Readable Merchandise!
From FREE to $5, short fiction to feature-length in a number of e-book formats!
Unavoidable Introductory Material, with Footnotes
Most of you have figured out that I write stuff. Most of you signed up here because you like to read stuff, so I figure it shouldn’t be hard for us to work out a kind of a deal.
Most of you like to read stuff for free, and that’s kind of awesome. I, too, like to read stuff for free. Pound for pound,1 most of the words I’ve ever read have been free, thanks to libraries and the Internet. I’ve paid for a fair bunch, though, because, as a writer myself, I know that writers need to earn money for eating and sleeping out of the weather and buying books to support other writers and—because of the subject matter of some of the stuff they read to fuel their own writing—a bit of money for medicine and therapy to undo some of the damage.2
Also, I like to write words for free. Part of the reason is moral. The words come to me for free after all, and the time I spend writing comes to me the same way—one second after another no matter how hard I try to pen them up—so it doesn’t feel right to charge for them. Also also, the things that words do for us are, in the aggregate, existential necessities [see footnote 2] like A) critical information we need to have about the world in order to be able to survive in it and B) recreational therapy to help us cope with whatever we just learned, i.e., medicine. Another large part of the reason is to pay back—or maybe pay forward—the debt I owe for all of the free words I’ve read.
Seeing as you like to read words for free, we come to our current deal, “human centipede”-like, straight from my keyboard-orifice to your eyeholes.
My outline notes say here to “pause for gagging,” but I’m not sure how to do that in text. I figure you’ll work that out on your end.
However [see footnote 2], I have to find a way to pay for food and shelter and medicine and books from other authors, so I still need money from somewhere.
I am loath3 to ask for any of your money through Substack because they unflinchingly give a platform to monetize a number of bigots and hate-mongers who, in turn, use this platform to organize their readers. I considered trying to locate another platform, which is still an ongoing search,4 but in the meanwhile I’m happy to continue to remain a parasite here and force this one to expend their dwindling resources on my behalf until they fail and/or get bought.
As a more “cruelty-free” option, I invite you to visit my Ko-Fi shop.
First the free stuff:
BLACK BAND is the imprint I’m launching to promote and distribute free, professional quality e-book versions of a number of Public Domain titles that I feel deserve better exposure. These works are already available in a thousand other places, of course, offered for free in barely formatted raw text or HTML or zero-effort/auto-converted electronic forms (or massive PDF compilations of JPEGS of scanned pages) via sites like Project Gutenberg, or piecemeal for the shorter works as seed-crystals for pastiche/homage anthologies, or bot-driven slap-on-a-cover-and-upload-it-to-Amazon 99-cent specials—after first ripping out any and all references to the hardworking teams of editors and cleaner-uppers at Project Gutenberg.
Few of these products are very appetizing as they exist now. Our sources of ancestral inspiration deserve better. And they’re fun to re-read as I compile them into hand-polished suitable-for-any-reader ePub or suitable-for-reader-or-print-on-demand PDF formats, complete with legal artwork and legal fonts, and licensed for free distribution, with the only restrictions being you can’t modify them or charge for them or include them in a bundle of other things you charge for.
There are a couple of titles available so far: “The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood—a lovely novella of outdoor adventure for a pair of friends in an ill-advised canoe trip down the Danube in the off-season with a hint of cosmic horror—and the unabridged The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers, a story collection that firmly established the idea that some literature will permanently and catastrophically damage your brain in the horror genre—an idea pounced on by Lovecraft and his turn-of-the-previous-century playmates.
They each get a custom-made Foreword by yours truly to provide a bit of context.
There are more in the works, of course. Right now I have Lovecraft’s own “The Festival” short story on the slab, and I’m eyeing the elderly Muir translation of Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” and Mark Twain’s “Letters from the Earth” for suitability. I’ll add one or two monthly as time permits. I’ll also happily hear your suggestions for titles that should be added! (Public domain works or free-distribution-permission-explicitly-granted-by-the-author only!)
BLACK BAND titles are available for the low price of ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Unless you care to add a gratuity. I’m in no position to stop you if you feel so inclined.
Now, the less free stuff:
I’m also offering seven self-published works of my own.
You can click on any of the above for a few more details and a closer look, including screenshots, but if you do, REMEMBER TO TYPE IN THE DISCOUNT CODE “THOFK” TO GET 50% OFF THE PURCHASE PRICE THROUGH JULY 21st so I can thank you for reading my stuff here and supporting my wretchedly low-paying calling.
Also if you could recommend my stuff to your friends and share reviews and such in the usual venues, that would be awesome.
→ONCE I GET ENOUGH MONEY←
I would love to turn this all into a legit indie/nonprofit publishing house to benefit the incurably weird, complete with ISBN codes5 and a legit online storefront and relationships with printers and translators and distributors and stuff. If anyone wants to help out with any of that part, or grant writing to get funding to help me get it all set up, let me know. I’m good for A LOT of the labor for the nuts and bolts of making books happen, but I still need help.
[*]
It’s a given that most words have a bit of weight, right?
All of this is because the social contract under which we are allowed to live has commodified every single existential necessity including de-polluted water and air, but absolutely including food and shelter and medicine and books. People seem to have accepted this as the “natural order of things” for some reason, despite the obvious fact that this line of thinking is less than a few hundred years old in most places, and certainly not a set of natural circumstances under which we evolved.
I’m saying it’s a crock and we shouldn’t put up with it.
And please treat the term “social contract” above as a euphemism, because nobody signed up to live under these rules, and nobody supports them enthusiastically except the ones who profit (literally, with money and everything) from the arrangement.
“Hi, Loath. I’m Dad.”
The most suitable ones cost money on a monthly basis. Not a lot, but enough to be discouraging.
$295 for a ten-pack from the Bowker ISBN monopoly in the USA, but it takes three or four codes for every title because each format needs its own number—ePub, PDF, mass-market, trade paperback, hardback, audiobook, etc. It’s a racket, but you can’t make it into a library or a bookstore without one.