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.
