Features

When that ubiquitous television pitchman Billy Mays died recently, I had just started watching the reality series about him and his partner, Anthony Sullivan, appropriately called “Pitchmen”, on the Discovery Channel.   I’ve done a lot of sales work over the years as “day jobs” supporting my writing career; so much so that I tend to forget that the process remains mysterious to most writers, who remain clueless about this essential rite of modern commerce.

The hard truth is that everyone sells, and where a self-published book is concerned (or a first time one, for that matter), if you don’t sell […]

On Kash’s Book Corner there’s an eye-opening post about how book buyers and publishing reps interrelate – and it’s such a nightmarish scenario that it makes me almost proud of the fact that it’s harder for self-publishers to get into bookstores (even if that is where most books are sold). The fact is that book buyers – even in small independent stores – have as narrow a criteria as editors and agents.

What’s especially troubling about the post is that it has a number of positive comments, saying things like “This is fascinating.” It is an interesting window into the […]

Rejection, a writer’s fate. Whether impecunious and unpublished or Pulitzer-prize winning and flush, the encounter is inescapable. Unless the writer is a “fulltime” masochist (“part-time masochists” are hereby exempted) the meeting is rarely stumbled upon or bumped into. Rather it’s a consequence traceable to the writer’s own exploits. It comes after months of research, followed by years of writing and rewriting. It comes when the pandemic self-doubt that is manifestly rampant in the writer’s head during the writing process, suddenly peters out, shape-shifts, and re-emerges in the form of unrepressed self-esteem. This cryptic and schizophrenic phenomenon occurs in syncopated climax […]

Regarding the review of Bonnie Kozek’s Threshold, I had this email exchange with J.M. Reep that I’m printing here.

JMR: I’m wondering why Bonnie Kozek’s book was reviewed for SPR given the following facts:

1. Ms. Kozek is a contributor to the website.
2. Ms. Kozek is also a member of Backword Books, along with Henry Baum and Kristen Tsetsi, who are also contributors to SPR.
3. While there was a hyperlink to Backword Books at the end of the review, there was no mention in the review of Ms. Kozek’s status as a contributor at SPR, nor […]

The terms “vanity press” and “vanity publishing” used to mean that people who wrote books too poorly written to interest a “real” publisher would pay to have their own books printed and bound. The implication, of course, was that “real” publishers published “good” books and authors of “vanity” books were by definition failures who couldn’t write.

I dare you to call Herman Melville a failure. He paid to have Moby Dick published after New York publishers turned up their noses at his crude tale in favor of the fashionable novels written in England. Or call me a failure, and I’ll […]

In 2005, the Naples-born sculptor, Giancarlo Neri, created a work entitled The Writer – a 30 foot tall table and chair made of wood and steel. Exhibited in the middle of a grassy field in London’s Hampstead Heath – as homage to the famed park’s associations with Keats and Coleridge – spectators interacted with the sculpture in a variety of ways. Some viewed it from a distance; others circled its perimeter. Some lay beneath it; others looped the massive legs on bicycle. Its grand scale and curious posturing dwarfed both viewer and nature. At length, the sculpture produced an unsettling […]

On the heels of his well-read and well-commented post, A Publishing Person Self-Publishes (seriously, read the entire discussion), Andrew Kent writes about the important issue that self-published non-fiction must be held to a much higher standard than fiction.

The readers and writers on this blog tend to produce works in fiction genres like mystery, romance, and general literature. My novel, which I self-published and talked about in an earlier post that generated a lively discussion, is a mystery novel.

Self-publishing fiction is entirely fine, in my opinion.

But when it comes to scholarly works, things change.

I work in scholarly […]