So glad a friend sent me this this. I just self-published “Ink from the Pen: A Prison Memoir” through my own small imprint, Nuance Titles, after a fruitless literary agent/Big Publisher hunt, and I think I was probably right in that their rejection had nothing to do with the quality of the writing (certainly not given the reaction of the readers on Amazon) but on the fact that they just didn’t feel a book about how an educated, gay, HIV+ man survives prison though wit and creativity had the chance to sell a hundred thousand copies. I daresay had they said yes, my experience, at best, would have tracked yours.
Having creative control of every aspect of the roll-out is very gratifying though, and I love my marketing campaign. Although being one’s own assistant is a full-time job that pays terribly, at least I like my boss, even though he spends far too much time on the internet and watching TV. I know all of us struggle with this, at the same time I don’t think you can be a producer of content you want others to consume and not be a consumer of other artists’ content. I’m mean you can, but you miss out on a lot of zeitgeist, for one, and reciprocity in the vein strikes me as a spiritual principle.
Anyway, I’m definitely intrigued enough to order your books, especially because I long ago plotted a futuristic dystopian novel that sound a tad like yours, and I’ll get a kick out of seeing how much we were both pulling from the same zeitgeist. (It fell low on my project list, but who knows, you might inspire me to revive it. Another reason I read others — at the gym, on the bike, mostly. For the inspiration.)
