FULL BLEED: AND GOLD IS NOT REALITY
- 6 days ago
- 5 min read
After going back and forth on things over the last couple of weeks, I went ahead and decided to run the Kickstarter campaign for my newest book. I’d thought that I wouldn’t have the energy/focus to run it and promote it and all, particularly since I was spending a lot of time helping my wife recover from surgery. Yeah, last week was long and rocky. The surgery isn’t the only issue in our lives and I’m gonna leave it there. I have a lot to do that has nothing to with writing or promoting (and promoting just ain’t that important in my book, not anymore.)
I started thinking that getting another book out in a year to keep the schedule rolling was impossible. And it might well be give the challenges I’m dealing with and to some extent that we all are, as I look around. (And that’s all I’m saying about that.) But we’ll have to burn that bridge when we get to it, maybe put some of the free-floating zeitgeist into half of the next book (that half being titled Air Burst and if you know you know) and just forge ahead. Have to forge ahead, even when it’s stupid. I can’t go on; I must go on and all that.
So I pulled the switch and activated the pre-campaign page for My Gifts Are Hungry. You can go check it out right now, get some flavor of the book, take a look at the cover art. You can even sign up to be the first to hear about the project when it goes live. I think we’ve got all of twenty-six interested folks on the list now. This surprises me a little (positive.) I’ll take every bit of support I can find. And if that makes folks feel a little better about where things are, standing up and being counted in my crazy little enterprise, I’m absolutely going to encourage that. I’ve heard that Kickstarter HQ watches all these sign-ups and the like. I’ve also heard that making your goal too small means you don’t believe in the project. So I went ahead and doubled it from the last project. It’s still not real money in the aggregate. It’s still huge.
Here’s that link:
Yeah. I know. Things are awful, psychically awful, right now. It’s not exactly a treat over here at Hazeland central, but I’m carrying on. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Which is a weird thing for me to say. You know, the guy who turned his back on, ah, pretty much everything in publishing, genre or otherwise. I think the business is in a bad place that’s going to be made a whole lot worse. And that’s before, say, some activist investor buys out one of the Big Four because these things run themselves, right? And look at all that juicy NYC real estate that’s up for grabs. A smart fella could flip that all and sell off the pieces then let some heartstruck angel investor sweep in and save publishing.
The meteors have hit, so far as I’m concerned. There’s still more on the way. And, in all honesty, nobody amongst the big or even middle to small sized publishers who are actually under the umbrella of one of the Big Four ever wanted anything to do with my work. I can live with that. My experience in indie publishing was enough to put me off that, too. Sorry, indie publishing. I know you’re all run by good folks who have their hearts in the right places, but I’ll carve my own name across three counties all by myself. The only time since my initial deal (which in fact, turned into a grinding nightmare that combined with life left me staring at a wall like the Kingpin for the better part of two years) that I felt like I actually had an audience at all, was when the first Kickstarter campaign I ran for a Hazeland book actually did… pretty great. The second did even better. It felt real which was a huge deal.
My Gifts Are Hungry, I figured out, was the first novel I’d written in four years. Five if you count the fact that the last novel-length thing I wrote was actually a collection of short stories slash novelettes and not a unified novel, not really. It took a long time to crawl out of the wreckage of my previous publishing deal and the reality that even having a publisher didn’t move the needle in terms of attention. All the reviews I drummed up were me. All the blurbs, the goddamn blurbs, were on me. The cover artist (though not the final design, no matter how much I fought it) was my call.
I got tired of struggling to see not much return. I got tired of a lot of things.
Making a direct connection to the audience was about the only thing that turned it around. Those last two books and Kickstarter campaigns? They were written and done before the campaigns started. Years before. My Gifts Are Hungry is the first book written in the wake of that, of feeling like the books actually mattered to someone (believe me, I burned out on being enamored of a publisher liking the books after the first run-around.)
As I’ve said an awful lot, writing is a lonely business. Particularly when you’re an outsider and pretty much always have been. It’s a lot less lonely now. Still, the writing part itself is, yeah, isolated. By necessity on my part. I can’t do all those social writing gatherings. I can barely talk about my process in a group because the actual writing part, the thing that makes that all come together isn’t something I have direct access to. I can do the prep work, all the outlining and research and the like. All that is making a place at the table for whatever else it is that the words come out of. That’s all ritual. Apologies if this freaks any of you materialists out.
And now that I’ve got an audience, small though it might be, I can feel like this work won’t just get tossed away on a hard drive forever. That folks might actually read it and experience something, even if it isn’t exactly what I had in my head when I was writing it or when I read it again. But at least it’s something that they haven’t seen before.
So, yeah, please check out the pre-campaign page. If you’re so moved, please click the link asking you to be notified on launch. In about three and a half weeks, this whole crazy thing takes off. Another trip back to a time that maybe you don’t even know, maybe you grew up in. In a place you might’ve heard about or maybe even lived in. And hopefully the rest of it is a new thing that you can take with you.
See you next time.
