Size Does Matter

One thing I love about publishing is it’s so deeply rooted in The American Way. Almost everybody starts out as a dreamer.

That dream can turn out worse than a hard night of tequila and puking in a smelly Mexican bar. Waking up in a Tijuana alley ripped off down to your colored shorts.

Or maybe without those shorts.

God, there’s nothing worse than a Mexican vasectomy. They usually do it with a dirty switchblade.

That doesn’t happen to everybody. Hey, Benny Franklin ran ink and did very well with it and so did the folks at Random House.

The thing is that they weren’t always household words. Most small publishers today start with a couple of books in their inventory. Too often they are their own books. Lightly edited, and their only critics have been their sisters or the mailman.

It’s hard to predict how a publisher will do once they start out. Most small publishers start off with a writer in charge. That writer may move commas around as well as Charlie Watts beats the bongos, but most of them can’t balance their own checkbooks.

That’s why most small publishers die. Publishing is a game of nickels and dimes for a small press. Most writers don’t understand that.

Bean counters do. They sit at the wheel at most big presses even though they can’t tell the difference between a comma and a semicolon. It’s so hard to bring one of those guys in because they don’t understand art.

Bean counters suck. Screw art. Some of these guys don’t care what they sell. They just understand spreadsheets.

Small presses run by writers and managed by bean counters are a great marriage. I believe in them and have done a lot of work with them.

That loyalty may pay off if the press grows. Gee, look what happened to the guys who believed in Microsoft when they were down to binary code. Now it’s all swimming pools and movie stars, as Jed Clampett would say.

Don’t put off the small guys when you’re begging companies to move your writing. They can believers in the trade and work their asses off. A whole lot of them don’t see a paycheck at first. The money goes into paper and ink. And they scramble like all get out to get on the shelves.

You shouldn’t be ashamed to work with a small press. Many writers are.

It’s like I always say; the future is an awfully big space. It always starts out with a dream.

Welcome Home Ed

Hey, let me get serious for a moment.

I know those moments are few and far between, but this is one of those.

It's been a while since I posted on Blogger. The fact is that I yanked almost every blog and reference to me on the web that I could find. They weren't doing much for me other than gather dust.

The hitch is that the Web never forgets, so if you want to know all about the crawly things in my basement, just Google me. Google me hard.

A lot of my publishing work in this millennium has been like a freight train missing some of the stops, and if you'd like to know, here's my publishing status at this writing:

My paperback work had spooky accounting. My publisher and I opted to part ways. You can still buy that work on e-Bay, Amazon and Barnes and Noble. You're not supposed to be able to.

I have yet to see a dime after we parted ways. My books are sold in Hong Kong and Munich but my royalties really suck. Suck like they don't arrive here. Suck like the check must still be in the mail.

But shit happens, it just does.

I moved everything to e-books. I thought e-books were a lousy reading format. Who was, for example, going to drag their $1,000 to $3,000 laptop out the beach? You'd take a paperbound version.

I'd cry if I soaked my Mac Book.

Even so, I moved them so they'd stay in print.

Kinda sort of.

You can find my work on Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble. Just look up E.D. Easley. I'm the guy at the bottom of their sales lists, the guy listed at 2,375,000. The publisher looked honest enough, he seemed like a really nice guy and the editor appeared to be working her ass off.

I couldn't find any crap on them like they'd have served much prison time.

They are evolving. They hope to go into print soon, but print publishing is getting dicey. Even the big guys are offering books up as e-books and on memory sticks.

I've contracted for quarterly royalties. So far sales have sucked.

I blame that on a number of things:

--Nobody reads e-books. There's been a lot of talk about how they're the format of the future, and they may be. They still aren't. Nobody really buys them. But me, I've got my fingers crossed.

--Nobody knows about them. Hey, I learned to read and write four decades (and change) ago. I hadn't heard much about them until 2006.

--They're overpriced. C'mon, $7 for a download. Yeah, right. And nobody can copy them? Sure thing. I find mine on Ebay all the time.

--Their royalties bite. When somebody slaps down that $7, you don't get the $3.50 to $4.00 you may think.

You get paid after everybody else does. The folks who sell them, the nerds who make them, taxes, marketing, and whatever crap the publisher can dream up. Then surprise, you, the last guy in the food chain, gets paid.

But then that's nothing new. The union pressmen at a print publishing firm usually make more than a writer.

This sucks the most because no one would have a job without the smuck who made the product in the first place.



I pulled Crimes Against Commerce from the e-book mix. Many print publishers have an attitude against e-books.

I still see Crimes Against Commerce as the most commercial book in my stable. It's drawn great reviews and did very well in the development stages where it was market tested.

I love that book, but the sequel, The Lost Generation, is a better book I believe. I've been hoping it will get a better showing with publishers if it ever makes it to paper and ink.

My magazine sales have been terrible. I haven't sold much for forever. Part of it may be that I write crap. Most of it maybe I'm not just doing well in the market.

An aside (I get to do this because it's my blog):

Most writers don't realize how tough it is to get into a publication of any size. The market is crowded and cut throat.

God bless the editors at any magazine. Most are swamped with queries. They have piles of them and the piles often get bigger every day. It's hell to get to the top of those piles.

You'd best check your ego at the door when you get into this business. It's usually not how good you are. It's a complex combination of factors.

--God help you if your manuscript reaches the top of the pile on a Monday when an editor has a serious hangover.

--Hope your submission doesn't arrive the day an editor gets divorce papers.

--Hope the IRS treated that editor well and the editor gets a refund check.

--Then too, dogs die. Damned if your stuff is reviewed after the funeral.

Funny thing about me and gambling. I might as well just throw my money at the door. It's going to end there anyway.

Welcome to publishing.

So that's where my work is at this juncture. Hope yours is doing better.

God I love this business.

Our Fragile Universe

Ever wonder how cyberspace has blown up from a way to play Pong to a trillion-trillion pile of cybercrap?

After a while on the web a lot of it all seems the same.

There's a reason for that. There is one Great Writer in cyberspace. He pounds out deathless prose on an old Apple IIe in a cold, clammy basement in Ponca City, Okla. The guy puts in 18 hour a day, but every moment of that 18 hours is a gift to history.

Today everybody Googles his work. How? One guy found him in 1997.

The guy started to rip off his work. Some other guy needed a source for a term paper, and another guy used it to make Christmas cards. (The Great Writer had this Robert Frost thing going some Tuesday in 2001.)

It grew until nobody knew his name anymore, they just start to credit each other as Great Writers after ripping off his stuff. Then other people started to reference each other. They sounded so good, other people ripped them off.

They started selling stuff to each other after one night the old guy was watching 187 channels of used car commercials and weight loss products on cableTV. (He was mulitasking that day.)

This went on into the universities.Teachers had grown up with the stuff folks stole from the old guy. They crammed it down the mouths of a whole new generation of kids.

The old guy died in 2004, but his legacy lives on. Copied crap after crap from crap to crap some stole.

Now he's the God of Everything You Do or Learn.

The old guy finally gave it up and drowned in a pool of his own drool. They found him slumped over his vintage Apple, still hooked up to AOL with a telephone modem.

He had one last floppy disk pryed in his cold, dead hands. Curious, they ran it through Mac's orginal system... one they had to get from an old Apple file.

And what did they find the The Father of All Things Webbed left as a legacy?

It was an episode of Pee Wee's Playhouse. He was about to destroy the Internet by dominating it with trillions upon trillions of Pee Wee's pals and chums.

It was luck. It was an Act of God.

It was a lesson on how fragile our universe really is.

God, Gays and the John Deere Tractor

I'm not gay by anybody's standards. Not that I have a problem with that, my first book (A Matter of Tastes) is on a woman who comes out of the closet and it ruins her life.

It's what a lot of folks would consider tasteful. I mean, there's no explict sex -- certainly none with fish or animals.

The book taught me a lot about where I was born and bred... Spokane, Wash.

It's 2007 and we're watching moving pictures in Spokane in color. A couple of things shook me up a little lately.

Now I've seen the world. I've been to Post Falls, Libby and lived in Astoria for a while. None of these places have had a black mayor, let alone a gay one.

Recently we had a mayor here who was kicked out of the closet when he pissed off the local paper.

I mean, he wasn't doing it in his office with minors and stray cats anymore. The guy just went the wrong way. Granted he'd done it with Boy Scouts and orphans, but what politician hasn't?

He was fine until folks found out he was a little light in his loafers. He was fixing the streets and the city's budget looked a whole lot better than my checkbook.

There was really no reason to fire the guy, except for who or what he slept with. That bothered me. If most of us turned on the lights after a long, hard night in The Blue Banjo we'd probably be a little spooked by what woke up with.

But they did fire him. And turns out the guy died of (colon, honest) cancer a few months later. Nobody remembers that. They just laugh about the queer mayor in Spokane who got canned for swinging the wrong way. A couple of folks, I guess, look at broomsticks twice anymore.

Now why does that bother me?

Remember the novel I talked about earlier? I decided to walk down the street to do the dog and pony show. Writers do that. They pile up a bunch of books on a table and sign them if folks will buy them. In the meantime the paying customers can either swoon at the artist or get within spitting range.

Turns out I never got the chance. I walked down the way and found the store's owner. I've lived in the neighborhood for like 200 years and they just know me as the spooky-looking bum who stumbles by on the way to the ATM machine.

I introduced myself proper and had a couple of my books with me. The owner was just fine until the third or fourth sentence when I said the word "gay" somewhere in there.

She freaked. There were a couple of folks in the store and I'm sure they figured I was flashing her or something.

Her son was about nine-foot-two and used to be a professional wrestler. He came to protect his mamma and proceeded to introduce me to the curb. He threw my books after me and went back inside.

I got a chance to think about my hometown a little as I collected my spleen and headed home. I thought about how Spokane was trying to pass itself off as a cultural mecca and all, but there weren't a whole lot of blacks, Mexicans, or known homosexuals in the city government. I did hear, however that a half-black, half-Mexican homosexual woman with a Chinese layabout transexual boyfriend had applied to be Chief of Sanitation.

I think they turned her out because her Masters degree was from a mail-order printer in Montana. I also heard she was doing fine now as the deputy mayor of some town in Oregon.

We ALL know about Oregon.

I'll add there are a couple of other bookstores in town, and they won't carry ANY of my work because of this. They won't let me do signings or attend the moving pictures at the Garland Theater unless I sit way in the back. They'll take my money to get in. They'll sell me soda and popcorn. But I have to wait until everybody else sits down and the movie starts before I can get in.

I lost the first minutes of Bambi because of that. And it hurts.

It especially hurts when you realize you can buy my book in Oklahoma City, in New York, and in Easley, S.C., but you can't buy it in Spokane. Not even bootleg copies. It's on Amazon's bestseller list (something like 2,894,532 - but it's there).

I figured this would be a good place to whine because I can decide whose comments I can publish.

Oh, and my second book, Crimes Against Commerce? One of the guys is God. He drinks beer and drives a John Deere tractor. Haven't seen that one in town.

I guess it's because God is a Baptist.

How I made it to Harvard

I’ve adjusted to the fact I may never be famous.
I’ve been writing and editing for 35 years, and after a while you just accept the fact that even if you’re great at what you do The Writing Fairy may not find you until you’re long dead.
But now I’ve been to Stanford and Harvard.
Publishing Heaven.
I Googled myself lately (which sounds nasty, I know) to see what was happening with my books. I do it about once a week. All writers should.
I’m not the sharpest stick in the pile. Heck, I’m barely qualified to toast bread unsupervised by an adult. But you can find my books at these fine institutions, available to some of the brightest minds in the world. They’ve got Mensa clubs where the members make up calculus jokes.
I know, I don’t get it either. I flunked math in college.
I was really baffled when I found out my first novel was recently listed as the featured book at Stanford University’s bookstore.
Yep, you can slap down about fourteen bucks on their counter — not order it — buy it off the shelf — and be the first one on your block to read my stuff at an Ivy League school. Maybe you’ll get a discount if you have a student ID.
I wonder what that's worth in beer...
That’s a big deal, by the way, at least to me. Shelf space anywhere is tight in ANY bookstore, let alone space in a decent college’s. And for an old hack like me?
I don’t know how they got there.
But imagine America’s future President reading my stuff. Just pray to whatever God you worship it never happens. I hope I don’t live that long… .
I know I’m no Rowling. Looking at my royalty checks, Rowling does a lot better. A lot, lot better. A lot, lot, lot better.
I reminded myself how my second book has only been out a few months, and only appeared on the college scene in August. I still had plenty of time for the bestsellers list.
Then, as hard, cold reality set in, and I realized it was just a matter of time before my masterpieces would wind up in that big ugly bin where all the nonreturnable books go. The ones going for a buck or less. Mostly cheap romance novels. The ones paying me a dime or so in royalties.*
That’s our business.
And how I’ll make it to Publishing Hell.
*A note: My books are not carried at my alma mater, Central Washington University. I called and asked why. After the manager stopped laughing, she asked, “You’re really from Spokane?” and hung up on me.

Witches in Ditches

What would you do if you hit a foreign lottery for a billion dollars?

Would you quit your day job and swill better beer because of it? All day.

Would you find out how many diamonds Zales has? And buy them. (The real ones. Not the $199 chips they usually sell.)

Would you book a seat on the next space shuttle? And get REALLY high. (God, sex with no gravity. You know the astronauts have done it. Imagine seeing it pop up on the Discovery Channel.)

It happened - the billion dollar thing -- to Stretch Walker in Crimes Against Commerce. He had a guy who he beat up in an alley manage and multiply it.

I mean, c'mon, if you're THAT rich you could buy all the ponies down at the track. You'd win matter who places.

For those of us who can't make the rent month to month, imagine. I know I'll never get rich, but damn, I know what I'd do.

The answer is on Page 168 of the English version of Crimes Against Commerce.

Page 69 of the French version.

Page 766 of the Polish version.

This advertisment courtesy of Your Light Company. I've always wondered why you never see the guys who shut you off.

God, getting Googled gets gooey…

I was Googling myself this morning…

(I know, I know, I’ve said a million times you shouldn’t Google small children, animals, for money, and limit it to consenting adults within state lines.)

…just to see how my books were doing. And I found out I was up to $9.95 plus shipping in eBay.

(Ebay, by the way, is everywhere in Google.)

I figured the $9.95 bid was quite a compliment. You can get a fully operational nuclear reactor and a pound of plutonium for that on the eBay for twelve bucks. How do you think Iraq did it?

The next time one of those suckers comes up for bids, I’m going to get one for the back yard. Not only will it bring down my heating bills, but I have this neighbor I want to irradiate.

As I got deeper into Google, of the 582 listings for Ed Easley, as I’d narrowed it down from 352,966, I found out there’s an FBI narc out there by the name of Ed Easley who does drug busts. I wanted folks to know THAT’S NOT ME.

I’m also not the baseball player. He’s rich and famous. THAT’S NOT ME.

I’m blind in one eye. When you’re blind in one eye, you have no depth perception.

This was funny for a while. When I was a kid, the all other kids wanted to play baseball with me. I had no idea where the ball was, so I would swing wildly. This stopped being funny when I brained the catcher.

Protective gear is overrated.

Back to Google.

I still count my book reviews in the Ponca City (Okla.) News and Trailer Park Gazette as my favorites. The brilliance if their feature writer really is unsurpassed.

THAT IS ME.

Also on Google… I do not sell insurance for State Farm, though I am sure that guy is a capable, qualified, handsome devil.

And no. NO FOR GOD’S SAKE, did I ever have anything to do with Connecticut’s swim team. I’m thinking of suing that guy for defamation of character because he won’t leave Connecticut.

I hate Connecticut. I wish we had 49 states or Iraq would overrun the state. Only the American Bar Association would notice it missing.

Crimes Against Commerce and A Matter of Tastes are both available in German, Japanese, and Republican. You can find them at a book burning near you.

Crimes Against Commerce is not only available in places like Yale and Harvard. You can also order it order from fine sites like from Bottom Dollar (www.bottomdollar.com ) First Place Bookplace (www.firstplacebookcase.com ). It’s also available in dumpsters outside of your public library I understand.

More on Google.

What you can’t do is find this site on the web by searching Google. Well, not easily anyway. I was wondering how I could write every newspaper in America and beg them to review my book and have only a couple respond.

Now I have my answer.

Hundreds of them may have.

I just can’t get Googled. No matter how hard I try.

Google doesn’t do most newspapers.

It's A Glamour Profession

Most folks think of writing as a glamor profession. The fact is salaried journalists sulked away as one of the bottom four least respected professions in a recent survey. Their pay sucked too; averaging $35,000 annually - less than your average garbageman.

Freelance writers are even worse off. I belong to a bunch of writers' groups. Most writers have to work day jobs to support their writing habits - even writers with several books out. I've met some of them who will work for free, or a penny a word. They say they do it, "Just to get their name out".

Would a doctor do that? Or a stockbroker?

I thought the days of indentured servants were long gone...

(Hey, on another note, I got excited when I checked Amazon.com and found Crimes Against Commerce had squeezed in something like a millionth place in line. Other books were sitting at the tens of million. Mine had been to Harvard - and WNBC called yesterday... they want to review it.

Who said an Ivy League education didn't mean anything...)

If you really want to write, and you really want to make a living at it, you're going to wind up working at, or freelancing for, trade magazines. Take a look at www.woodenhorsepub.com . This is your future.

Scary, huh? This is Stretch Walker's world in Crimes Against Commerce. These are the invisible guys in journalism nobody thinks about. They're also the guys who make twice as much money as "traditional" journalists.

If you want to know more about them, read Page 62 of Crimes Against Commerce. Tobin pretty much spells out the heart and soul of trade publishing.

He's a dog's dog lined up to be gassed.

How I made it to Stanford and Harvard

I Google myself about once a week. I know that sounds like something perverts would do in a dark alley for $25 to somebody in a short skirt. Someone ugly enough you'd have to Google them in the dark. But in the 21st century, every writer needs to do it just to find out what kinds of horrible things folks are saying about them.

It turns out lately a whole lot of you haven't been bitching about me lately. That surprised me, but that's another story for another time.

As it turns out I was amazed to discover my books are being sold at Stanford University. Granted you can buy my books anywhere through Barnes and Noble or Amazon.com, but you can plunk down something like $15 and get "Crimes Against Commerce" across the counter there. I checked Harvard too. They're there.

I checked my alma matar, Central Washington University. Nope. After I got the bookstore manager on the phone, she said, "You're from SPOKANE?" She was still laughing when she hung up on me.

You can't buy my books in Spokane either.

I was shocked and amazed. I have no illusions about being the next J.K. Rowling or Stephen King. My work may be good, but it's not THAT marketable. My agent couldn't possibly get me into the Ivy League.

Then a cold streak ran down my spine. I imagined one of our future presidents, say around 2016... somebody like JFK or Jimmy Carter reading Crimes Against Commerce. Getting to know Stretch Walker. Reading pages 142-160. I became frightened. Really frightened. At this writing I'm 49. I now have an incentive to die before I reach 60.

I won't be looking both ways when I cross the street any more.

The Truth About Hell

You know it's funny, ever since Crimes Against Commerce came out people have come to me asking if I really do know The Secret To Life. The fact is I do. Like Stretch Walker, God talked to me. Unlike Stretch, it wasn't just the Union God who gets three days and holidays off, but The Real God.

I met Him (or Her) on helicopters during medivac trips, in ambulances, and I think I met Him (or Her) at Six Flags once.

God does not, I will note, need a season pass to get into Six Flags. They let Him (or Her) in all year for free.

He (or She) has a sense of humor. This explains the Republican Party.

If you're curious and want to learn more about God, a demon, and The Way Things Are, buy Crimes Against Commerce and look at Page 62. If you don't like what you see, go ahead and burn the book, but remember — buy it first.

A Tough Day On The Schoolyard

I recently discovered Crimes Against Commerce won't be available in your child's elementary school reading program or available to most kindergarten students.

I was shocked.

Understand I spent a lot of years in newspapers and magazines, where I worked my way up from beat reporter to publisher. I'm big on freedom of speech, and that message— America's First Amendment— shines through every page of this novel.

I'd like you to read it yourself and see if the National Education Association's guidelines regarding reading material are, in fact, too Victorian for our children. I think they are, and our kids are being deprived of a lot of fine literature; not only my work, but that of great authors you'd be amazed to learn about.

After you've read the work yourself, if you agree it should be in your local library take it into the next school board meeting.

What, you don't attend school board meetings? Damn, the next thing you know you'll have principals like me running your schools...

--Ed

And the critics say...

I will give you points… funny … caught my attention. Your
years as an editor paid off because you know how our minds work.
Thanks to you and Mr. Sharkey.
--Sarah Veit, Ashbury (N.J.) Park Press

By PATTI CARMACK
News Lifestyles Editor
Ponca City (Okla.) News
In a cross between a Mickey Spillane paperback thriller and a diatribe on topics we all discuss, E.D. Easley has written an acerbic tale in his latest book "Crimes Against Commerce."
The Pulitzer-nominated writer sums his book up this way — "A lowly magazine editor barely survives a misguided Mob hit, gets fingered in a bank robbery, has a nasty run-in with the IRS, and another encounter or two with the Devil, plus his ex-wife is no walk in the park, but who said money can't buy happiness?"
As Easley puts it, he bites the hand that feeds him in a witty and oftentimes vulgar manner on the subjects of taxes, religion, death and "other things we were warned against talking about at the dinner table." While the language in this book is not my cup of tea, one can get past that and enjoy the scenarios the author depicts. After all, those who watch television will not find words in the books unheard.
Easley has been a writer, photographer and editor, grew up in Yakima, Wash., served in the U.S. Army at the end of the Vietnam War, and now resides in Spoke, Wash. "Crimes Against Commerce" is published by Cloonfad Press.
The contemporary style of writing is splashed with a "film noir" atmosphere; hence, the Spillane reference. For those of you who do not know the genre — look it up on the Internet.
The descriptions are worthy in this tale, and one feels at home with the main character, as though you have known him forever. While not my usual read, it was thought-provoking in a tongue-in-cheek way. Enjoy!



Ed,
Stretch Walker?
Stretch Walker?!?
Stretch Walker?!?!?
Sincerely,
Rusty Marks
Staff writer
West Virginia Gazette




Written by Pulitzer-prize nominated author E.D. Easley, "Crimes Against Commerce", is a cynical and hilarious look at life.

Stretch, an atheist, travels back and forth between heaven and hell. Sharing his journey are, both God and Devil, Elvis, aliens, a mob killer, gang thugs, an IRS agent, a lieutenant governor, and more. Despite the fact that there isn't a trailer dweller in the whole crazy bunch, I found it to be a very enjoyable, giggle provoking, over the top, read.

If gritty language is not a barrier for your reading pleasure, I wholeheartedly recommend this book. It is written in an "every man" style --no pretense here.

By the time you reach the last page, you will have a profound understanding that, shit does indeed happen.


Renee' Barnes
-Editor
The Trailer Park Gazette

Review of Crimes Against Commerce

Title: Crimes Against Commerce
Author: E. D. Easley
Publisher: Cloonfad Press
ISBN: 0-9769404-3-4
Pages: 243

E.D. Easley is a snarky guy. We belong to the same writer's group, but that isn't why I chose to review his latest book. No, that reason will only be known to you AFTER you've read the book.

Irreverant, insightful, and at times--brilliant! Where else can you find a Mafia hit man, an IRS agent, a cat that won't die, Satan, God, a beautiful woman, and an oozing monster, all in the same book? And then there's "Stretch Walker".

A fun, freaky, frolicking ride all the way through this farce! “Life is stranger than fiction”…this one is so off the wall that it could happen in real life. It just could!

And sometimes…it just does. Brought to you in the living color that is E.D.'s everyday vocabulary, "Shit happens. It just does".

If you’ve never been to hell and back, climb aboard for a round trip in hilarious fashion. Hate your ex? These characters can take care of that matter for you. Ever been audited by the IRS? Just ask for redemption here.

Written in everyman’s everyday language, this one is a fun read. Go ahead—get lost in the world of E.D. Easley’s characters. Build your world around them.

They’ll take you for a ride in theirs.From Mafia hitmen to Sho Rin Ku master Kow Pi, you’ll savor each personna Stretch meets on his way through life. Life—the way it should be.

Reviewer: Linda J. Hutchinson
http://www.lindajhutchinson.com
http://reviewhutch.blogspot.com

03/09/06