Not content to remain permanently in the shadow of the succès fou of Jonah’s magnum opus Liberal Fascism: From Mark Twain to Oat Bran Muffins, John J. Miller, the resident dork at America’s Shittiest Website™ and perpetrator of the 100 Most Awesome Conservative Rock Songs, has become an author (of sorts). His long-awaited masterpiece The First Assassin is hot off the presses, well, the press, well, the laser printer.
Here is Miller’s touching description of the novel’s long path to self-publication:
When I finished writing The First Assassin, I tried to sell it to a traditional publisher the old fashioned way, as I had done with my previous books of non-fiction. Yet I couldn’t find a publisher that was willing to take a chance on a first-time novelist during the worst economy of our lives. I didn’t exhaust my options in this area, but I did start to explore alternatives.
The First Assassin is available exclusively online through a new print-on-demand service: If you order a copy, they’ll print one and mail it to you. My partner is CreateSpace.com, a subsidiary of Amazon.com. During this “soft launch” phase, The First Assassin may be purchased only through CreateSpace.com (here). Soon, it will also be listed on Amazon.com. … Those will be the only ways of obtaining copies. You won’t find The First Assassin in book stores.
Since I had no problem finding recently published first novels and I have a neighbor who just published a first novel, I think the reason for Miller’s lawn-sized trash bag filled with rejection notices might just perhaps have more to do with the novel itself than the economy. It might have something to do with, for example, the blurb for the novel that mentions “Portia, a beautiful slave who holds a vital clue, hundreds of miles away.”
Another reason that the novel’s manuscript made a resounding thud into the rejection bin may have been that most readers would not be in much suspense over whether a guy named Lorenzo Smith would kill Lincoln. Well, perhaps Miller’s likely fans — many of whom believe that dinosaurs once roamed the earth with man — would stay up all night reading to discover the book’s answer to that question.
Or maybe the universal thumbs-down had something to do with this riveting description from the first chapter of Miller’s thriller:
He saw the engine’s massive oil lamp mounted on top the smoke box. It gazed forward like the unblinking eye of a mechanical cyclops. Behind it were the cab, the coal tender, and a line of cars. Flags and streamers covered them all. The whole train glistened from a recent cleaning.
Apparently Miller is under the impression that even self-published authors get paid by the word, else he wouldn’t have bothered to point out that trains generally have a line of cars behind the engine and where the oil lamp was mounted. And “mechanical Cyclops” — what an original and compelling metaphor for a train! So original and compelling that I quickly found it also used for a train in the straight-to-paperback bodice-ripper “Distant Dreams” — in the second paragraph.
To add to the hilarity, Miller is over at Big HollyButt, pleading, no, begging on his knees for someone, anyone, to pick up the film option for his book. He even wants Tom Selleck to be in the film. (I deeply apologize for mentioning that. Miller’s inadvertent revelation of his preferred wanking material really should have stayed over at Big HollyButt where it belonged and not have been shared here to the detriment of the gentle sensibilities of all SadlyNauts.)
Miller currently has three glowing reviews at Amazon. That is probably explained by this:
You all know what to do.
