The Traditional Publishing Scam
In former times–meaning antedeluvian–I worked for a small press. I reviewed unsolicited manuscripts, called the slush pile, to locate undiscovered gems for publication and I also did some editing. Not once did the small press publish anything that came over the transom. If they wanted to publish something like a vampire novel, for instance, instead of putting something from the slush pile under contract, they would assign the task of writing the desired mss to one of the staff editors and totally ignore the slush pile. The editor, who usually had a publishing history, would then get to work in his or her spare time and crank out a vampire novel. Nice work if you can get it.
This makes me think of the old structure of “authorship” and the exploitive process of a writer getting published.
First, the writer hunkers down and hammers out an outline for a novel. It’s always a novel, by the way. Keep in mind that everyone–and I mean absolutely everyone–eventually writes a novel, usually about their “amazing” life which no one but their mother will ever read. Case in point: an engineer friend of mine, now deceased, wrote a book on pipelines. He put it on Amazon and to his surprise it sold a hundred copies a month for year after year with zero marketing. “This is way easy,” he said to himself and he wrote a novel and posted it on Amazon too. Zilch. Zero sales. Year after year went by with no sales despite herculean efforts on his part to push the book. And it was not even about his “amazing” life. Today over a million books are “published” each year, most of them fiction or autobiographical, or both, most self-published, and the number is increasing every year. And most are never read by anyone once the writer runs out of friends and family.
That bit of info is just to alert the reader as to the realities of fiction publishing. I don’t call it a marketplace because publishing is not a marketplace, but a monopoly. You can always tell a monopoly because monopolies can afford to fire their customers. Amazon bans books by the hundred–that’s because Amazon functions as a monopoly. The biggest distributor, Ingram, also fires its own customers, routinely putting publishers out of business because Ingram is also a monopoly.
New York publishers function as a monopoly also because they work together to screen out “heretical” writers and ensure that they will all publish the same ideological slant to the same targeted audience. New York publishing companies are mostly owned by multinational megacorps with oodles of advertising dollars which they can use across multiple venues to make sure the books the publishers wish to push on the public conform to their biases and ideological preconceptions. Monopolies can afford to act this way because profit is not their chief motive–pushing their ideology is. This is called ESG.
After completing your outline, you will then create a first draft, which you will be advised by some of the great many ancillary businesses that prey on would-be authors to submit your work to a “beta reader”. Professional readers, as the term suggests, charge money for this service. Usually the writer will skip the “professional” part and contact a friend who is known to write a bit on the side, for instance a diary, and dragoon the reluctant friend into plowing through the first draft. It’s hard to say which is better: the friend who doesn’t want to offend you, or the “professional” who will quickly “correct” your draft into the kind of ideological drivel that cash-paying publishers want.
Then comes editing. Again, some will pay cash for a professional first draft initial editor, as if every joe and his dog don’t know how to compose sixth grade English, while the thrifty writers will dragoon another friend for some kind of barter deal.
Once the writer makes the recommended “corrections”, which are certain to remove any spontaneity the manuscript (mss) formerly possessed, our forlorn, and now perhaps poor-lorn writer, will turn his work over to what’s called a developmental editor. They are even more expensive because they actually look at such items as character development, and analyzing the work for the required 25% intro, 50% body, and 25% resolution portions. As if readers give a flying F for such things. But you’ll be told you have to do these.
Next comes the copy editor. If we don’t yet have enough cooks in the kitchen to completely flatten and obliterate any creativity that remains in this crockpot, the copy editor will entangle you in a ridiculous series of nose-heightened “writers’ style manuals” that will dictate where you must put your Oxford commas, and apostrophes, and hyphens while catching misspelled words, as if Word won’t already do that.
And we’re still not done. Next in line is the professional editor who will rapidly transform your once charming story into a dreary, predictable, boring tale devoid of any style at all.
The predators, in fact, will keep coming as long as your bank account holds out: the format editor, more beta readers, more reviews by copy and characterization editors, etc.
Whew. Finally, after all has been lost, it’s time to submit your work to an agent. Don’t ask the silent questions like, for example, is the agent married to a conglomerate publisher, which in effect means the publisher will double-dip into your royalties. These swindles are yet another dirty secret of New York publishing. Agents too operate effectively as a monopoly, in fact are part of the NY publishing monopoly, acting as recruiters for their very selective recruitment of writers in exchange for kickbacks from the orgs they pretend to “negotiate” with.
If your mss is too long, the agent may reject it and reject you. If your mss is very short, meaning no longer than a few scribbles on a page, then your agent might be willing to market it to a magazine. If medium length, the agent might be willing to market it to a select book publisher. But if your mss is in-between in length, then it’s a novella, and the agent will reject it and you because no one publishes novellas anymore because monopolies can publish whatever they like and they don’t like novellas.
But to give agents their due, they actually sometimes are honest and have a difficult job. This is because NY publishers today have not only a litmus test which will automatically exclude a writer’s work, but now excludes writers themselves, sight unseen, and work unread, specifically white males.
Case two in point: Equus Publishing is open to msss (how often is that spelled?) by writers. I receive a steady stream of submissions, sometimes with explanations of why they have come to Equus instead of to an agented NY publisher. A recent writer told me that his agent helped him place several books with NY publishers and they have all sold well, even reviewed by the NY Times Book Review (one of the conglomerate venues I mentioned that NY publishers use to promote their chosen ideologically favored books, much like the Oscars and just as honest). But despite this success, he suddenly has a problem: his agent is firing him. Why? Because the NY publishing monopoly is no longer accepting manuscripts from white males. So she can no longer place any more books by him no matter how creative and brilliant his books are.
So it’s no longer enough to merely comply with the octopus-like PC Cult, but white males are now heretics by definition and can no longer publish, no matter the quality of what they write. If you are a white male, you have been or will soon be fired and your msss rejected, both sight unseen, and no agent will represent you.
Let’s say you do have a sizable dose of melanin, or you feel like a 13 year old girl today although you are in fact a 56 year old man. Thus you qualify to bypass the ideological screening. But if you are still not part of the in-crowd, there will be no $ up front, no marketing, perhaps misspelled words on the cover of your book (that happened to me), and you will have to resign yourself to criss-crossing the country doing all the marketing yourself at your own expense, because advance fees only go to former presidents or select members of the chosen few. The more books you sell, the deeper in debt you will go.
This whole traditional publishing framework works like this because it is driven by advertising. IOW, the reading audience does not buy books, rather books are sold to them. The monopolies and their conglomerates know that because they have the dollars and the advertising venues, they can sell whatever they wish to the public and the public will buy it so long as it’s not written above a sixth grade level. It is not a market, but a cash cow of Manchurian Candidates, a public so conditioned that the moneyed publishers know in advance that the public will buy whatever the publishers choose to sell, backed up by a slew of “reviewers” owned lock-stock by the same conglomerates, therefore would not dare write something negative about the stream of trash that comes from NY publishers.
BUT THEN CAME THE INTERNET and all of the above is crumbling. Now anyone can set up his own website and promote his own books and market using AI, audio , and videos. It is no longer necessary for a writer to submit his work to ANY publisher, including Equus Publishing. Of course, I am still happy to assist talented writers in any way I can, and there is still the issue of de-conditioning the public at large, which is something like deprogramming a religious believer, and making them aware that the best books are no longer being produced by the NY publishing monopoly, but are to be found in small independent outfits like Equus.
AI comments
The developments of AI are disturbing. How can a democratic process work if everything one sees and hears is fake propaganda? ChatGPT has already been tagged as having a political slant that is readily identifiable and now Google Gemini portrays whites as blacks, but never blacks as whites. For those who think this kind of falsification is good, I suppose it presents no problem.
I wonder how law schools will handle this? In law school there are right answers and wrong answers which lends itself to AI. Law students must write many papers investing a huge amount of time when time is severely limited. Suddenly students can go to the head of the class having done no research. Of course that would become evident at exam time.
I didn’t go to law school to practice law but merely for the knowledge. Back then it was affordable and I paid cash all the way through. But today most lawyers owe huge $. A foolish investment IMO since the market is glutted with unemployed lawyers who can already be hired for spare change. I see even more lawyers becoming unemployed once AI gets better. Maybe before long one can consult a lawyer online that is completely AI. OTOH maybe that would be a good thing since IMHO 90% of the lawyers out there are completely superfluous. Even immigration law, which had been absorbing the excess, is now proving a desert for the legions of unemployed counselors as people simply walk across and squat.
I have no fear that any writing of mine can be replicated by an AI bot. I use language in innovative ways and my books have complex and carefully weighed plots with surprise endings. Of course, that means my books will never be bestsellers since the biggest sellers on Amazon, today’s virtual publishing monopoly, are mostly AI products. It’s too bad the general public can’t tell genuine creativity from machine production.
Latest books from Equus
It’e been a while since I myself wrote anything of consequence. My latest effusions (that sounds better than emissions) are Quantum Marlowe and Jihad Bubba. I actually wrote another novel before I wrote those, titled The Glow.
This is a sci-fi horror novel about a young man who must keep the same coins in each pocket otherwise he will burst into flames. He’s okay with that, but there is another angle to his problem–his Glow is contagious. If he touches anyone, or if they are stupid enough to ignore his warnings and touch him, then they contract the Glow and if they don’t learn real quick how to control their new illness, then they will burst into flames. And if they touch anyone else, the Glow will spread like an epidemic. IOW this is a horror novel about spontaneous human combustion, except it’s not really spontaneous, but extends from this eccentric young man with his strange affliction.
Although several years old, The Glow is making the rounds of agents and publishers, but so far no bites mainly because a white male wrote it. That’s the unfortunate state of modern America. Being on the inside of publishing, I am occasionally contacted by writers who tell me the difficulties they are having with mainstream publishers due to the one fact that they are white males. New York City publishers (that’s almost a redundant phrase) don’t like white male authors. Thank goodness for the amazing tools that have appeared which allow places like Equus to put their talents and ideas before the public without the intercession of hostile enemies bent on silencing white males. In the words of Elon Musk, “They can go fuck themselves.”
Still, The Glow is a mainstream Stephen King-like horror tale which should find appeal with a cellophane corporate publisher that has the bucks to promote it, unlike Yours Truly who has zero dollars to put into advertising. I publish my truly strange books with Equus, but mainstream works like The Glow should ideally find a home elsewhere.
My new novella of 34,000 words, completed last spring, titled ‘Temple of the Double Sun’, is also making the rounds. No bites yet there either. It’s too long for sci-fi mags and too short for sci-fi books, but maybe it will eventually find a place.
Confessions & latest news
Despite careful proofreading, the sample copies of ‘Confessions’ revealed several typos. I really, really hate typos. I corrected all of them n reposted the file on Amazon. ‘Confessions’ should be typo-free now but the book may not be available for shipping until Tuesday, Sep 5.
My sci-fi novel The Glow has been carefully proofread n submitted to a major sci-fi publisher. It will be a few weeks before I get an answer. It might be helpful if I had an agent to help open some doors, but I have an issue with NYC publishers anyway, so maybe not. One of my queries to a NYC publisher received a reply roughly in the vein of “How dare you propose that we publish a book such as you described in your query. Don’t ever contact us again!” That was likely ‘Cross-Dressers From Pluto’ which I finally self-published. Originality and humor just cannot find an audience among agenda-driven Woke NY publishers. That’s why I am open to publishing similar creative works by others. No one else will do it. Agents tend to be in bed with publishers anyway–literally.
‘Confessions’ spy book published – comments
After months in preparation, my latest book, Confessions of a CIA Spy in the Soviet Union, is finally out and available from Amazon. For many years I kept to one side the journal that the CIA requested me to keep, thinking that with the Soviet Union gone, no one would be interested in what it was like to live, or more accurately try to survive, daily life in that Communist country. With the current war in Ukraine and people of all factions and convictions splitting on whom to support and why, or having no interest in the matter under the impression that what happens over there has nothing to do with what happens over here, I thought this book might be educational as well as entertaining. ‘Over there’ is a lot closer to ‘over here’ than it used to be. I am also finding that many young people today seem to have no idea what the Soviet Union was like, some even advocating similar conceptions to be implemented in this country. Such–to me–is simply astounding.
This is not strictly a political work, but in a sense an exploration of cultural anthropology by a trained anthropologist and historian of Russian and Islamic history. On the other hand, it was quite impossible to refrain from observations and conclusions after many surprising personal experiences and unexpected encounters. Perhaps my most surprising observation was not why the Soviet system did not collapse sooner than it did, but that the S.U. did not so much ‘collapse’ as simply fail to improve over 70 years, and its people simply could see no reason why they should continue with it. When the majority of the people learned the reality of their situation, the regime was doomed. Many people today also seem to equate modern Russia under Putin with the Soviet Union, believing there is little difference. I invite such people to read ‘Confessions’ first and then make the comparison.
Despite my best efforts, today I found several typos in the text. Having promptly corrected them, I hope Amazon does not postpone any deliveries as a result. I did the cover using Amazon’s new cover creator. It was clumsy but seems to have worked. As for the price, it’s just about impossible to put out a substantive book anymore without a $16 price. Even then, given the time and $ that it costs a publisher to do so doesn’t come even close to genuine compensation. There really is no profit in book publishing these days unless one sells tens of thousands of copies, which only the cellophane megacorps have the marketing resources to achieve, which does not include Yours Truly. I hope readers find my latest effort entertaining and informative.
Update on ‘Confessions of a CIA Spy’
I am now in the editing phase, correcting typos and verifying facts. It’s fun relating all the parties I had with friendly Russians and their ever-present vodka even if some portions of my journal aren’t as sharp in my memory as I would like. The journal has much detail so luckily I don’t have to rely much on my memory. Some scenes, of course, stand out clearly even after 33 years. I relate much about what it was like to actually live in a Communist society. I tried to blend in as a common Soviet citizen as much as I could and I learned many lessons.
More Peculiar English Etc
Perhaps the most puzzling to foreigners is ‘ou’. While spelled similarly, pronunciation varies wildly.
‘Though’ is pronounced ‘long O’, as ‘throw’.
‘Through’ however is pronounced ‘u’ as in ‘you’.
‘Could’ is like ‘good’.
‘Thought’ is like ‘awful’.
‘Thorough’ is like ‘throw’ again.
‘Ouch’ and ‘couch’ are pronounced like ‘cow’.
‘Tough’ and ‘enough’ and ‘couple’ are pronounced like ‘stuff’.
Biblical ‘thou’ is pronounced again like ‘cow’.
‘Imminent’ is pronounced almost the same as ’eminent’ but have opposite meanings.
‘Sanction’ includes opposite meanings, either a boycott or an endorsement.
This one confuses every foreigner striving to learn English: ‘straight’, ‘strait’, ‘weight’, and ‘wait’ are all pronounced with a long A, as in ‘state’.
‘Truth’, ‘roof’, and ‘booth’ are usually pronounced the same, as in ‘moo’. But ‘roof’ can also be pronounced ‘uff’, as in ‘hoof’. But ‘hoot’ and ‘poof’ are back to ‘truth’!
‘Break’ is pronounced like ‘brake’, but ‘creak’ is pronounced like ‘eek’.
‘Pipe up’ means speak louder. But ‘pipe down’ means shut up.
Who can make sense of all this? There is no sense to it. English needs to be radically reformed in its spelling. Very few languages have such inconsistencies.
Words ending in -tion, -cian, and -cion all are pronounced ‘shun’.
‘Owe’ as in owing money is ‘throw’ again. But ‘how’ is like ‘cow’. No sense at all.
The ‘ach’ in ‘stomach’ is pronounced ‘uk’. But ‘ache’ is ‘long A’ pronounced like ‘eight’ (!) or ‘ate’. While ‘cache’ is pronounced ‘cash’.
‘Epoch’ in the US is pronounced almost like ‘epic’. But in the UK it is pronounced ‘ee-pock’.
‘Wreck’, pronounced ‘rek’, means destruction, especially of cars. ‘Wreak’ is to inflict a wreck, to destroy something or create disorganization as in ‘to wreak havoc’. ‘Wreak’ is pronounced ‘reek’ as in ‘Greek’.
‘Infer’ and ‘imply’ are often confused, even by native speakers of English. ‘Infer’ means to extract or induct information, while ‘imply’ means to suggest something not obvious.
‘Eunuch’ is a castrated male, sans cojones. Pronounced ‘you nik’. Contrary to ‘Reuters’ which is pronounced like ‘oysters’.
Then there are the homonyms:
‘Peace’ is pronounced the same as ‘piece’. ‘Survive’ the same as ‘serve’. ‘Rush’ the same as ‘Russia’. ‘Scene’ the same as ‘seen’. And ‘worse’ the same as ‘curse’ and ‘hearse.’ How can anyone explain this to foreigners wishing to learn English?
This is why foreigners learning English often can speak it but can’t write it well, or write it with many spelling errors. Not many languages besides English have spelling championships because most are spelled exactly as they sound. Only the chaos of English requires this kind of memorization.
But then there is Arabic! In Arabic Fusha, the classical tongue, almost all nouns are ‘broken nouns’. Like ‘man’ and ‘men’ in English. Every Arabic noun must be memorized therefore in pairs: singular and plural together. Plus most Arabic nouns have multiple plurals that are broken in different ways. That is a prodigious task.
Not to mention Russian. In Russian, the nouns are rational, but every verb comes in pairs and must be memorized together. That’s another kind of chaos requiring more prodigious memorization. But I’ll give Arabic the top score for difficulty due to its hard grammar on top of its required memorization. Russian is not so bad with its cases which are similar to Latin and Greek, tho some Russian words are utterly bizarre in their case construction and require more sweat memorization. Arabic is not so detailed in its cases, but its sentence structure is utterly unlike any Western language typically beginning with the verb, followed by modifying clauses, then the object with more modifying words, and finally the subject of the sentence. But word order, as in Russian, is not important in Arabic. Why do I bother reading these three crazy languages and just learn Esperanto?
No ChatGPT here!
ChatGPT is the latest proof of the collapse in public literacy. The proof is that some so-called “publishers” are using ChatGPT to write “books” and the public is buying them. ChatGPT can never write original quality literary fiction. I offer $1,000 to anyone who can prove that any AI program at all has written a novel of fiction equivalent in quality to mine including original plot and characters and in my writing style. Will never happen.
Language Lovers
I am giving a new byline to Equus: “Books for Language Lovers” since that is more in tune with the real substance of the books that I write and my writing style. My books are about language, its beauty and its poetry and are not really aimed at a particular audience. As I often say, my books should be read aloud since the sound and meter of the language is part of the message. If one is reading rapidly then s/he is missing much of the book. Unlike most people today, I am not focused on the image of the moment, or videos, or media, but I am “perpetually floating on a sea of script”, on meaning as revealed by scrawls on parchment.
[Update: I went back to styling Equus as “Books for Men”. Not because I am going back on my comments about language, but due to the fact that most publishers, big and small, are of, by, and for women, from conception to style. I have found that most women simply have little interest in my books, and in fact rarely comprehend them. They take a glance, see there is no sex or romance, or very little in the first few chapters, and they promptly put my books aside. Equus Books are satirical, scientific, or heroic. There is some romance, but that’s really not my thing. This is why, I suppose, my best reviews have come from men, not women. Women for the most part seem simply not to understand them.]
The Thing with Slogans
I am constantly amazed at how Americans seem to judge everything by first impressions. On occasion I hear people comment about clothing, for instance someone might see a T-Shirt that says Astros and they immediately assume that one supports the Astros. Or they see a hat with a big A on it and assume one supports the Atlanta Braves. I have zero interest in organized sports and I was only barely aware that the Astros were a baseball team or that an A signifies the Atlanta Braves or that the Braves have anything to do with baseball until people waved and smiled or yelled “Go Atlanta!” Is the “Braves” even correct? I’m not sure. To me, these are just a T-shirt and a hat which I change often with no regard for what is printed on them.
Same with usernames online. I find that people often completely misinterpret online names, assuming they mean something when usually they don’t mean anything at all having been randomly selected. I once selected a username that sounded a bit like marijuana and people would–mysteriously to me–leap to the conclusion that I must smoke pot. I don’t. Now it has become almost impossible to tell a joke online. People often miss the joke entirely and conclude that the statement was serious and that I was trying to insult someone and they go berserk. Very puzzling to me since I never deliberately insult anyone and certainly not online.
Visual impressions are also typically wrong. If people see a person in a wheelchair, they often conclude that the person is crippled and cannot walk. Movies often use this as a trope where the person in the wheelchair suddenly gets up and stands and the audience is supposed to be surprised and realise that the person was completely normal and doesn’t need the wheelchair. Whereas in real life there is rarely such a thing as someone who is so disabled that s/he cannot take a single step and from what I have learned over the years is people in wheelchairs just need assistance and can often walk for short distances. There is nothing deceptive about this at all, only the short-sightedness and ignorance of observers.
Now to books. I have seen books that advertise that by reading the book one can reliably come to conclusions about people from a single glance, like Blink. This is total nonsense! It only reinforces the tangle of misimpressions that unthinking people have. I have read so-called ‘reviews’ of books that are themselves genuine works of art and when I looked at the book itself I discover that the book is trash written by the equivalent of a six year old. Perhaps Equus should publish a collection of reviews that were written better than the books ostensibly reviewed.
Book covers are the same. The most beautiful book covers I find typically camouflage trashy books. Plain vanilla covers often cover intelligent, well-written ones. Why don’t book readers take the extra step and go to Amazon and click on the Look Inside button before they buy? They would immediately see that reviews and covers may be irrelevant. I knew a novice writer of little talent who threw together a Kindle in a couple of weeks, put on a sexy cover, and sold large numbers of his ‘book’ for .99 each. He made a lot of money, tho he did have to pay a lot more to a team of promoters who talked up his ‘book’ on FB. More fake reviews, which paired with the fake cover, tricked many into buying his product. Who will read such after he dies? Or even next month? How has he contributed anything to civilization with his Kindle?
Slogans suffer from the same defect. Given the small ability that most people seem to have in perceiving value or facts, and their tendency to focus on short slogans of little meaning, the voting public seems obsessed with slogans and respond to them as if they were responding to a new-colored toilet cleaner. Programmed to buy something bright and shiny, they are always disappointed when the election is over.
