25/03/2024
Had to give a detailed breakdown of my book to a contest recently, so they could figure out if they think it's a novel or a short story collection (I think it's a novelthology, but there's no categories for that). They were very pleasant, but it made me realise I am definitely too weird for most competitions.
I've done the SPSFC3 (where I think I was again a little too weird)
and I'm going to do this next one (which I love)
but I think that might be it. Unless I can find some kind of pseudoagent to find weird contests for weird people for me, it takes an awful long time to find one place where I or a particular project belong. That's a sort of hidden struggle for a lot of artists that create in niches, you're not going to get people interested in your work if they don't yet know what it is. Nostalgia is really powerful, so something that reminds an audience of something else will always overshadow you.
This is true in the Lego world, where project ideas submitted to Lego are almost guaranteed success if they are depictions of old sitcoms. If people fondly remember it, they'll vote for it. If it's new (like many brilliant moon bases my friends have made) it will struggle, and ultimately be squished under COMEDY SHOW NUMBER 9877, FEATURING SULKY CHARACTER, FUNNY CHICKEN SCENE, AND HUMOROUS PRODUCT PLACEMENT!!!
Being weird is easy, comes to me naturally.
But pitching weird to the world is hard.
For this reason, and thanks to enlightening conversations with dozens of agents over the past few months, I am seriously considering going self-pub for all of my books.
It might just be the future.
I said it was in 2015, maybe I was right.
