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Sunday 24 October 2010

Book Blog 1

WHY I AM YEARS AHEAD OF GOD

 

It has taken me five bloody years of miserable poverty and near-starvation to get my novel into print – which is pretty good going when you consider that publishers wouldn't touch God's first book for 1,600 years and He had to kill off his main character in the rewrite.

 

God and I aren't the only ones to have suffered from publishers' clearly-questionable authority as the expert arbiters of what will sell. Apparently it took John Grisham two years and the rejections of 12 publishers before he could go on to shift 250 million paperbacks.

 

HG Wells had the same problem, more than 10 publishers told him that his War Of The Worlds was a crock of unsellable shit. Mind you, Stephen King topped that – thirty publishers told him that the four-million-seller Carrie was rubbish.

 

When you add to the tally the many publishers who turned down Orwell's Animal Farm, the 23 of the same who rejected Frank Herbert's Dune and the dozen who said 'no way, never' to J.K. Rowling's first Harry Potter then you start to wonder not about how hard it is to get into print but what on earth qualifies anyone to get a job in publishing?

 

Do they only accept applicants who can display a marked inability to read, or at least can project poor judgement? Publishers must be the literary equivalent of those weathermen who told New Orleans 'good morning Louisiana, it's a fine day ahead and no winds'.

 

Seriously, how do publishers make a living when time and again and again it has been shown that they would not know how to finger a pulse if they had their heads up inside your carotid artery? What is the mindset that makes these presumably-educated, or at least sentient, oracles say 'you know what, I'm going to pass on this Death Of A Jackal and instead go with Baking In Colour The Armenian Way, I've got one of my hunches about pirozhki'?

 

Anyway, fuck 'em, blindness is their problem and I don't care because at long last and after more heralding than an international symposium of Peter And The Wolf, my book Rock Bottom is finally coming out for Christmas. I'll be detailing here soon how you can get it.

 

 

 

 

 

8 comments:

Unknown said...

so funny~ I cannot wait for all your books to come out!~ xx

fuckit,forgottenthepassword said...

thanks CHB, we have five on the way
x

Unknown said...

hahahaha~ fuckitforgottenthepassword-

no more C it's M as in McCartney~ :) xx

Unknown said...

Geoff needs to give me an admin pass in "permissions" so we can spruce up and add labels to his posts~

an idea?!!!~ let me in!~ lol

Unknown said...

oops I forgot to add. fabulous article!!.. like Purple Melon says

"Don't give Up!" xx

pondlife said...

Brilliant matey....

Sharon said...

Pure Genius.....and all the research on those publishers too!! I for one am VERY excited to read your book!!
XX Sharon

Devil's Kitchen said...

I heard that Alistair Maclean got turned down 137 times—and that was for the genius that is HMS Ulysses too...

DK