NY Review of Books and X Libris!

Cafe Society
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Outrage! Erudite outrage, to be sure, but outrage nonetheless!

(Note: to really appreciate the extent of my disapproval, you might need to fetch your copy of the New York Review of Books of Jan. 14th. I keep mine on the coffee table next to my Scientific American. You would be familiar with my letters to same, regarding the cladistics of Bigfoot and how they clearly refute the fantasy of global warming. Bigfoot? Snowshoes? The connection is so obvious…but I digress, and the Goreist conspiracy has blocked their publication…)

I much admire and appreciate the intellectual depth offered by the Review. One can snack upon the NY Times Review, a crumpet, a toothsome morsel, but merely a snack in comparison.

I also admire the opportunity to enjoy the Letters section, where high dudgeon is on full display, academic hissy-fits phrased in the most abstruse language. “In my critique of Prof. Farnsworths’s paper on the semiotic deconstruction of Little Women, I was careful to make no mention of his exotic sexual practices…” And so on.

A special favorite of mine is perusing the ads for academic publications, to play one of my most cherished games of intellectual solitaire, to wit, Who The Fuck Is Ever, Ever Going to Read This Arcane Shit! Jolly bit of fun, that.

But included in this months issue, once again! is several pages of advertising for XLibris, who might best be described as a vanity press, or more accurately as a life-sucking vampire preying upon the dreams of the hopelessly inept. (They have a website, but I refuse to offer a link, I will not soil myself so.)

Gaze with horror upon the “books” offered, the amateurish cover art and the pathetic ad copy. If you cannot locate your copy of this months Review, permit me to remind:

Wildflowers of Southeast Kansas - “Feast your eyes on the stunning photographs of the Wildflowers of Southeast Kansas and appreciate the breathtaking beauty and importance of plants.”

Meanderings of an Aged Mind “Wend your way through the thoughts that cross the mind of a golden-ager in Kay Fay’s Meanderings of an Aged Mind. Told in pleasing rhyme…journeys through the different alleys of life as viewed from a ripened perspective…”

Thanks all the same, Ms Kay, but I have quite enough of mine own, and a handy outlet to inflict them upon the innocent…

But the prize of the collection, the magnum opus, the tome ptomaine…

Someone Has to Pluck the Chicken, Someone Gets to Sound the Alarm by Vern Duane Porter.

(I swear on the soul of Eugene V. Debs I am not making this up!)

“Come with me through a storm of different yet compelling ideas as I comment on our history and science, Sharia Law and the Koran. Laugh at the shenanigans of farm life in the early 1900s and learn how they got along without modern conveniences…”

Graced with a photo of the author with a chicken dangling from his grasp, presumably choked to death and plucked. Unless it illustrates sounding the alarm, I won’t hazard a guess…

These pathetic efforts won’t even crawl to the remainder table at your bookstore, no one not captivated by a morbid fascination with abject failure will ever, ever read one. These sadly deluded people have paid good money, money that might be spent on drugs or pornography, perfectly good money shoved into the pockets of scoundrels who prey upon the delusions of the hopeless.

X Libris should be flayed alive and staked out upon an ant hill, they should be nibbled to death by ducks, if any tree was sacrificed, they should be planted in its place and daily urinated upon by English majors.

The New York Review of Books soils itself by accepting their advertising dollar! Shame! I say, and again, Shame! What, are they so desperate for a dollar,they cannot sell themselves as two dollar back passage whores on the Shanghai waterfront? They cannot offer themselves as subjects for medical experiments? Their blood cannot be sold?

This crap cannot even be used for toilet paper, like Newt Gingrich’s 1945. The erudite rectum would withdraw into the colon, slam shut tighter than a grasping banker’s fist!

May the Goddess pee into their chardonnay, may their brie turn to Cheez Whiz in their mouths. Curse them for greedy, unfeeling swine, preying upon the sadly hopeless dreams of the addled “authors”.

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SD Chicken Plucking Thread

Obligatory Whizbang Chicken Plucker Video

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Vanity publishers are the best publishers. One of my best friend works for Barnes & Noble; here are some of the best he’s come across:

Momma… ?

**Non-Stop Action with Dangers and Fun: The ironical-geographical Mystery **

How To Summons The Dead

Discharged from Booty Duty

Think about It! 30 Short Stories by Ben King

**The Juggler’s Wooing: A Man’s Initiation by the Feminine Divine **

Incident At Fawn Lake: A mystery with a solution! Find it for me !!!

I strongly suggest you follow the links and check out the reviews and author bios, as well.

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You reveal your herbisnobbery here.

True, narrowing down the scope to SE Kansas might damp down potential sales, but books on native flora are not automatically vanity press offerings, at least not on the scale of The Wit And Wisdom Of Elucidator, vols. I-MCMXLVIII (epub ahead of print).

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This all reminds me of this immortal review by Dorothy Parker of several of the short story offerings of 1927, so as you can see this problem goes back a while.

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Why is the man on the cover holding a chainsaw?

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Think about it!

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Next week, we’ll talk about PublishAmerica!

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Huh. If I needed to summons a dead person, I’d ask the Deputy Sheriff to serve the papers at the cemetery.

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Yeah. The five anonymous reviewers of that one have an uncannily similar writing style to the author of the synopsis (and the book’s tagline).

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She of the immortal: “This is not a book to be set aside lightly, but to be hurled with great force!”

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That was exactly what came to mind when I read the thread.

They’re a vanity press pretending to be something else. And a warning to would be writers everywhere to do their homework.

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[delurking]

Vanity publishing is not all bad.

My great-aunt vanity published a book about my great-grandfather. While it was basically a hagiography (with sermons and prayers) of a man who believed that Asians and Africans were in desperate need of becoming Presbyterian or whatever, many little details of the lives of my great-grandfather, my grandfather, and my mother were new and interesting.

For instance, in my mid-40s, I learned that my grandfather’s mother died in giving birth to him.

While the book may have only sold about 200 copies, all 200 buyers were appreciative.

Now, whether my great-aunt lost money on it, I can’t say – I don’t know. Perhaps if she’d included a more thrilling description of my great-grandfather getting out of Chunking one step ahead of the torches and pitchforks . . .

[/delurking]

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This is the revised edition to my favorite field guide: Flattened Fauna The original was right popular around these parts when eating roadkill became legal in Tennessee.

There is also a cookbook for roadkill. It is fun to leave out on the coffee table when my daughter-in-law from N.J. comes to visit. She is a picky eater anyway.

elucidator, about that chicken hanging from the man’s grasp: I don’t know why you would assume that the chicken was choked to death. I was taught to hang the chicken up by its feet, run a knife up through the roof of its mouth and pierce its brain, then let the blood run out while the chicken flaps around and dies. They just don’t teach home ec. like they used to. Maybe there’s a book there somewhere?

This thread is hysterical. Bravo, all!

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I once perused a small paperback cookbook at my local Pakistani grocer titled: Good Food From Waste Products.

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Moved from The BBQ Pit to Cafe Society.

Gfactor
Pit Moderator

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I lived across the street from the head of publishing house for a while - we discussed books a lot since I read a lot and was collecting first editions actively at the time. He told stories about the Advanced Reading Copies he got of the most ridiculous-sounding titles - I can’t remember any now, but they were always worth a yuck. Once, he sold a bunch of boxes of the books to The Strand on Broadway (“8 Miles of Books!”) - only to have the author of one of those books find that copy, with the heartfelt inscription to my neighbor intact, a few days later. Not good.

Did you guys see that Shouts & Murmurs a few weeks ago in the New Yorker where they whole online, web marketing plan for an author is laid out, with Facebook chats and Twitter feeds and interviews on the HuffPo and the like - and in the last paragraph, it turns out that the book title is something like “Etruscan Architecture from the pre-Roman Era?” or something like that. It was really funny.

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This is the dumbest thread I’ve ever seen here. What’s wrong with wanting people to read a book you wrote?

Also, advertising space is for advertisers. The Review didn’t soil itself. It’s not their space.

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Self-publishing is indeed a decent way to go if you have a nonfiction book of niche interest. The Wild Flowers of Southeast Kansas is a case in point; the author could sell a few hundred (or a thousand) copies to people in the area.

But using Xlibris to do it is by far the wrong way to go. The best way is to go to a printer and print up a bunch of copies, then have bookstores sell them on consignment. It’s much easier to sell a book when people can hold it an pick it up. Something like Lulu.com is second best – it’s print on demand, but they charge a fair price, low enough so that the author can buy enough copies to put out in bookstores. Xlibris is too expensive to give you any chance to make any money, even if you do have a niche book.

My brother has made some money by self-publishing a book on the history of Harmony Guitars, for instance. It’s a niche – guitar collectors and those who may have owned them – but it’s enough to sell copies. And he self-published – he didn’t use Xlibris or anyplace like that.

For fiction, though, self-publishing is an exercise in throwing your money away. The average sale of a self-published book is around 75 copies. That’s how something like PublishAmerica gets by – they assume that’s the average sale and overprice to book so that the author is paying as much or more for copies than he would pay if he went to a regular vanity press.

Worse, vanity presses attract many people who can’t really write all that well; there’s a *reason *why they can’t sell their books elsewhere. Since they publish anything anyone is willing to pay for, they aren’t taken seriously by anyone. Book reviewers get dozens of these a year and soon learn to ignore them. There may be a great book in there somewhere, but it’s buried in so much shit that no one wants to look for it.

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Nothing at all. But going with a vanity press guarantees that no one will read your book except for your friends and family.

You want people you’ve never met to read your book. You want someone 1000 miles away from you to see a book in a bookstore and decide to buy it. You’re not getting that from a vanity press. You’re just getting . . . . vanity.

Agreed. They can take ads from anyone they want. It’s more problematic when a magazine like Writer’s Digest does it, since they’re supposed to help writers, not cripple their careers (though they now require a disclaimer).