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I am now accepting bounties on publishing houses. Here are a few things I believe: I believe that We Can Work it Out is the best Beatles song, ever. I believe that there should be more players in baseball like Bob Gibson circa 1968. I believe that American democracy purposefully keeps the common man as far away from actual power as possible . I believe that the Olympics are possibly the most boring televised event in history, although investigations continue. I believe that robots will someday kill me in my sleep, that bourbon is the drink of the gods, and that I have special voodoo powers to destroy any publisher I come in contact with. Yes, it's happened again. The more dedicated among you might recall that I sold a speculative fiction novel, The Electric Church to an outfit called Another Chapter. No one thought this would lead to riches, fame, and me floating in a swimming pool filled with beer, bloated and money-ruined, but it was a bona-fide sale and was a published credit that didn't involve favors done me by friends or family, so what the heck. Another Chapter offered serial fiction, delivered to subscribers one chapter a week for five bucks a month on average. On paper this seems like a decent idea, but really, who wants to pay five bucks a month in order to get PDFs in the mail? No one, apparently, since Another Chapter went out of business about five months after we signed a contract. Bad business plan, or my evil powers? You be the judge. The power to destroy companies that I do business with is not to be considered lightly. If I can somehow figure out a way to harness this awesome power, I could burn away individuals, corporations--whole nations--with just my mind, balefiring them into nonexistence so thoroughly they would never have existed in the first place. This could possibly result in paradoxes pulling apart the very fabric of the universe and the subsequent destruction of all living things as we know them. Or maybe not--we just don't know. The real fun, of course, will be when I do finally sell a book to a large publisher for real money. I've often considered how I'll handle that situation--will success make me stop putting out this zine and website? Will I stop drinking bourbon in dive bars an start sipping white wine in upscale lounges? Will I stop talking to myself in public? Start voting? Start writing a lengthy novel with a main character named Jeff Somers, stocked with a million footnotes? Probably all of the above, of course. Except I'll always be putting out this zine and website. Heck, when I'm rich, I'll have even less to do with my time, which means I'll probably start pumping out weekly 200-page issues of The Inner Swine, Bwana. But what will be most enjoyable will be the way my power undermines the world's economy when that large publisher topples like a rotten tree, bringing down its overseas parent company in the process and probably causing an unstable political situation to result in that company's native country. I can't explain this power, all I know is that from the moment I sign my name to a contract, I'm on the clock: My book has to be published fast, or the whole house of cards will come crashing down. I could theorize, I guess, that this is the result of the power of my writing, the radioactive aura that permeates every hotsie-totsie bit of Somers prose (which begs the unnecessary question: If my prose is destroying civilization one corporate unit at a time, imagine what my poetry can do!). While the idea that my writing is so damned powerful it causes buildings to collapse and men to go bankrupt is tempting, it's probably not the case. Despite my whining and bloody-nailed scrabbling, I remain floating serenely towards the bottom of the literary world, and one thing that's been true about this dark, oxygen-rich environment for the past few years is, everyone down here thinks they can run a publishing company. Not a zine, mind you, or a vanity press, but a true-blue, makin'-money publishing company. What writer hasn't dreamed of partnering with a few smart peers, pooling your meager resources, and launching the indy press that changes the world? It seems so easy, these days. Take one dash Print-on-Demand (POD) technology, two parts Amazon.com Advantage sales, and one part The Motherfucking Internet What Is Changing the Way the Game is Played, Yo, and it probably looks like world-shaking literary kickass is just around the corner. I'm guessing its this sort of madness that gifted us with Another Chapter. While I'm grateful that they published me (sort of) and paid me (a little) for the honor, I can only imagine it was madness of some sort that made them think people wanted to pay them $45 for a 70,000 word novel that they then had to read on their monitor, or invest even more money into by printing out. I mean, what's next? A bind-your-own option where you send the publisher fifty bucks and they mail you an unedited MS Word file of the book which you then have to edit, tag, flow into a Quark template, deliver to a printer and pay for printing and binding? No, I'm guessing the bar to publishing has become so low people start thinking there's nothing stopping them. As long as you don't care about making money and can handle losing some, that's very true. Even a shlub like me can 'publish' stuff these days--it's the making back of expenses and having some left over for bonus celebratory alcohol that's difficult. But the easy entry into taking a mess of words, formatting them in your favorite low-rent DTP application (even Publisher isn't half-bad these days, shudder) and spitting out a press-ready PDF makes it seem like the equation should work:
2. Typeset it 3. Release via Amazon and Email subscription 4. ???? 5. Profit!! Oh well. Don't cry for me, Internet-land; the truth is, I didn't expect this to go far anyway. I'll take my battered manuscript and see if anyone else wants to risk certain doom by trying to publish it, and if not, eventually it will end up here, dressed up and dusted off and given away for free, all with no sense of shame at all! E-mail me your outrage here. Jeff |
October 5, 2004