I received an offer letter for
Move Under Ground from an independent foreign-language publisher (language announcement TK on signing) this morning. A good Christmas present, one made better by the fact that the same publisher had rejected the book earlier this year, but with a promise to send it along to a friend of his at another company with a more amenable list. He wrote, this morning, "On a second thought and a more selfish one I admit, I hate the idea of giving the book to somebody else since I liked it so much..."
This sort of thing happens to me a lot.
"Who Put the Bomp?" was paid for and published
out-of-pocket by
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
scalzi because he just liked the story too much. Generally, in fact, acceptance letters I receive read like, "I wasn't sure if it was the right fit at first, but I'm trying to take more risks and continue to break out of the box," to quote one from earlier this month. Then there was the venue that purchased Story B one hour after submission and in the acceptance letter mentioned that they are still considering Story A, submitted in March, as it was "good and also challenging."
Of course, for every letter like this I get three or four—or usually, my agent does—that read, "Wonderful, loved it, can't publish it." Or, for books, "can't sell it." Stories are a lower-risk proposition for editors than books, after all. The "good stories" (As in "The most important thing is a 'good story'") in an issue of a magazine or anthology can do all the selling, and the outlier material generally isn't a drag on financial performance. Outlier books though, in these days of consolidation and mass layoffs of editors at "prestige" imprints, generally don't get the patronage. Heck, a poet friend of mine with seven books is having trouble selling her eighth to the publisher of three of them, a publisher which was
founded as a poetry press, because the list is shifting away from poems and toward other, more popular stuff. (Propaganda for the Democratic Party, novels by writers who were dropped from major publishers for being outliers, comic books about people who slouch and walk past restaurant windows full of happier sorts who just don't understand, etc.)
I suppose one of the charges I get from writing and submitting fiction is the sense of "Yes! BOW to the story, Oinky!" I get when receiving acceptance letters. And, truth be told, I've
been Oinky myself. I originally rejected Kristin Mandigma's
Excerpt From a Letter by a Social-Realist Aswang for
Clarkesworld, the decision made purely from the fear that I'd be the only one to like the story. I even tried to place it elsewhere for a while on the author's behalf, then finally broke down and wrote Mandigma a tearful plea to give me the story after all. Worked too! Readers didn't seem to object too violently, and it's been reprinted in
The Apex Book of World SF (which you should buy with your Christmas money next week). See, that means at least two people like it!
And the worm can turn. Yesterday I received from the wonderful UK criminals Murder Slim Press a copy of
Hating Olivia by Mark SaFranko, which I bought four years after its release by this micropress—the book looks practically handmade, with no barcode and the ISBN and price on a sticker—because I heard that Harper Perennial will be reissuing the title in the US, and I wanted lit-nerd bragging rights when it comes out. From glue gun publishing to Rupert Murdoch is really sticking it to Oinky! (Of course, if the Bookscan numbers on Dan Fante's reissues are a bellwether, Oinky will likely soon stick it right back, but we're counting coup here, not overthrowing capitalism. Yet.)
Indeed, this all is my ultimate objection to the recent misuse of the word "indie", as in "indie author", which generally means self-published author of utterly commercial fiction about young children in a fantasy world, tiger-men with zap guns, or Christian serial killers. Or worse, they're small publishers just hanging on to some reactionary aesthetic that is simply no longer commercial. You are not
indie if you self-publish your commercial nonsense because "The Big Boys" don't want it. You are not
indie if your publishing program harkens back to the good ol' days of commercial fiction before it was ruined by women or big words. You are a beady-eyed shopkeeper, as tedious and annoying as Mrs. Olesen from
Little House on the Prairie with your mind-numbing hustle and your ridiculous airs. Real
indie writers create stuff so odd that
someone else must ultimately publish it (even if they saw it as some leaflet you taped to a lamppost), often despite their own better judgment. That publisher becomes an indie and then you get to be an indie author, even if some bigger pig tries you out later in a historical moment when downtown is hip. A publisher is indie when it doesn't see itself as a training ground for "new" writers who are "working their way up" some hideous and greasy ladder, but as a
superior alternative to well-funded capitalists whose lists are too commercial. To sum it up:
Indie
Not Indie
If you're your own Oinky, you're not indie at all. The power of whatever bundle of aesthetics and themes makes a piece potentially "indie" can be measured to the extent that
other people will bleed money or risk their own homes and health to publish the material.
Stick it to Oinky.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small}
cheerful
curious