In 2010, after a bad experiences with a “regular” publisher, I was seduced by the promise of total freedom and instant publication on Amazon (and a handful of its competitors), possibly allowing me to write and publish much, much more.
Much has changed since those early days. While Jeff Bezos’s net worth has shot up from $10 billion to $180 billion, most of his writers (now called “content providers”) have become much poorer. Above all, print books are back in fashion (even I prefer them because of the tactile pleasure they give me, and because after 5 hours of looking at a computer screen, I prefer not to look at an e-reader). Though I have been publishing e-books now for 10 years, sales have fallen to low double digits (essentially, peanuts), and print books take much longer to format and design, so I haven’t caught up. (I plan to as soon as I have the energy).
So I hope a few of my friends and devoted readers to encourage the process (which is time and life-consuming, and also costs money and spirit) by buying a few of these books, even if they never plan to read them (I too have bought books just to support authors, knowing I might not find the time to read them). But I think some will be surprised, and enjoy at least parts of them. As for writers who [**continued below the links]:
Here are the paperback Links, which are not easy to find on Amazon:
Impressing the Whites: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1469906295
Eaten by the Japanese: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1494467798
What We All Need https://www.amazon.com/dp/1887681191
The Killing of an Author: https://www.amazon.com/dp/150276217X
Benzo Land: How Drug Companies Enslave Us https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1724449583/
I Will Not Go the F**k to Sleep: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1466480173
The Man-eaters of Malgoonda and the Last Days of Louella Lobo Prabhu https://www.amazon.com/dp/1493778609
The last book records these voices:
–[facetiously said] “I tell her she ought to stop writing plays on Catholic themes, convert herself to Buddhism, invite 1,000 proletarians to celebrate her conversion, and on that occasion, donate one apartment to a poor family.”
–Dennis Britto: “Naturally, all the big [important]families wanted their sons to be priests, and so many good families have died out because all their sons either went mad or became priests. So Heaven is full, but Mangalore is empty. Tell me, the Canon Law, does it have balls? And the Pope’s gun–does it have bullets?”
–“Now, anybody with money is a Brahmin.”–Dennis Britto
–“She was the Audrey Hepburn of Mangalore, married, like Audrey’s character Eliza Doolittle, to a much older Professor Higgins.”–Reuben Nazareth?
**Writers who mint money, like Paulo Coelho, are as removed from a regular writer as the sun is from Pluto. The astonishing implication of one British reviewer of “Eaten by the Japanese” was that it had been published by a “gold-digger”; but I earn more in four hours of professional editing than I do in an entire year from all my Richard Crasta books and the Eaten by the Japanese book combined. I am in the literary profession far more because I see it as a sacred calling, even though it drains time and money and life from me. Yes, a financial loss, almost right from the start. I only began professional editing in 2010, and have done it infrequently, since my first duty, I feel is to my own original writings.
I provide these links, because “Amazon search” can be frustrating, misleading, misdirecting, and mischievous, and many of these are not easily available on Amazon or elsewhere, and there is a lot of misinformation about me on the Net.
Hoping to bring out a paperback of The Revised Kama Sutra too: that’s the most challenging work, because it is long!