Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

What a great story, Martha!  I'm so glad somebody finally, finally got 
excited about your story!
  

    

Wonderful story.

What was Bridge Publications fraught with? 
  

    
Bridge Publications was and is the publishing arm of the Church of
Scientology.

Starting the the early 1980s, the CoS has mounted a determined campaign to
buy some respectability from the professional science fiction world.  They
have spent millions of dollars publishing works allegedly by L. Ron Hubbard
(which their followers are instructed to buy in bookstores, thus creating
"bestsellers") and running various operations which appear on the surface to
be good works but which, on examination, prove to be essentially devices for
promoting a benevolent image of the CoS.  A major priority for them has been
to promote the idea that Hubbard, a minor pulp writer, was a giant of the
field at the level of Heinlein or Asimov.  To this end they have sponsored
such organizations as "L. Ron Hubbard's Writers of the Future," an annual
contest for new SF writers culminating in a glitzy award ceremony.  They are
very good at getting SF people who should know better to play along, as
judges and so forth, thus loaning their respectability to the CoS.  Their
basic method is to offer people their heart's desire.  Thus Terry Carr, that
great editor and fine man, was offered, at last, the chance to edit a real
SF _magazine_.  It is no wonder that Terry, like many other men and women of
integrity, ultimately took Scientology's shilling -- I can't say that,
offered the things I want most, I would have been any more able to resist.

But Scientology is still a criminal organization: Amway for thugs.  I
forgive those who have been seduced by them, because the business of the CoS
is highly-skilled seduction.  I don't forgive the CoS, or Bridge
Publications, or any of their lackeys.  And I won't exchange pleasantries
with them at SF conventions, or set foot in their hospitality suites, or
consume their food and drink.
  

    

Thanks, Patrick. I suppose that's something I should have heard before, 
but I hadn't, and it's good to know.
  

    

Oh, that Patrick!  When Travolta comes out with his $80 million
adaptation of *Battlefield Earth*, you know he'll change his tune.
  

    

you'll all tell me if there's anyone I have to unbozo to slap them around,
won't you?

Martha, if I weren't too depressed to leave the house I would have rebought
your book.  It is embarrassing to be this ineffectual.
  

    
You're better off mail-ordering my book anyway, plum, than hoping to find it
in any particular store.  Hazards of the small press, even though the
edition is as large as the short-story collection could hoped to have got
from a New York press.
  

    
Good gravy, how pompously my #78 reads the next day.  Martha, sorry for
hijacking your topic as a soapbox.
  

    

Didn't sound pompous to me, pnh, just impassioned. 

How have sales of the book done so far, Martha? You've had a reprinting, 
I believe.  
  

    
I have embarked upon a campaign to ask for it at all local bookstores.  The
reaction so far is "Never heard of that publisher."    Grrrrr.  The book
industry!
  

    
I don't know how the book has sold.  Why do people always assume the author
knows these things?

What it has is a trade paperback printing (recent), after the hardcover
printing.
  

    

I ask because my publisher tells me.  They can tell you, you know.  Some of
them may be more loathe than others, but they get these daily readouts.
  

    
I don't really want Greg to dig out and tell me the exact figures.  I don't
need to be so depressed really.
  

    
Of course "local bookstores" haven't heard of Dreamhaven.  We've heard of
them in the SF book industry, because Dreamhaven is a large and well-run SF
bookstore in Minneapolis, and Greg Ketter's (the proprieter's) ventures into
small-press publishing have been notably well-done.  But you will no more
find someone who's heard of Dreamhaven at randomly-selected "local
bookstores" than you will find someone who's heard of the Well at local
7-11s.

There are a lot of reasons to go "grrrr" at the book industry, but the fact
that there are tens of thousands of small presses, many of them making
enough money to keep going, far too many for the average minimum-wage clerk
to have heard of, is not a pathology.  It's a symptom of good health.

If you want a book not published by a big publisher, you can special-order
it at any bookstore worth its salt, or buy it online.
  

    
The specialty, science-fiction bookstores are your best bet.
  

    
It's much like poetry.  Well member Jane Hirshfield is a well-known poet,
but you could easily go to a randomly-selected half-dozen bookstores and
draw nothing with her name but blank looks.
  

    

martha, you have many many good reviews on Amazon!
  

    

I asked Diesel Books, in Oakland, to order it.
  

    
Thanks, bradburn!

Mail order is good, too, either from Amazon (which is faster than it
suggests it will be, I hear), or from the publisher, whose phone number for
mail orders is 1-800-379-0657.  (They can get you just about any other genre
book, too.)
  

    

WHile I wait for my second M. SOukup book from Amazon, I will today lift up
my treadmill to see if Doc has hidden the first one there.

Martha, are you hell-bent against writing a novel?
  

    
Not hell-bent at all, no more than I am against, say, writing a symphony.  I
just haven't had a novel to write.
  

    

And you have no fear?
  

    
I have fear about just about everything.  I just have no novel-length story.
  

    

Martha, you still there?  What are you doing?
  

    
If you're not willing to be Flannery O'Connor, could you try being Flan
O'Brian for a while?