Evermore Anniversary Date

One year ago today I self-published Evermore, my first novel, and became a published author for the first time. The book had a different cover back then. I began this novel (my very first book) in early January 2002 and finished it on March 30, 2002. Yep, it only took me three months to write my first book.

Then, for the next two years, I peddled it to 45 of the Great and Powerful Publishing Wizards of America, most of them located in Big Apple City, and to 47 of the Literary Agent Gnomes of America who serve them. But, being an unknown author and an independent author to boot, the big bad Wizards and their pet Gnomes were just chewing me up and spitting me out without even tasting me.

It took me two years to finally realize that Americans hate indie authors more than anybody else in the whole wide world because indie authors don't guest star on talk shows or sign books on C-Span and you can't find their mass market paperbacks at Walmart. So, if it's not on TV, no one in America knows anything about it and they don't want to know anything about it. In America, if it's not on TV, it's not real.

While I hawked my first science fiction thriller, I wrote two more, undeterred by American shortsightedness. By May 2003 I'd completed The Evermore Trilogy and was unsuccessfully hawking the entire trilogy to traditional publishing houses for the next year or so.

Would I do it all over again? You gotta be kiddin'. I know when to stop beating a dead horse. Besides, I'd rather be vivisected by extraterrestrials than subject myself to the galling snobbery of my fellow Americans, half of which are "upscale" snobs and half of which are "rube couch potatoes" who get all their information and entertainment from TV.

So, why didn't I try to get published outside the USA? I did. But after mailing two or three queries to Canadian and British publishers who then threw out or else stole my material along with the Self Addresses Stamped Envelope (SASE) and who used for their own purposes the International Reply Coupon (an international stamp called an IRC that I had to purchase and include in the query) I decided that's it's better to be snubbed by your own countrymen than to be robbed by foreigners.