I published this post on the AOP Blog last December and had two offers to publish the books...no payment but a "payment when they sell" and then 7% of the cover price. NOT real publishers, obviously!
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In all seriousness, the prose books consist of just some of the work from the last 40+ years and the reason for self publishing was simple.
Book after book that was being published on UFOs, "sea monsters", strange creatures and other phenomena had become a mish-mash of a few little distorted "facts" and heaps of sensationalism. People were buying these books expecting to read the truth and find out about all the weird stuff going on around them.
They might as well have gone out and purchased a fantasy novel.
Several times, large publishers waved the contract and offered the cheque but the line from them was always the same: "Can you, maybe sex this up a bit? Claim government cover-ups or threats against you if you revealed the truth? That sort of thing?" These were established and "respectable" publishing houses and they knew I needed the money. However, despite making it very clear that lying and adding false claims was something I would not do, I kept getting the "Yes, but no one will know other than us" and my insistence on honesty led one after another to back out of the contract.
It may sell but what would that achieve -apart from getting me money!- in the long run? You cannot set out to lay facts before readers that have been fully referenced and investigated/researched and then add fantasy elements to "make it sexy".
So I self-published. A couple of copies have sold. Looking at the number of views of posts on these books on my Yahoo groups, Face Book, Twitter, CBO, Google+ and so on, we're looking at a quarter million. Three copies of a book sold.
Is fiction published as truth really preferable to fact?
It may well be. A year or so ago I started touting the books to publishers because them not selling were doing me no good. Presumably no interest since I never got responses.
So I have books. I need a publisher who can do the whole publisher things and not ask me to add lies or sex the books up. I can't see it happening but.....
Book after book that was being published on UFOs, "sea monsters", strange creatures and other phenomena had become a mish-mash of a few little distorted "facts" and heaps of sensationalism. People were buying these books expecting to read the truth and find out about all the weird stuff going on around them.
They might as well have gone out and purchased a fantasy novel.
Several times, large publishers waved the contract and offered the cheque but the line from them was always the same: "Can you, maybe sex this up a bit? Claim government cover-ups or threats against you if you revealed the truth? That sort of thing?" These were established and "respectable" publishing houses and they knew I needed the money. However, despite making it very clear that lying and adding false claims was something I would not do, I kept getting the "Yes, but no one will know other than us" and my insistence on honesty led one after another to back out of the contract.
It may sell but what would that achieve -apart from getting me money!- in the long run? You cannot set out to lay facts before readers that have been fully referenced and investigated/researched and then add fantasy elements to "make it sexy".
So I self-published. A couple of copies have sold. Looking at the number of views of posts on these books on my Yahoo groups, Face Book, Twitter, CBO, Google+ and so on, we're looking at a quarter million. Three copies of a book sold.
Is fiction published as truth really preferable to fact?
It may well be. A year or so ago I started touting the books to publishers because them not selling were doing me no good. Presumably no interest since I never got responses.
So I have books. I need a publisher who can do the whole publisher things and not ask me to add lies or sex the books up. I can't see it happening but.....
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