Tag: self-publishing

On Cheating:

Posted on by blablablaandgabbler

My point is that Michael Derrick Hudson could have found a more effective way to promote his poetry, or so it seems to me. His strategy would never have occurred to me: There has to be some honor, even among thieves. But it is a strategy, however misguided, and strategy is what is required to compete in this very small game. My small submission ruses were hardly innovative. The obstacles erected by publications could be disrupted more cleverly and quite without the racial clamminess for which he opted. I encourage all poets and short fictions writers to find them. Code-writing writers should game the electronic submission portals, and figure out a way to automatically shuffle a story to the top of the digital pile. Bribery seems an option (if you’re submitting to me), although since most literary publications pay nothing or next to it, I can’t imagine the point. And if, as Hudson implies, race wins out then win the race race, I guess. Yet I bet it doesn’t, even for him. His 49 rejections—40 white, 9 non—strikes me as far from conclusive evidence. Besides, what I’m counseling is cheating: You don’t have to be an asshole. The submission process is a rigged casino game, though, and all is fair in love and literary magazines.

Read the rest.


[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name – singular) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, goodreads, and Vulcan’s shit list.]

all yellowB&N | Amazon | Etc.

[Author-as-God, Author-as-Brand]

Posted on by blablablaandgabbler

8) With the mock interviews and reviews, were you aiming to start a conversation about authorial identity and the problem of readers reading authors rather than books?

That would be lovely, yes. Because that’s exactly what we do: we read authors. At present I am being interviewed by the New York Times not for the quality of my writing (which, by any standard, is tremendous and perhaps even “top-notch”) but because I may or may not be Thomas Pynchon. This is unfair to my work – especially if I am not Thomas Pynchon – as well as to the many other writers out there who are being denied access to their own possible readerships on the grounds that they are not Thomas Pynchon.

Read the rest. 

[Self-published author gets interviewed and the main point isn’t that they self-published? Spoof gets treated like the real deal for NOT being the real deal? Am I in heaven?]


[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name – singular) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, goodreads, and Vulcan’s shit list.]

all yellowB&N | Amazon | Etc.

[On Fake stories, Fake Authors, Fake Presses for the Fake Industry:]

Posted on by blablablaandgabbler
‘“I’ve always had a severe distaste for all the mindless biographical drivel that serves to prop up this or that writer,” Pearson admits in an interview in a publication called Cow Eye Express, part of the auxiliary Web material associated with the novel. “So much effort goes into credentialing the creator that we lose sight of the creation itself, with the consequence being that we tend to read authors instead of their works. In fact, we’d probably prefer to read a crap book by well-known writer than a great book by a writer who may happen to be obscure,” the unknown writer asserts.

 

Hmm. Somewhere I have heard of an author as reclusive as J.D. Salinger (who has no further need to defend his privacy). No, not the Italian Elena Ferrante (also a pseudonymous invention), but an American. Rather than face what he (assuming the gender itself is not fictional) calls “a false and destructive system” that is nonetheless “a reality of our world,” Pearson notes that his response is to “manufacture disposable authorial personae for every book,” making each one earn its own way rather than piggybacking on whatever reputation a previous title may have earned its author.

That sounds like an honorable approach, as Pearson’s interviewer notes. Will it work? “Probably not,” Pearson concedes. “The reading public, and especially professional reviewers, tend to be pretty dismissive of new authors.” He allows that “skeptical” or “indifferent” might be a better characterization than “dismissive,” for unknowns lack the benefit of the doubt reflexively ceded to well-known authors. While Pearson recognizes that he may be consigned to “an utterly disjointed and fruitless literary career” as a result, there is an upside: He will not be forced to participate in a “dishonest system that I don’t believe in.”

Terrific, this seems promising enough to look into! We have an unknown author published by an unknown press with a huge chip on his shoulder about the state of our literary culture. What could be more interesting—albeit common—than that? But wait a minute, this is metafiction, fiction layered atop the fiction to orient our view of Cow Country itself. The interview is a fabricated story in a fabricated publication. Could someone be dropping clues like a row of bread crumbs, designed to stir in readers the thought that Pearson’s views are remarkably in line with those popularly believed to be held by a certain chimerical, widely known but seldom glimpsed author?

…

It is hard not to see some validity in Pearson’s assertions about unknown writers facing an uphill battle, given the silence that has so far greeted Cow Country. Certainly its publishing route is a factor as well, for widely recognized houses and imprints and independents such as Knopf, Farrar Straus and Giroux, Norton, and Graywolf, and a handful of others, do have an advantage when it comes to gaining the attention of reviewers and review-section editors.

To return, finally, to the question of the book’s sensibility and Pearson and Pynchon, my highly subjective but very strong impression is that the two authors are closer than kissing cousins, they are joined at the hip. The off-kilter sensibility one sees in the work of both would not be, in the words of the college accreditors, easily “replicable” by another, in my opinion. Encountering Cow Country was like going to a thrift shop and finding designer clothing with the labels cut off.

…

If I am in error, to the person hiding behind Pearson I would say, To be taken for Pynchon is no small compliment but an enormous one, and your mimetic abilities in emulation of his sensibility are admirable. To Pynchon, I would say, Don’t fret, and issue a reminder that imitation is the highest form of flattery, no?’

Read the rest.


[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name – singular) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, goodreads, and Vulcan’s shit list.]

all yellowB&N | Amazon | Etc.

On New York Publishing:

Posted on by blablablaandgabbler

“There was another consistent trend I found when interviewing zombie novelists for my article: fervent distaste for the New York publishing industry. And maybe that’s the real reason why publishers and agents never bothered reaching out to them; it’s not that they don’t recognize the sales and money potential for these authors, it’s that they’ve spent the last decade sowing so much bad blood within the writer community that they know approaching them for a book deal is a lost cause. Midlist authors have been burned once, and now with Amazon and their own marketing abilities they can ensure they’ll never be burned again.”

Read the rest here.
[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, and goodreads.]

The problem with literary agents:

Posted on by blablablaandgabbler

“Almost all agencies, he told me, are looking for one of two things: bestseller potential or the possibility of media adaptations…

Let us hope that what that agent told me was a gross exaggeration born out of personal disenchantment. (Everyone in the publishing industry these days seems pretty disgruntled.) After all, good and serious books still manage to get published. Yet after plowing through hundreds of agency websites, I find it hard to believe that many other good and serious books aren’t being stopped dead in their tracks. The nomenclature is the first tip off. Nothing wrong with a little business jargon, but must they call themselves “boutique agencies” or, even worse, “full-service boutique agencies,” which, rather than lending the snob cachet so obviously intended, makes them sound like massage parlors? Far worse than any unfortunate phraseology is the resistance to ideas that contradicts the otherwise high-sounding claims made on so many of the agencies’ websites…

Unlike furiously anti-establishment bloggers, I have no problem with the role played by literary agents as cultural gatekeepers. There are far too many writers out there, and if the good ones are not to be buried by the bad ones, agents have an obligation to recognize and nurture talent that might otherwise go undetected. Economies of scale, to which the publishing industry remains bound, tend to favor the mass publication of trash, and the trash isn’t always so trashy. Only the sourest puritan would disdain genre fiction as inventive as George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones saga merely because there are five clichés to a page. But economies of scale also allow for the publication of midlist books supported by all that trash, not to mention by all those indispensible guides to gastro-intestinal disorders, college entrance exams, and the rest.

…As I’ve said, significant books still get published, and there are inspiring literary agents helping to make such works a reality. I’d like to see more of such books, yet the grotesque philistinism of so many literary agencies works against that outcome—and you can’t get to the publishers without the agencies. It’s no accident that much of the best American writing today is to be found not inside the covers of a book but in magazines and online journals.

…So why beat up on literary agencies? Aren’t publishing houses equally risk averse? Possibly so, but in mediating between writer and publisher, the agencies build in an extra layer of exactly what is not needed: more conservatism and caution. Am I naïve in believing that publishing houses might be slightly more receptive to innovation than most literary agencies imagine? A literary scholar of my acquaintance told me he knows of three first-rate studies of W. H. Auden that have no chance of getting out of manuscript. Never mind my book. I want to see the ones about Auden.”

-Stephen Akey. Read the rest.

[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, and goodreads.]