There's an old saying that goes, If you don't have anything nice to say, sit right here next to me. I hope you don't mind if I sit right there, next to you. I'm just so fed up with my distribution issues!!!
It's hard enough to try to convince people that a novel published by a small press is not the same as a self-published novel (the first is where the publisher pays you to print your book; the second is the exact opposite), but when your small press publisher's distribution is whacked, it makes you want to climb to the top of a water tower armed with an AK-47.
I was in a Barnes & Noble, trying to convince them to 1) carry Bitter Things, and 2) let me have a signing in their store. Try to sell some books, right? Well, the guy behind the counter did his due diligence and saw that my two distributors no longer carried my novel. For B&N to get a copy of the novel, they would have to go to their used-book resellers. In other words, as far as B&N was concerned, Bitter Things was out of print! It just came out a few months ago, and it's out of print???
Unless I sold every copy of my book so far (and I have this vague notion that I haven't yet), then there's something seriously and dramatically wrong. This is the same problem I had when the book first came out, when I was marketing it and people wanted to buy a copy, but no one would sell it to them.
I feel like a kid failing social studies - repeating history.
And all this is going on when I'm trying desperately to get radio interviews, advertising, talking this thing up - taking this website more seriously. It's just ... always something.
Look. Whatever.
Ok. I decided that I need to stay positive. And to do that, I'm going to start posting up some fan mail on this blog. So here's the first one, from Arthur F. Temple - author of Dark Currents:
- "bitter things-a book so provocative and erotic I have to put it down every other page and think about baseball LOL. Great character development. In addition your writing is very fluid (no pun intended) and descriptive without being overly descriptive. You create the characters in a conversational tone just enough to get a strong feel for them both on a mental, emotional level and what they look like physically. So reading the book becomes like watching a movie. This is very hard to do. I have read novels where there is so much informational overload in regards’ to one or all of the characters that I refused to read the rest of the book."
Thanks, Arthur! It's encouragement like this that helps me get through my own dark currents, which are distribution-induced in this case.