Wanted: Reviewers and Book Bloggers

Implosions of America: Nine Stories will be released Friday morning on Amazon as an ebook. You can already get it as a paperback at CreateSpace. The paperback will be available through Amazon before the weekend is over. I’m still thinking about whether I want to go through a shark jumping exercise and post to other sites like Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, etc. For now Amazon and CreateSpace are your best bets.

For what it’s worth, independent publishing is hard enough, what I’m doing with Implosions is close to insane. The Amazon-Indie system is astoundingly good for genre and pulp fiction — whether you’re talking romance, mystery, thriller, YA, or sci-fi. Historical fiction and non-fiction are also pretty well served. Throughout the Internet over the past several years large networks have been established for genre fiction. Book bloggers specializing in specific types of story are common. So are niche FaceBook sites, genre communities, listserves, and social reading networks.

This nine story collection is not genre fiction. It’s just straightforward contemporary storytelling with attention to language, emotion, and the ironies of everyday life. There are stories about love and marriage, stories of political and cultural import, and stories that I think of as commentaries about the puzzle of memory where love is a kind of brain fog.

There is no real Amazon-Indie system set up for general contemporary fiction. That means finding reviewers for this book (and all my books, really) is not easy. And what’s very clear is that if you don’t get reviews on Amazon, sales are dang hard.

It’s kind of funny — I’ve worked hard to publish a book of quality artistic fiction but it’s going to be very difficult to get people to pay attention to it, specifically because it’s quality artistic fiction.

So, I need reviewers. And readers interested in writing reviews on Amazon. I’m more than willing to send anyone interested in doing a review a free electronic copy of Implosions. Just leave me a note here with your email address or send me something private at david.c.biddle@gmail.com.

If you don’t have an electronic reader, I can send you a nice PDF. For those who hate reading on-screen, I’m also willing to send a free signed paperback copy, trusting that you’re a good soul and truly interested in doing your part with a review.

I know what I’ve written isn’t for everyone, so I’m not anticipating Five-Star, Double-Thumbs up exclamatory support (although it sure would make me feel good). I don’t write for praise. I write to say what’s hard to say. I write to express what I think is important about life. I write to rattle the doors of perception. And I write to help readers who like to question why we’re here and why things are so hard.

So give me a shout and I’ll get whatever you want out to you at no charge. These are good stories. Better than a lot of the mooshy pap you find in literary journals and The New Yorker. No, there’s no explicit sex or violence or mystery, but there is weird humor, distinct narrative voices, and stories that play with the magic of being alive and the quiet beauty of what really matters…also a few bad words and strange conjurations of puerile intent.

I look forward to hearing from you soon. I wrote these stories for everybody. I just want everybody to read them.