Kindle woes, more nomenclatura, the resurrection of the gothic and the usual gloom and doom

Kindle Direct Publishing has been experiencing hick-ups over the past few days, so you still have to wait for the official launch of the next Pegasus Pulp e-book. Alas, the story is already available at OmniLit/AllRomance ebooks and XinXii.

In the meantime, here are some links:

A lot people don’t like the term “indie publishing” for various reasons, as discussed here and here. However, without a catchy alternative, this seems to be the term we’re stuck with.

Now thriller writer Robert Bidinotto suggests the term “vigilante author”. I quite like this term and wouldn’t mind if it caught on, particularly since my retro pulp Silencer series actually is about a masked vigilante character.

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One of the best things about indie publishing or vigilante publishing or whatever we want to call it is that it gives a chance to niche or dead genres that are no longer in demand at the big publishers. One of those dead genres is the gothic romance, which flourished in the 1960s and early 1970s and gradually died out in the late 1970s. In many ways, those gothic romances* were the ancestors of today’s paranormal romances and urban fantasy. At Baen’s Universe, there is a great essay by Kristine Kathryn Rusch about what happened to the gothic romance after it died off as a genre.

“Daphne du Maurier and the modern gothic novel” was one of my proposed topics for my MA exam essay** and the one I actually wrote about, so I did quite a bit of research on the gothic romance genre at a time when vintage gothics were hard to come by.

However, in the era of indie publishing no genre is ever truly dead. And hence writer A.J. Hamilton plans to resurrect the gothic and invites others to join her. I’m tempted to give this a try, provided I come up with a good idea.

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David Gaughran explains that word of mouth is the best promotion and that traditional advertising does not really work. Which ties in with everything everybody else says about marketing your books.

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There is no week without proclamations of the impending death of traditional bookselling, publishing and the print book, so here’s a round-up of the usual gloom and doom posts.

Here is a pretty good one from David Gaughran explaining why the digital revolution threatens big publishing companies.

At the Guardian, Sam Leith asks if this is the end for (print) books as we know them.

The most amusing thing, however, was an ad at the bottom of the article. The ad was for a vinyl turntable sold cheaply (stunningly cheaply to the point that I almost purchased one to replace my aging record player) in the Guardian store. You know, vinyl, the recording technology that was pronounced dead approximately twenty years ago.

Old media never really goes away, even as percentages shift.

*Most people call the genre “gothic novel” or just “gothic”. Th academic in me prefers “gothic romance” in order to prevent confusion with the gothic novel of the late 18th century that was the seed from which much of today’s popular genre fiction grew. If you want to know why and how, you’ll have to wait for my PhD thesis.

**I had to suggest three possible topics for the MA exam essay. The professor would pick two of those topics, which would then show up as essay questions in the exam. I then got to choose one question and write the essay. My three topic suggestions for the English essay were: “The British spy novel”, “Daphne du Maurier and the modern gothic novel” and “Sir Walter Scott, father of the historical novel”. In the exam, I got the gothic and Sir Walter Scott topics, since my professor was not overly familiar with the spy genre, and ended up writing about gothics. I got an A, too, though the essay itself is lost in the mists of time or rather the depths of the university archive.

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