indy author

We all know there’s a cottage industry in making fun of Sarah Palin. Whatever your political bent, her appearance(s) on Saturday Night Live cemented that fact. Now that she’s written (cough) a book that’s due out shortly, people are trying to get more yuks out of the woman.

We also know that the whole self-publishing movement is saddled with a lot of baggage. If it isn’t the vanity-publishing industry ripping off customers, it’s the pervasive idea that self-publishing of any stripe is an admission of failure. Failure to succeed in publishing, failure to write good (sic!), failure to have been born into the right social circles, etc. I’ve even read snarky comments about use of the term independent author, although I can’t figure out how it’s anything but accurate.

Tonight, however, all that changed. Because of this:

Start-up publisher OR Books has announced plans to publish….

Start-up publisher…?

OMG!!! [Cue gender-neutral thrill-squeal.]

If perception is reality, then marketing speak is the plutonium that fuels cultural mushroom clouds. One day you’re a lowly self-publisher fighting industry scorn, the next you’re a start-up publisher driving technology and innovation to capture market share!

(See also micro-publishing for another marketing-friendly co-opting term.)

— Mark Barrett

When you’re digging into a subject on the internet, there comes a point at which the site links you’re following become known paths, and those paths start doubling back on each other with increasing frequency. It’s at this stage that you confront two possibilities:

You’ve discovered all there is to discover on the subject.
You’ve discovered a self-contained network on the subject, and there are other undiscovered networks dedicated to the same subject.

It seems counterintuitive that this could happen in an information age defined by search-engine and browser arms races, but it happens to me all the time. I search on a given subject, I follow the links, I seem to run out of fresh links, then I sit there, wondering: is there another system of links out there just like this? Am I missing it? Am I not searching for the correct keyword, variable or wildcard?

Maddeningly, there is no way to verify either possibility without actually searching for something that may not be there, and even then the best you is call off the dogs when the sun goes down and tell everybody back at the camp that you did your best. I mean, in the spy business this is why CIA operatives go funny in the head looking for moles. You can’t prove a negative.

I say this as preamble to frame my experience of stumbling onto April L. Hamilton and her various online incarnations. It’s also a lesson in doing due diligence as a researcher, which means digging into web sites, following links, reading comments, following links in comments, and generally being exhaustive in the way that you would be if you thought a big pile of money was waiting for you to find it. [ Read more ]

Start Me Up!

Site Seeing: April L. Hamilton