Here's something you might be interested in.
When I was a teenager in the 1970s, one of my dreams was to some day write for the confession magazines. During the height of the sexual revolution, those publications were really dirty and I would have sold my soul to the devil to get my hands on them. As my friend, Claudia, once said, "Confession magazines were to women what Playboy was to men." My parents were not the type to read such trash. The only way I could read them was to babysit my neighbor's kids because she had those magazines stored under her bird cage. I read about stuff I never heard about anywhere else. I can still remember the story about two bored housewives whose husbands didn't satisfy them so they satisfied each other. Holy Cow!
Twenty years later, the publications had completely turned to milk toast. There was nothing sexy about them whatsoever. My little contributions appeared in the "Voice Beyond the Grave" and "Incredible But True" features. But I liked the family-owned business a lot. When I heard that Stephen King got his start writing for Dorchester Media's book line, I looked into it. I started writing Glamour Ghost for their Hollywood Headlines book line in August of 2011. A month later, the one-hundred year old company went out of business.
According to an article in Publisher's Weekly, Dorchester's owner attributed his loss to the fact that Barnes & Noble drove him out of business by refusing to carry his authors' books. Apparently, during the Great Recession, B & N narrowed down it's inventory and Dorchester books didn't make the cut.
I was really lost when I discovered that I wouldn't be able to submit my book. Not knowing what else to do, I self-published it and B & N subsequently picked it up. How crazy is that? If I had gone with Dorchester Media, B & N wouldn't have touched it, but when B & N found it on Smashwords, the powers-that-be put it in their store. How crazy is that?
When I was a teenager in the 1970s, one of my dreams was to some day write for the confession magazines. During the height of the sexual revolution, those publications were really dirty and I would have sold my soul to the devil to get my hands on them. As my friend, Claudia, once said, "Confession magazines were to women what Playboy was to men." My parents were not the type to read such trash. The only way I could read them was to babysit my neighbor's kids because she had those magazines stored under her bird cage. I read about stuff I never heard about anywhere else. I can still remember the story about two bored housewives whose husbands didn't satisfy them so they satisfied each other. Holy Cow!
Twenty years later, the publications had completely turned to milk toast. There was nothing sexy about them whatsoever. My little contributions appeared in the "Voice Beyond the Grave" and "Incredible But True" features. But I liked the family-owned business a lot. When I heard that Stephen King got his start writing for Dorchester Media's book line, I looked into it. I started writing Glamour Ghost for their Hollywood Headlines book line in August of 2011. A month later, the one-hundred year old company went out of business.
According to an article in Publisher's Weekly, Dorchester's owner attributed his loss to the fact that Barnes & Noble drove him out of business by refusing to carry his authors' books. Apparently, during the Great Recession, B & N narrowed down it's inventory and Dorchester books didn't make the cut.
I was really lost when I discovered that I wouldn't be able to submit my book. Not knowing what else to do, I self-published it and B & N subsequently picked it up. How crazy is that? If I had gone with Dorchester Media, B & N wouldn't have touched it, but when B & N found it on Smashwords, the powers-that-be put it in their store. How crazy is that?