Diary of a Mad Editor

If You’re a Publisher Life Can Only Get More Demanding

While the battle continues over Amazon’s antitrust case, their on-demand printing unit, Booksurge, just dodged a bullet in an unrelated defamation suit. Big John Law has reaffirmed what I’m always telling young wannabe writers who use POD printing services — that such services are not real publishers. Publishers share liability with an author in such cases, but printers don’t. While this is good news for POD providers, it’s food for thought for novice writers looking for short-cuts. In fact, anyone who considers POD should weigh the pros and cons.

Yet, despite the negative aspects of POD, the subject has been in the news a lot lately. Why? Because Print-On-Demand technology is becoming part of the mainstream. Both the reputable and disreputable alike are joining the POD bandwagon. What was once just for amateur authors and vanity operations is now an acceptable means of producing a book. Now we’re seeing Independant booksellers getting in on the action as is Carnegie-Mellon University. POD is even being used to print periodicals. Scammers are taking work from the public domain and selling overpriced POD copies on Ebay. I even read on a forum a while back where a guy suggested it would be a good idea to print back issues of comic using POD (something I don’t think comic book collectors would necessarily be in favor of as that would devalue the market).

On-demand printing is a marvel and has opened-up all kinds of possibilities, but it also poses a lot of questions and problems for the future that we are going to have to deal with. Are we ready for it?

No Rejection Slips, No Sticky Notes, Thunder Showers, and Other Disasters

When I was a very young man back in high school and just beginning to send my writing out for possible publication in various periodicals, I had this image in my head of the editorial office my submission would arrive at. It was always the same fantasy: a posh office in a skyscraper (even if the magazine was in Idaho, I always imagined the building was a skyscraper). There’d be a large staff of interns, assistants and secretaries milling about and the editor — no, I mean THE EDITOR — would be sitting happily in his big, leather chair, stroking his graying beard and smoking a pipe with feet propped up on the desk, just waiting for my bits of genius to arrive.

In this fantasy, the staff was mostly female and looked like Playboy Playmates (sometimes they were wearing bikinis or even lingerie — hey, gimme a break, I was about 15 at the time). Anyway, some editorial assistant who looked like Heather Locklear, would scurry into THE EDITOR’S office and hand him my manuscript. He’d smile and put his pipe away and gleefully spend the entire day reading my story or poems or whatever I’d sent him (it didn’t matter what, because I was a genius, after all). THE EDITOR would be so bowled over by my writing he’d not only buy my submission on the spot (for a hefty price, of course), but he’d send a big stretch limo to my house and whisk me off to a power lunch with his buddies, the big LITERARY AGENT and the BOOK PUBLISHER. I’d be a gazillionaire before my 18th birthday!

Ah, would that such fantasties were true.

More than a quarter century later and lots of publication credits in small press publications hardly anyone’s ever heard of and a small press of my own, I’m still waiting for that limo. And the bit about the big office? Well . . . that’s the biggest crock of all.

Right now, I’m in my own office — which is in my bedroom. A tiny desk and work area that is really too small for my PC and all the stacks of submissions. Right now, I’m inundated with submissions and envelopes and no Playboy bunnies — just dust bunnies. Dictionaries and reference books and trash and . . . well, you get the picture. The point is there are no hot, young women running around in their underwear and I don’t have all day to spend on any one writer. And believe you me, buddy, they ain’t all geniuses. Hell, I suspect many of the writers who submit to me can’t even tie their own damn shoes!

No, I’m scrounging around looking for sticky notes because I’ve run out of rejection slips again. I’ve just accidently spilt a box of paper clips on the floor and the light bulb above my head looks like it could go out at any minute so I’m probably going to have to change that soon or else be sitting in the dark. I just got a notice from my web hosting company that my hosting package is up for renewal in 15 days so I have to come up with the money. On top of that, the weatherman is predicting thunder showers this afternoon and I fucking hate rain.

So the moral of this tale is that if you are a young writer sitting around dreaming of bestsellerdom and fame and riches and scantily clad models and editors who live for no other reason other than to read your work — guess again, bucko. That editor is likely someone who’s been through everything you are about to go through and more. He’s a guy who is sitting in a tiny cell of an office space and there are a million tiny little things going wrong in his day that don’t really have anything to do with you necessarily, but tend to put him on edge before your submission even arrives in his inbox. Remember that and know that, in fact, you ain’t no genius, hoss and you’ve got maybe a minute or two of that editor’s time to prove otherwise before he jots a rejection note on a sticky and forgets your name.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn Dead at 89

“A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.”

“For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones. ”

“Woe to that nation whose literature is cut short by the intrusion of force. This is not merely interference with freedom of the press but the sealing up of a nation’s heart, the excision of its memory. “

– Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the former Soviet dissident and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, is dead at 89 of a heart attack.

Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsky on December 11, 1918. He attended Rostov University where he studied mathematics and took a course in literature at Moscow State University.

He served as an artillery captain in the Red Army during WWII. It was while serving on the German front in 1945 that he was arrested for criticizing Joseph Stalin in a letter addressed to a friend. Solzhenitsyn was found guilty and sent to a Soviet labor camp in Kazakhstan. He was finally released after serving 8 years. His first novel, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich drew from his own experiences.

His next novel, The First Circle, described the lives of a group of scientists forced to work in a Soviet research facility, and Cancer Ward, based on his experiences as a cancer patient, were both banned after Nikita Khrushchev fell from power. In 1969 Solzhenitsyn was expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union and deported from Moscow.

In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature but was not allowed to go to Stockholm to collect it. Solzhenitsyn continued to write and his novel about WWI, August 1914, was banned in the Soviet Union but was published abroad. This was followed by his memoir, The Gulag Archipelago. This led to him being charged with treason and arrested yet again. This time, the government took away his citizenship and deported him to what was then West Germany.

Solzhenitsyn, who finally collected his Nobel Prize in 1974, settled in the United States where he continued to write. Lenin in Zurich was published in 1975. This was followed by two works of non-fiction, The Oak and the Calf and The Mortal Danger as well as the novel, November 1916.

In 1994 Mikhail Gorbachev restored Solzhenitsyn’s citizenship and the charge of treason was dropped. Later that year he returned to the Soviet Union where he spent his remaining years living in seclusion.

Although his stature as a writer had waned by the time the Soviet Union collapsed, he stood as one of the most important voices of the latter half of the 20th century was a beacon of hope to many for more than a generation.