Lars Eighner's The Main Blog Archives

Wilma celebrated five years of service or captivity (depending upon who you ask) quietly Sunday. The carob-and-peanut-butter dog cookies she was awarded did not seem to impress her particularly, but letting her think she was stealing them seemed to improve her opinion of them.

Sigh. I repaired the styles for Netscape 7+ to keep the right bar from overflowing. It was already working for many of the Mozillas. It was just my error in substituting values in the excellent Skidoo_too (see credit in footer) scheme.

The basic idea is to really big borders for the main document and to put the side bars on the borders. I increased the size of the right side bar, but failed to increase the size of the border

Also, I had to add a filter to unTidy lists because some old IE do not handle lists properly if you have white space after you close list elements. The result of the filter is that lists all go on one line, which makes them hard to read with View Source.

Somehow the phantom underline in Opera 7 went away. I did not fix it because I never knew what was wrong.

Sweated bullets for several days over this one. GNU make (like, I guess, all makes) exist to put together programs from source files. It can do a whole lot of other things, but the documentation for idiots is mostly directed toward idiots who want to compile C programs and do reasonable things with them and their parts.

This Makefile copies *.chml files from directory test to directory test2 and preserves permissions and ownership, but only if the file in test is newer than any file with the same name in test2. Run it with gmake target.

The Xerox commercial is at it again. You know the one. The smart-ass kid shows up the old-fart professor by explaining that owing to on demand publishing, everyone can get published. It is, of course, a crock.

It is a crock because on demand is not really what people want when they want to be published. Sure, you may get an ISBN. And it may be possible for someone who has been browbeaten into searching for your book on the web to order your book. And you might even sell a copy or two to someone who is not related to you and is too far away for you to bully. But that is not what people want. And I am pretty sure they do not want the derisive laughter when they tell people they are published on demand. Not to put too fine a point on it: on demand is to being an author like flying a kite is to being an astronaut.

What is this?

But the Xerox ad is running, so I am getting email. I need to compose a boilerplate reply. I waste too much time on these people. They do not want my advice, you know. Many of them think they want my advice; but those really just want me to tell them what they already believe. Others do not believe they want my advice; they know they want me to use my godlike literary influence to pluck them out of unpublished obscurity — but they pretend they want advice.

So I'll have a go at a form letter:

The normal state of affairs is that publishers pay you for the right to publish your work. People who ask for anything from you to publish your work are called "vanity presses." That term doesn't refer to a piece of bedroom furniture favored by ladies.

The Writer's Market people put out a whole book listing people who will look at your work and decide if it is worth putting up money to have it published. They are called "publishers." You can probably find a recent edition of Writer's Market at your local library where you can consult it for free. Most publishers cooperate with the editors of Writer's Market, even if it is to say they are not reading at this time.

If you cannot afford to send query letters by regular mail, and to make a couple of copies of your manuscript to send out in case your queries find an editor who is willing to look at your work, you certainly cannot afford a scam like on demand whose cheapest package seems to be around $300.

I have to wonder what you think being published means, and what exactly you are aiming at.

If you want a few hundred copies to give as gifts to friends and families, you can find printers that are surprisingly cheap, especially if you are in no great hurry and the printers can work on your book at times when their equipment would otherwise be idle. You should take many bids. It is a very price competitive business.

Otherwise, it appears to me that you have some kind of fantasy notion of what being published means. I was raised in a family in which the facts of publishing (and mostly the facts of not getting published) were a part of everyday life, so I have difficulty understanding fantasy publishing, but so far as I can make out, the fantasy seems to be something like:

1. First I get published,
2. a miracle or something happens,
3. then there is demand for my book and I get at least a little more famous (or respected) and possibly at least a little money to the good.

If you think that is publishing, any money you put into getting published would better be spent on Lotto tickets. And when you ask anyone else to invest in your book, you are asking them for money they could better spend on Lotto tickets.

This, of course, is exactly backwards of reality publishing.

In reality publishing:

1. First I become respected as a writer and make a little money at it and create at least a little demand for my work,
2. a little bit of ordinary luck occurs when my query happens to hit the right desk on the right day (which bit of luck has been helped along by my sending many queries, many places,
3. then I get published.

Get it? You do not get published and then do the writerly things. You do the writerly things and then get published.

If you are interested in reality publishing, let me ask you, where are you reading your work? What poetry slams are you attending? Which coffee houses with open mikes do you frequent? Have you discovered which little magazines are the real deal by checking the contents of the Pushcart Prize volume? How many of them have you submitted work to? Enough so that one of them might nominate you for the next Pushcart Prize annual?

Did you submit your Pushcart Prize piece to Harper's', The Atlantic, etc. for their reprints sections? Where is the nearest entertainment and arts weekly newspaper? When did you meet the editor of it? Does it ever use fillers or run short poems — you do know the answer to this question off the top of your head, don't you? Because you did ask and you did hear the answer from the editor himself, right? How long did you beg the editor to let you review one of the many books of poetry they receive? Did you find out who really puts together the book section and ask her out to coffee?

(Okay, that is boilerplate for a poet and would be a little different for a mystery novelist. But it is pretty much the way reality publishing gets started. We even have a term for it. We call it "paying our dues.")

Do you want to skip that and be published? You just don't have time for it? Other things get in the way of you're being able to do that? Yeah. I know. I'd like to be the CEO of a major corporation.