S.G. Browne

Last April, I was approached by my buddy, James Melzer, to submit a short story to an eBook collection he was putting together as part of a promotional launch package for his upcoming novel, Escape: A Zombies Chronicle Novel. The idea was to offer up a collection of short stories for free to anyone who pre-ordered a copy of his novel. I liked the idea, so I said “count me in.”

The Mother Load is an eBook collection of never-before published stories from Mur Lafferty (“Style Won’t Save You”), David Moody (“The Deal”), Jeremy C. Shipp (“Spider Clowns From Planet X”), Wayne Simmons (“Mary’s Boy Child”), Matt Wallace (“Knowing”), and yours truly (“Softland”).

I won’t give away what any of the other stories are about, but “Softland” is about a family of two brothers and their grandfather who live in central California and who have the ability to steal luck. It’s also the story upon which my next novel, Lucky Bastard, is loosely based. Though with a different storyline and different main characters.

So how can you get a copy of The Mother Load? That’s easy. Just pre-order Escape: A Zombie Chronicles Novel by James Melzer at any of the following online retailers:

• Amazon (Print Edition)

• Amazon (Kindle Edition)

• Amazon UK

• Amazon Canada

• Borders.com

• Indigo Canada

Once you’ve pre-ordered Escape, YOU MUST FORWARD YOUR PURCHASE RECEIPT TO EscapeNovel@Gmail.com.  Once you do this, you will receive a .zip file that contains The Mother Load in .mobi, .epub and PDF formats for your eReaders within 24 hours.

The collection also contains an excerpt of Escape so you know what you have to look forward to.  You can also check out a synopsis and learn more about Escape: A Zombies Chronicle Novel by visiting the Official Website of James Melzer.

That’s it.  Any questions, let me know.  Happy reading!

For the most part, it’s a bad idea to read your reviews. One, they’re just someone’s opinion and not necessarily indicative of the quality of the work, good or bad. Two, writing, like any art, is subjective. As a writer, you have to remember that and not take anything personally. And three, it’s much too easy to get caught up in what someone says, whether it’s positive or negative. But as any writer can attest, no matter how glowing the reviews, a negative review has a way of embedding itself in your DNA.

Not that I don’t read any reviews. I give a look to those from places like Kirkus and Publishers Weekly and The Washington Post in hopes of a good review that yields a nice, juicy blurb.

Those are always fun. And I’ll read reviews on blogs that have requested a review copy or for which I’ve authored a guest post. As for the reviews on Amazon and Goodreads and random blogs that show up in my Google alerts? I do my best to avoid them.

But sometimes, you can’t help it.

While checking online for local bookstore locations where I might be able to swing by and sign stock copy, I came across a reader review about Fated that gave it one star and included the following gems:

Could it be the worst book ever written?
Completely mindless.
Worst use of $$ I’ve ever spent.

Ouch. But at least they read the book to the end because they didn’t believe it could be that bad all the way through.

Aah, another satisfied customer.

And then there’s the blog that listed Breathers as one of the most disappointing books of 2010 (even though the book came out in 2009). For the most part, the blog explains in detail why Breathers failed to live up to expectations, then finishes with this:

As a result — and due to Browne’s at-best serviceable prose — Breathers fails to elicit either laughs or sympathy. It’s horrifying, but not, I suspect, in the way that Browne intended.

Can I have some salt with that knife wound?

These are just a couple of examples of the criticism that authors expose themselves to when they get something published. That doesn’t mean we have to believe it. Or take it personally, which isn’t an easy thing to do. The trick is to try to have a sense of humor about it and realize you can’t please everyone. But if you please yourself, then you’ve done your job.

And if that doesn’t help to make you feel better, you can always respond to your bad reviews like this:

So last week I mentioned that from 1992-2002 I’d sent out more than 500 queries for stories and novels, with the number of those stories actually accepted for publication being around 3%.  As you can imagine, that makes for a lot of rejection letters.

Most of the time, the rejections weren’t particularly helpful and were nothing more than basic form letters:

Thank you for submitting to Whatever Magazine.  We have read your story but don’t feel it fits our needs at this time.  Yadda yadda yadda.

Occasionally, I received rejection letters with constructive criticism and encouraging comments like:

Close but no cigar. Try again.
Not quite right for our audience. Good job!
Would love to see more of your work.

And once in a while, I received a hand written rejection that challenged my ego, like the following one from Deathrealm back in 1994 for my short story “What You Can’t See,” which was about a little boy who has a monster in his closet and the monsters turn out to be his parents.

Mr. Browne:

We all know about the thing under the bed and in our closet.  It’s as much a part of our childhood as doing chores.  Basic and fundamental.  You wouldn’t write a story about brushing your teeth, would you?

Two months later, the story was accepted by another publication. But that publication went out of business before the story could see print.

While I’ve thrown away the majority of my rejection letters, I kept this one because it’s my all time favorite. After all, it’s not often your writing gets compared to good dental hygiene.

Back in the early 1990’s I was a fledgling horror writer, penning supernatural horror stories about alternate realities and Nintendo gods and things that go bump in the night and sending them off to magazines with names like Deathrealm and Pulphouse and Haunts, among others.  Lots of others.

Naturally, I felt my stories were worth being published, otherwise I wouldn’t have sent them out. To be honest, looking back on those first stories, they weren’t particularly good.  I wouldn’t ever want to publish them in a collection as an example of my writing abilities.  More as an example of how you can eventually get from A to Z.

But in spite of my current perspective on my past writing, I did get published for the first time ever in a digest sized horror and dark fantasy magazine called Redcat Magazine in the Spring of 1994.

“Wish You Were Here” was a simple little tale about an airplane that crashes and the thrill-seeking passenger who is doomed to experience the last moments of his life over and over.  Just a month earlier the same story had been rejected by the editors at Deathrealm for being too sophomoric.  Which it probably was.  But Redcat loved it, bought it, and published it a few months later for $5 and a half dozen author copies.

Score!

At that time, I’d only been writing for a few years and I figured I’d get more short stories published and would find representation for my first novel that I’d just written and be on my way to publishing glory.  The fact that the next four stories I wrote got accepted for publication only added to my optimism.

Instead, those four short stories never saw print because the magazines that accepted them went out of business. After that, I hit a solid rejection streak that lasted five years until I published another short story.  And it would be another ten years after that until I published my first novel, Breathers, which was actually my fourth novel.

All in all, from 1992 to 2002, I submitted my short stories and my first three novels to more than five hundred magazines and agents and editors.  I eventually wound up with sixteen acceptances and ten short stories published, which comes to an acceptance rate of about 3%.  Which means I got rejected 97% of the time.

Try taking that success rate into a singles bar and see what that does for your self-esteem.

So you always like to start a new year on an optimistic note, one filled with hope and prosperity and good fortune.  But for the publishing industry, which includes publishers, booksellers, and writers, this isn’t exactly what you would call starting off on the right foot.

Apparently, due to financial problems, Borders is delaying payments to major publishers.  Here’s the story reported Monday from the New York Times, which includes the industry prediction that a bankruptcy filing from Borders is now more likely than ever.

This was followed on Wednesday by an updated report in Publishers Weekly.

And the latest from Publishers Weekly says that publishers are unimpressed with Borders proposals to accept a note or bond in exchange for missed payments and for a delay in making payments. Borders told publishers it would have more details next week after it heard back from the banks it is in talks with to receive new loans. One publisher said the proposal, as it stands now, “is not going to fly.”

I’ve done a number of signings at Borders and have always appreciated their support.  And whether or not you patronize Borders or have an aversion to large chain bookstores, this is discouraging news for writers and readers alike.