Enough

I took a stand on writing/art and publishing politics early. It was inevitable, given my radical stand on everything. My position has only strengthened itself since I started up my truly independent publishing company.

Establishment publishers have lots and lots of reasons to be defensive: their active, repugnant censorship, their ongoing centrism, their ruination of both potentially good stories and authors. They serve the establishment, the tyranny of the world with every act of editing they do. And not the least: Their hateful attacks on truly independent authors, those that don’t want to submit to their authority and be a part of their system of propaganda and oppression.

Avoid them, at all cost.

I was accepted by one major publishing company once, but not really. They wanted to change seventy percent of the book, which pretty much says they wanted to change everything. They don’t want to publish your work, but their own. They do that all the time. I laughed very loud and walked out, swearing I would never return. I saw no point in doing that.

Ten years later I self-published my first novel. Twenty-five years after that, I have published twenty-nine, a number I would probably never have reached if I had chosen trad pub. And I’ve spent lots of time on each novel. It isn’t like I have chosen quantity and forsaken quality or anything. I have basically completed one book every second year, give or take a bit. My novels have an average of 175 000 words. Your Own Fate is “only” 87 000 words, while Phoenix Green Earth is 405 000.

It took thirty-seven years from I started writing The Defenseless until I published it. I pondered the story of the entire Janus Clan series a lot during that time. And now all thirteen books in the series have been published. A giant watershed. I can safely say that no establishment publisher would have touched that, and certainly not without massive rewriting and censorship.

There are, unbelievably so, still written articles about how authors should handle rejection by these entities of conformity, and authors buying the hype.

Don’t! Self publish instead. There is just no reason to not do it anymore. Reject the voice of authority and oppression so prevalent in establishment publishing.

Not that I care about such trifles at all, but self-publishers should have been and should be hailed as pioneers.

But of course we won’t be, since the existing oppressive system sees us as a threat to their earnings and hegemony.