Flop

So I haven’t blown my own horn in a while, and I may be a little out of practice, you might want to cover your ears.

Instead of spinning my wheels looking for interesting faces to shoot, (There’s been a Pandemic don’tcha know), I’ve spent my time writing. Yes, I know that’s what I do here, but I actually had more to say so I thought a novel would be the best way. (Four hundred and forty-one pages makes for slow loading on the Internet.)

And since the damned Plague has been with us for over two years, there was a lot of time—time enough to finish three novels.

Which means, for those of you in the remedial math class, I now have five novels desperately seeking readers. I could have gone the traditional route and submitted my work to a mainstream publisher, but that seemed like a heavy slog, being an unknown so I did Indie.

Yes, indeed there was a time not so long ago when independent publishing was a secretive practice, like selling French postcards or admitting you’re addicted to Girl Scout Cookies. Justly so for most vanity publishers had no intention of ever getting anyone beside the writer to buy the book. Also a good thing for most vanity publications were not quiet as good as the Masked Singer or other trash TV.

Then Amazon.

Yes, the eight hundred pound gorilla in the room of all things marketable became a publisher and overnight changed Indie publishing from something you wouldn’t confess to your priest to something even your mother could be proud of.

Amazon makes it so easy even the Ole Trawler could do it. But, (You did know there was a but coming?), once the book is up you have to do all the peripheral chores. Oh yes young Padwan, the marketing, advertising, promoting, finding reviewers, securing interviews and all the time keeping an eye on what is up cause with print on demand there is no excuse for leaving in any mistakes.

If a gimlet-eyed reviewer finds a mistake, you have to pounce on it cause the next person to discover it might be a reviewer for The New York Times or Rolling Stone or even The World.

There’s just a whole lot that has to be done like what I am doing right now. You gotta plug your heart out. Cause in this game there is no pinch hitter. You swing for the fences and hope like hell you get more runs than outs.

So I made my best guess and picked the book I liked the best, (hey I get to pick cause I’m writing it), and set out to see if I could get it out where someone might just read it.

The process of getting it published was simple enough, (enough so I managed to get the first distribution out chock full of errors. Not just typos and misspellings but horrible line feeds and spacing mistakes), so it got up on Amazon.

And crickets.

Maybe not even the crickets. It went thud but there was no one in the forest so you couldn’t hear the flop.

Back to the drawing board.

Maybe it was the cover cause God knows the prose was fantastic.

I got a new cover, big improvement, if I do say so--

Maybe I'll say what happened next next time.