Curtis Edmonds's Blog, page 20

It’s Peach Cobbler Time, Knuckleheads

I was going to make Texas sheet cake this weekend, I really was, but I went to the farmer’s market and peaches were 59 cents a pound, which is an excuse to eat ALL the peaches, as in all the peaches that there are. But, of course, you can’t eat all the peaches that there are. And you can’t do what my mother and grandmother used to do when they got all the peaches that there are, which is to can them, because you do not know how to do that and you don’t have the equipment or the Mason jars just sitting around, and God help you if you try to turn them into peach preserves, because you will foul that right the hell up.

That means that it’s time to make and consume vast quantities of peach cobbler. “Consume vast quantities,” of course, is from a Saturday Night Live skit that was old and moldy by the time I was old enough to stay up late and watch the show myself. (Now, of course, I am far too old to do that – youth, like bad SNL skits, is wasted on the young.) ANYWAY. You are going to buy all the peaches and make all the peach cobbler, got it? Good.

YOUR DELICIOUS SAVORY PEACH COBBLER RECIPE

Take your peaches out of the sad little plastic bag in which you toted them home from the farmer’s market and wash them.
Use your handy-dandy Williams-Sonoma peeler (less than ten bucks!) to peel your peaches. This is easily the most unpleasant part of the job, because you will get peach juice all over your hands and will probably feel icky about that for some time. Get over it. It will be worth it.
Take a knife and hack off large irregular pieces of peach until you get to the pit. Remove the pit and throw it in the same refuse pile as the peels. Don’t worry about being pretty here. You want nice mouthful-size hunks of peach. Occasionally, eat one of the hunks of peach to remind yourself that summertime is over and you are one year closer to death.
At the end of everything, you should have no peaches left, a bowl full of hunks of firm peach innards, and a bowl full of peach peels and pits. Throw away the bowl of peach peels and pits – no, not the actual bowl, you stupid knucklehead, the stuff inside the bowl. Put the empty bowl in the sink. Wash your hands.
Dig the good-sized Calphalon Dutch oven out of the cabinet, you know, the one that you were smart enough to buy on sale. Dump the peach chunks into that. Add in, maximum, a cup of water, and a cup of that brown sugar that you bought at Costco and haven’t used up yet. Stir over medium heat until the mixture begins to boil, then turn down the heat to the minimum and let it simmer.
What you are trying to do is two things at once: you are using heat to break down the crunchy fibers in the peach, and you are making a nice lovely syrup with the water and the sugar to make the whole thing as delicious as humanly possible. The problem is that cooking the peaches releases some of the water trapped inside, so you may have a very thin syrup. You can fix this by maybe not pouring quite so much water in the first place – you probably don’t need the full cup, especially if you didn’t buy enough peaches. But the other way to fix it is to reduce the syrup by simmering, which you know how to do, right? Good.
The next step is to add spice to make your syrup more savory. Why do we do this? Well, I suppose you don’t have to, especially if you listen to people like Albert Burneko, who suggests that you flavor your delicious peach cobbler with lemon zest and lemon juice to make it tart, and then to salt the hell out of the dough to counterbalance the sweetness of the ice cream, because you are TOTALLY putting ice cream on the cobbler. But there’s a much easier way to do that, and that is to put some spice in your syrupy peach thingy. Yes! Cinnamon! Nutmeg! Ginger? WHY NOT. CLOVES. Put a little bit of some of that good stuff in there. Vanilla? Why not.
Next question: why cook the peaches on the stove when you’re just going to cook them in the cobbler? Well, so you can taste the syrup, that’s why. Take a little bit out with a spoon, let it cool, and put it in your mouth and OH GOD THAT’S DELICIOUS. Resist the urge to drown yourself in the syrup. And if it doesn’t taste all kinds of delicious, fiddle with it until it does.
While the cobbler is simmering, take out two boxes of JIFFY pie crust mix and make yourself some pie crust, one box at a time. (Follow the directions – mix cold water in the crust to make a ball, then roll the out.) The first pie crust that you make will look horrible. Who cares? Take out your cast-iron Dutch oven – not the one you’re cooking the peaches with – and put the horrible pie crust in the bottom. Then when your peaches are ready, pour them on top of that pie crust, and then take your second horrible pie crust, and put that on top, and there you go. Put the whole thing in a 400-degree oven and cook until the top crust is golden brown and delicious, and the syrup has congealed into a delicious gel.
Serve with ice cream and eat.

I have not yet, you understand, perfected this recipe. I am not 100% sure that I have the pie crust the way I want it – I may try adding in some butter next time to make it more gooey and less crisp. But if you do this, it will taste good and make you feel good.

Also – ALSO ALSO ALSO – if blueberries are on sale, well, make your blueberry cobbler this way – it’s a LOT easier and I KNOW this works:

Wash your blueberries and dump them in a bowl with a little bit of water and a cup of white sugar. Heat to boiling and then let simmer.
Get a box of JIFFY blueberry muffin mix and make up a nice muffin batter, following the directions.
Put the blueberries in your Dutch oven, pour the muffin mix on top, and bake at 400 until the muffin mix starts to look like it’s done on top. EAT.

“Rain on Your Wedding Day” now available at Nook Store

My debut novel, RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY, had been available exclusively at Amazon, but I’ve recently offered for sale at Barnes & Noble, and hopefully soon at other online outlets. If you have a NOOK e-reader, check it out.

Submission Guidelines for The Coconut Wheel: A Literary Exploration of Candy Crush Saga

Who are you?

We’re you. That is to say, we’re you if you’ve ever gotten stuck on Level 33 for a month. We’re you if you’ve ever run out of lives at three o’clock in the morning. We’re you if you’ve ever actively tried to play Candy Crush Saga while diapering a baby. We know. We understand. And we think there’s a literary dimension to what you’re going through.

What is your philosophy?

We believe literature is about desire and achievement. Candy Crush Saga is no different. Hemingway said the things we want are like cards. We know the things we want sometimes can be like having a blue candy drop in just the right place so you can use it to help swap out a color bomb with a striped candy. Desiring the things we want is the engine that drives the narrative forward to reach the summit of achievement. Our goal at The Coconut Wheel is to gather these stories, within the context of Candy Crush Saga, and present them to the world at large.

What are you looking for?

We’re primarily looking for short stories in the flash fiction range (about 1000-2000 words in length). We will be happy to consider longer pieces, assuming you have the necessary attention span to complete them. We will not consider novella-length pieces, as we no longer have the necessary attention span to read them.

What aren’t you interested in?

We are not actively seeking poetry, dream journals, or screenplays where Liam Neeson uses a particular set of skills to crush through a wall of meringues. We will not consider erotica because we personally think combining Candy Crush Saga with sex diminishes the pleasure involved. However, we will carefully consider slash fiction involving striped candies and wrapped candies.

What about non-fiction?

We are only looking for fiction at this point. We are not interested in non-fiction pieces, such as tips, tricks or strategy guides, unless you know something about Level 311 that we don’t already. We are also not interested in articles focusing on ways to pick up women using Candy Crush Saga, because that would be sexist and misogynist, and anyway it doesn’t work.

What themes are you focusing on?

There are many classic themes in literary fiction for talented writers to explore, such as the loss of innocence, the tension between man and his place in the natural world, and the conflict between the need for parental approval and the need to make one’s own way in the world. None of these things have anything to do with Candy Crush Saga. We are looking for themes related to addiction, conflicts with spouses who don’t play Candy Crush Saga and don’t understand why you just paid two dollars for a Lollipop Hammer, and addiction.

How do I submit my story?

The Coconut Wheel is one of the first literary journals to use Facebook for the submissions process. Just “like” us on Facebook and then send your story as a Facebook message. Oh, and please send us an extra life along with your story.

When will my story be published?

Right away. We’re not picky. If you send us the extra life, we’ll put it right up. We reserve the right to check for spelling errors, of course. And, like most small up-and-coming online literary journals devoted to casual gaming, we of course aren’t able to pay our contributors anything. But if you could just send us that extra life, that would be great. And three more moves, if you have them to spare.

This sounds sort of, you know, like a scheme to get free lives from strangers.

We’re just trying to share great literary stories related to Candy Crush Saga. The addictive nature of the game is not under our control. If you’re questioning our need for more lives, what you’re really doing is questioning the fundamental structure of the game. You’re questioning whether it’s right or wrong to intentionally set up a game which is so addictive and difficult that it requires the occasional financial contribution in order to play it properly. And that’s not a conversation we feel comfortable having. Just write us a story and send us those three moves and that extra life already. Thanks!

Stats from August 2013 KDP Select Promotion

My novel, RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY was free as a KDP Select promotion from August 15 through August 19. In that time, it reached as high as #14 on the free list at the Kindle Store, and was #1 in literary fiction and contemporary fiction, and #2 in women’s fiction at one point or another. So that’s good.

Here are the actual sales numbers:

Territory
Sales


The Good Old U.S. of A.
14238


United Kingdom
193


Germany
128


France
8


Spain
2


Italy
1


Japan
2


India
25


Canada
52


Brazil
3


Total
14652

A few points:

Thanks much to the websites that featured my free promotion, like Freebies 4 Mom and Florries of Words, just to name two.
Having said that, it would be great if I knew where the traffic to my Amazon page is coming from, in terms of maybe doing some advertising. Just how many people picked up a free copy through which website?
Amazon.com was down for a couple of hours yesterday, but people still seemed to be buying books. My best guess is that a substantial part of the free sales aren’t being done by, you know, actual human beings who are making an actual buying decision to choose my book over others. I don’t know that bots are downloading my book. I think so, though.
The avalanche of sales after the free promotion hasn’t happened yet, for some reason. I expect that it won’t. It would be nice to be surprised for once.
I am probably not doing this again. I won’t say “definitely” but I would a lot rather have a hundred sales from a 99 cent promotion than a hundred thousand sales from a free promotion.

A First-Year Associate Reconsiders His Ethical Commitment To Intellectual Property Law

Dear Gary,

My name is Ethan Randall, and I’m a first-year associate at the Andrews, McClellan & Patterson law firm here in Wilmington, Delaware. You may be wondering why I’m contacting you, and I’m kind of wondering that myself, honestly.

It’s like this. As you may remember, your grandmother, Marion Carswell, had her 75th birthday party at her assisted living center in Arizona in February 2009. Your mother, Amanda Wright, was in attendance, and took a video, which she posted to YouTube. (I do not know if you were in attendance, but there is a young man in the video wearing a Colorado State T-shirt, and your LinkedIn profile shows that you graduated from Colorado State, so I’m going to assume that’s you, not that it matters that much.)

In December 2009, another first-year associate from this firm, doing a routine copyright search, viewed the video and noted that the video contained a recording of the song, “Happy Birthday to You.” The copyright to “Happy Birthday to You” belongs to my firm’s client, the Warner Music Group. Under current copyright law, you can’t broadcast clips of people singing “Happy Birthday to You” on TV or the Internet without paying for the rights to do so. That attorney sent your mother an e-mail, asking her to take the birthday party video (hereinafter referred to as “the infringing video”) down.

In March 2011, another first-year associate from this firm noticed that your mother had not responded to the first e-mail. She sent your mother a follow-up e-mail, again asking your mother to take the infringing video off YouTube. Again, there wasn’t a response. The firm was preparing to begin initial work towards legal action on this matter when I investigated the situation and determined that your mother passed away in August 2009, thereby complicating our litigation strategy somewhat.

So first of all, Gary, let me pass along my condolences, and the condolences of the firm, at the loss of your mother. Based on the obituary, it sounds like it was very painful and traumatic for her, and probably for you. It can’t have been easy watching her suffer like that. It’s a sad thing, and I’m sorry it happened, and the note you wrote about her on Facebook at the time was very moving.

However, and this isn’t easy for me to write, the fact that your mother is dead doesn’t change our position regarding the copyright infringement of the video made at your Nana’s birthday in 2009. (I am glad to hear that she seems to be doing well and has recovered from that mini-stroke.) Therefore, on behalf of my law firm, and the Warner Music Group, I respectfully ask if you can take a minute and work with us to remove the infringing video from YouTube.

I understand how weird this all sounds. Believe me, it’s weird for me, too. I graduated from Cornell Law School in June 2012. I was out of work for nine months before I started this job in March. I have credit card debt that totals more than what Zillow has your house listed for. I have a studio apartment and I walk to work because I can’t afford car insurance.

When I was hired, I was told I would be working on an innovative project involving social media and data mining and intellectual property law. That turned out to be using Facebook to track people down and and make them take down birthday videos on behalf of a faceless multi-billion dollar corporate entity.

I am not real thrilled about being the guy who keeps people from posting videos online of happy family celebrations just because they’re singing a song that just happens to be copyrighted by a large media conglomerate. My first day on this project, I asked whether this was a good use of my time, or anybody’s time. The answer I got back was that if Warner Music Group doesn’t prosecute every infringing use of the song that it finds, other media companies will be able to argue that the song is now in the public domain, and Warner won’t be able to charge five thousand dollars to people who want to use “Happy Birthday to You” in their movies and TV shows. It’s a decent legal argument, even if it sounds more than a little ridiculous.

I have to be honest, though. I don’t think your mom did anything wrong here. I think it’s morally dubious to continue a copyright on what’s basically a nineteenth-century folk song. Even if it’s still copyrightable, I think you can still argue “fair use” and there’s not a jury in this country that will disagree. I think it’s wrong that a huge company employs lawyers to try to intimidate people to get their way, even on something so small and inconsequential like a video that’s been seen by eighteen people, tops, and has just three comments, all about Singaporean foreign exchange trading.

Then I think about what my student loan payments are, and how hard it will be to ever get a house if I don’t keep them up.

That’s why I’m writing this e-mail, instead of a stiff and boring cease-and-desist letter. I figure you understand. You were out of work for most of 2010, right? You know what the economy is like. And you seem like a nice guy. Your kids look very cute, and I’m sure they will want to see the video of their great-grandmother one day.

What I can do for you is this. If you’re OK with it, I can send a note to my contact at YouTube that you’ve authorized removing the infringing video, and then I’ll personally burn you a copy on Blu-Ray. You don’t have to do anything other than give your permission. If that works for you, I’ll take care of it and you won’t have to worry about defending a lawsuit against you in your role as executor of your mom’s estate filed by Warner Music Group in the United States District Court for the District of Delaware. Because I already have that kind of roughed out.

Not to sound all lawyerly or anything, but I need to hear back from you by the end of next week. If you’ll excuse me, some guy just posted a video to Facebook of his kid singing “Hooked On a Feeling,” and even though it’s majorly cute, I have to tell him to take it down, too, because my entire job seems to be making people afraid of the things that should make them happy.

Cordially,

Ethan Randall

Andrews, McClellan & Patterson

2100 N. Walnut Street

Wilmington, DE 19801

This e-mail is intended only for the person or entity to whom it is addressed and may contain information that is privileged, confidential, or otherwise protected from disclosure. If you are not the intended recipient, or an employee or agent responsible for delivering this message to the intended recipient, you are notified that any disclosure, copying, distribution, or the taking of any action in reliance on the contents of this message is prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please contact the sender immediately and delete the original message and all copies from your system.

Update on Sales Figures

If you’re not familiar with self-publishing, here’s a quick primer on how the system works on Amazon.

The lowest possible price point is, of course, free. You get no royalties for any free giveaways, of course. You can price it for free, or if you’re on Amazon and publish with them exclusively (through what’s called “KDP Select”) you can have up to five “free days” per quarter.

Anything you price under $2.99, you get 35% of the purchase price back from Amazon as a royalty. The classic price point here is 99 cents – for some reason, people won’t buy books at the $1.99 price point. So for every book you sell at 99 cents, you get 35 cents back. (To put this another way, if you can sell a hundred thousand books a year at 99 cents, you can earn enough to have an average income in this country.)

Anything you price $2.99 or over, you get 70% of the purchase price, which is a much better deal. (You only have to sell 17,500 books a year to have an average income at $2.99 a book.) Even better, people will still buy your book at #3.99, which is even better.

Okay, this is what I have done so far:

My book (RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY) was published in March 2013. It started out at the $2.99 price point.
In April, I set my five free days for the first quarter. RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY hit #1 on the free list for literary fiction.
In May, I continued at the $2.99 price point.
In June, sales flatlined. I set a 99-cent promotion for June 29-July 4, and kept it going for a couple of days after that.
After I ended the 99-cent promotion, I re-priced the book at the $3.99 price point, mostly to see if it would sell.

So the prices have been kind of all over the map. Here’s what the actual figures (not including international or paperback sales) look like in a chart:

Price Point
Sales
Earnings


Free (includes free borrows)
17814
$174.64


$0.99
1155
$404.56


$2.99
189
$366.95


$3.99
22
$60.06


Total
19180
$1006.21

I think the lesson here, if there is a lesson, is that you can’t repeal the law of supply and demand. Other than that, you’re on your own.

A Brief, Slightly Fictional Letter to an Intern at a Literary Agency

Curtis Edmonds

Duckthwacket, New Jersey

July 7, 2013

Intern

Slightly Fictional Literary Agency

New York, NY

Dear Intern:

Thank you so much for your letter of July 1, 2013, rejecting my query of representation for my novel, RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY. As you noted in your letter, there has indeed been a long delay between the date of my query and your response, and I gladly accept your heartfelt apology.

However, I would be remiss if I did not bring to your attention just how long of a delay we are talking about. I sent my query to your agency in September 2012. That was nine months ago. Nine months ago, the Dallas Cowboys and New York Yankees still had a shot at the title. Mitt Romney still had a shot at being President. Babies conceived in September 2012 are having their diapers changed as I write this.

After three months of not hearing anything from your agency–or from many of the hundred-plus agents that I queried–I made the assumption that your agency was not going to respond, and proceeded to self-publish RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY in March. Sales have been well above-average for a self-published novel. I had about 150 sales before I dropped down to the 99-cent price point, and about 1100 sales after that. I have yet to recoup the money that I have spent on editing and proofreading and cover design and promotion, although I think that will come in time. From a purely commercial viewpoint, I think I can say that your agency made the right decision to reject my book. Despite the fact that reviews have generally been excellent, RAIN ON YOUR WEDDING DAY hasn’t made the kind of money I would like, and it probably won’t.

So, after nine months of not hearing from you, and after four months of having my book out on Kindle, you can well imagine how surprised I was to get your rejection letter. The one nice thing about self-publishing is that there aren’t any rejection letters, and I assumed that I had gotten my last one. I am not best pleased about being wrong about that.

I am not blaming you personally. I think I understand what happened–you’re an intern, and you were tasked with cleaning out the slush pile and sending out the rejection letters. I am fine with that. Interns get lousy jobs because they’re interns. Bless your heart.

What I hope you will learn in your internship is this: Literary agents are the only professionals in America that get to treat people badly anymore. No other business in this country gets to operate like this. Even Comcast, which has the worst customer service in the English-speaking world, doesn’t take nine months to tell you whether or not you can get a second cable box hooked up. Literary agents can get to treat prospective authors as badly as they like, which is in most cases very badly, because there is such a power mismatch between agents and prospective authors. (That’s not true of the very few highly successful writers, another fact of which you should take note.)

I like to think that I have learned a lot from querying, and being rejected. I think that agents, unfortunately, learn all the wrong things about rejecting people. I think that because it’s socially acceptable that agents get to be cruel to writers, that it sends a message that cruelty is the standard–the basis on how authors should be treated.

It is true that agents get a lot of queries and don’t have a lot of time to consider them. It is true that some authors don’t follow submission guidelines. It is true that some authors are rude and pushy. It is true that some manuscripts are so badly written that they would make a stone angel cringe.

But I do not think it means that agents should routinely be mean, dismissive, and ugly towards writers, or that agents should, as a matter of course, take untold months to look at submissions. There’s no law that says that agents have to treat writers badly, and I hope that you will work to set a good example.

I wish you the best of luck in your career.

Cordially,

Curtis Edmonds

Thor Slaymaster’s Breaking Point

Thor Slaymaster sat quietly in the dark room. He had been there for three days, more or less. In that time, he had determined that the floor and walls were constructed of hard, durable, seamless plastic, probably overlayed on solid concrete or stone. Temperature and humidity were controlled, which suggested some kind of ventilation port, somewhere above his reach. He had not been provided with any sort of food or water or anything that even pretended at being a toilet, and had therefore determined that the room did not have a drain built into the floor.

The good news was that there weren’t any zombies in the room. Thor Slaymaster could handle being in a dark, stinking, escape-proof cell as long as there weren’t any zombies in there making life difficult for him. So he slept when he could, and sat quietly when he couldn’t sleep, conserving as much energy as possible against the time when his situation changed enough that escape and bloody vengeance were possible.

Twenty feet above Thor Slaymaster, an eight-foot tall alien in a brown robe impassively watched a monitor showing Thor Slaymaster impassively sitting in his cell. “This one is not reacting as the others have,” he said.

A human in a filthy lab coat nodded. “He is taking longer to reach his breaking point. But he will. All men reach their breaking point, sooner or later.”

“As you have said, Dr. Slaughter. What else can you do?” the alien asked. His squirming mouth-tentacles were the only outward sign of impatience.

“I can introduce pain,” the doctor said. “This specimen is very large and very tough, and probably not very smart.”

“He could be smarter than he looks,” the alien said.

“I don’t think so. He’s probably survived much worse privation than this in the wilderness where we picked him up. It will be difficult to break him using our standard tactics.”

The alien’s mouth-tentacles spasmed and went slack. “We have discussed this, Dr. Slaughter. Our race does not believe in violence. We intend to subjugate Earth through persuasion and logic, not force. There is no need to cause this man any more pain.”

“But we must break him,” Dr. Slaughter said.

“Yes,” the alien said. “Do you remember how we broke you?”

Dr. Slaughter went pale. He repressed a violent shudder, then went to the control panel next to the monitor. He paused for a long moment, considering a large red button that read “NICKELBACK,” but thought better of it. He opened a plastic cover and pushed a smaller, black button, to be used only in emergencies. It read “LANA DEL REY.”

Thor Slaymaster heard the opening strains of “Young and Beautiful” and smiled. Up until this moment, he had only known one thing about his captors. Now he knew several things. He knew that they used some sort of power source to power the hidden speakers above his cell. He knew that they were at least conversant with some elements of human culture, even if they might not be human themselves. He knew that they were wholly irredeemable and therefore not entitled to anything even approaching mercy.

And he knew they would come for him, eventually, and try to subject him to something worse. He would be ready.

About sixteen hours into the musical torture, a bright light came down from the darkened ceiling. Thor Slaymaster was caught in its beam. He was unsurprised to find that he was immobilized, and that he was drifting upwards.

“It’s a stasis field,” Dr. Slaughter explained. “The sensation will pass in a few minutes. You’ll be taken to our recovery room for analysis.”

The recovery room proved to be brightly lit and quiet, without a hint of twenty-first century torch music. The bed was nice and comfortable. The restraints were well-padded. A small medical robot crawled up Thor Slaymaster’s arm and injected an IV saline solution. A larger robot held out a bedpan.

The alien in the brown robe glided over to the foot of the bed. “Welcome,” it said. “Are you ready to accept my unquestioned authority?”

Thor Slaymaster stayed silent.

“He must have survived his ordeal only through his brute strength,” the alien said. “He does not appear to have much in the way of reasoning function.”

“It may be a lingering aftereffect of the stasis field,” Dr. Slaughter explained. “More likely, he’s just too stupid to understand.”

“Maybe a different question, one that’s easier for him to answer?”

“You can try. He’s not going anywhere.”

“Well, then. Do you have any questions of us?” the alien asked Thor Slaymaster. “Who we are? Why we’re doing this to you? What do we hope to accomplish?”

“Why do you want to die?” Thor Slaymaster asked.

“A metaphysical question,” the alien said. “See, Doctor, he is smarter than he looks. And to answer your question, what I want is to rule this planet, and end its plague of violence, and I cannot do that if I die. So your premise is invalid.”

“You misunderstand,” Thor Slaymaster said. “You kidnapped and tortured a Slaymaster, so you must want to die. If I know why, I can kill you more efficiently.”

“Clearly,” the alien said, “this one is not at his breaking point.”

Dr. Slaughter started to say something about the limits of operational conditioning, and then started to say something about the padded restraint on Thor Slaymaster’s left arm being loose, and then didn’t say anything at all because Thor Slaymaster had yanked on his cheap polyester tie and had fractured his windpipe.

“Violence,” the alien said. “Is it all you humans know?”

Thor Slaymaster grabbed hold of a medical robot that was trying to refasten his restraints. “Pretty much,” he said, as he threw the robot in the general direction of the alien’s head.

As the alien screamed in unaccustomed pain, Thor Slaymaster removed the rest of his restraints and his IV. Unfortunately, the alien recovery room did not seem to have anything in the way of usable weapons. “I have one more question for you,” Thor Slaymaster said. “Do you like your justice swift, or poetic?”

“I thought you were smarter than you looked,” the alien said.

“Poetic, then,” Thor Slaymaster said. He picked up the IV stand and whacked the alien in the midsection. The alien doubled over, and it was easy work for Thor Slaymaster to push him down into the cell below.

“Get me out of here,” the alien said. “I’ll give you whatever you want.”

Thor Slaymaster smiled. He had what he wanted. He had his freedom, a new race of aliens to fight, and fellow human beings to rescue. Thor Slaymaster had a breaking point, but it would take a lot more than nonviolent aliens, turncoat doctors, and cheesy twenty-first century popular music for anyone to get anywhere near it.

Barbarians at the Gate

I am destroying literature. I’m sorry about that. Really. I don’t know what got into me. Here I was, a regular guy, doing regular guy things like cooking meat with fire, watching baseball games, and writing funny things on the internet, and all of a sudden, it turns out that I have been engaged in the systematic and deliberative process of wrecking the foundations of Western literary culture. My bad.

Well, that’s the argument that somebody named Michael Kozlowski is making at some digital publishing website or other. I put out a book earlier this year that was self-published (something that I have YET to apologize for, you might note) and that makes me part of the problem. Or, if you want to put it another way, part of the unholy conspiracy to stop literature and replace it with crap.

To the best that I can discern, these are his principal arguments:

You can’t browse Kobo, Barnes and Noble, or Amazon without running into a maelstrom of poorly written and poorly edited books. All of these bookstores put indie authors’ books side by side with established authors, who are signed to a publishing company.

Oh, how DARE they! The nerve of some people! Imagine, putting a poorly-written book on a digital shelf next to another book that is actually good! They should be ashamed, these digital retailers!

Of course, it’s not as though actual, real-world publishers don’t put out dodgy, poorly-written books themselves, and durn it if some of those books don’t sit cheek-to-jowl with well-written books on actual bookshelves. And, of course, it is not as though I am in charge of how Amazon (my book is just on Amazon for the time being) slots my book. All I did was put it into their database. If Amazon wants to put my book next to GONE GIRL (please, please, please) there’s nothing I can do about it. So that’s not on me.

At a recent publishing conference in London, Andrew Franklin, founder and managing director of Profile Books, blasted authors who self-publish. “The overwhelming majority of self-published books are terrible—unutterable rubbish, they don’t enhance anything in the world.”

To which I have four responses:

Thbpt.
Even if my book is rubbish–reasonable minds can disagree–tons of rubbish gets published every year by traditional publishers. Self-published books may have a higher percentage of books that are rubbish than traditional publishers. I will grant you that. But there are plenty of self-published books out there that are decent, or better. You just have to seek them out, like you would any other book. The odds are going to be worse for self-published stuff, but that is the point at which you use your judgment.
And even if it’s true, so what? So what if my book is bad? (I will point out that the majority of reviews have been five-star so far.) So what if some other person published a self-published book that is bad? Big deal. No one is making Michael Kozlowski or Andrew Franklin read any of them. Why does it matter to them, anyway?
No, seriously, THBPT. Koslowski complains that Amazon and “[a]ll of their other self-publishing programs do not have anyone proofreading or editing the book.” It’s true that it’s not a requirement, fair enough, but I had my book edited, more than once. I had it proofread. I worked as hard as I possibly could given the time constraints involved to make my book as good as possible, and even if you’re going to include me in the rubbish heap, you can at least acknowledge that. And if you can’t, thbpt.

Then there’s this:

Good e-Reader has around 3,000 Twitter Followers and over 5,000 Facebook friends. Not a day goes by that I don’t see people asking for ebook sales. “BUY MY BOOK!” No marketing, no reason to buy it, JUST BUY IT!

Well, here I have to say “guilty as charged.” I spend about ten minutes a day setting up tweets asking people to take a look at my book (although it’s not as crude as “BUY MY BOOK!”). But nobody in this world is forcing anybody to read any of these tweets. If you don’t like it, just unfollow. If you think that Twitter is too spammy (and it is) then don’t use Twitter. (I am not convinced, at all, that these tweets are helpful or do very much to build my brand, but other people who are more successful than me do it and it seems to work for them and what do I know?)

So am I ruining Twitter> Maybe. But that’s a far cry from ruining publishing. How am I doing that?

One thing indie authors have done is devalue the work of legitimate published authors. You know the type that write for a living, who have an editor and are considered accomplished, or at least well-read. The average indie title is $0.99 to $2.99, and the average publisher price is $7.99 – $12.99. Book buyers have been so conditioned to paying as little as possible that often they will not even consider a more expensive book.

Well, to disprove that, all you need to do is look at the rankings at the Kindle store. I am perusing it now, and note that there are three books in the top 100 for literary fictionas I write this that are what I’d call bargain-priced – Michael Chabon’s THE YIDDISH POLICEMAN’S UNION (HarperCollins) at $1.99, THE BIRTH HOUSE (HarperCollins), a novel by a Canadian author at $1.99, and A MIRACLE OF CATFISH, by the late Larry Brown, at the same price. A MIRACLE OF CATFISH looks as though it’s published by the late author’s editor, which I guess could be self-publishing. I don’t know. The only other book priced less than my book in the top 100 for literary fiction is a Mark Twain book, which I guess is nice. Authors with books priced at $2.99 in the list include Meg Wolitzer (a 2007 release), Jodi Picoult (a 2008 release), Ali Hosseini (a new book), Pat Conroy (his debut novel, published in 2010) and Elizabeth Berg (a 2003 release).

So, okay, look. What Jodi Picoult (just to pick out one name) is doing here is selling something from off her backlist for cheap to drive up sales. Is there anything wrong with that? No. Is it stopping people from buying other, better books? No, I don’t think so. Is it ruining everything for everyone? No–there are plenty of more expensive books out there that people are buying.

So what is Jodi Picoult doing to destroy American literary civilization?

I can’t think of anything, either. Okay, maybe she’s cutting into her own profit margin, but that’s her choice. Maybe she’s undervaluing her fellow authors a touch, but their prices still seem to be fairly high and it looks as though there are enough sales to go around.

If she’s not doing anything wrong with her $2.99 book, what am I doing wrong with my $2.99 book that isn’t selling anywhere near as well? I can’t imagine. To the extent that the $2.99 (or 70% of it) is going to me instead of Jodi Picoult, I can see how that hurts her, but it’s much more likely that she is eating into my sales and not the other way around. Besides, why can’t we both be successful? Why can’t everyone be successful if they’ve written a good enough book?

I am a barbarian. I will admit to that. I am outside the gate, but not from lack of trying to get in. But all I’m doing is trying to sell books. I am not stopping anybody else from buying anybody else’s book. I am just trying to do my thing here without the Michael Kozlowskis of the world trying to say I’m responsible for things I’m not even remotely responsible for.

What I Plan To Say In Case I Run Into Any Celebrities When I am in Southern California Next Month

Jim Carrey

So, I guess there’s not going to be any more Lemony Snicket movies, then, eh? No, I’m not blaming you. It wasn’t your fault. Not really. I mean, maybe a little.

Robin Williams

Nanoo-nanoo.

Bar Rafaeli

Did you ever see that one episode of “Seinfeld,” where they talked about that list of people you could sleep with and your spouse couldn’t hold it against you?

Justin Bieber

My kids don’t know who you are, and I’d like to keep it that way as long as possible, bucco.

Eric Bana

I really, really liked you as the Hulk. Much better than anyone else who’s played the character.

Christoph Weitz

So, you’re in charge of security for this little theater in Paris, where Hitler and Goebbels are going to be, and you don’t notice the huge big pile of highly flammable film stock behind the screen?

Edward Norton

Just between you and me, I thought you were the best of the recent Hulks. I thought you really captured the spirit of scientific inquiry.

Brooklyn Decker

Did you ever see that one episode of “Seinfeld,” where they talked about that list of people you could sleep with and your spouse couldn’t hold it against you?

Kevin Bacon

You don’t know me, but I once met Charlton Heston at this Republican fund-raiser, and he was in “Midway” with Robert Wagner, who was in “Wild Things” with you. Great flick, by the way.

Quentin Tarantino

Really? Hans Landa doesn’t notice that huge big pile of flammable film stock in a huge pile behind the screen?

Adam Sandler

All I’m saying is, do one more movie like “Punch-Drunk Love,” and I’ll forgive you if you do a “Waterboy” sequel.

Brad Pitt

Okay, I figure you would know this one. There’s a Chanel Number Five, right? So what happened to Chanel Number Four?

Tom Hanks

All I’m saying is that there’s no way that a Nazi colonel in charge of security for Hitler visiting Paris would miss a great big huge pile of flammable film behind the screen. He’d have to be an idiot.

Mark Ruffalo

No doubt, man. Best Hulk ever. You nailed it. Congratulations.

Kate Upton

Hi. Um. well. Hi. I just think that… wow, this is awkward. Hi.