I think I have waffled on about life in the thrall of the C19 pandemic. Let’s get back to writing!
My new book, He might still be on Mars is now in the printers. Kindle and other formats will likely all go online when the print copy comes out. I’m also republishing Everything Hurts, the second volume of my vampire/detective duology. I am told the cover was too dark and might have put people off from buying it. It tells the tale shortly after The Last Dream Before You Die, the first novel I published, but not the first novel I had written. I always consider Everything Hurts as the better book, but some folks tell me that they prefer Last Dream.
As William Goldman famously observed about the film industry, nobody knows anything. It’s a good offhand comment on the blinkered mechanical thinking for anything to do with creative arts, or at least those of the literary sort. I like to look at the Amazon reviews for books that have been lauded to the heavens and the authors lionized for their contribution to literature, many of them winning distinguished literary prizes. Having tried and failed to read many of these stellar contributions I wondered if it was just me. But it’s not. The one and two star reviews contain sentiments pretty much the same as my own. Some of these people belong to book clubs so feel a sense of responsibility to finish a stellar book. However, even the imposition of a deadline for a club meeting is not enough to prevent the reader from throwing the book across the room in disgust.
As an author, and a self published one at that, this may sound very sour grapes. However, finding many folks having the same negative feelings about a stellar book means there are many out there who have critical faculties like mine. It’s often really instructive if the number of 1 and 2 star reviews end up to be more than 10% of the reviews.
I’m a retired fishery manager with training in multiple biological and ecological disciplines. In a meeting I helped convene, one eminent social scientist talked about the ‘ecology of institutions.’ It is an interesting way to look at the way institutions function. I have often wondered about the literary publishing industry. A survey of American publishing has found that it is blindingly white and female, with 79% of staff white and 78% women. The study was conducted by Multicultural children’s publisher Lee & Low Books that surveyed staff at 34 American publishers, including Penguin Random House and Hachette , as well as eight review journals, to establish a baseline to measure diversity among publishing staff.
The 2015 Man Booker prize winner Marlon James has slammed the publishing world, saying authors of colour too often “pander to white women” to sell books, and that he could have been published more often if he had written “middle-style prose and private ennui”. Strong stuff! Does it mean through that there are books being rejected for publication because they don’t appeal to a predominant mind set? That’s a dangerous road to go down for an author with multiple rejection letters/emails. James himself received 78 rejections for his first novel, John Crow’s Devil. This also puts JK Rowlings 12 rejections of Harry Potter in perspective.
It probably why Self Publishing has grown into a major literary industry, especially with the advent of cheap personal computers, and the internet. But the expenses can add up if you intend to seriously market your book. These days, even published authors have to shell out for advertising and marketing, as the publishing trade is now not the only game in town.
Finally, I hope and pray that we are now over the hump as far as the C19 pandemic, and we can soon get back to normal, whatever that new normal will be.