This original Trouserpress, alas, has pressed its last wrinkle. The PHP has gone delinquent on me, and rather than mend its ways, I have re-started the blog at a new address, and in snazzier form. I hope.
There are a few good posts on the old press and I leave them up.
If you are an avid and regular reader of Trouserpress (if there is such a person), you might want to consider bookmarking the new page or resetting the RSS because all future posts will appear there.
E-books Weed and Shorts have appeared on the Sony ebooks site about 10 days before expected, while they have not yet shown on Kindle, Mobi or Barnes & Noble as I thought they would by now. http://sony-ebook-samples.com/sample/5714/weed
It didn’t register with me at first but my ebooks Weed and Shorts are available from SmashBooks.com in all the following formats:
• Online Reading (HTML)
• Online Reading (JavaScript)
• Kindle (.mobi)
• Epub (open industry format, good for Stanza reader, others)
• PDF (good for highly formatted books, or for home printing)
• RTF (readable on most word processors)
• LRF (for Sony Reader)
• Palm Doc (PDB) (for Palm reading devices)
• Plain Text (flexible, but lacks much formatting)
• Plain Text (viewable as web page)
That’s so many formats, I’m almost embarrassed. And it also means that the books are available in just one place to everyone who has any kind of digital device whatsoever. All possible nice things to Sage Evans and SmashBooks.
Meanwhile, I’m grinding out the press releases but not anticipating an overwhelming response — or any response other than the cat rubbing round my ankles as he is. But then, cats like Weed, don’t they.
Following on my theme (frothing obsession) with publishers and their iniquities.
In my last rant I complained how the big boys were sewing up ebook/POD independent publishing process and effectively disempowering the independent.
Yesterday, I came across more grist for my ire. Not content with merely appropriating the means of production and distribution, one of the big boys, Amazon, to name a name, has been bullying the independents into working its way, or not getting listed at all.
Some time ago, Amazon set up a company called Book Surge which, for a commission, will format and print your POD books and list them with Amazon. Clever bit of marketing from Amazon. Book Surge’s homepage claims that it was set up by writers for writers, thus implying independence from the Goliath. Bollocks, it was set up by Amazon as an exclusive portal and the independents were coerced into working through it or having their books de-listed by Amazon. The buy buttons were removed from the listings of many books before the independents had time to respond or were informed. And never mind that Book Surge’s services were considered shit by some people. You can read the story here in a article I came across on The Register site (biting the hand that feeds it, and good for it too). The article is a little old but retro is the new now.
For lots of reasons, it would be nice not to do business with Amazon. Fuck ‘em. But they are so big, is it possible to ignore them? Amazon remains the single biggest, distributor of books, reaching those parts that, etc.
The time is here (not for the first time) for some proper punk DIY alternative publishing and distribution, and I probably ought to initiate something as a matter of principle, and indeed I have hoped to. That was a breathless sentence, but I’m too puffed to take another run at it.
Punk publishing does take time. Lots and lots of it. Lorry loads of time. It will require a group effort. I would need to upgrade the software on my site. I looked into this and became dizzy at the enormity of the task for one so unused to code.
Well. Anyone out there want to build a shopping cart and some proper blog PHP for the site’s front page? You know where to find me.
Meanwhile, the distributors of my ebooks have told me today that they should be listed by the end of this week.
I am intrigued by the title of this book I came across on Amazon while considering cannibalism:
Sinisterism - Secular Religion of the Lie: The History of the Nazis Who Were Marxists Who Were Fascists Who Were Cannibals And Are Leftists Today — by Bruce Walker
Obviously a fair read from a well balanced intellect.
In the interests of historical accuracy, I include a link. Ha ha ha!
Well, Weed and Shorts are due to be published Friday, North American EST. After all the false alarms, delays and non-events, I shall believe it if it happens. I will also scream so loud I won’t need a blog to broadcast the news. And despite a week off the bottle, I will likely get hog-swaggling drunk.
Well, it seems like Michigan might exist after all. The files for Weed should be listed with the major ebook outlets soon and a collection of my short stories are soon to follow under the title Shorts.
Witty title, witty cover image, eh?
I still don’t know the exact release dates but you’ll hear the hullabaloo when it is all finished without having to check this blog because I’ll be jumping about and yelling like an expert at hullabaloo.
Well, it has taken years and years and aeons, but we are getting there. If it all happened instantly, it would still be too slow, so I shall just have to take up a hobby to fill in time while I am waiting — a hobby like weeding, for example.
I will never win the Nobel prize for literature, but if there were a Nobel award for lame last lines of blog entries, I might clinch that.
Oh groan. That’s not the good kind of groan, that’s a really groany kind of groan. I am sitting here utterly shagged (and that’s not the good kind of shagged either) with the stems of broken wine glasses keeping my eyelids open, while supping more of the same to keep me sane.
Bloody ebook publishers. This ebook technology is supposed to take publishing control (the censorship of the market) out of the hands of the corporate totalitarians and put it in the hand of the ordinary Joe, or ordinary Chris in this case. But no! Not a bit of it! Bollocks! That’s what I say. The big boys are apparently sewing up the means of publication. Oh, yes, the proles (hi!) have the means of production (if you can afford the software or a freelancer who can do it for you) but the suits have put armed guards on the store doors.
Yikes.
I am ranting on about my favourite novel in the history of the universe, Weed, the one wot I wrote myself. It was finished years ago and has been sitting on my HD so long it is covered in cyberdust.
Once I had dashed down (very slow and tentative kind of dashing, to be honest) the last full stop, a new narrative started: the fucking Greek epic of trying to get agents and publishers to take it on, a process full of hydras and clashing rock-like brains that I have mentioned here before.
Digression: when in London recently, I was chatting with a friend who has written and published a book. I won’t say who this was, because she may not want her stories repeated in public — not that the sub zero readership of this page constitutes public … a whisper in a locked cupboard, perhaps, but whatever. My friend’s book involved time money and months and months abroad researching when she was earning no money from her usual occupation as a freelance journalist, well paid and stable job, that freelancing is. Book finished, she found an agent. Months later, the book had not been placed with a publisher. My friend one morning fired the agent and within three hours found a publisher herself. So there you are, another tale to add to the many I have about the freeloaders and timewasters and parasites that are agents and publishers (and yes, I will be happy to take back those rude words if any agent agrees to take me on).
Where was I? Oh yes, I was ranting.
Thoroughly bored with this Greek epic of not publishing the normal way, I decided to self publish. Why not? James Joyce started that way. So having abandoned the Greek epic we start on the long difficult modern novel with a Greek name of trying the get the effing story put out as an ebook.
I tried to do the cover myself. I did used to be an artist of some enthusiasm, but the enthusiasm goes all soggy when it actually matters. I engaged an artist who … well, never mind. I decided again (re-decided? Is that a word?) to do the cover myself. That was a success until I decided one day it wasn’t a success. I re-did the cover myself which involved a lot of head scratching technical bother and the help of a friend who can actually use the software I have on my own machine.
Then I needed to format the documents and convert them to as many as possible of the myriad ebook formats, which involved a lot of terminally boring reading of very long blurbs and which were so long and difficult to read that by the time I had finished them the technology had moved on two more generations and I needed to start again. Once having gleaned the basics I was stumped for software to do the formatting and conversions, and I could not beg, borrow, steal or afford all this stuff.
Sorry, Mr. ePolice bot, I in no way intended to imply there that I was in any way whatsoeveratall intending to do anything that would infract copyright laws vis ownership and acquisition of software. Oh no. Just an expression.
Eventually, I hit on the stunningly obvious idea of using a freelancer in Kalamazoo, Michigan, which is apparently in the USA. The freelancer did not have to be in Kalamazoo, or at least I don’t think that was a requisite and I could have had one in Sophia, Bulgaria, which is not in the US, and which sounded like a pretty wild night out. But Kalamazoo it was, and my instinct for once was right because the chap has been enormously helpful, which is an adjective I cannot apply to the major ebook outlets.
Amazon UK have stopped listing ebooks while they set up an ebook store, though they could presumably have continued listing ebooks while they set up the store. They don’t know when their store will be up and running, and I know that because I have asked them twice this year. Of course, there is Amazon’s Kindle ebook store but you have to be a resident of the US to list with them. Mobipocket just rejected the files I uploaded. Neither the http nor the ftp uploads would accept the file. At one point I was sitting here using three computers to try to get the file accepted: a G4 700 series Powermac running Tiger, a Macbook running Leopard and a Hewlett Packard thingy running Vista; I used Safari, Firefox and two different versions of Explorer and nothing would stick. Ebook.com simply wouldn’t work with me because I am not exalted enough and Waterstones have bidden me to write to a snail mail address in London — of course: digital publishing; British company; snail mail.
Anyway, so here I am no further on. Except I might be. Wherever there is a problem, there is a solution, other than in my private life, so I am already working on the workarounds, ie, blogging about the situation and drinking more wine. There is a cunning plan in my head (and where else would one keep a cunning plan? The sock drawer?).
Er, so. There we have it. Weed will be with us eventually, but I will have spent so much time sorting it out, I won’t have time to write any more.
Back to the wine, in that case. Glug. Cheers. Burp. Weed.
You may have heard me harping and/or carping on about this topic before. Tune out now.
I have proposed (see previous posts and innumerable pub conversations) that publishers and writers’ agents are perhaps motivated by bottom lines rather than neat lines, by profits not profundity, by talents and shekels rather than just plain literary talent; by monetary value rather than literary value and are anyway often unable to tell a best seller when it bites them on the nuts.
And in my discourse I have been quick to deny that I am personally influenced in my conclusions by the reluctance of the same publishers and agents to handle my novel Weed. Oh no, not a bit of it.
Well, now vindication, because even the Guardian, that bastion of the literary establishment has noticed. The article is called How fiction lost the plot — silly title since it is the market makers that have lost the plot, not the people who make the fiction, but why let accuracy stand in the way of an eye catching headline? The article has a similar thesis to mine, but the writer Mark Lawson has done some actual research to back up his claims. You can read it here, if you are still with me.
In my own posts I have described this bread head trend as a relatively recent phenomenon and I think I said that the success of JK Rowling (all the best to Ms Rowling, by the way) really entrenched the modern publishing culture. Perhaps it has. However, having a good read of Kurt Vonnegut’s Palm Sunday while passing through Coincidence City a few days ago, I came across the following observation: “… now accountants and business school graduates dominate book publishing. They feel that money spent on a first novel is good money down a rat hole.” You can find the passage on p2 in my edition. In the chapter called Self-Interview he expands upon this theme in a more satisfying manner and at greater length than I can quote here. The rat hole remark was apparently written in 1980 or thereabouts and Self-Interview was published in 1977, so I don’t know where I got the idea this a new phenomenon. Vonnegut himself claims it was the rise of TV after WWII that killed the market for the printed story. TV has a lot to answer for.
Well, that’s me done on this topic. Honest. No more.
