Category: Book Reviews

Insightful book reviews by our staff

You Pays Your Money and You Takes Your Choice

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So, I learned some stuff today about publishing a book.

  • There’s no such thing as an objective authoritative critic who can tell you whether your book is good, bad or indifferent. In other words, “You pays your money and you takes your choice.”  If you believe your book is good then you take your chances.  So that puts the onus back on me.  Do I believe in my book or not?
  • After you write it and put a cover on it and edit it, then you have to get influencers to tout it and reviewers to praise it. But after all that you have to advertise it on Amazon to the tune of thousands of dollars.  Otherwise, no one will know it’s there.

Well, now I’ll have to search my soul and decide just how much I want to get my book out in the world.  Do I put my money where my mouth is?  I guess I’ll find out.  Now, all this is still preliminary.  I have to get a cover and get an editor to tell me about all my typos and inelegant grammatical constructions.  And get a marketer to “alert the media.”  And for the next month I’m going to be buried under a project that will prevent me from concentrating on anything important.  But by the third week in November, I’ll be available (other than a Thursday where I’ll be buried under cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie).

Well, it was definitely a clarifying experience.  There’s no way to pass the buck on a thing like this.  The author has to search his soul and use the wisdom of Solomon to make the correct decision.  Well, so what?  What’s Solomon got that I ain’t got, in spades?  Darned right!

So, if you drive through Dunwich and you see a disheveled geezer picking up bottles and cans on the side of the road, it may be me trying to raise enough capital for the project.  With any luck I’ll strike oil in the north forty and I can start on the gold leaf hardcover edition that all of us “real authors” like so much.

Okay, so enough moaning and groaning.  The journey is the reward they say.  So, I’ll just follow my nose and see where all this ends up.  Of course, if I get too enthusiastic Camera Girl will wonder why the checking account has gotten so anemic.  And that could trigger all kinds of hazardous situations.  After all she has complete control over my food supply and knows my sleeping habits.  But I won’t allow artistic decisions to be influenced by cowardly and pedestrian concerns. “Ars gratia artis,” you know.

Well, back to something comical; the government shutdown!  I hear Trump is going to permanently terminate “hundreds of thousands” of federal employees to get back at the Democrats for shutting down the government.  That’s a pretty bold move.  I’m starting to believe there are no limits to what he plans to do to the federal government.  He seems to be borrowing Obama’s statement that he would “fundamentally transform the United States.”  And at this rate maybe Trump will actually do it!

I Am Oz, the Great and Powerful!  Who Are You!

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Tomorrow, I have an appointment to talk with a marketing expert.  Someone who gets paid to say how to market a book so that people will find it and want to buy it.  What are my expectations?  Surprisingly, I’m not expecting miracles.  What I’m hoping to do is learn what the limits and parameters are for this kind of service.

For instance, what is the reach of this business?  What is the specificity?  I’ve been led to believe by everything I’ve read that Amazon and Google can target ads to someone based on what they want to buy right now.  Well, okay so how much does it cost to target only those people?

Another thing I’m interested in is pricing.  Obviously the lower the price of something the more people will be willing to buy it.  So, there is probably an optimum price for maximizing profit.  But what if you want to maximize the number of people who read your book?  Is zero and option?  And is some minimum price just as good?

And I want to know if these experts are well-acquainted with right wing readers (my target audience).  After all, I’m not selling to the people who read “A Handmaid’s Tale” or “Woman on the Edge of Time.”  Those people would be rooting for my villains.  So, I want to know how specific they can get with the audience that they are reaching as potential readers.

Also, I want to know if they can tap into expert critical opinion to tell me ahead of time whether my story even has potential to interest a large audience or not.  They might be able to convince me that I’m attempting the impossible.  That piece of information alone would be extremely valuable to me.  I mean, sure, I’m just like every author.  I love my creation and think it worthy of an audience.  But maybe I’m very wrong.  Knowing that ahead of time could save me a lot of money and pain.

So, I’ll spend tomorrow collecting my thoughts and writing down questions to ask the “Wizard.”  One thing I’m interested in is how important a cover is.  Sure, a glossy cover with a sniper on a building above an Antifa riot would really hammer home the story better than just a text but what is the actual difference in sales?  Could I compensate by dropping the price to $0.99 for a few days or weeks to get word of mouth?  After all aren’t most books now e-books?  Do people need a cover when they’ll be reading the “book” on a Kindle?

And finally, I’m intrigued by the idea of running a Kickstarter to try and drum up funds and give the project visibility before the book is even up for sale.  I recently watched Larry Correia run a Kickstarter and he’s gotten $250,000 in advance sales.   Now I’m not kidding myself.  He’s got an enormous fan base already so there’s no comparison but still, the “GoFundMe” site has high visibility for whomever uses it.  So, I’ll ask about that too (even though I think I know what the answer will be).

So that’s what my Thursday looks like.  Maybe after tomorrow I’ll have a new perspective on selling my book.  Or maybe I’ll be even more confused than ever.

Tomorrow the Stars – A Science Fiction Book Review – Part 1 – Poor Superman

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A while ago I spoke of buying a book I owned fifty-some-odd years ago.  So, here’s a story from that book to talk about.  The author Fritz Leiber was pretty popular back in the day.  So, I don’t intend to rewind the plot here because it’s a short story (twenty-eight pages) and anyone can find it out there in the public domain, I’m sure.

But I just want to give some impressions of the best aspects of the story.  This is explicitly a post-apocalyptic world.  New York City and Washington DC are craters.  And because of the disaster the US government has been supplanted by a regime called the Thinkers.  They are frauds who have convinced the populace that they have supercomputers and atomic rockets that go to Mars to commune with the all-wise Martians and something called the “Mind Bomb,” etc., etc., etc.  The real scientists have been cowed into keeping quiet and the nominal leader is a guy named Jorj Helmuth who was a publics relations specialist in the before time but now believes his own hype and thinks he’s a master of sleep learning and hypnotism and whatever else he’s made up.

The story is basically the maneuvering of Jorj, his cronies, the scientists and a few other actors on stage.  Leiber lays out the story and the characters in broad strokes but very skillfully and it’s fun to recognize the Soviet (and American) propaganda playbook being run to fascinating effect.  It’s a cautionary tale about idealism and chicanery and power politics and the danger of believing in your own lies.  And even thought this story was written in 1951 it reads the same as if it was written today or tomorrow.

And it has a great villain who just exudes realpolitik and a feme fatale and even a twist ending to make sure you don’t forget that it’s from the golden age of science fiction.  And even the title of the story is the punchline.

All these same people inhabit our present world.  The lies and make believe from then is no different from the BLM or Antifa grifts that we see all around us.  Probably the closest thing would be the climate change scam that has bankrupted Europe and exacerbated the monetary problems we’re experiencing.

So, that was fun.  There are a few more stories in the book that I’ll highlight in later episodes of this book review.  But I’ll say that “Poor Superman” is the crème de la crème of the entire collection.  And since it’s the last story in the book you finish it off with a smile on your face.  See, that Bob Heinlein really knew the trick to editing an anthology.  Make sure the last story leaves them wanting more.

So, who remembers this story or at least remembers the name Fritz Leiber?  Surely, I’m not the only old science fiction fan here and I’d love to get some other opinions.  After all, I’m just one man.  And I’m not even superman.

Another Psycho-Killer, Another Book Lesson

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Another day, another psycho leftist shooter.  As I said the other day, be prepared for an almost endless sequence of these suicidal people.  Their lives are a misery to them so they want the rest of us to suffer too.  Only in addition to everything else that was wrong with this guy he even failed to accomplish what he set out to do.  He wanted to kill ICE agents and instead he killed and wounded illegal alien detainees that were in an ICE van.  Now that level of incompetence and stupidity really does deserve the Darwin Award.  And right there with the shooter’s idiocy, the Left is trying, once again, and to no effect, to question whether the shooter was a Leftist.  Well, give it a day or two and they’ll settle for, “He wasn’t a card-carrying member of a terrorist left-wing organization, which is another way of saying these organizations don’t have cards.  Their badges are the crazed looks on their faces and the social media memes and buzzwords of the left.

Well, enough of that.

Some of the results from the beta-readers of my novel are coming in and the consensus is that this guy photog must be out of his mind if he thinks anyone is gonna read his awful book.  As reader after reader disparaged its characters, plots and even adverbs I was like a cornered wild animal looking for some way to escape the tsunami of negative results.  I yelled, “Nooooooooooo!!!!!!!!”  Well, maybe there weren’t that many exclamation points in real life.  But I was pretty busted up.  So, I took a bottle of Tylenol and washed it down with a gallon of grape Hawaiian Punch and pretty soon I was really sick.  But that took my mind off my book problems while I headed to urgent care.  Now that I’ve mostly recovered, I’m happily in denial and working on an alternate reality where I’ve sold more books than James Patterson and am twice as handsome as Brad Pitt but somehow it turned out backwards.  I’m unfortunately, twice as handsome as James Patterson and have sold more books than Brad Pitt.  You know it really is important to work these things out ahead of time.

I have an appointment to talk with a marketer who specializes in self-published books and I’m trying to put together a list of questions to ask.  At the moment all that comes to mind is, “How can I become fabulously wealthy from my book without putting in any effort at all?”  And I think I’ve nailed it.  That is exactly what I want an answer to.  But I have this nagging suspicion that there may be more to it than that.  I seem to be confusing marketer with the genie from Aladdin.  Well, you can hardly blame me.  Both of them are in my mind, mythical creatures with supernatural powers.  But seriously, this whole book thing has been an interesting experience.  I’ve learned that writing is a craft that requires lots of work and especially in the planning stages.  Writing a story by the seat of your pants seems more intuitive and natural to me but I now understand that building the story ahead of time saves time at the end when re-writing is extremely painful and maybe impractical.  Well, the journey continues.

Guest Contributor – Chemist – 24SEP2024 – Death of SF Magazines

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I have always enjoyed the shot story format. For a while, in the 60s & 70s, some of the big name authors were competing with each other to write a complete story on the back of a picture postcard. Some of these were amazingly good!
As for Analog, I gave up on it a long time ago (30 years?). Their Science Fact articles were all doom and gloom:
“We are all going to die and thee is nothing you can do about it!”
Or:
“Here is why FTL travel, Nuclear fusion, laser defenses, etc. won’t work and cannot work.”

And, to me, the Fiction was woke before woke was a thing. So I stopped buying after I realized I had a years worth of issues that I had not read and could not motivate myself to read.
I suspect that Analog (and maybe the others) got infected by the same liberal women who took over the NY publishing houses.

Another datapoint: I recall talking to a successful SciFi author in the 80s who switched from writing short stories to novels. When asked why, he said: “Its just as hard to sell a short story as a novel, but novels pay a hell of a lot better.”

BTW, Photog, another non-woke publishing house is Chris Kennedy Publishing.
You might consider sending him a copy of your novel.
https://chriskennedypublishing.com/

Just Something that Came to Mind

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Lately there have been a lot more options if I wanted to talk about what’s in the news.  There’s all kinds of Jimmy Kimmel talk.  He’s off the air, he’s back on, he’s gonna apologize, his show won’t be carried in a quarter of the country, blah, blah, blah.  And Donald Trump just got through trashing Joe Biden and the UN in front of the General Assembly.  There are psychopaths shooting up innocent victims everywhere you look and Democrats are desperately kowtowing to Mamdani hoping he can provide the magic bullet needed to bring back the millions of voters who are jumping ship.  Yep, there’s all kinds of madness everywhere you look.

But I can use a break from it from time to time.  I just get fed up with the awfulness of the world and the awful people doing awful things.

So, let’s talk about something less depressing and maybe more interesting.  A while ago I mentioned I bought a copy of a book I owned back in the stone age.  It’s an anthology of science fiction stories published in the 1950s, edited by Robert Heinlein, called, “Tomorrow, The Stars.”  There are fourteen short stories in the book’s two hundred and forty-nine pages.  They’re all between ten and twenty pages long and were written by authors “famous and less well known” at the time.  Interestingly, one of the less well-known authors was a certain, “Kurt Vonnegut Jr.”

So, I’ve been rereading these stories, some for the first time in over fifty years.  I won’t pretend that they’re all equally good or that any of them are timeless prose.  They’re not.  They’re pulp fiction or maybe slightly better than pulp fiction.  But they’re also entertaining.  They amuse.  They keep the reader’s interest.  They tell a story.  All that good stuff.  But what’s my point?  I’ve read lately that science fiction short stories are an unsellable product.  All the magazines and the anthologies are going bankrupt.  No one will buy them.

Back in the dark ages magazines like Analog and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction made plenty of money selling monthly editions filled with mostly just short stories.  Sure, they would also serialize some novels but mostly we were reading short stories by authors, “famous and less well known.”  Now I am well aware we are living in a new age.  Theft of intellectual property has been the downfall of all the formerly lucrative entertainment forms.  CDs, DVDs and books have been pirated out of existence.  Young people have been conditioned not to pay for anything.  Everything is a streaming service.  Amazon sells books by the penny/a page method.

Yes, yes.  I get all that.  But these are just the technical details of our age.  Piracy has always been around.  What it takes to sell a product in the face of these kinds of obstacles is the same thing that is needed in any other place and time; creativity and psychology.  And in fact, a short story would seem to me to be the easier sell.  You can read (or hear) a short story in a car ride or a subway commute or a high school class that you don’t want to listen to.

Sometimes you don’t want a four-hundred-page epic fantasy.  Sometimes you don’t even want a novella.  Sometimes you want a ten-to-twenty-page story to take you out of your life for a half hour.

Just something that came to mind.

Hear Ye, Hear Ye

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Update:

To verify my ownership of “The Sniper” for the Royal Road folks, I am adding this note to show I also control Orion’s Cold Fire.

 

We interrupt the daily progression of actual civil war to bring you a message about a fictional civil war story.  I’ve finished the manuscript for my book, “The Sniper.”  Now I’m looking for beta readers.  I’m looking for folks to read the book and give me their honest feedback.  Also I’d like to disseminate the book to friends and family who you judge would be a good fit for the book based on your estimation and if they agree to read it I’d like to get their opinions too.

I’m looking to get this book out to the largest group of people possible to see whether it is something that people will want to read.  So after reading it if you think it’s appropriate for people you know let me hear that too.  And remember, I’m not a fragile author.  If you think it sucks, say so, but also tell me why you think it.

If you’re interested leave a comment to that effect and I’ll e-mail you a copy of the story.  Now this is just a pdf.  No nice cover, no actual paper.  Just electrons.  But I will guarantee that this sniper is nothing like the actual sniper we’ve had to hear about for the last week.

And just to remind you here’s the beginning of the book.

 

Chapter 1 – An Object Lesson

Joseph Boghadair was set up at a loophole in a small prefabricated metal building at the top of the mountain that contained the Icarus Mine.  His .50 caliber sniper rifle was trained on the narrow road that led up to the mine.  He could see a line of black SUVs about a mile and a half down the road and he was getting ready to start firing on the convoy.  His first shots took out the engine of the lead vehicle thereby halting the convoy.  His second volley took out the engine of the last car in line thus trapping the rest of the vehicles between.  Then at a more leisurely pace he took care of the other eight vehicles.  By this point the passengers were crouching behind their disabled cars and randomly firing handguns and automatic weapons in Joseph’s general direction with almost no discernible results.

After about half an hour a few of the men in black body armor attempted to reach a stand of trees about 300 yards away to their left.  Joseph put a few well aimed rounds in front of their path and they quickly retreated back to the supposed safety of their not-so-mobile-autos.  Joseph snorted wryly at their shyness.

An hour after that a helicopter approached the mountain from the opposite direction to Joseph’s loophole.  Walking over to a window on the other wall he could see a distant Blackhawk approaching at relatively high altitude.  Joseph then began his preparations for their reception.

Between crew and troops, the Blackhawk had a dozen men on board.  And more importantly it had a couple of Hellfire missiles.  From a very safe distance away it targeted Joseph’s position and fired.  The missile struck precisely on target and obliterated the steel structure almost completely.  All that remained was the foundation of the structure around the mine shaft, now clogged with debris.

The Blackhawk landed about three quarters of a mile from the mine entrance.  At this point the agents, hunkered down behind their vehicles, began to stream toward the helicopter.  By the time they reached the aircraft the troops had exited and were waiting for their rescued brethren to arrive.

FBI Special Agent in Charge, George Chastain assembled both teams and briefed them on the updated mission plan.  “We will proceed to the mine head and look for any human remains.  We will collect whatever we can retrieve for lab analysis and attempt to seal the mine head until qualified personnel can be assembled for recovery operations.  It is presumed that the target, Joseph Boghadair was killed by the missile strike but we will take no chances.  He was an extremely dangerous individual and should not be approached by anyone without backup and prior approval from leadership.  In addition to his war record it is believed that Boghadair is responsible for the shooting deaths of forty-six people in the last six months with thirteen of those people being FBI personnel.  No one enters the mine until remote sensing equipment is brought in.  Alright, proceed.”

The agents formed two groups.  Apparently, SUV agents and helicopter agents must not bond very well.  But before they were more than a hundred feet from the helicopter the ground began to quake so powerfully beneath them that they were irresistibly knocked off their feet.  And while they were clawing at the ground for dear life, they could see that the high ground where the mine head was located had collapsed into the earth.  The roar of that collapse was more frightening than the initial earthquake and some of the agents hid their heads under their arms in abject terror.  When the mountain stopped shaking the men started to collect themselves and stand up.  When they looked around them, they were astonished.  A circular pit had opened up centered on the mine head.  It was a thousand yards in diameter and so deep that only blackness could be seen at its center.  Several cracks had formed outside the circular pit.  One of these had nearly swallowed the Blackhawk.  It was on its side and half buried in the crevice.  Its rotors were fractured and it wouldn’t be flying away from this landing.

Chastain went over to the edge of the crater and just stared down into the blackness below.  Then he went back to his team and started giving orders to begin a retreat from the stricken mountain.  He was trying to think of what he was going to tell his boss.  Nothing reasonable came to mind.

Exaggerations of the Simple Stuff of Human Life

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Act 4, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, when the second witch says:

“By the pricking of my thumbs,

Something wicked this way comes.”

And Macbeth enters.  What a marvelous scene.  Witches, bloody ghosts and a demigod truly drained of his humanity.  A horror story in a stage play.  And then Ray Bradbury takes that line, “Something wicked this way comes” and makes it the title of his own American ghost story; the story of a haunted carnival.  Now what does Macbeth have to do with Bradbury?  Well, in both cases we have basically good people seduced by the devil.  Whether it’s Shakespeare’s witches or Bradbury’s Mr. Dark it is the story of men succumbing to the devil’s promise for their heart’s desire in exchange for their souls.

Macbeth wants the Scottish crown.  Bradbury’s Green Town denizens want various things.  Tom Fury and Mr. Crosetti succumb to lust.  Mr. Tetley wants money.  Miss Foley and Charles Halloway want their youth back.  Jim Nightshade wants to be older so he can indulge his various negative desires.  And for these things they risk becoming permanent prisoners of Mr. Dark and Mr. Cooger’s haunted carnival travelling the American continent in search of more souls to consume.

What a marvelous conceit.  An ancient locomotive from the Civil War era, arrives in small towns in the middle of the night and sniffs out the spiritually wounded inhabitants and lures them into the haunted attractions of the show.  If they wander into the house of mirrors, they will see their heart’s desire or their greatest fear.  Or they can follow the barker’s lure and enter the tent where the belly dancers expose their bodies for a silver dime.  And those that disappear are no longer recognizable as themselves and so cannot be rescued by any police force.

And redemption can only be had in Bradbury’s story if the devil is laughed out of town.  Laughter and happiness are the only cures for this evil.  The secret is to realize that life is not a tragedy.  Even at its worst, it is better than the alternative which is nothingness.  Pain and sadness and even death are a human story and in fact the only certainty in this world.  But it’s also still better than never existing.  Because no matter how sad and awful our existence, it’s still ours.  We get to feel it and react to it and maybe win a few rounds before we’re finally cornered and beaten by death.

So, the ride’s the thing.  That’s the lesson that Charles Halloway learns by the end of the story.  Even though he’s old and overwhelmed with trying to be the father of a young boy, that overwhelming challenge is his greatest opportunity to squeeze every bit of meaning and gusto out of what remains of his life.  And the boys get to see that fears and desires are exaggerations of the simple stuff of human life.  Lust and greed and fear are just the ingredients of life taken out of balance from their normal proportions and occasions.

I wonder who will take this theme up next?  Maybe I will, someday.

Grammata-Euphoria

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All this Charlie Kirk media madness and the manhunt have depressed the hell out of me.  We live in a madhouse surrounded by awful, depraved people.  So I needed a break.  So I’m writing about something lighthearted instead.  My apologies.  I’m sure on Friday more horrible things will occur to drag me back into the madhouse.

Publishing a book.

Step two complete!  I sent off my manuscript to the one traditional publisher that I’m confident isn’t ideologically opposed to the political position of my protagonist.  Now I’ve got to write a “query letter” and send it out to a bunch of agents to see if any want to represent me.  And I have to make a list of publishers that will take submissions without agents.  Once I’ve done all that, if no one bites then I have to self-publish it and then I have to market it (advertise, announce it on social media, run a Kickstarter, hire a skywriter to put my message over Manhattan, and get a Superbowl commercial).

Well anyway, that will keep me busy for a while.  Based on all the advice for new writers that I’ve read, I intend to disseminate my story for free to all of my friends and try to get as much good word of mouth and favorable reviews as I can when it’s ready to launch.  After all, I don’t want hundreds or thousand of readers and dollars.  I need millions and billions!  Like the holy texts, my book should be in every home in the first and second world.  And dammit why not the third world too?  Surely, I can squeeze the little bit of hard currency that they would normally buy food with and divert it into my coffers.  Yes, yes.  That sounds right.

Well anyway Larry Correia started a monthlong Kickstarter for his new book on Ark Press and within about 24 hours he had $150,000 collected.  And what has he got that I haven’t got (beside thousands of devoted fans)?  Unfortunately, that is exactly what he has that I don’t.  Ah, the trials and tribulations of the unknown author.  There should be a “Tomb of the Unknown Author.”  It could be right past the colonnade of heroic sculptures of Homer, Moses and whoever wrote George Burns’ jokes.  It should have an eternal flame that’s a large hibachi using charcoal brickettes as fuel.  Some residue and aroma from a nice porterhouse steak would be fine and possibly a meat thermometer somewhere nearby.

You know I did learn that writing a story really is just for yourself.  I found parts of the work where I said, “Now that’s exactly how it should be.  Dammit, the writer nailed this perfectly.”  And of course, I know I’m talking to myself but it’s immensely satisfying when the words evoke exactly the emotion you’re reaching for.

Of course, the tricky part is knowing (or hoping) that the scene will elicit that same response from someone or better still, many someone-s who will let the world know just what a genius the author is.  I guess the definition of a great writer is when the whole world (mostly) is moved by what you write in the way you wanted them to feel.

Alright, that’s enough grammata-euphoria.  I’ll only report back when something interesting (publication or a book deal) is imminent.  Until then we can concentrate on the latest hideous atrocities on the streets of our cities and Trump’s latest poke in the eye to the Left and its minions.

We Have to Change with Them

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I watched a YouTube video that described how a book that was struggling to sell a few hundred copies suddenly caught fire and ended up selling 1.5 million copies.  Well, the secret was that they gave away 150,000 copies of the book for free.  And then enough of those readers loved it that they got their friends excited enough to buy it.

Now I’ll have to say, on the face of it, this sounds insane.  I’m not even sure how you would go about giving away 150,000 copies of a book.  I guess you’d set the price to zero on Amazon and then e-mail 150,000 people to let them know they can have the book free that week or something.  But where do you even get an e-mail list with 150,000 science fiction fans?  But then again, I have read a lot in the last few weeks about how even traditionally published books mostly only sell a few hundred copies altogether.  That can’t be considered success, can it?

This has really got me thinking about how limited my little world of friends and family is in the larger scheme of things.  Even on the web I only communicate with a few hundred or maybe a few thousand people at most.  I guess these proverbial “influencers” may have a reach that extends into the hundreds of thousands and possibly a few million people but I’m not sure how much this translates into marketability.  Of course, I don’t discount the youth market and how suggestible teenagers are.  But that’s not a market that I’m currently interested in.

But it was fun thinking about my book reaching millions of people.  Hordes of adoring fans lining up on the highways leading to Dunwich all with the single fixed idea of having me sign their personal copy of “The Sniper” so that it would become an heirloom that they could pass down to their children and their children’s children unto the eighth generation.

It kinda gets you, … right there.

Well, anyway, I definitely have a lot to think about in anticipation of actually publishing this magnum opus.  I still think I’ll look at traditional publishing first because that is the traditional thing.  And I am a traditional guy.  But it’s tempting to think of trying to break out into the big bold beautiful world out there and get as much feedback from the readers out there as I possibly can.  After all P.T. Barnum was successful because he knew how to catch the public’s attention.  Possibly a lurid cover that has little to do with the plot of the book may be part of how you attract the great unwashed.  Then again, covers cost money and maybe I’m better off spending that on a huge e-mail list of science fiction fans.

So, as you can tell I’m staring out into the abyss and finding it abysmal.  When I was a young fan of science fiction, I assumed that finding readers was not a problem.  I thought getting published was the trick.  Times change, priorities shift and we have to change with them.