The Tyranny of the Internet

I am old. I need to get that clear before I start this rant. I started writing my stories when I was 10 years old. To give you some perspective, the Beatles were still a new phenomena at the time.

I grew up believing in a fairy tale. The fairy tale was that if I wrote well, told a good story with good characters and a good ending, I could eventually get a book published. It shouldn’t matter my age, my race, my sex. At that time, all kinds of people were getting published, though I found out later that it was much harder for a person of color or a person with an alternate lifestyle to find a “traditional” publisher. Hard, but not impossible.

So I have been working on my writing for 54 years. A long time, but I admit that I wasted a lot of that time on chasing women and watching TV. In truth, I didn’t get serious about my writing until I was 38. That’s when I started writing my daily journal and reading good books that I hoped would teach me how to be a good writer.

I tried to be a good student. I tried to remove the cliches from my work, tried to write from life and not my artificialy fantasy world in which things went the way I wanted them to and not the way real life would work them. I tried to improve my prose. I tried to make my stories real and from the heart.

In some ways I succeeded. I even had an agent at one time due to a book that I truly wrote from my aching heart.

Alas, the agent and I parted ways. I look back on my rashness in getting rid of her and realize I was a fool. But then, that’s the theme of my life, my foolishness.

Now I am trying to get another agent due to my completion of the many drafts of “Minerva James and the God of War.” It’s damned tough. And I’ll tell you why.

The internet. The damned internet.

That’s right. It is no longer enough that you won a major mystery writing prize, that you have published seven short stories with the same character, that people who don’t know you say good things about you in their blogs. No. The agents look at your own blog (hello!). Then they look to see how many followers you have.

I have two. I am grateful for both, but it’s not something that’s going to impress an agent.

The agents look at your Kindle stuff (I’ve posted a few things on Kindle just for fun). If you don’t have tens of thousands of sales, they are not interested.

The tyranny of the internet. It doesn’t matter to the agent that I am not good at publicizing my work, or that I don’t know how to get this little blog out there to 30,000 hungry fans. No. They only see that I have two followers and they’re not interested.

But…well, if you don’t have a blog, they’re not interested either. The modern catch-22. The tyranny of the internet.

What to do? I’m not sure. I will just keep writing and hope that, against all odds, I write a book so good that the internet doesn’t matter.