My e-mail is full and the supplier is not allowing me in to delete the scads of spam that have drifted up in there.

Sorry.

Addendum.

I should have said naught. It’s back.

I could, of course, have just started referring to the other half as my fiancee and let you do the math. But I wish to be explicit in this rather than implicit. The Monkey is getting married, probably next year although we’re still in that dazed and confused stage after informing the families and just before christmas so we don’t know anything about dates or times or any of that.

I am excited about being married but more terrified at the prospect of the actual marriage. This must be what it’s like to relish “having written” but not actually wanting to”write”.

The Monkey is very happy.

Actually these things have not transpired because I took my eye off the blogging ball but it makes a nice article header. First, though, health news. The hypertension continues but the side effects of my medication have mutated. No longer am I cursed to live half my life in slumber instead I have a slight wheeze and occasional head spin from standing up too fast. I see a doctor tomorrow, the prospect does not thrill me.

So what’s causing a dangerous elevation in my BP today, we ask ourselves?

Well, a colleague started the snowball by sending me a link to a blog run by yet another colleague, this was an inoffensive enough action. It got me thinking however about how I should really increase the peace (so to speak) by looking through associated blogs and linking to them here. After all, that’s how these things work. So by a careful process of spidering my way through various blogrolls I turned up some less helpful interweb artifacts. One, in fact snarked at by the Betterment Blog at the foot of this post and snarked at less classily by me later on in this post.

But let’s not start there shall we. Let’s start with this post by agent’s lackey The Rejecter. This post does a real good job of summing up every non-ridiculous although not entirely accurate cliche in existence referring to us self-published types.

All the stuff about e-books amounts to waffle. What I will say is this. e-magazines and e-books on technical or academic subjects are ok because who wants to store tomorrow’s fish wrapping or work related bunkum in space reserved for precious fiction? Not I. But if your fiction is only in e-book then I’m not going to even think about reading it and if I’m not going to then you’re in trouble.

Then there’s that assumption again. You see, traditional publishers have a no-longer economic business model that encourages anodyne blandness and tries to force as much of its product down everyone’s throat as possible. The reason for the blandness - safety, traditional publishing is a gamble and despite the fact that breakthroughs in fiction tend to be mould breakers it’s still safer to back the horse with the little “favourite” icon by it than take a risk on a showy but unproven outsider. The reason for cramming stuff down people’s throats is that it’s the only way to keep the business alive.

The assumption, therefore, is that all self-published authors want to do the same thing. That’s bollocks for a start. Rejecter, to be fair, does say that if you merely want your product available for “interested parties” then that was fair enough. Then has to suffix that with the thought that if you wait for some one to give a crap then you’ll be selling under 100 copies guaranteed.

Waitagoddamnminute! Hold up! Under 100 implies, at the very least generous end of the scale “over 50″ or else why not just say “under 50″? If I sold 50 copies of my current catalogue (each, 150 sales in all) I would be ecstatic. To me, job done. It will have been worthwhile. If I was in a small conference room with 50 people the room would be crowded. That’s all the audience I want or need. I mean I used to do open mic stand up comedy for badger’s sake.

And because my publishing is “on demand” it means that only necessary copies were ever printed and I don’t end up with a garage full of unsold product. Marvellous. A sane and rational view. As someone who has had an audience of “one if I’m lucky” for about 15 years the fact I now have an audience of “2 or 3″ may not excite HarperCollins but it sure the blue f*@£$ beats waiting for the aforementioned publishing behemoth to pay me mind it may never pay me.

For a writer to be read at all should be the highest compliment that can be paid.

Rejecter ends with a patronising (and as someone who does patronising without even thinking about it most of the time I can sure as hell spot it even written down) recommendation that people who had been courted by rejection to ponder why.

Oh yeah. Hadn’t thought of that. Of course, so simple. Hadn’t thought of wondering why. Just assumed that the mind of the publishing world was unknowable. Thank you, Rejecter, for your prescient invokation of enlightened Buddha nature to spill this petal of wisdom from the lotus of your uninterrupted diamond consciousness.

You tool.

Rejected people the world over wonder why it is they didn’t come up to scratch. Any victim of unrequited love has the option of spending hours wondering why it is they weren’t good enough and if you knew one then the standard advice regarding this obsession is: “Screw them, they didn’t know a good thing when they saw it.”

Not to say that all POD manuscripts have any hope in them. From bitter experience I know they don’t but some day I know I will discover something that is good and non-commercial. Because the big mistake publishing industry people make is that commercial=quality. IT DOESN’T! It does mean there is a basic quality but that basic quality must, must, must be wedded to some basic commercial viability and then there must be some mysterious “X” Factor that pushes it past all the other manuscripts vying for attention.

In case you were wondering how bad that competition was here is a chilling little post from a working agent telling us that on average it seems that around 1 in 2500 (being generous) submitting authors to an agency even get an agent at all. That’s not “sell a book” that’s “get an agent”.

And what are we tired of remembering has to be an agent’s primary concern when reading a manuscript seeking representation? Is it “do I like it”? Not if that agent wishes to continue eating. No. The question is “can I sell this”?

To give an example of the difference between these two questions I should point out that to me my Nintendo GameCube is worth the same, or possibly more than, it was worth on the day I bought it. I have several really brilliant games for it that I love to play. Some of them I specifically prefer to play using a GameCube controller, despite those titles being available for other consoles. I like my Nintendo GameCube.

If I wished to sell my Nintendo GameCube I could expect at the very most £35ish (average eBay Buy It Now for the unadorned console is about £25). To me this is an insult. I cannot sell my GameCube for what I think it is worth.

So if we are to return temporarily to the mysterious “X” Factor can we really presume this is some measure of spiritual aesthetic quality or is it more akin to a gambler deciding, after all which of three very similar horses to back?

I do not want an agent or a publisher because I detected in myself a trend towards trying to churn out something an agent might be able to sell and trying to fit what I wanted to write around it. Because when I have a 2500-1 chance of even impressing a single agent (and that’s in the US I dread to think what the statistic looks like from the UK) I should be a good little author and try to impress that agent. I, of course, am cursed by knowing the numbers. Were I more naive I might try and compete on my own merits as a writer.

Oh yeah, it’s not really supposed to be a competition.

So Rejecter, take your condescending little diatribe and your work ethic and your belief that you are doing right by a writer by handing out this advice and stick it up your arse. I know the numbers and 50 readers is plenty for me. I don’t need to ram my books down people’s throats until they vomit my prose back up upon merely seeing one of my books.

Of course such high minded response will do nothing to quell the acid wit of this f*&@tard. Now, I’m going to take a wild stab in the dark and guess that this has to be at least somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I hope. After all anyone who could make the statement:

…sobering statistics from Pub Rants. Extrapolated data: 80 query letters per day, 0.25% of which result in requests for full manuscripts. This is an exact measure of quality.

with a straight face (referring to the stats linked to above) has to either be trolling or smoking crack.

So suffice to say: Aesthetic quality cannot be measured by a commercial yardstick.

A quick demo. Chick lit seems, from conversations with the other half (important announcement to follow) to fall into two categories:

1) Fiction regarding impossibly beautiful career women slightly upset by some relatively insignificant past event who sometimes have children or sometimes just cash whose “lives are turned upside down” by some happenstance.

and

2) Fiction that is about a woman’s life being “turned upside down” by some happenstance often to do with relationships/children/both but without the cash as the author is at least somewhat ashamed just to churn out Mary Sue style fiction and take money for it.

The major problem with all the fiction being sorted into these two boxes is that it leaves out just about every book submitted to a chick lit agent/publisher that is not about these things. It could be a great novel and the agent could like it a lot and it could get down to the final 10 of whom 1 can go forward. In the end that manuscript will only ever be an also ran. It is defeated in its originality by the lure to the gambler of the safer bet.

The fact is sometimes this means crappier stuff is published merely because publishers find it easier to cram that crap down people’s throats.

I know it’s an unpalatable truth but it is a truth. Am I convinced that my stuff is not commercial but is brilliant nonetheless? I honestly don’t have a clue. I think it’s better than it seems to be given credit for but I am no arbiter of my own work. I just know that some day I’m going to find the book that proves Mr. Stop Writing is talking out of his arse. I’m waiting for the day. Eagerly.

Look folks. Publishing people, and people who suck up to publishing people and every other person who is involved in publishing’s commercial end has forgotten, or never knew, that to a certain extent writing is an artistic expression. Everyone has a right to do it and, if they feel so moved, they are also free to persuade others to read it.

The fact is that others may not want to, or may not like it, or may not bother. If that makes you, as an author, want to give up then you were never really an author. If it just encourages you to keep your unreadable literary sileage to yourself then that’s as good as it gets.

But don’t let anyone tell you not to do it if you want just because they want to look cool in front of people who really don’t understand what you were trying to do in the first place.

So things have been quiet. This is because I have had a bout of flu… a mere three or four weeks after having a stomach bug. Hmmm. A weak immune system? So I went to the doctor and they started banging on about my High BP again (hypertension). So after going through flu, the weekend and some blood tests I finally caved and filled a prescription for an ACE inhibitor for lowering blood pressure called lisinopril.

I took one Monday night… goodbye Monday night. I was giddy, half-asleep, giggly, dilated pupils the lot. Basically, if everyone acted the same way on this stuff I should be selling it outside nightclubs. Unfortunately this made me unfit to drive until about 2pm yesterday afternoon so I had to sit at home feeling woozy.

And thus no work has been done on the project at the moment because, well, health conditions and everything. Still feeling a bit shell shocked but picking myself up. Hopefully will be able to have a more positive update soon.

The Book: The Last Man Out Of Europe by Roger Cottrell

Review Category: Bad Moods > Dear God Why?

The Blurb: A nightmarish parallel universe where Hitler never came to power, and Britain is now the 51st state of the USA; where war is a constant and information is a commodity; and where truth is increasingly hard to come by.

Preview Available: The nice lulu one. Very presentable.

Why not buy this? Well, let’s run through this slowly. This is a 1984 style political thriller set in an alternative history where the main character is called Winston Smith. That’s right, the main character is called Winston Smith. If you don’t know why this is a major mistake then you’re probably reading the wrong review.

The Nitty Gritty: This one is an odd one. You see, when you think about the authors who give POD a bad name what leaps to mind is those people who can’t even tell a story. For incompetence of the highest order it’s easy to point at people who can’t write a single coherent sentence and who use punctuation randomly loaded into a scattergun. When I first started looking at POD writing the description of what I was looking for broadly summed up was “something readable that I feel able to comment on”.

The Last Man Out Of Europe makes it into that category of writing in all but one important respect. It wears its agenda on its sleeve like a badge of honour and was written by someone whose dictionary appears to have omitted the entry for “subtle”.

One of the things about alternative history or faux-fantasy political satire that’s appealing when it works is precisely the subtlety this piece is lacking. I can’t really go much further than to point out that when you think that calling your main character Winston Smith is a homage rather than a sledgehammer you should give up right then.

I might consider using the name if I was writing a satire about dystopian alternative histories or faux-fantasy political satires. Then it could be a homage to prove that I had researched the thing that I was going to poke fun at. 1984 would become the thesis to my antithesis allowing the reader of satire, as expected, to make their own synthesis.

This is not the impression I gain of The Last Man Out of Europe.

From the preview it looks clear that in fact this is supposed to be some literary Bartok fanfare to certain left wing ideals and references with carefully crafted references to power corrupting and the capitalist nature of war or… something. I’m afraid not being properly political myself I’m afraid I wouldn’t be sure what I was looking at here.

This is the difference between this and, say, Animal Farm. The whole point of Orwell’s writing in that case was that he was being more flexible in stating his position. A true political satire is all about saying “this is what I think is wrong but please, discuss”. This volume doesn’t seem to be an invitation to discuss, rather it’s a fanfare call to arms for people who already agree with the politics it embodies.

No doubt the volume sells to these people and is probably quite readable to them. However, if this is the type of stuff that Lulu publishes that people can read then maybe this niche marketing is more volatile than I thought.

Don’t get me wrong, free speech, free expression all that stuff is fine. However, with publications in fiction at Lulu being rarely starred or reviewed and with the marketing blurbs coming from exactly the same person who wrote the book with little or no editor intervention this is the kind of thing that could prove a nasty surprise to the less tolerant.

I wouldn’t read it, I wouldn’t particularly recommend it, I wish it were more clearly labelled as political propaganda. I don’t mind it existing it’s just, from a distance, it looks just like a novel and really it’s just a manifesto dressed up as a novel.

At least, that’s the way it seems.