when Best-selling authors are turning down six-figure contracts to self-publish their ebook, and a completely unknown 26-year-old signs a four-book, $2 million deal with a major publisher after selling a million copies of her paranormal romance young-adult fiction on Amazon? It's simultaneously inspiring and infuriating.
I think it's not only an issue of technology (though it most definitely is), but also one of sheer volume. There are more people writing now than ever before, more people who are serious about being writers, published writers. And even though it seems as if fewer people are reading, probably proportionately it's the same amount, if not more. Publishing is changing; self-publishing is changing it, and is being changed itself by the change. Change change change. The problem now, I think, at this very moment, is how to tell the difference between the good stuff and the crap without having to read absolutely everything, go to every website, subscribe to every RSS feed and online press newsletter. When there are a handful of a Big Presses and a cluster of smaller local ones, it's easier to keep track and know what to pay attention to - or at least to GUESS. What we need, and what we're now beginning to get, are communities of like-minded readers who can point each other to cool stuff that they find. Otherwise we're just wading out there, up slushpile creek without a paddle.
So in conclusion, please buy my story, because it's pretty good. I'll also stick a little link to the short story collection I edited, "Can'tLit: Fearless Fiction from Broken Pencil Magazine," which you can also buy, if you want, and contains about 40 awesome stories, none of which are by me. Thanks, everybody!
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