Just to keep this on the radar — Amazon’s shenanigans continue. At the end of February, they locked out over 500 small presses from the Kindle store.

You all should be keeping up to speed on what’s happening and, thankfully, IPG’s on the ball. Here’s a collection of all the articles to date regarding the Kindle debacle.

For those of you with a Kindle, you can fight on. Here’s how to read any epub document. You can download the epub version of all of our titles directly from our distributor, just visit this link for more details.

Also well worth reading is this post from IPG’s blog. This really is about the state and the future of our literary culture, folks.

Two years ago,I signed on as a consultant for Alan Squire Publishing, out of Bethesda, MD. They had two titles — Bermuda Shorts and That Paris Year — already published, and we brought them into the SFWP family and gave them worldwide distribution. In what felt like (as far as publishing is concerned) the blink of an eye, Alan Squire Publishing catapulted to success. Of their first two titles, since September 2010, they’ve sold 12,000 copies. Granted, we’re now including electronic copies in those sales figures…and, these days, such sales figure may be a touch more grim for small presses. But, still, a resounding victory for two “kitchen table” presses.

This month, we are celebrating Alan Squire’s latest release — and their first frontlist title — A Secret Woman by the lovely Rose Solari.

You can read all about it, order a copy, and find out more about Alan Squire Publishing right here. For those of you with an ereader, you can find the ebook links right here. And, if you have a Kindle, don’t worry. Amazon’s shenanigans won’t get in the way… Your device can still use the epub version, which you can order direct from our distributor.

In light of the recent adventure with Amazon, I’ve decided to fill up some Friday blog space with a shout out to the indie bookstores. Our titles are still on Amazon for a nice discount, of course, but I’m feeling like it’s time we rally around the indies and see if we can make a difference. You may be paying more if you order from your local bookstore, but you’ll be investing in our literary future.

If such high-minded notions don’t fly with you, though, here’s an idea: Order our books from an indie store and send me a copy of the receipt. You can scan it, take a picture, mail it, whatever. Include your address and I’ll mail you a free copy of Ray Robertson’s Moody Food.  That’s two books for the price of one. Sexy.

Today’s book is Fatal Light, by Richard Currey. The 20th anniversary edition was released in 2009 after about 10 years of planning. Tim O’Brien called it “one of the very best works of fiction to emerge from the Vietnam War.” So get it in you. You can go to Indiebound and enter your zip code to find your local store…or you can support two of my favorite local stores. From my hometown of DC, there’s the always excellent Politics and Prose. And, from New Mexico, I have a guilty pleasure… It’s a little store in the tiny town of Las Vegas, NM called Tome on the Range. I was going to pick a Santa Fe store, but I’ve fallen in love with Las Vegas after my cousin moved there to go to school. On a recent visit, I ended up poking my head into Tome on the Range twice a day and, you know, spent far too much money. It’s rare to find the sort of community bookstore that feels like a home away from home.

Both those stores can ship the book anywhere. In fact, most indie stores can. And there’s probably someone like me there stuffing those books in boxes.

Enjoy!

I had a plan.

And, oh, it was a great plan.

Back in October, author Richard Currey said, hey, have you heard of Kindle Singles? I had a brief, terrible moment where I thought Amazon had started a dating service, but then Richard went on to describe what had become his latest literary addiction: The seemingly perfect venue for the short form. The growing Kindle Singles market.

One of my causes has been to champion the short form – short stories, novellas, etc. A little side path of the craft of writing that has been quietly dying over the last few decades, mainly because it’s hard to sell. A collection of short stories is almost always stillborn no matter how many marketing dollars you pour into it. There are certainly exceptions, but, for the most part, it’s a hopeless task.

With Kindle Singles, the cost to produce a collection of short stories dropped to almost nothing. We could go hog piggy wild, to borrow a phrase from my grandmother.

I went to my distributor and, together, we received tacit approval from Amazon to enter the Singles market. At the time, the Singles were primarily coming through Amazon’s KDP program. Self-publishers and a few big money folks.

Of course, as I detailed yesterday, Amazon was laughing up their sleeves at us the whole time. The wheels were, at the end of 2011, fully in motion to rip the rug out from under us.

So…the Singles project died. I was heartbroken, as I saw it to be the next wave in SFWP’s publishing efforts. But…that’s business I guess. Here’s what I had planned:

From Richard Currey, I had two projects lined up. Spreading across five or six standalone Singles, we were going to release Currey’s first new work in over 12 years. – Downriver.

In 1999, Currey travelled the Rio Grande from source to the Gulf, blending stories of the history of that strange borderland with the gripping modern tales that he encountered. Before 2001, America’s border with Mexico was a strange frontier. The book is compelling and powerful, but, when it hit the publishers in 2000, they shelved it. Not quite a fit for their current catalog. They’d review it again for the next round. But then came September 11th. In just one day, Downriver became oddly dated. Perhaps even naïve. An America instantly forgotten as the Age of Terror descended.

The Singles version would take the best vignettes from Downriver, changing it from a study of the border to an author’s journey along one of the most iconic American rivers.

In addition to Downriver, my pet Currey project has long been to reprint Wars of Heaven, his critically acclaimed short story collection from 1990. Currey re-acquired the rights some time ago, but reprinting a collection of short stories seemed like financial suicide. Now, finally, we had the chance and had planned six standalone Kindle Singles.

From Alan Cheuse, I received a ton of shorts and novellas, and I planned to follow the journey that I had started with our 2007 publication, The Fires. My hope then was to create an “SFWP Novella Series,” where we would put together slim volumes from multiple authors in an attempt to breathe life into the short form. Finances, as always, shut down the project.

The two novellas in The Fires came from a vast pool of generally untapped work from Cheuse. Some have appeared in journals and magazines, some haven’t seen the light of day, and all of them are terrific. I planned to stake out a little corner of the Singles store for Alan, doling out novellas and collections of shorts on a monthly basis. Stunning glimpses into the human condition as only Cheuse can deliver, and all for a buck or so.

From Pagan Kennedy – the woman I blame for inspiring me to go down this foolish publishing road – I secured rights to her early, out of print work. Those books from way back when, from the Earth-That-Was.

Pagan’s zine culture years inspired me, in 1990, to start my first publishing company, an alternative school “literary journal,” and launch headlong on the path that has brought me to this point.

I had planned to serialize Living, Zine, Platforms, and her groundbreaking biopic Black Livingston.

Once all of those wheels were moving, and the tireless SFWP publishing gnomes were all hammering away on their anvils, I planned to turn to the vast ocean of writers who have come across my desk in the last ten years of Literary Awards Programs. I’ve seen some truly stunning authors over the years… And I don’t mean just the winners, or the finalists. I’ve seen work from hundreds of seriously amazing authors come through our doors.

Typically, the sort of people who enter writing contests make your soul wilt. But, for some reason, SFWP’s contest, from day one, has always attracted a higher caliber of author. Some of these folks make my socks roll up and down, and the judging period is always filled with agony, heartbreak, and arguments. There’s a reason it takes two or three months to judge each program. It’s not easy. There’s work that comes through, each and every year, that I’d be willing to die for.

It breaks my heart, each year, that I can do nothing for these fine writers. But, with the Kindle Singles plan, suddenly I saw a light at the end of the tunnel. We could publish the winning entries, the finalists, and collections of our favorite work. We could create a new generation of the SFWP journal. Through the Singles, we could essentially put together a de facto lit zine. One that would be seen by millions.

The average production cost per Single would have been roughly $50. My plan was to cover my costs and then pass on 100% of my net to the authors. Why not? There’s no need to worry about inventory, overstock, returns… It was clear, from the pricing structure, that Singles wouldn’t ever be about making money. So why not let them exist simply as a voice for our ever-growing family of authors?

But, now, Kindle Singles are out of SFWP’s reach. I feel betrayed by Amazon. They are not allies to writing, or authors. But, for some stupid reason, I had thought they were. Or, at least, passive dictators.

Last week, my friend emailed me a pitch to start an ezine for the iPad market in the vein of Esquire. A hare-brained idea, at best, but one that fills the gap in my mind left by Amazon’s corporate shenanigans.

I also approached my distributor to get permission for ebook-only publication. Perhaps I’ll throw all the former Singles together into a larger work.

We’ll see what happens. One thing I promise you is that SFWP’s publishing wing will return. When it does, I plan to rock a few boats. This is still the Wild West, my friends. I had thought that the frontier days of publishing had come to an end. I’d started to settle down. But then Dark Dirk and his riders rode into town, stole our womenfolk, and burned our church. Time to break out the dusty rifles and strap on the six shooters. I’d suggest you get up there on the roof of the general store. I’m the crazy one who’s gonna stand in the center of the road with my tarnished sheriff’s star.

By now, if you’re following the industry in any way, you’ve heard that Amazon pulled the plug on over 5000 Kindle ebooks distributed by IPG (who handles all of SFWP’s titles). You can read about it here, and here, and here, and probably a hundred other places. This came about because Amazon wanted a larger slice of the pie. Though I see it as an attempt to take the whole pie, and I worry that IPG is only the first of many victims.

Last summer, I wrote a lengthy, multi-part article for the Writer’s Center blog about the future of publishing and indie bookstores. My conclusion favored the electronic revolution (but also warned about the problems to come). Finally, after two years of watching the income from Kindle sales drift in, I decided to embrace this ebook thing. Though I have never bought an ereader, and, frankly, despise the whole thing in near Luddite fashion, I was still glad to cash the checks.

There had been rumors since October that Amazon was planning a Big Push that would change the face of ebooks forever. Some folks theorized it was a next generation uber-Kindle (The Fire was something of a red herring, in that sense), some figured it was going to be the rather exciting growth of the Kindle Singles market (which I felt was a chance to breathe new life into the dying art form of the short story and novella), some figured it would have something to do with the growing “publishing house” that Amazon was putting together. Amazon had created what was, for all intents and purposes, the ultimate vanity press. The next generation of vanity presses, really. Using the millions of authors who signed up as their backbone, Amazon morphed their vanity press into something a bit more robust…and scary as hell.

The lure went out not just to the little fish, it went out for the prize catches – publish with Amazon. Earn more from your sales. Eliminate the middleman.

Shutting down all the IPG titles was done with a flip of a virtual switch. In a matter of minutes, Amazon did more damage to independent presses than the last 30 years of chain bookstores.

In a way, Amazon’s rhetoric is on the mark. Getting rid of the middleman. Sure! Why not? But they’re lying about their motives. The true middlemen in publishing are the big presses. These blind monsters who decide the fate of who and what we read. The giants who pour millions into the creation of fad books that make you throw up in your brain, who blacklist writers, who rip books off the shelves if they dare to sell fewer than 20,000 copies and then sit on the rights so the authors can’t shop their work around elsewhere. The puppeteers of our somewhat diseased literary culture.
Has Amazon pulled the plug on their ebooks? No. Will they ever? No. Because those big publishing houses don’t have a stake. The electronic revolution, for the giant publishers, is almost a hobby. It’s a barely significant source of their income. So why would Amazon try to battle them? Pull the plug and the big publishers will just shrug it off.

The small, indie presses are not the middlemen. They are the dying voice of true publishing and writing. They are more loyal and respectful of writing than the big presses…and certainly more so than Amazon, which invites authors to cast their work adrift in a vast, uncharted ocean. Attacking the indie presses is simply an element we’ve seen in every other facet of American corporate culture. It’s a reflection of the death of the ma and pop shops, the general stores, our neighborhoods, true indie music and film… Big fish eating little fish in some sort of insane attempt to…I don’t know what. It all seems pointless, especially when these big companies collapse in a blaze of horror and shame.

What adds a sinister light to all this is the fact that Amazon spent a couple years convincing the indie presses to embrace the ebook revolution. We were all lured in by the always impressive Kindle sales…especially when the upfront cost for an ebook was pocket change compared to putting a full-on physical frontlist together. Now, finally, small presses saw an opportunity to get back on the tiger. We can do this. Hell, we can go ebook only and move 10,000 copies and it’ll just cost us $300.

One by one, we all got into the windowless panel van with wide eyes on the stranger’s candy. And then we were never seen or heard from again… Though that’s our own fault. After all, Amazon laid out their plan of attack last December.

Take SFWP. As of the end of 2011, about 70% of my income came from Kindle sales. I’m certainly not alone. If my wild conspiracy theories are on the mark and IPG’s publishers are simply the first in what will be a wholesale program of genocide, then it will take just about a year or so for Amazon to become the sole electronic publisher in America. You all have Kindles, right? It’s the king of the market…the sales figures almost completely eclipse the Nook, Apple’s bookstore, and everyone else. And, now, as they draw in big name authors like Stephen King, their gamble for a corporate monopoly might just pay off.

All I can think about is what happens when the next Tropic of Cancer comes along. Assume some dystopian future where ebooks are ruled by Amazon and some author puts together something controversial that some legal entity deep in the bowels of Amazon HQ decides is not fit for the Kindle store. What happens then? A censorship more complete than any other. If there are no small presses left to raise the freak flag, where would that author go? You and you and you with your Kindle reader become a coalition of the willing in support of monopolies, censorship, and the overall death of literary culture.

I beg of you to remember that indie presses, indie bookstores, and indie-friendly distributors like IPG are the backbone of our literary culture. When they die, that’s it. Don’t be fooled by the apparent freedom offered by Amazon. It all may be fun and games now but, when they get tired of you, or when they fold, you’ll all look up and around…and find yourselves alone. Mark my words.

But, you know… Tra-la-la. No point in this rant, I guess. What I have done is create an SFWP page for all of our titles listing alternative ebook sources. So you can get them on the Nook, on your fancy iPad, on your phone, your computer, through Google’s ebookstore, through Indiebound, through our distributor, and so on. Endless choices. You can even hack your Kindle Fire if you want. Don’t let it be said I’m not trying.

Tomorrow: SFWP Kindle Singles fell victim to Amazon’s shenanigans. So what hare-brained plan am I thinking of now?

The winners for the 2011 Literary Awards Program are in!

The grand prize goes to:
Lance Larsen for Seventeen Ways to Float.

In second place is:
Angie Chuang for The Four Words for Home

In third place we have:
Emily Stone for In Search of Chocola: Love, Chocolate, and Language in Guatemala

I’ve just received the short list of finalists. You can find the long list right here.

Again, in no particular order…

Lesley Poling-Kempes – Bone Horses

Julie Johnson – Dulce Et Decorum Est

Emily Stone – In Search of Chocola

Stacy Nguyen – A Girl, A Boy, A Gun

Leanne Tankel – The Adulterer’s Notebook

Jamie Patterson – Lost Edens

Tori Warner Shepard – Spider’s Blood is Blue

Richard Lutman – Iron Butterfly

Mimi Lipson – Food & Beverage

Karima Alavi – In the Shadow of Tombs

Angie Chuang – The Four Words for Home

Sara Burnaby — Bears

John Laue – An Education

Robert Richter – Something Like a Dream

Lance Larsen – Seventeen Ways to Float

Reg Saner – Reaching Keet Seel

AE Baer – Death is a Canary

Jerome Siegel — Bad Shrinks

Phillip Hammes – Memory Songs

Donna M. Vesely – all i loved, i loved alone

Art Schwartz – Survivors of La Revolucion

Saundra Amrhein – Green Card Stories

Claire Cox – Chapin Hall Will Rock You

Okay! Here’s the long list of finalists… We hope to have the short list sometime next week, and then we should be about on target for announcing the winners.

In no particular order…

Lesley Poling-Kempes – Bone Horses

Emily Stone – In Search of Chocola

Stacy Nguyen – A Girl, A Boy, A Gun

Leanne Tankel – The Adulterer’s Notebook

Jamie Patterson – Lost Edens

Tori Warner Shepard – Spider’s Blood is Blue

Richard Lutman – Iron Butterfly

Tony Burnett – American Folk Song

AE Baer – Death is a Canary

Thomas J. Zuzich – When the Mind Plays Tricks

Karima Alavi – In the Shadow of Tombs

John D. Trudel – God’s House

Keith Dahlberg – The Samana Incident

Bernard Chamberlain – Streetlights for Port Cecil

Mathias B. Freese – The i Tetralogy

Angie Chuang – The Four Words for Home

Lance Larsen – Seventeen Ways to Float

Ruth Crocker – The Children’s Room

John Mort – Illegal

Robert Richter – Something Like a Dream

Thomas John Malaskee – Brothers and Grapevines

Jerome Gold – Hard Lives

Michael Milstein – Undisclosed

Gloria Zachgo – The Rocking Horse

Kelly Clancy – Soldiers of God

Becky Hagenston – Midnight, Licorice, Shadow

Bob Ross – The Woman Who Knew Bob Hope

Julie Johnson – Dulce Et Decorum Est

Gary Navoy – The Sparrow of the Bayou

Marie Marley – Come Back Early Today

Richard Hague – A Life in Black and White

Joe Vastano – Experts

Nikhil Modi – Tales from the Himalayas

Scott Kauffman – Last Call at Last Chance

Elaine McGee – Our Home, Our Passion

Joanne Kingsbury – The Supermother Box

Kathryn Rhett – Near Breathing

Alma H. Bond — Camille Claudel

Arnold Gordenstein – A Small, Perfect Place

Nancy Webb – O, Hear the Angel Voices

Leighton Scott – Hardship Pay

Mervyn Kaufman – Slicky Boy

Richard Hague – Earnest Occupations

Mimi Lipson – Food & Beverage

Sara Burnaby — Bears

John Laue – An Education

Reg Saner – Reaching Keet Seel

Jerome Siegel – Bad Shrinks

Phillip Hammes – Memory Songs

Donna M. Vesely – all i loved, i loved alone

Art Schwartz – Survivors of La Revolucion

Saundra Amrhein – Green Card Stories

Claire Cox – Chapin Hall Will Rock You

We have the long list of 2011 Literary Awards Program finalists nearly ready! Look for it sometime tomorrow here on the blog.

I’m getting ready to head out for the holidays and enter the land of Too Much Eggnog. With the 2011 Literary Awards Program concluded, and many irons in the SFWP fire, I thought I might throw out a quick blog post on our “roadmap” for 2012.

A few months ago, Richard Currey was talking to me about Kindle Singles. I’m a Luddite when it comes to ebooks. I don’t own an e-reader, I print out manuscripts to read them, and, generally, I feel like I fell out of a tree from 1890. Of course, every SFWP book is on the Kindle. Despite my technophobia, it’s foolish to leave such stones unturned, if you will. But I’ve been dismissive when it comes to those bells and whistles that can be done with ebooks.

As Richard and I discussed Kindle Singles, though, gears started to spin up in my head. This is what the ebook market should really be about.

For years now, the short form has been the ugly stepchild of publisher’s catalogs. Short stories and essays are hard to sell. They’re generally ignored and often abandoned if they do go to print. How many great writers are out there with allegedly unmarketable short stories holding up their coffee tables? Too many. Both famous and unknown.

The Kindle Singles market changes the way we approach and publish the short form. It’s now reasonable to do so. From 6000 words up to 100 pages, you can download a Single to your Kindle in seconds and rip through it on your commute home.

I engaged in a couple months of back and forth with Amazon, with the help of my distributor, and we eventually worked out a deal to swing open the doors of the somewhat exclusive Singles market. Now I can, as my grandmother used to say, go hog piggy wild.

And hog piggy wild I will go.

The SFWP Kindle Singles will start in early 2012. We’re going to see five or six short entries from Richard Currey, detailing his journey from the source of the Rio Grande to where it spills into the Gulf of Mexico. A writer’s journey and a history of one of the country’s most iconic rivers.

We’ll be pulling together several Singles from Alan Cheuse, starting with three excellent novellas.

We’ll be releasing the 20th Anniversary Edition of Currey’s long out of print collection of short stories, The Wars of Heaven, as five short Singles and a novella.

Moving forward, I’m looking at a way to do justice to Pagan Kennedy’s out of print back catalog, and we’ll be seeing work from James J. Patterson and, eventually, the multitude of SFWP Awards Program folks who have crossed my desk over the last decade. All the info you need (and a newsletter) can be found right here.

In addition to all of this, I’ve been helping Alan Squire Publishing get off the ground. Their third title, A Secret Woman, by Rose Solari, will be hitting the shelves in April, and their fourth title (a wonderful little Christmas story) will be available in November.

I’m very excited that we’ll be warming up the publishing wing of SFWP next year…and everything that we’re putting out is amazing. It’s the new face of publishing, and SFWP is geared up to lead the charge.

For the Literary Awards Program, we’ll get that started again in late 2012, concluding in 2013, and, finally, we’ll be able to offer our winners publication in the Singles market.

As the year goes on, I promise I’ll keep the blog up to date with developments… So stay tuned!

See you all next year!