From NYMag‘s Vulture blog:
George R.R. Martin’s longtime editor Anne Groell recently answered some fan questions about her editing process, Martin’s writing timeline, and the future of the A Song of Ice and Fire series. The big takeaway? Groell thinks there might be more than seven books…
More at the link, and it’s worth reading the comments (even apart from the obvious “What — Martin has an editor?!?”)
***********
Apart from the speculation, what’s on the midweek agenda?
Tommy
I got a question for readers of the series. I bought all the books, but not read them yet. Huge fan of the HBO show and a reader. I wanted to support the writer. It seems if my reading of the show is correct, HBO will soon catch up to the last book. How is that going to work out? Seems HBO is making shows faster then he is writing books.
Raven
Last day of our conference at Stone Mountain! Got to do setup , tear down and tech support for 6 rooms with computers and projectors that were all different and with crazy ass logins! Nice setting though. This is a huge park and it is interesting that there are so many African American folks exercising on the trails below this big ass Confederate monument .
Tommy
@Raven: Had to Google Stone Mountain. Made your comment about African Americans and a Confederate monument make total sense.
PsiFighter37
I bet if he decides to write an eighth book, his fans will give up any hope that he ever finishes the series.
Raven
@Tommy: Yea,there used robe klan rallies here and the town had klan shop into the 60’s . It really a great park,Marriott bought it from the state a few years back. Two golf courses, a huge lake and the mountain. I hiked up it yesterday at sunrise and it was stunning. Flickr won’t post from the iPhone so I’ll put some up later when I get home.
R-Jud
@Tommy: Numerous interviews with the showrunners reveal that GRRM has given them an outline of how the stories end. They’ve also had access to the manuscript as he’s producing it.
Also, he writes one episode a season for them, so he’s there in the writers’ room saying things like “oh, Character X can’t do that, because he needs to do Y later on.”
I watched the series in a massive binge while I was sick with pneumonia back in March, and then read the books. I think the show is better overall, and I don’t really care if he doesn’t finish the books at this point. I’m confident the show will come to a satisfying end in 2017 or so.
Raven
Used to be.
srv
Anyone heard Deep Purple play in the last decade?
Have an EU friend coming who wants to see them and wondering if they’ll live up to my memories.
Hillary Rettig
In case anyone’s interested, I wrote a post on the Amazon-Hachette debacle from the standpoint of a successful indie published author and Amazon supporter.
http://www.hillaryrettig.com/2014/05/30/amazon-writers-best-friend/
Welcome any concise comments, critiques, or questions. If you’re interested in indie publishing, ask away!
Schlemizel
@srv:
I just learned that King Crimson is making one last show, I wonder the same thing about that bunch.
Sometimes its better just to live on the memories I think.
OzarkHillbilly
Well, it looks like Obama is going to go after all the America loving, God fearing, pale skinned Patriots ™ just like Wayne LaPierre warned all those years ago. I think I will just sit back and watch the right wing freakout today.
Raven
@Schlemizel: oh god! The Palm Beach Pop Festival, Nov 69. http://www.oldrockphoto.com/palmbeach.html
They were the house band and played 3 times a day! The Court of the Crimson King is burned into my brain. So is Johhny& Winter and Janis playing together.
OzarkHillbilly
@srv: Hmmmph… Did they live up to them when they weren’t memories? ;-)
PurpleGirl
It may surprise people that GRRM has an editor. This doesn’t mean the editor asks for any changing to his text; he needs the editor to sheperd the manuscript through the production process and get all the tasks involved coordinated. (Note: I haven’t read the link yet but this is based on my experience in publishing.)
mai naem
Am I the only person who’s surprised at the Bergdahl coverage/outrage of the day? Michael Smerconish, on his show, was going on and on about Bob Bergdahl’s “Follow your conscience” last response email to his son’s email. Apparently “follow your conscience” means ‘Conscientious Objector” in Smerconish’s pea brain. How many military scandals might have been avoided if the parents of some soldier had told them to follow their conscience? Also, Smerc mentioned the Hippy Dippy part of Bob Bergdahls life. Anybody wish some of these idiots have their kids taken hostage by some militant jihadists solely to watch their reactions?
randy khan
@Tommy: They won’t catch up to the books that are out until at least the end of next season, and book 6 ought to be out by then. (I may have to eat my words on that one, but all indications are that it will be out.) If it really ends with book 7, it probably will be neck and neck.
Botsplainer
@mai naem:
Smerconish blows in the wind and is still occasionally influenced by the emanations from the right wing puke funnel. Eventually, he’ll come around and acknowledge that everything that spews from it is a fucking lie.
Ash Can
@OzarkHillbilly: I certainly hope they start flailing around over this today, and get distracted away from Bowe Bergdahl and his family. The date on this story is yesterday, though, so I hope it’s not flying under their radar.
RAVEN
Remember what they did to Bobby Garwood. http://www.3rdmarines.net/Garwood_Overview.htm
mike in dc
Tienanmen. June 4, 1989. Take a moment today.
Botsplainer
Guffaw:
http://www.newsmax.com/newswidget/tim-tebow-keeps-training-nfl/2014/06/03/id/574821/?promo_code=1z6kyuy4&utm_source=Talking_Points_Memo&utm_medium=nmwidget&utm_campaign=widgetphase1
Poor Timmy Tebow – training for something he’ll never get again.
Has he gotten laid yet, or is he still wearing Veggie Tales underoos when mommy tucks him in?
Sherparick
He apparently has done the outlines to ASOIF to the end with the fate of each character known (which is why GRRM = God/gods in Westeros) and has shared this with Benioff and Weiss so they can write the HBO series in congruence. Because of budget and constraints of the medium B&W have already had some big plot diversions from the books and I expect more to continue and we book readers are going to be more and more in the same boat as the series only folks about what comes next (for instance, next year I expect to see know the outcome of at least one, if not two major battles that were left hanging at the end of DWD). Right now for instance, I don’t know what will happen with Aarya and the Hound’s characters, or Gendry’s character, or Brienne’s and Pod’s characters in the remaining two shows (parts of FFC and DWD have already been put into this season, while the Red Viper’s character who dominated this season was a relatively minor character in the last chapters of SOS). So it looks like B&W plan to finish up the series with three more seasons (unless HBO decides to entice them to stretch it to 8). (P.S. Martin is a fine writer, but he needed a stronger editor and also it is to bad he did not learn Tolkein’s trick of doing flashback and story back fill which allowed Tolkein to cram 80 years of events into the first two chapters of LOTR (from the end if the Hobbit when Bilbo is 51 through his 111th birthday party (Frodo’s 32d) to when Frodo starts out from Bag End in September on his 50th birthday with the Ring. Frankly, Martin has lot of wandering and repetition in both FFC and DWD with limited character development.
Botsplainer
@Ash Can:
The Idaho locals have been really surprised at the vitriol and the number of calls by fat, home bound old white people in rascal scooters canceling their vacations to a winter ski resort.
Those Idaho folks must be socialistical commie libruls. Either that, or they’re reaping what they’ve sowed on an electoral basis for decades.
Welcome to the party, motherfuckers. This is the environment you’ve enabled.
srv
@OzarkHillbilly: I remember that they were loud.
Walker
@randy khan:
It has always been at least 7 books, at least since the “Meerenese Knot” — also known as “I am not ready for Dany to make it to Westeros so what they hell do I do here?” They will catch up; GRRM is in denial.
Honestly, I am excited about next season. The series goes downhill after book 3 (the end of this season is the end of book 3) that they are already going to have to be creative with the source material. I want to see what they are going to do.
Ash Can
@Botsplainer: Yes, I saw those news stories. While I’m sorry to see that happening to innocent, oblivious local CoC people, I hope it’s opening some eyes regarding just what the right wing is all about these days.
And as far as Tebow is concerned, I wouldn’t be surprised to see him caught with the proverbial live boy or dead girl one of these days.
srv
@Schlemizel: Well, I’m a Levin era guy (other than one earlier show), and always happy to see him. Levin, Mastaletto and CG Trio put on a good show a few years back.
OzarkHillbilly
@srv: Ohhhh… That was that concert. There was a lot of smoke too, wasn’t there? ;-)
srv
@OzarkHillbilly: Everything was smokey & loud before I was ten.
Bit more reserved when I grew up. Real DP fans don’t consider that era the real stuff.
edit: band fart
Elizabelle
@R-Jud:
Great to see you here. You’ve been missed, and I forget who was asking after you recently.
Sick with pneumonia, eh? Hope all is well now.
How fares the Bean?
OzarkHillbilly
@srv: I think when things stopped being so smoky was when I stopped going to concerts. Seeing as I didn’t smoke dope I don’t think that was the reason. My tastes in live music just changed.
Baud
@Botsplainer:
I hear The Citadel is considering moving from Idaho to a less socialist state.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: Oh Dog, Not them too. This state already has more than 3 times it’s per capita share of racists.
Gene108
@PsiFighter37:
See Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series. Author died. Publisher put together his notes and had another writer finish the series in one or two more books.
I am scared Martin is heading in that direction.
rikyrah
Black dentists complain over TennCare removal
The Tennessean 9:05 p.m. EDT June 3, 2014
Black dentists from across Tennessee told a group of lawmakers Tuesday that they had been treated unfairly by the company that administers the state’s contract to provide dental services to the poor.
Several dentists said they and their colleagues had been purged from the list of providers approved to treat patients through TennCare, the state’s Medicaid program, shortly after a new contract was awarded last year to DentaQuest, a Boston-based provider.
They and representatives for the National Dental Association, a trade group for black dentists, said dentists never were offered an explanation for why they were removed or an opportunity to appeal the decisions. But some said the purge had destroyed their practices and risked the health of the often poor TennCare patients they see.
http://www.wbir.com/story/news/local/2014/06/03/black-dentists-complain-over-tenncare-removal/9935603/
AdamK
@Gene108: I just hope Brandon Sanderson is keeping his pencil sharp. Martin’s slow, distracted, and old, and the last couple of books are a mess.
Tripod
@Gene108:
It’s worked pretty well for the HBO continuity.
Hire some capable ghost writers, hand them a plot outline and the character through arcs and quit trolling the readership.
Gin & Tonic
@RAVEN: I’ve been thinking of him ever since this thing started.
Jack the Second
@Gene108: I looked up the actuarial tables for a man GRRM’s age. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but given his pace of writing he’s got a pretty decent chance of surviving seven books, but eight or more gets pretty dicey.
gussie
Hey, Hillary:
I think that’s pretty silly! Particularly the Stockholm Syndrome thing. I make more money from traditional publishing that I make from self-publishing online. Hell, I sometimes make more money from traditional publishers than they make from me.
I’m not gonna claim that FSG or Abrams or S&S are paragons of pro-labor practice, but Amazon is Walmart. All these self-publishers who are hitching their wagons to Walmart make me very, very nervous. At this moment, Amazon _is_ epublishing. They’ve captured an entire market–and they’ve made extremely clear that once they are secure in their position, they will start extracting every penny possible.
But just in terms of finances, I don’t see it. I can make $15,000 from a traditional publisher without much effort: and they’ll pay for editing, marketing, and lunches. My chances of making $15,000 from e-publishing strikes me as vanishingly small.
rikyrah
Natalie Cole: An Unforgettable Dream House
The singer recalls the English Tudor home her dad, Nat King Cole, bought in 1948 in a predominantly white section of Los Angeles—triggering a wave of racial hostility but a childhood of fond memories
The house where I grew up in the Hancock Park section of Los Angeles was like a dream—even though my family faced threats after my father bought it in August 1948. At the time, many homeowners in white areas of Los Angeles refused to sell to blacks and other minorities, and Hancock Park was predominantly white and wealthy. But as a young girl, I was oblivious to all that. I felt like royalty living in our home.
I was born in 1950, so my first memories of our English Tudor brick house were filtered through my mid-’50s childhood world. I don’t think my dad had a clue that the neighborhood was going to have such a hostile reaction to us living there. Both of my parents were celebrities and exceptional artists. After all, my dad was Nat King Cole, one of the country’s most popular pianists and singers, and my mom, Maria Hawkins Cole, had been a singer in Duke Ellington’s band. She wanted a nice house after they married in ’48 and my dad had the money to buy it for his new bride. His money was as good as anyone else’s, and he figured that would settle it.
But it didn’t. When my mother, father and older sister Carole moved in they became the first black family in the area. Apparently my father’s real-estate agent had a light-skinned black woman put a binder on the house and then sign it over to my dad. The neighborhood was furious when they realized what had happened. Despite cash offers, threats, a lawsuit and racist signs on our lawn, we stayed put. Little by little, many of the neighbors calmed down once they realized we were a great family. My mom was a natural interior decorator and she turned the house into a symbol of elegance and beauty, and my father’s fame kept growing in the ’50s. It was impossible not to love him.
We lived in an interesting neighborhood. On one street were the Van de Kamps, who made their fortune in baked goods. On the others were the Gettys and Shells of oil fame, and the Vons and Ralphs, who pioneered supermarket chains. My best friend was a daughter in the Ralph family, and we sold Girl Scout cookies together. I got along with all the girls in the neighborhood. As kids, we had no clue about the racial stuff that seemed to preoccupy adults. We just enjoyed our life as kids.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/natalie-cole-an-unforgettable-dream-house-1401298798?mod=WSJ_GoogleNews
rikyrah
War on voting follows GOP inaction on rights
Rachel Maddow reviews how Republicans failed to follow up on promises to fix the Voting Rights Act after it was gutted by the Supreme Court, helping usher in a new Republican war on voting with new ID laws, restrictions and intimidation tactics.
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/watch/war-on-voting-follows-gop-inaction-on-rights-273215043693
rikyrah
Oregon insurer proposes double-digit premium cut
By Elise Viebeck – 06/03/14 06:05 PM EDT
One health insurance company on Oregon’s ObamaCare exchange is proposing to lower premiums an average of 16 percent next year, according to a report.
The other two carriers — Regence BlueCross Blue Shield and Kaiser — are proposing negligible increases of less than 5 percent and 0.2 percent, respectively.
The rates were reported by the Portland Business Journal on Tuesday. They come as state officials around the country begin to shed light on what consumers might pay on ObamaCare’s exchanges next year.
http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/208127-oregon-insurer-proposes-double-digit-rate-decrease#.U48dyHnAL5Y.twitter#ixzz33g6Lqdmt
R-Jud
@Elizabelle: Thanks! The Bean fares well. Nearly done with her first year of school; she’s been loving it!
winnie
We are definitely moving beyond the books with Sansa and for the Vale next season book readers and Unsullied alike will be in the same boat.
Hillary Rettig
@gussie: Thanks for your comment. You don’t seem to address any of the points in my piece, except to say your own experience has been different.
I don’t doubt that, but if your experience were typical, the Big 5 (or however many there are now) publishers wouldn’t be in the mess they’re in. The reality is that many, many authors feel the traditional system didn’t work for them. This is not just wannabes but successful authors like Barry Eisler, who famously gave up a $500K contract with St. Martin’s to go indie.
It also includes many authors who are happily selling books that publishers gave up on.
>. I can make $15,000 from a traditional publisher without much effort: and they’ll pay for editing, marketing, and lunches. My chances of making $15,000 from e-publishing strikes me as vanishingly small.
I would like to hear more about this “without much effort” part. (Including, esp. what you publish.) Also, while your chances of earning $15K from epublishing may be vanishingly small (makes me curious about what you publish and whether that’s really true), I quoted a study that showed that many authors are indeed doing just that. (Including me.)
And the situation with the traditional pubs just gets worse and worse as more authors and talented people flee what is clearly a sinking ship.
As I noted, Amazon’s labor practices are deplorable, and, yeah, I”m not happy about partnering with that. But as I note, the labor problem is much bigger than Amazon. Anyone who does business with Apple and Target – to name just a couple – is supporting equally bad practices, just not here in the US, (Plus the whole Target anti-gay, anti-union thing.)
RSA
@Tripod:
I wonder what Martin’s contract looks like? I can imagine that HBO would have wanted some guarantee that the series wouldn’t be hung up waiting for Martin to finish another book, but I can see Martin not wanting HBO to take the story in new directions because they’ve run out of published material.
gussie
Well, yeah–all I can talk about is my experience, and to a lesser degree those of other writers I know!
I didn’t dig deep into your links, and mostly just wanted to chat. I did see things like this, though, at one of your links: “E-book earnings represent roughly 64% of a traditionally published fiction author’s income.” I’d be shocked if that were true. I’ve made a living as a writer for 15 years. My wife does the same. I have five or six friends who do it, too, with varying degrees of success. And 90% of all our income is advances. Maybe, on some theoretical level, those are advances against ebook earnings? Not sure how that’d work. But in actual fact, our books largely don’t earn out (I mean, I get a couple hundred bucks here and there), and that doesn’t matter. The advance is the bottom line. And by paying me an advance–as well as paying for editing, proofing, art, etc.–the publishing is assuming much of the risk.
_That_ is what publishers offer. And they usually do a good job with gatekeeping. I mean, there isn’t a single competent publisher in the world who would’ve touched 50 Shades before it started selling, because it’s not professional-quality work, so clearly there are massive blind spots … but I’m not sure that dismissing 50 Shades is such a bad thing. As opposed to, y’know, promoting it.
Don’t get me wrong: I hate publishers as entities (the people who work for them, largely, are the book-lovingest group you can find!) and publishing in general. It’s a deeply stupid industry. But the rise of self-published ebooks strikes me as very much like the rise of home schooling. That is, some people do a terrific job with it! They are wonderful, they have all the tools and knowledge of public schools, and do a better job than any teacher.
But the vast majority is people who don’t want eggheaded experts–with their fancy book-learning, and their challenging tests that are way too easy to fail–messing with their precious baby. It’s a sort of dunderheaded populism.
However! I definitely should’ve said that I write fiction. And I don’t know anything about nonfiction, really. Or about people who are heavily invested in self-promotion. I don’t like people. I don’t like promotion. I don’t like anything except writing.
I write novels for adults and children. I’ve gotten advances from mid-six figures to low five. I’ve made about a million dollars in publishing–which sounds great, except it’s been over 15 years. You’ve never heard of me. _Nobody_has heard of me.
And I don’t doubt that some people do extremely well with ebooks. I just think it’s like the lottery (and some of the numbers, I suspect, are not true–or are fudged). You hear about the woman who made $40,000,000, not about the 40,000,000 people who lost.
hildebrand
@Schlemizel: The only problem (as one who started listening to King Crimson in the early 80s) is that Adrian Belew is not in the line-up. I know Fripp is King Crimson, but Belew made it more fun and adventurous.
Lurking Canadian
@RSA: I saw an interview with Martin once in which he said there was no reason to worry about the show passing the books because there is so much awesome in Feast for Crows. He even suggested there was some material he had left out that the TV show could use as padding.
‘Cause everybody knows if there’s anything TV audiences like more than slogging through a ruined countryside counting the burned farms, murdered children and rape victims, it’s sweeping up the leavings from an author’s cutting room floor..
Walker
@Gene108:
And those books were better than the middle books of the series by the original author. It helped that the author they picked was both an established author (not a ghostwriter) and a superfan.
There has been a lot of discussion on who such a person would be for GRRM. The consensus seems to be Joe Abercrombie would be the best choice.
Comrade Mary
Open thread? OK.
“We’re rolling out #condomTO bit by bit. Why? Because it’s more fun that way!”
Moar here.
Hillary Rettig
@gussie: Your experience is actually the obverse of mine and many others. I actually think trad publishing is the crapshoot, for reasons I explain in my piece.
Many who fail at indie publishing do so either because they’re not good writers or marketers. Let’s leave the former group out because they woudn’t succeed traditionally either. re marketing, I teach that and wrote about it for Konrath’s blog:
http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2013/09/guest-post-by-hillary-rettig.html
It’s a lot of work, but you can approach it from different angles and leverage your particular skill set. And it’s a lot less work than failing, or (god forbid!) having to keep your day job. (That sounds flip but I mean it.) Your home schooling analogy may fail because, even though many parents learn they’re not up to it, many also learn they are–and that the investment of time and money is well worth it because of the profound benefit they perceive it to have for the kids.
I am painting with an overly broad brush – I know traditional publishing works for some. I’m happy it works for you. At some later date, it might work for me. But it doesn’t work for more and more writers.
I think the gatekeeper defense of traditional publishing is actually the worse defense. If they were such good gatekeepers, Sturgeon’s Law wouldn’t apply. (And preemptively, I know there’s a lot of bad indie stuff published; I’m not saying there isn’t, only that publishers are not great gatekeepers.)
When I look in the bookstores, I see acres and acres of the same basic stuff. Someone gets a home run with a memoir; next year, memoirs out the wazoo. And that doesn’t even count the numbers of good books that don’t happen because Snooki, etc., gets a million-dollar advance.
>> “E-book earnings represent roughly 64% of a traditionally published fiction author’s income.”
Yeah, I find this stat suspect (mostly because it’s meaningless), too.
I’m truly happy for your success. Unfortunately, I know “midlist” writers who had a solid record of success who got dumped by their publishers without a thought. In the old days, there was a relationship, reciprocity, partnership – but for many writers those days are long gone.
RSA
@Lurking Canadian:
Heh. I’ve read all the books, but with decreasing interest the entire way, in part for the way you describe things.
winnie
Yeah Martin has clearly been in denial about the inevitability of the show catching the books. Frankly I’m relieved we have the show to give us some closure about how all this ends. And grateful that the
Show won’t be indulging in so much filler and irrelevant sub plots.
Bob In Portland
The “anti-terror” campaign in Ukraine continues. It’s been going on for two months now and the Kiev forces have not yet managed to recapture one city. People are dying. Ukraine’s jets have fired 150 rockets into Lugansk.
Has Obama offered to negotiate a peace conference? No, he has promised more military supplies. So our nation’s official policy is to continue to kill people in eastern Ukraine until they stop killing people in eastern Ukraine.
Does anyone think that Russia is going to give back Crimea?
Trollhattan
@Bob In Portland:
Hodor! Hodor! Hodor!
Damn, this is too easy.
Pogonip
@Bob In Portland: Hodor.
gussie
@Hillary Rettig: Oh, god, I’ve been dumped by 5 publishers! Don’t think I haven’t been dumped! And I’ve dumped three agents. But it’s not really ‘dumping,’ any more than I dump one restaurant when I start going to another. We weren’t in love; we just worked together on a project, until it ended.
And I certainly wouldn’t want to try to defend publishing as an intelligent business model. It’s crap. Sturgeon’s Law certainly applies … though I’m not sure you can really say ‘well, if you ignore all the indie books that are shittily written, they’re as good as published books!’ And instead of looking at the huge crappy midlist (aka, my home), what about actually excellence? The last two books I read were The Savage Detectives and The End of Mr. Y: perhaps ‘indie publishing’ has produced a few novels which come within a thousand miles of those. But I doubt it.
In fact, here’s a question: what are the best novels that have been indie published in the past three years?
Hillary Rettig
@gussie: I will have to punt on “best” because I’m not reading a lot of fiction these days. I also think it’s a bit of an apples and oranges comparison since trad publishing remains bigger and is decades older–it’s not surprising that it has a bit of an edge in some areas. I’m sure that, soon enough, the indies will produce their literary geniuses. (btw, if you check out “self publishing” on wikipedia, you’ll see that this has historically been true.)
Some trad publishing best sellers, like Lace Reader and Still Alice, started out indie. I don’t know about their quality, though.
gussie
@Hillary Rettig: That’s true. There hasn’t been enough time to really judge. But traditional publishing -did- give us Maya Angelou and George RR Martin and Percival Everett and Elmore Leonard and Cynthia Ozick and Jonathan Lethem and on and on and on and on and on and on into the thousands. Just recently, we got Goon Squad, Bernadette, Gone Girl. So the 10% that’s not crap? It’s _really_ not crap. Despite all the idiocy, something very smart happens, which I haven’t seen elsewhere.
(I should say that editors, right now, are _dying_ to buy books that have been indie published, and are doing well. I’m seriously considering indie publishing one of my unsold novels, and paying for fifty thousand sock puppets to buy it at a penny a pop, so I can say I’ve sold that many copies. Are there systems in place to prevent that sort of gaming? Are there ‘indie publishing consultants’ who offer hand-holding through the process?)
Hillary Rettig
>editors, right now, are _dying_ to buy books that have been indie published, and are doing well
Well, why wouldn’t they? it means they are buying a sure thing. on the one hand, this represents yet another abdication on their traditional responsibilites; otoh, if it means they treat those authors with more respect then I’m all for it.
my next book will be on weight loss, and I hope for a deal like that some day.
>50K sock puppets
I don’t know if there’s anything to prevent you from buying 50K of your own book, although Amazon is very aggressive in weeding out fake and quid-pro-quo reviews. sounds risky (not to mention, unethical).
there are lots of indie resources out there. email me at [email protected], if you wish, and we can discuss it. i’m sure you’ll have some advice for me, too.
sure, there are many trad publishing successes. I just wonder how many would-be Ozicks, etc., never made it past the hoops and gatekeepers. I was writing fiction in NYC in the 1980s, when Gordon Lish seemed to rule everything, and if you weren’t writing sucky minimalism, forget it.
big Bernadette fan here!
gussie
@Hillary Rettig: Editors are lemmings. Though I don’t see why buying a ‘sure thing’ would be an abdication; surely -not- buying a sure thing would be the abdication!
Yeah, fake reviews are blech. But if I bought 50,000 copies of my book for $500, at a penny per, would that propel me up the ‘indie bestseller’ list? I probably shouldn’t admit my Evil Schemes in public.
And I’m sure that many would-be Ozicks never got past the gatekeepers. But that strikes me as similar to ‘It sucks that so many potentially great teachers can’t get hired because they don’t have a teaching certificate’ or even ‘if you put my 6-year-old’s doodles in a gallery, they’d look just like Twombly!’ Gatekeepers are often wrong, but I’m not sure they’re worse than no-gatekeepers. Unless we start seeing an irruption of Ozicks in the next few years …
I guess the bottom line is just, ‘this works for some people, that works for other people!’ Such a boring bottom line.
Allison Williams Esq.
He gazed like a true king.