A rose by any other name…

… would smell as sweet, and self-publishing by any other name is still self-publishing, and carries its own peculiar reek.

Rob Asghar, writing at HuffPo Books, opines that self-published writers should rebrand themselves as “indie” writers, and thereby replace the stigma of self-publishing with that indie cachet. All by way of telling us that he has a (self-published) book coming out in January, which he’d like us all to read. Of course, if he’d actually had some success with this approach — that is to say, if he was actually a successful “independent author,” rather than, say, yet another frustrated writer declaring that self-publishing is the future while plugging his own book — I might find him credible.

HuffPo Books has already covered itself with glory by declaring its disinterest in actually talking about books. Instead, it’s about promoting books by talking about things peripherally related to books.

Look well on it: see the myriad pieces about the struggle of the writer, etc. I see a nightmare vision of our future, in which the only people who want to read a book are those who write them, and in which the actual quality of the books is less relevant than the social networking skills of their authors.

Maybe it’s just me, but I’d like some actual discussion of, you know, books. Not about how the Internet Is Changing Everything For The Better, but about how stories work.

Sack full of kittens

I can’t yet let the kittens out of the bag.

Writing a novel is a nasty process. A certain number of mood swings is involved. Word has it that this has made me difficult to live with. These reports, I have chosen to ignore.

The end result is rather like a litter of kittens: you want to keep them, but cold reason suggests you should stuff them in a bag and throw them in the nearest waterway.

Instead, you stuff them in a bag and send them to a publisher. The publisher, in all likelihood, will then throw them in a river.

If, on the other hand, you receive a response including such words as ‘fresh’, ‘powerful’, and ‘uncompromising’, or even ‘unputdownable’ (which may not actually be a word, per se), then you develop a sudden and luminous insight to the meaning of ‘euphoria’.

More to follow.

Why

I wrote a book; a book, wrote me.

I left said book under yonder tree.

And the world said, fiddle-de-dee.

Consequently, I considered it expedient to do this blog thing. And, since every blog must have its first post, this is mine.