Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones:
Preparatory Design for a Stained Glass Window, Virgil and Horace
(Undated)

"If I emphatically whisper, I believe the right readers will hear."

Since I published my book, Cluelessness, three weeks ago, I have received several calls from various “agents” seeking to assist me in turning the book into the bestseller they presume I intend it to become. Each has a scheme that they claim could transform my work from an unassuming self-published into something notorious. One dealt with connecting authors with agents who purchase subsidiary rights, such as audiobook production, foreign-language, and serialization rights. She had assembled a list of “over 600” active purchasers of such rights. She offered to sell access to this email list for three thousand dollars and to throw in some free advice on the “come-on letter” that should accompany each cold-call contact. I sat through an hour-long self-promotional video in which I was introduced to someone with superhuman self-regard and invited to “invest” in my book. She was not interested in investing in my book, though she seemed more than willing, downright anxious, to profit off it nonetheless. I declined her invitation.

There might not be any end to those who feel moved to offer me some scheme to further invest in my dream, though my dream for the book doesn’t quite match the dream they aspire for me to have for the work. I’ve already invested considerable time and treasure just to bring the damned thing to publication. I had not seriously considered creating a money pit where I could continue to throw perfectly decent, if non-existent, savings down into it. I know from personal experience how the Published Author Myths (PAMs) can utterly undermine an otherwise uplifting experience. If my goal in writing Cluelessness had been to become a best-selling author again or fabulously wealthy, I would have been wiser to “invest” in lottery tickets. The dominant PAM must be that the world had been impatiently waiting for me to finally release my brilliance into a marketplace desperate for the deliverance that only my book could provide. Authors have been successfully fetishized to the point where they appear omniscient, even wise, when they’re most often more like Kurt Vonnegut’s fictional greatest writer who ever lived, Kilgore Trout, whose books featured lurid covers and could only be found in shady porno parlors’ back rooms. Author’s ain’t all that special.

I make no excuses for my many shortcomings. After all, remember that I’m the guy who self-published Cluelessness. An agent I spoke with yesterday, after he contacted me, asked if I wanted Cluelessness to be picked up by one of the major imprints, this being the sort of agent he fancied himself to be. I replied that I didn’t really. The major houses virtually all require that their authors transfer their copyrights to them as a precondition for publication. In return, the author might receive an advance, though these have become increasingly rare, and a small percentage of the eventual purchase price, the bulk of which is split between seller, distributor, and physical book producer, and some “promotion.” The cost of those goods sold far exceeds the author’s share. Of course, Amazon reserves the absolute right to put any work on sale at any time, the discount for which comes out of the author’s portion of the split. I replied that, no, I thought that being discovered by one of the major houses, which signs scores of authors and relies upon the law of large numbers to sort out the few winners, would qualify as something akin to a worst-case scenario for Cluelessness. Just because I’m self-avowed clueless doesn’t mean I’m stupid.

Other agents maintain lists and offer to include me on theirs for a modest “investment.” One claimed they operated the site where readers search for their next read, as if such a place existed. I can’t quite imagine that there are legions of desperate readers frantically seeking their next transformative read, and that they subscribe to this guy’s authoritative list. Who pre-reads these works to qualify them for the list? It turns out that nobody does. In lieu of curating, the list owner sorts out recommendations based on author contributions. Several of the “agents” who’ve contacted me seem to run active shakedown rackets.

My aspirations for Cluelessness remain modest, given that I’ve released it into a marketplace expected to absorb four million new titles this year and even more than that in each of the years after that. It’s at best a gnat. I never aspired to become either rich or famous, given what seems to have happened to everyone who already had rich and famous happen to them. That seems like a suicidal goal, one guaranteed to blow up a life. My life doesn’t need blowing up. I am promoting Cluelessness in rather old-fashioned ways. I’m visiting bookstores and libraries, sending press releases, and asking colleagues to leave reviews on their social media—word of mouth. The fact is that nobody knows where their next reader might lurk, and that the connection between any author and their reader must remain mysterious. The most meaningful books in my life didn’t come by recommendation or subscription, but by accidental convergence. A book fell off the shelf in front of me when I was searching for something else. I happened upon an obscure title in a bargain book bin. I stumbled upon an author who never gained notoriety but whose work came to mean virtually everything to me. If Cluelessness has a chance to be anywhere near that class, I must be careful about how I promote it. It might be best touted as a poorly-kept secret whose mystery best endorses it. If I emphatically whisper, I believe the right readers will hear.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #EndDays, #PureSchmaltz