Disappearances tells the story of a young man mentally disconnected. Early one morning he’s awoken from a restless sleep by a plane crash outside his apartment window. Rushing down to the scene, the young man is unable to find anyone – no people, no rescue workers, no survivors. He is alone. Everyone he loves, everyone else on the planet as far as he knows, has disappeared.

Frank’s task is to listen to the young man’s story, help him discover the secrets behind the disappearance of everyone he loves, and most importantly, to reconnect the young man with the rest of the human race. But before the young man can do that, he needs to learn the most important lessons about himself, his father, and how to move forward with his life.

Download the PDF from my site

Please help me support digital self-published books by helping me spread this around the internet. The book is freely available from my site, from Scribd, or Feedbooks.

I’m also considering Smash Words – not because I want to make money on this (though I wouldn’t mind), but to reach an audience outside the typical self-publishing sites. That’s something for another day, however. Preparing this for publication is the reason behind my long absence on this blog and it wore me out. I want to get back to business as usual before taking another step like that.

Thanks for reading! I hope you like the book!

Today we’ll hear from someone inside the traditional publishing world. This was emailed to me from a member of an established New York publishing house. Aside from working in publishing, he’s also been conventionally published himself. I know it’s unfortunate, but I’ve been asked to conceal his name. He doesn’t want to anger the publishing company that employs him. That’s fine, I understand. I’m just glad to have a viewpoint from inside the machine.

Anyhow, here is his insight, after being presented with my questions:

I totally agree with what you say about a self-pubbed work reaching critical mass via word of mouth, blogging, etc, and, most important, actual sales figures. If a self-pubbed author approaches a publisher and says I’ve hoofed my ass from Kalamazoo to Timbuktu to sell 100,000 copies of a book that explains everything about life, the publisher will sit up and take note.

As for part 2, in general, I think the gate-keeping system in place works pretty well right now. In every media there’s some sort of comparable set up of readers/scouts > agents > editors > publishers/producers/decision makers. Self pubbing or publishing on demand doesn’t really change anything. You’re either happy being self-pubbed or you still want acceptance/approval from established houses for reasons of greed or fame, and possibly on the rare occasion true belief that you have something that will improve the world somehow and want the greater distribution capacity a major house provides.

If this is all in terms of trying to get into a writing program, I’d like to think all that matters is the writing itself. Saying that one is self-pubbed might give credit in terms of the author’s willingness to work their butt off.

Thanks for the input, Anonymous.

Join us next time for the final part of our discussion, where we’ll wrap up our discussion and try to make some sense of everything. Thanks for reading.