People are constantly asking me this. Sure, I would like to be published by a traditional publishing house such as Scribners, Doubleday, Dutton, Grosset & Dunlap, Random House, and the like.
But, frankly, I am haunted by the experience of John Kennedy Toole, who wrote a magnificent novel, A Confederacy of Dunces. It is said that every major publishing house in the United States either rejected or ignored his manuscript. In despair, Toole killed himself. Later, thanks to efforts by his mother and the Louisiana State University Press, the book was published posthumously in 1980, with a foreword by Walker Percy. The next year it won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Xlibris Corporation is the digital and e-book subsidiary of Random House. Xlibris is already renown for its fast turnaround. How I found out about Xlibris is that an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux recommended it to me for Leopardo da Gotcha, a picture book I had written about my Bengal cat. (Leopardo's website is www.leopardodagotcha.com.) So I went with Xlibris for the cat book, and when Xlibris later contacted me to ask if I had any other manuscripts, I sent them The Passing of Merlin Zauber.
In my view, merit accrues from having written a book in the first place. Whether the book is successful or widely distributed doesn't matter from a spiritual point of view. After all, Melville's Moby-Dick or the White Whale wasn't much appreciated when it first appeared. Members of the audience hearing Beethoven's Symphony No. 8 for the first time walked out in the middle of the performance. A great work of art breaks traditional molds.
I think The Passing of Merlin Zauber is a good book, maybe a great one, but that, of course, is just my opinion.
© Copyright 2005 by Robert J. R. Rockwood. All rights reserved.