Iuniverse Cookbook Kaput

I contacted Iuniverse today and told them to remove my first cookbook from the market. I felt a great deal of satisfaction as I pulled the letter out of the fax machine, and I'll tell you why. If you bought this book and read the foreword--I think it was the foreword--you know that I paid $99 for a "professional editorial review," in the hope that they might like my work and choose to promote my book. And they hired a moron (What other kind of writer can afford to spend several hours reading and reviewing a book for $99?) who claimed to be a professional humorist, and he panned me for not being PC.

If you bought my book, you know all this, because I altered the foreword to include a piece-by-piece disembowelment of the review and the pinhead who wrote it. I wrote a new foreword making fun of this idiot, and then I sent it back to Iuniverse and made them print it.

Since then, they have promoted all sorts of trash, I am sure. And my sad little book sat ignored on Amazon and Barnesandnoble.com.

Now there is a faint possibility that my new book will sell, and the last thing I want is for people to look for other stuff I've written and buy that piece of crap from Iuniverse. When I say "piece of crap," I'm comparing it to the Citadel version, which will be a billion times better. There is a lot in that book that I'm proud of, but I don't want people to judge me by something I spewed out just for the sake of pleasing my blog's readers and getting over the psychological hump between me and the writing of an entire book. And frankly, I don't want Iuniverse to get the damn money. They weren't there for me, so I don't see any reason to cut them in now that the rainmaking may finally be paying off.

Iuniverse is a great thing if you're just starting out and you need SOMEONE to publish your book. Overall, it was a great experience. But I'm never going to forgive them for treating me like Rupert Pupkin. I am not Rupert goddamn Pupkin.

Or maybe I am. In the movie, when Rupert finally got on the air, he turned out to be pretty good.

The condescension in that reviewer's words rose off the monitor like stink off a landfill in August. He was so proud of his credentials. He was a professional humorist. He had been PUBLISHED in this and that periodical. And he only wanted to help, although deep inside, we both knew he was wasting his time on me, because I just didn't have the stuff. You liked the book, right? My editor liked it. The publisher liked it well enough to offer me a contract and pay me an advance. But some guy who isn't fit to lick the sweat off a real humorist's ass tried to tell me it was not just flawed, but substandard.

Obviously, politics were what made the book bad. If I had written a book making fun of people who eat veal and white sugar and drink whole milk, he probably would have told me it was genius. I should have done that and claimed I was a dyslexic lesbian Marxist who killed her own family in the gutters of Caracas for refusing to get up three times a night to pray to Gaia for Hugo Chavez. I'd have a Nobel prize by now.

I pulled the plug today, and I say, "good riddance." I hope the cookbook makes ten million dollars, even if I never see a penny, just so each individual at Iuniverse who let me down will get giant ulcers and bleed out of his rear end.

I could understand saying, "This book makes me mad." I could understand saying, "I disagree with the author." What I can't understand is telling me I can't write. I don't know how well I'll do as a writer, but I'll bet I do well enough so I don't have to hire my sorry ass out to vanity publishers to review books for ten bucks an hour.

If it hadn't been for people like that, I would have been here in 1990. Do you understand now why I say I feel like Roy Hobbs in The Natural?

Tomorrow, if my luck holds out, I go on television. Fox News. God bless Fox News. I'll bet you right now I never appear on any other news channel or the broadcast channels, unless it's a hostile interview. Picture CBS doing a friendly interview of a guy who picked on poor, benighted foreigners who only commit crimes because of global warming and Manifest Destiny The White Man's Burden and whatever other lame excuses the likes of Bill Moyers and Katie Couric can pull out of their biased butts. I abused Fox's new humor show here ruthlessly, and I stand by what I said, but Fox is the shining hope of broadcast journalism. My book is apolitical, but that's not enough to make the MSM happy. To have real quality, a book should have a certain smell about it that shows that if it were political, it would be liberal. My strong suspicion is that only on Fox will a book lacking that smell get a fair shake.

I haven't heard from Fox directly yet, but I assume we're still on. I have no desire to be famous or to be on camera, but I am going to dress as well as I can and be pleasant and cooperative and make sure they know I am very, very grateful to be there. I am going to try to make this pay off for them as well as me.

I didn't announce the time of the appearance because I'm not particularly eager to expand my blogging in the direction of video. I wish I hadn't mentioned it at all, but I was so freaked out, I felt compelled to blog it. A friend called me and told me to milk it for all it was worth, and he's right, but as much as I appreciate my readers, you don't use an insignificant blog to promote a national TV appearance. That's like trying to drum up an audience for a concert by taping a note on your refrigerator. The plan is to use national TV to promote my books and two sites that relate directly to those books. I might be seen by half a million people tomorrow. Putting an entry up here saying "tune in" isn't going to help Fox draw a crowd. And there is now way I'm mentioning Hog on Ice. If I ever do well enough with my books to generate real web traffic, I'm sending it to SteveHGraham.com and the sites I create for my books and Roller Coaster of Hate. Don't feel slighted. If anything you should feel special, because the other sites are impersonal compared to this one.

I'm shocked that the PR effort went into high gear instantaneously. I don't think Lucianne realized how much power her site had. I'd love to take credit for part of this, but it was all Lucianne. If the books succeed, okay, I'll take credit for that. But knocking six months to a year off the time it took to get noticed...I don't think I could have done that without her. Although Moxie has done an amazing job of getting me interview opportunities. All you people who haven't been nice to Moxie, your day in the shade may be coming fast. That's all I plan to say about that.

It's funny; Lucianne pretty much undid the damage other people have done by deliberately ignoring me. How big a favor is THAT? Hard to measure. And if the public likes my books, every other real-media boost will push me farther and farther out of the gravitational pull of the Blogosphere.

I'll tell you something I've learned about this weird little virtual world. Big bloggers can refrain from helping you, but in the big scheme of life, they are bugs and there is absolutely nothing they can do proactively to hurt you. Nobody listens to them in publishing. Nobody listens to them in broadcasting. Nobody with a life knows who they are. I think that rule is generally true in life, even of powerful people. There are a lot of people who can refuse to assist, but there aren't many who can keep others from assisting. I know a number of bloggers and minor media figures will eat their livers if I do well--they're probably filling their diapers over Lucianne's actions right now--but they can't do diddly to stop me or even slow me down. They never could. And sadder still, if I make it, damn few of them have the stuff to catch up with me.

I hope the interview is still on. Whether it is or not, I'm here for the long haul, and I'll get where I'm going eventually.

Thanks so much for all the great comments. Thank you "Sparrow" for writing that nice Amazon review. I consider a lot of you friends or at least friendly. I hope that if you see my books on store shelves in years to come, you'll take some pleasure in the knowledge that your support helped put them there.

Speaking of store shelves, Keith came through for me tonight with a picture I'd like to present. It's from a store in Minneapolis. I haven't seen it yet, but it's attached to an email, and I know what's in it. Before I even look at it, I can tell you it's just about the sweetest sight I've ever seen. I'll upload it now. Enjoy.