This is the second to last day of my blog tour. I wasn’t sure I’d manage to do all the work — 52 stops in 35 days. When you count the posts I did here to promote the tour, that means I wrote eighty-seven articles in five weeks. Whew! I truly did not intend the tour to be so long and involved — somehow it just took off on its own. I have a lot of sleep to catch up on — too many late nights – but the tour was worth it. Not in sales so much, but in what I learned about my books, me, other blogs. Because of all the interviews, I had to think about where I came from in regards to writing, and where I want to go. It turned out to be quite intensive. I do not recommend such a long tour, however. A week or two is sufficient.
Today I am at Book Reader’s Heaven with Glenda Bixler talking about My Books, My Way: Experiences With a Small Independent Publisher. It’s a bit ironic. Yesterday I started reading Dan Brown’s Demons & Angels for no other reason than I somehow ended up with the book, and it struck me that the main difference between small presses and the large corporate publishers is the distribution capacity the big guys have. It certainly is not quality. I have seen some excellent books published by small presses, and Demons & Angels doesn’t even come close. There are way too many inconsistencies, both internal and external.
Robert Langdon is supposed to be an intelligent fellow, knowledgable about symbols, yet when he finds out that physicists are trying to answer such questions as where we came from, what life is made of, and the meaning of the universe, he is astounded. Why? That’s what physics is. Or what it does. Any halfway educated person knows that. He’s also astounded when he discovers that a scientist was also a priest. Why? If he knows anything at all about ancient symbols, he would know that many of today’s religious symbols were ancient scientific symbols. He would also know that the “priests” in ancient times were scientists — science was religion, or perhaps religion was science — and that the division between church and science is a relatively new occurence. This post is not supposed to be a dissertation on religion, but a refutation of Langdon’s character. He simply would not have been surprised if he was as smart and knowledgable as he was supposed to be.
Perhaps that example is a bit esoteric. So try this: the scientists explain to Langdon that a bit of anti-matter is suspended in the center of a container, held there by two magnetic fields. Yet when Langdon looks for the bit of matter, he searches for it on the bottom of the container, and then is surprised to find it suspended in the center of the container. Sheesh. If that’s the kind of writing that is acceptable to corporate publishers, I’m glad not to be a part of it. Though I wouldn’t mind a bit of their cash.
If you want to know why I am glad to be published by a small independent press, you can find the article here: My Books, My Way: Experiences With a Small Independent Publisher.
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