Hardpressed - UK Urban Fiction

As the same discussions about self-publishing take place on the authonomy website I wonder why people refuse to understand the information staring them in the face.

The same people continually complain the rankings, the gaming and the spamming but it is the only crumb of comfort they can take from their failure to make an impression.

The evidence clearly shows that who do well on authonomy receive endorsements as to the viability of their work. Subsequently, the vast majority of members who have a achieved a prominent ranking on authonomy have gone on to self-publishing. The others seem to whinge whilst waiting for Buffalo that clearly are not coming.

All things being equal, if you maintain a presence on that site and your book doesn't make the top 100 - It's probably not something that people want to read.

Why don't black people read? . . . They can. Some even do . . . but it's the minority.

I have a theory – listen. And listen very carefully. My observations on this subject go way back to my childhood.

I used to hear the Salvation Army band marching down the street . . . and I thought to myself – What a load of godawful noise!

And on Sunday, Jess Yates was on the telly, introducing Songs of Praise . . . and I’m thinking that God is sitting up there with earplugs praying that those people to stop singing – because he couldn’t take the noise.

The years rolled on and I got older. I had no interest in stories or books. All my leisure interests were centred around music. I assure you that it wasn’t a conscious thing, nor was it a racist thing. But clearly the only music which I enjoyed was music of black origin. Then again, there’s nothing remarkable about that, a black man preferring black music, is there? And let’s face it, in recent years all popular music is music of black origin.

Why did I decide to write a novel? That’s a very long story which, quite frankly, we don’t have time for, but I did, and then things began to fall into place.

On peer review sites my work was criticised for poor punctuation, particularly for overuse of commas. On the positive side, the better writers would comment on my rhythm and pacing. Then I realised that the commas were placed to control the speed and sound of the text. Does (narrative) text have sound?

Well, I suppose that would depend on your cultural roots.  Storytelling was audio based until the quill took charge in the west. Perhaps other cultures, on reading text, will naturally covert it to audio as it is read. And to those cultures does a lack of rhythm lead to a lack of interest?

Although Human biology is not one of my better subjects, around about this time I developed my AVS theory. I understand communication protocols. I understand that the nature of storytelling is to transmit the contents of your imagination and transfer them to another. The information in your mind is encoded into a format for transfer (text). The area of my theory requiring further research is where the text is decoded by the recipient. The human brain was not designed to accept text as a form of input. ‘Text’ is not one of the senses. For us to experience something text must converted to one or more of the senses in order that we comprehend it. The question is; do we all have the same favoured or default protocol for handling complex data streams?

 Simple data is ‘simple’.

ELEPHANT - produces a visual image of an elephant.

Let’s make it more complicated, and bear in mind that the brain stores and retrieves data by a system of familiarity.

THE ELEPHANTS WALKED IN TWO BY TWO – Do you see elephants walking two by two. Or do you hear the line from the rhyme? I suggest that a culture based on audio culture will try to associate the text with audio, first.

This is not an essay, therefore I will not quote sources but there is evidence all around. According to Wiki there are 36 Black British writers. You will find most of those are poets – there’s that rhythm factor again. Black people make gazillions worldwide from songwriting and the like. By comparison, in literature, black people perform poorly. Seemingly they cannot produce 'quality' literature. However, the ‘quality’ that is produced by publishers is clearly not what they want to consume. If you accept that black people don’t appear to overly appreciate Bruce Springstein or Bon Jovi, then perhaps you are on the right track.

Are other cultures reading ‘Call me Ishmael’ and thinking . .  What is all that noise?

In other walks of life cultures blend, and the popular consensus wins. During the 1970s Indians and Pakistanis emigrated to the UK en masse. They found the found the food bland and tasteless.  It didn’t take long before Fish and Chips was exiled and Curry became the order of the day. Not only for the Asians but the natives also preferred it.

Asian food, Black Music; both were presented to the public and became the best flavour and the sound of now. With the advent of easy self-publishing will a new style come to the fore?

Am I saying that writing in a style led by rhythm and voice will lead to massive sales of books to black people?

No.

There is a lot work to be, or undone, depending on your POV. First you must undermine many years of black people thinking that there is nothing inside a book for them.

The younger generation are more receptive to global culture. And in recent years they have been berated for having little or no interest in literature. Perhaps they simply are inspired by a different beat.

Harper Collins’ authonomy hasn’t worked. It could never have worked, and is now something of an embarrassment to the big six publisher. It took a while for the membership to realise that Harper Collins were never going to publish any of the top ranked books but eventually the penny dropped. Such is the disinterest of the Harper Collins imprints that the majority qualifying books don’t even get reviewed on time. Members have been known to wait for up to six months for what amounts to a summary rejection.

Self-publishing via Createspace seemed to be the direction in which authonomy wanted to herd the group of unpublished writers but this seemed to be an ill thought out plan. Authonomy is a UK based website with a predominantly UK clientele, trying to get them to self-publish with a US based POD company was never going to work, the shipping costs alone make the marriage untenable. The Createspace services from which authonomy looked to earn a commission were not taken up. If the members have learned anything from that site it’s that US techniques and US editors are of little or no use to European writers.

Having realised that there was no route to either mainstream or self-publication some of the membership turned to e-books. Although it was obvious, authonomy missed the boat and offered no clear path to e-publishing. No e-publishing facility meant no e-commission for Harper Collins and authonomy had become a financial liability.

Hoping for better times, authonomy quite cynically began to announce a series of ‘authonomy successes’ - writers who had placed their work on the authonomy website, and had subsequently been published by Harper Collins. A little investigation reveals that these writers were not ‘discovered’ by HC on the authonomy website, the manuscripts were submitted via the traditional route. Authonomy is probably the busiest writer’s website on the internet. Flicking the beads on abacus around will very probably show that any new writer published recently holds reasonably good chance of having had their work on the authonomy site at some point in time. Therefore authonomy can claim a hand in almost anything.

Authonomy has reached the point where most of the membership has realised that there is little of no chance of publication via the Ed's desk. The forum has degenerated into nothing more than chatroom – with a difference. The hardcore membership of the forum is, in the main, a group of writers with one thing in common – failure, or lack of success. Inevitably, with so many frustrated people in close proximity – all hell breaks loose.

To register an account with authonomy takes but two shakes of a lamb’s tale – you can have as many accounts as you have email addresses. A visit to forum will show what Paul and Art meant when they penned the words “I get slandered, libelled. I hear words I never heard in the Bible.” Survival of threads posted by the likes of Shuab Parvez claiming that he wants to stab another user and rape his daughter were allowed remain on a site that has no active administration.

In fairness the site was probably conceived in times of plenty but the credit crunch hit and now authonomy is the elephant on the web that Harper Collins does its best to ignore.

It cannot last. Fears of liability caused Microsoft to close down all of its free chatrooms in September 2003. History has proven that the people need government. Government costs money.

 It’s just a theory, but I’ve seen enough ‘evidence’ to bet that it’s pretty accurate.

Let’s start by saying that the ‘authonomy team’ is one person, a fairly junior person. Harper Collins, and their editors have little or nothing to do with authonomy.

The review system goes like this: At the end of every month the top 5 books are selected for ‘review’ – The authonomy person, looks at the various genre tags on the books and emails them to the relevant editors at the relevant imprints.

At this point I’ll remind you that editors are not in the habit of reviewing books. It's a chore.

When the editors receive the manuscripts they take a cursory glance, roughly equal to if you’d mailed them a submission – they may well return the manuscript to authonomy with a note simply saying ‘no thank you’.

 

At this point authonomy have fulfilled their obligation to the writer. An editor has reviewed the manuscript. There were no guarantees that the editor would write the review. The authonomy person writes the review, with no information other than the editor didn't want it and publishes it in the writers comments section. In the rare instances where an editor is actually interested in the manuscript – that’s when the process get delayed.

 

So in summary – it is likely that your review was written by a glorified slush-pile reader. What are you going to with their suggestions?

There is no way to identify an individual computer. Many years ago Intel programmed individual CPU’s with ID’s. Sale of Intel processors fell and so the transmit ID feature was disabled.

Essentially, your PC or laptop is just a bunch of components. The poor old 4044 calculator chip and subsequently 8086 on which your super computers are based wasn’t actually good at anything in particular. It’s crap at floating point calculation and has zero graphics capability. As computers were required to perform more functions more peripheral devices and chipsets were connected via a bus in order to make the computer function.

When it came to connecting to other computers the existing serial and parallel ports weren’t up to the job, and so the network interface card (NIC) or network adapter was invented.

Just like no two people can have the same telephone number, each network card was encoded with an individual ID. (MAC Address).

It is the MAC address that authonomy uses to identify individual computers. Ergo, if you use a different computer you can re-back a book using an alternative ID (sockpuppet).

Users of older computers will find that they can back a book again if they switch from wireless to a wired connection as the different built-in adapters have different connections.

So now, you can back the same book from each computer that you have access to.

That’s all that I have to say about hardware – Let’s move on to software.

Hardware always does exactly what software tells it to do. If the software tells the network adapter to lie about its MAC address – it will!

With many drivers, and all Microsoft operating systems after XP came this facility. . .

In the Network Adapter [Advanced] properties box you will find an option allowing you to change the MAC address of your Network adapter.

Enter a new number in the box and you have changed your MAC address. Disconnected and reconnect, you are, as far as authonomy is concerned, a different entity.

Make new sock-puppet, rinse and repeat until bored. You’ll never run out of numbers – they’re all in hexadecimal – enjoy.

I’ve never done it – It sounds like too much hassle.