In the publishing world (whether you’re talking books, magazines or online), silence is almost always a bad sign. I learned this lesson early and painfully in my fiction career. I had written a novel, Poison, and through a shared acquaintance had managed to get the manuscript in front of a publisher at a small start-up venture in Brisbane. He expressed much enthusiasm for the novel, and in time sent me some editorial revisions. The shared acquaintance, who also happened to be an artist, even mocked up a cover for me. Meanwhile, the ‘coming soon’ section of the company’s website announced the imminent arrival of Poison by Kris Ashton. It was 2004, and I had not published a single word of fiction. The prospect of being a novelist was breathtaking.
Over the next few months I kept checking the news area of the site (as an author does when he is about have a story or novel published) to see what else was shaking, and it didn’t escape my notice when updates began to taper off. Eventually they stopped altogether, and then… silence. Nothing on the site, nothing from the publisher.
Then came the email. The publisher’s ambitious little venture had foundered with just a single book in the marketplace. He had discovered what so many small press entrepreneurs do: that even moderate financial success in publishing is almost impossible, especially in the 21 century – much harder than in movies or music or the visual arts.
Time and again in the years subsequent to that devastating email I have noticed that silence in publishing is ominous, a herald of bad news to come. One particularly unpleasant time it involved a podcast called Well Told Tales, where I had found a publisher sympathetic to my work. He featured two of my stories, ‘Modifications’ and ‘The Pothole’, and had accepted a third when the weekly podcasts stopped appearing. Once again I kept checking the site, hoping the hiatus was temporary. I even emailed him to check that everything was okay and he assured me it was. But it wasn’t okay. A change of life circumstances meant the publisher had to abandon Well Told Tales. Silence, especially in small press, is the harbinger of death.
So I couldn’t help but get a little nervous when the proposed publication date of my novel, Hollywood Hearts Ablaze, came and went, and the publisher could only give me a vague idea as to when it might appear. A week or two later Steam eReads’ publicist decided to up and leave, apparently out of the blue. Then a fellow author on the Steam eReads Facebook page left a post asking, “Has anyone heard from [the publisher] Nicola Boss?”
Alarm bells went off in my head. Silence. I began to check my communication history with Nicola. It had been nearly two weeks. That didn’t seem so bad. Then I jumped on the Steam eReads website and checked for updates. Two months since a new blog post. The February 2014 release archive had not been added, even though it was nearly the end of March. The homepage gave me some reassurance: the March e-book releases had been put up (even if mine wasn’t among them).
Then the next day I happened to be on Facebook when a post came up advertising my author interview on the Steam eReads website. I got in touch with Nicola, and it turned out that because we had missed the original March 5 slot, we had to wait until the production company (which is located in the US) had another slot available.
Hollywood Heartz Ablaze is now due to be released on April 21, so it was a false alarm.
This time.
BELOW: Concept cover art for Hollywood Hearts Ablaze.