And I like you, Artifice Magazine.

A bit more praise here for the Oprah Read This >> Oprah, Read This project.

The path to book sales shouldn’t be paved with white smiles and checkerboard slacks. When dealing with a product that has neither life-sustaining value nor infomercial superfluence, sales might best be treated as a byproduct of a well-manicured relationship. One between author and audience, as well as among the audience members themselves. Book groups exist. George Foreman Grill groups do not.

Which is why world of mouth is a valuable route to book sales. People talking and sharing opinions, with no explicit intention of selling a product = a perfect, mutually respectful form of consumerism.

Word of mouth has adopted a kindred form online, though isn’t really “of mouth” in this mutated guise. Fan lists such as Amazon’s Listmania! help connect like-minded readers, which would logically seem to drive sales (though no hard sales data exists that I could find; although online customer reviews seem to have a “casual” effect on book sales). Forums like The Velvet and The Cult, built around specific authors and genres, promote grassroots and guerrilla “word of screen” sales as a residual effect of the social media platform.

An evolved generation of authors and publishers has learned to leverage these relationships not just as part of a sales campaign but as a component of their overall philosophy. Another Sky Press focuses on building a fanbase before building sales* . Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman’s passionate post-sale reaction to their pre-sale mishap would impress even the most convinced fan-centric seller. Then there is Tim Hall and his handmade slipcase series.

I can almost picture Tim Hall, sitting on his living room floor, watching TV, using the downtime to assemble these slipcases. Essentially, inviting the future reader into his living room, taking the reader/author relationship to near awkward-morning-after levels (in the best of ways). These aren’t mass products. These are one-of-a-kind tokens of genuine appreciation.

Sure, their materials are likely would-be scraps with no intrinsic value, and it’s obvious the gesture is ultimately meant to sell books, but the true power lies in the implied relationship they create. I’ll be reading Hall’s books with a more subdued pessimism than I might otherwise with a completely unknown (to me) author. And when Hall releases his next book–and should I not like these initial offerings–I’ll be more willing to give him another chance.

The take away here is that reader/author relationships are just that, relationships. Leave obsessive sales up to those who produce utilitarian staples and fluff gadgets. When it comes to selling experiences, as books are, a relationship should be part of the package.

*ASP claims not to track sales in a way that validates this theory, but their conviction is contagious

Another fine yarn from ye olde Caleb J Ross takes valuable web space away from more needy charities. This one, an excerpt from my unpublished novel, Stranger Will, is called Formaldehyde and appears at the never disappointing Red Fez.

Formaldehyde is a bastardized version of the opening chapter of Stranger Will, very much pulled apart and reassembled into something with its own horrible intentions. This is all to say that if you don’t like this story, then you may still love Stranger Will. However, if you do love this story then I take back what I said above; this story is exactly like the rest of the novel.

The new issue of UK’s Gold Dust Magazine is available for sale. Also as a free .PDF download. Acquire by any means necessary.

Featuring fiction by Alan Kelly, Jim Meirose, Robert Edward Sullivan, Robert Dando, the always impressive Christopher J. Dwyer, the always disappointing Caleb J Ross, THE Richard Thomas, V Ulea, Sam Szanto, and the get-your-autographs-now-because-he-will-be-dead-(and-famous)-someday Nik Korpon. Also, crammed inside is an interview with China Miéville.

I’m so damn happy to share page space with names like these.

And now for the self-petting portion of the post. Author’s notes:

I’ve long been interested in the artist’s (in this case, writer’s) lack of control once a piece has its frame and audience (in this case, its binding and reader). The audience truly has more control over a work of art, writing, whatever, than the creator. A jury of our peers, sort of thing. Authorial intent is important for the sanity of the artist, but intent often doesn’t matter to the audience, sadly.

What is more important, the concept or the finished product? Don’t know. “Vertigo Unbalanced” explores this idea with an artist protagonist who is obsessed with correcting his painting (to represent his viewpoint as changed since the painting’s creation) even after it hangs on a gallery wall. The original draft had an explosion. I’d tell you why I took it out, but who cares?

The second annual issue of The Literary House Review has just been released. Why should you care? My story, “The Camp,” appears within. That’s why. Never mind that the publication contains 232 pages of genre and non-genre, commercial and literary fiction, along with poems enough to erect a mansion – albeit one inconveniently susceptible to moisture (guess what paper, you make a better art medium than a wall!). Never mind that The Review is available to buy here or here and is archived at New York Public Library, Rockefeller Library at Brown University, RI, and at the University of Wisconsin Madison Library (those are monocle-level smart houses, people). Buy it for “The Camp.”

Now for the author notes:

As so many stories begin, “The Camp” was a self-inflicted dare. The concept of “The Camp” is seeded in a desire to explore the horrid through a lens subjectively aimed toward beauty. I told myself that I should write about the hidden beauty in something ugly. How’s The Holocaust for ugly? But truthfully, The Holocaust could have been any tragedy as far as “The Camp” goes (though I would have had to change the title). I wasn’t looking to explore Nazi sympathy; I was simply after finding the pleasant within the unpleasant.

Read “The Camp” here for free!

I’ve been clicking over to 3:AM Magazine for quite a while now. I can’t remember where I first heard about it (probably from Dogmatika, where I hear about most every great thing in the underground lit scene), so I can’t place praise with full accuracy. However, I can pass on the good word. And what better way to do so than via the news of my own story, “Snake Girl at Scab,” getting some page space.

Some author notes on the story:

During my first visit to Portland, Oregon (USA), some locals took us to an event called First Thursdays, a neighborhood art gallery orgy (artgy, if you will) with booths, food, music, and lives to be changed. Most cities have these types of events, but due to a strange encounter involving an emotionless girl carrying a snake, this artgy impacted more than normal.

The snake girl depicted in this story is accurately described, with absolutely no fiction license taken. When she approached us at First Thursdays, pink lipstick, barefooted, snake in hand, and arm outstretched with requests for money, I was stunned. Granted this is isn’t the strangest thing to have ever happed to me, not by a long shot, but the combination of unfamiliar territory with such a displaced character stayed with me. I want to do more with the snake girl. I’m sure she will turn up in future projects.

Also, “Snake Girl at Scab” is, in a way, my own sort of scab, patching over a weakness that had been slowly compromising my stories for a while. At the time I wrote this story I had been writing a lot of grotesque stories, forcing visceral imagery and dark situations where perhaps they didn’t belong. Luckily, I’ve aborted these stories so they will never see print. “Snake Girl at Scab” was my way of reconnecting with tried-and-true storytelling.

Click the link above. Read the story. Then stick around for a bit and check out the rest of the site. I’m serious when I say that 3:AM is an asylum for some of the best underground writers around.

UPDATE: The contest has ended.

My short story, “A Trench is No Place for God,” is now live at Nefarious Muse. And not just live, but live as part of the 2008 Nefarious Muse Short Fiction Competition. Please, go to their great fiction site, read the entries, and vote for the best. Of course, I am hoping your vote goes to my story. In case you vote otherwise, realize that I know where you live; thank you IP Address and Google maps.

Click on the icon to the left to go straight to the comp homepage. Voting is open until March 14th, so don’t miss out on this once in a lifetime opportunity to help me win a prize.

No Record Press has just posted my story, “Car Dodging.” More importantly, the editor for No Record Press, Miles Newbold Clark, has written a fantastic novel called None of This Will Do. Now What? which I called, in my Depraved Press review, “one of the best novels of 2007.” I know what you are thinking – favors, right? – but know that I didn’t even know about None of This Will Do. Now What? until Mr. Clark notified me that my story would appear at No Record.

So, read None of This Will Do. Now What?, first. Then, if you have time and energy enough after taking in that true work of art, head over to No Record Press to read my story, “Car Dodging.”

Here’s the author notes on the story:

Easily one of the most polarizing intros I’ve ever written. I love this intro, and though it might be admittedly shock-driven, it still serves the greater story. A lot of people find this opening sexist. Those people probably stopped reading after the opening, and therefore, have no business commenting.

This story is based on an actual game my friends a I played during our Junior High-ish years. There wasn’t a point system, and there was more furious drivers, but nonetheless the “real” game carried all the absurdity of the “story” game.

Also, an early incarnation of this story won the Kay Alden Memorial Scholarship from Emporia State University. By that time I had stopped going car dodging, which is good because, though the scholarship money was quite helpful during my minimum wage college years it definitely wouldn’t have paid for the repair of a cracked skull.

No Record Press publishes the annual Red Anthology, which as been called by the Utne reader “wholly uninhibited–a refreshing change of pace”

The interview is a rare opportunity to experience the inner workings of a person. Unless that person likes to call himself a writer, then the interview is just old news to those who’ve read his stories. Fiction can be the ultimate autobiography, though a structured and controlled autobiography it is. Fiction is makeup.So what’s a writer to do when he wants to wash away the mascara? He answers some questions in an attempt to categorize his life, similar to the desires of the protagonist in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea:

I wanted the moments of my life to follow and order themselves like those of a life remembered.

And like this protagonist the writer understands that “You might as well try and catch time by the tail.”
Jason Kane and Justin Holt, both writers themselves, were kind enough to pretend I had interesting things to say, to pretend I had a some thoughts worth organizing. I won’t try claim that this interview forced impromptu responses (I had plenty of time to think), but it is a bit further from fiction than I am used to.

Click the Oxy icon to read interview

Any form of expression is arguably one committed “under the influence.” What we eat, what we say, how we walk—hell, human beings simply walking is really just a biological influence. But historically, for writers, one of the most iconic influences of all time is Absinthe—The Green Muse; a devastating liquor. Everyone from Ernest Hemmingway (his short story “Hills Like White Elephants” comes to mind) to Joey Goebel (with his novel Torture the Artist) has capitalized on the image of Absinthe. What better way to weave my own way into this cultural icon than by way of a lit mag called The Green Muse, with “Refill,” a story about a man governed by substance? I suppose a better way would have been for me to actually use the word “Absinthe” somewhere in the story. But I didn’t.

One of my writing heroes, Denis Johnson, has a few pertinent words on the topic of writing under the influence (of drugs and alcohol):

“I think it’s silly for anyone to think you could write under the influence, but if they’d like to think that, I’d like to keep the legend alive. Maybe I was under the influence when I wrote Jesus’ Son and I just didn’t know it.”

The Green Muse is a monthly journal publishing work both online and in print. They are a young journal so be sure to support them (and me) by purchasing a copy of the print journal here.