Idiotprogrammer: Texas Literary Blog

Robert’s Roundup #51 (March-April 2025)

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MAILING LIST: I just started a mailing list for my publishing company. Will mail out every 2 months and will include excerpts from my Robert’s Roundup columns and other random stuff. MASTADON: https://booktoot.club/@nagletx

Abbreviations: KU means Kindle Unlimited,  and APUB means it was published under an Amazon imprint.NYP means “Name Your Price” (that’s an option on Smashwords and other booksellers). If you’d like to submit an ebook to me for review or mention in this column, see my instructions here.

Hey, guess what? I made a 12 minute video about my obsession with ebooks (See below).

Indie Author Spotlight

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Under the Radar

Good To a Fault: A Novel by Marina Endicott (W). Endicott is a Canadian/British Columbian novelist . In this interview with her, Will Johnson writes, “Endicott’s work has emotional and moral complexity, and often explores matters of faith, whether she’s evoking a struggling contemporary family or writing about the vaudeville era.”

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Library Purchases/Printed books

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Creative Commons/Freebies

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Literary Articles and Essays

Becky Tuch on Can We Talk about Narrative Magazine (about exorbitant submission fees). I have lots of opinions about this (and I think Narrative is doing a lot of things right), but the amount of fees they charge is certainly excessive. Tuch runs the influential Lit Mag News. I love the idea of lit mags and for a while I subscribed to a dozen of them at once. But here are the problems with litmags:

  • Submission fees make it very hard to regularly submit.
  • Most of them are subsidized by universities or grants from arts organizations (and not sustainable).
  • Print copies of these mags are very expensive. They were always pricey, but now they’re ridiculously so.
  • Their primary purpose is to help adjuncts and writers fill up their CV so they can get better jobs.
  • Their value in raising an author’s visibility is very small (except to academic hiring committees perhaps).
  • They are staffed mainly by unpaid grad students and low paid staff.
  • They pay next to nothing.
  • Their tastes tend towards the academic/literary type of writings, so that excludes multiple kinds of writing

I used to follow the litmag world fairly closely (and I used to edit my own litmag and had plans to start a new online one). But there were always problems. First, it is really hard to make an online zine work — especially if it featured more creative things like poetry and fiction. Second, monetization means really terrible tradeoffs. If you lock everything behind a paywall, then you have to spend a lot more time and money on marketing. Developing a monetizable website is not easy; it requires a lot of planning and technological prowess. I probably am better suited to do this than other people, but ideally you’d want a technical staff to be able to run it semi-professionally.

The only zine I’ve seen do it well is Conjunctions. But there are lots of caveats here. Conjunctions has a long-running history and archive and stable of subscribers and authors. They have received grant money for quite some time. A lot of people already know about them. Also it probably helps that they are close to New York. Also, Conjunctions doesn’t put out issues on a regular schedule. They just do it whenever. Frankly, although their issues are very adventurous and thematically interesting, they have the organization, history and funding to solicit lots of high profile authors. And a NY publisher will likely be happy to offer you free content for the publicity alone.

(Fun fact: Older issues of Conjunctions are often discounted on Amazon. If you set a price alert for the editor Bradford Morrow, you can grab lots of old issues for a dollar each or so).

Rant

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Capsule Book Reviews

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Multimedia/Podcasts, Etc

Personville Press Deals

 run Personville Press, a small literary book press where all the ebooks cost less than $4. Prices normally appear highest on Amazon, Apple, Kobo and BN, somewhat lower on Google Play Books and lower on the two DRM-free stores which are Smashwords and Payhip. Personville Press is committed to selling DRM-free ebooks and audio files directly from the Personville Press payhip store or from Smashwords. The prices listed here are the non-discounted price on Amazon. Check the links to see if they are discounted at the moment (it happens often).

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Robert Nagle

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