Column: A little taste of Hades for our self-publisher
As the editor of a good little community newspaper I’m very proud of, I’ve had to think about all the ways the Internet affects my job.
But as a wannabe novelist, who’s been taking some time off in Key West with my bride this month and trying not to think about deadlines, the school budget or the screening machine at the Recycling Center, I’m finding it fascinating to see how the Internet is affecting a whole different side of the writing world: book publishing.
It’s scary, to use the phrase of Beth Greenfield, a former reporter of mine who’s gone on to make a name for herself in Manhattan with Time Out New York.
The web, to me, as a longtime aspiring book writer, has come to feel like a gigantic booby-trapped carnival arcade designed to take money from desperadoes who want to sell their books — or at least find adoration and the promise of immortality.
So many reader forums and book fan sites seem to be covers for editing, design and marketing services. Authors wander in like browsing deer, take just a little nibble and then plug their books. The sites tell them that is not allowed, except in a separate thread. It’s kept hidden in a dark, dirty corner of the readership playground with a thread title like: “Author Announcements” or “Read My Book” or “Troll Here and Pick Up After Yourself.”
Except for laughs, what real readers want to pore through an endless list of titles by unknown authors (“Crossed Eyes in Hell” by Sheena Trollop; “Evil Babies” by Sandra Bigham; “Fierce Teeth, Bloody Fangs and the Thrill of Hair” by Douglas LaTrobe-Brandywine) and badly written pitches about end-of-the-world erotic fantasies with werewolves and pirates and bodice-wearing vampire women?
After you post your book, and feel a little dirty about it, you might order some help fine-tuning your manuscript for $799 for the basic once-over by a very seasoned pro, perhaps a recent top-notch college grad who’s never heard of a dangling participle or a Latin root or even a transitive verb — or maybe by the Russian guy who has attempted to paraphrase a review on my book’s Amazon Kindle site for what I presume is his own site selling pirated ebooks. “So Thomas Jefferson come back. It goes not well for him, being such a ghost. But he make fine friends, even the president of USA, if brief. A book of beautiful writing!”
Googling demoniacally for evidence that someone else had noticed my book, I discovered a site called Shelfari. This is obviously a promotional device disguised as a reader forum. It was set up by Amazon. When I first found it, I was thrilled to see my book had been “added” to the bookshelves of 18 members.
I clicked on their member icons (most of them blank silhouettes; a few had actual photos but mostly of flowers or dogs, not the readers themselves) to see what kind of books they liked: most of them had literally thousands of books on their cybershelves. Most had joined Shelfari the very day I discovered them.
Hmmmm. Did they actually sit in front of a computer entering 4,568 titles in one day? I don’t think so.
The number is now up to 51 strangers with my book on their shelves and, except for one reader who gave it 5 stars by the grace of God (people who think my book is a paranormal fantasy romance just because it has a ghost and a Sally Hemings look-a-like in it, gee whiz, are always sorely disappointed), none have rated or reviewed the book.
I think these are robots. I think Amazon created them. I am not sure why.
I found another site called “LibraryThing.” Its graphics are suspiciously spartan and I can’t figure out who’s behind it or what their angle is. Somebody with a user name like “Chickeebird508” gave my book a two-star rating on this wretched site. Who is this Chickeebird508? What is wrong with her?
I’m still wandering through the thick of all this with my machete, in the midst of a process that I think is nearing its grand finale with a whimper, not a bang. I don’t have any grand observations to make about all this just yet — except that sometimes I get an overwhelming feeling of ickiness. Meanwhile, I just wanted to give you a little sense of things. I’m slated to talk about my experiences in the netherworld of the self-published novelist in June at the library. Until then, I’ll be collecting my thoughts for you.
