Indie Authors and Agents

I will start this by saying fuck money. Now, those who have clicked away, good. Those of you still with me I'll tell you what I told the love of my life today. I said, “I don't care about having extra money to play around with, I just want my bills paid.” To any indie author reading this, you may be asking, “Whoa, are you able to pay your bills being an indie author?” The answer is, “OF COURSE FUCKING NOT.” But as someone who once was(and I guess still is)a punk rock guitarist. I have this to say.

The indie music uprising is what made all the record companies shit their pants when the underground punk scene started to become mainstream. I don't look at being an indie author as being free or just unpublished by the mainstream.

I look at is as a revolution. We are not the next Bukowski's or Hemingway's or Salinger's We are the next Ramones, the next Sex Pistols, the next Runaways. We are the punk rock equivalent of Hemingway or Salinger. Of course we aren't writing to be in the big book stores. But if Big Agent Demon offered us a deal we'd be creaming in our pants. We'd leave CBGB's for the large stadiums and we'd give up the stenciled spray painted shirts for the screen printed ones.

The thing is that the agents who would find the great bands(or now indie authors)don't care about prose. They want the next fifty shades of semen or twilight or hungry games.

When those record producers or scouts were searching the clubs for bands, they wanted something fresh, new, different. With the agents and publishing companies they want all the same shit that the housewives, divorcees, and unmarried women like to read. They want meaningless pop culture diarrhea. I am sorry for that. It hurts my soul that even thought I scour the Internets and ebooks and ibooks and robot books and alien shit, I still can't find anything like Bukowski, Salinger, Fante, and I guess Hemingway.

The fact that I only know how to write one way. The fact that I learned from Bukowski, Fante, Salinger, Palahniuk, Kultgen. The fact that I learned from these fine men is the only solace I can take for the future of punk rock writers. Make some fucking noise with your literature. Make it your graffiti. Make it your knife to the throat of the authority. Make it your screams of misery alone in your bedroom at 3am. If you feel you can't write or ever be a writer, then good! Write more! If you read back and second guess the story, the prose, the content, then submit it! Let's take back our craft. Flood submission emails with your writings. Print them and snail mail them to agencies, who gives a fuck if they throw it in the trash, someone will find it! We will be read! No one can tell us what to do!

Let us ruffle some bow ties! Fuck them all and make them open a blind eye to our words! We Will Not Be Fucking Ignored!

And above it all, have fun! Write what you want! A storm is coming and the publishing houses and agents won't know what fucking hit them!

 

Read my short story book on Nook: http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/all-kinds-of-girls-shane-grey/1111299074?ean=2940033203130

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