Patterns

 There’s a pattern I’m noticing.  For fiction publishers.  Even if you aim low you’ll find it a struggle.  Part of the reason is the pattern.

Lots of websites list publishers.  The smaller, hungrier presses either eventually close or get to a place where they require an agent to get in.  That’s the kiss of death.

Although my stories have won prizes, and been nominated for prizes, I can’t get an agent interested.  I’ve queried well over a hundred, so the agent route is one of diminishing returns.  This too is a pattern.

Back to the smaller presses.  I check many lists.  What I write, you see, is highly idiosyncratic.  It’s literary but it’s weird.  Publishers don’t know what to do with it.  If a smaller press published stuff like this, I’d find it.

The pattern includes writers who never get discovered.  Ironically, a number of editors of fiction literary magazines (mostly online) tell me they enjoy my work.  They don’t run presses that publish story collections, however.  Ah, that’s a hard sell.

So I go back to the websites that list publishers.  I click on links.  I end up on some porno site that has purchased the domain name.  Or I find their website, closed to submissions.  Why, I wonder, is it so difficult to make your voice heard?

I sincerely hope that if you’ve done something for half-a-century you might be fairly good at it.  I have had five nonfiction books published.  (Can’t get an agent’s interest there either.)  To break the pattern you must believe.

Believe in yourself.  The world of fiction publishing tends to be inbred, with many of the same names reappearing in a repeating pattern.  Independent voices, no matter how weird, still manage to break through.  Don’t give up!

That’s a message as much for myself as it is for you.  For now I’ve got to go back to the lists and start checking yet again.  It’s a pattern.