More re: publishing one's own work oneself (see previous post). I have especially good reasons to consider it: the state of the market these days, in which nothing except easily identifiable genre fiction is considered by the big publishing houses and the small houses are becoming fussier and fussier (see this one, which requires a bookstore receipt for one of their books to accompany every unsolicited submission) and less and less accommodating of original work; the length and highly original subject matter of my magnum opus, The Adorations; and the misfortunes and sheer incompetence that my book has already endured. Wait till I tell ya. The book was originally scheduled to be published by Kein & Aber, the Swiss house that published, and publishes, my Killoyle "trilogy"; well, they decided to bring out Adorations first, the Killoyles, which had already been published in German, second. Great enthusiasm, on my part and theirs, greeted this prospect. I was paid a reasonable advance. K&A arranged and scheduled a ten-day book tour of Germany and Switzerland featuring me and my long-time translator and erstwhile drinking buddy Harry Rowohlt. The task of rendering Adorations' 600+ pages into German was assigned to Harry, but since Harry translates nothing written by women, and since one of the two narratives that make up The Adorations is purportedly written by a woman, the Swiss reporter Martine Jeanrenaud, a female translator, Susanne Aeckerle, who, I believe, translates no men (Germans, OK? Go figure), was brought on board and Germanized the distaff half while Harry did the same for the male part. Considerable money was spent on this project. But the two gender-discriminators must have worked well together, since they were finished within a year. Corrections to geography and history were made, with my approval, the manuscript was edited, and Die Anbetungen, as it was called auf deutsch, was scheduled for publication in the fall of 2007. A 50-page sampler was published and sent out to literary publications; an artist was hired to do the cover (questionable results of that idea shown above). The world--the German-speaking part of it, anyway--was my oyster. Then everything fell apart. Harry got sick and our book tour was canceled, my presence alone being deemed an insufficient draw. (He's doing better now, I'm glad to say. here's a recent video clip of him, in German, on a TV program.) Around the same time, my German-language agent went out of business. Then K&A told me they would be changing the order of publication, reissuing the Killoyles first, and bringing out Die Anbetungen after. Sure enough, they brought out the Killoyles, in a handsome boxed set, and that was nice; but as 2007, then 2008, slipped away into the misty past, I began to notice different publication dates popping up for Die Anbetungen on German-language book sites: spring '08, fall '08, spring '09....finally I asked them directly. Oh yes, they said, didn't we tell you? (They hadn't.) We've decided to cancel publication. Economic prospects, you know, and this and that--oh yes, one of your characters is Adolf Hitler, and we don't think it would sell in Germany because of that...but didn't you know all this before, I inquired? Well, yes, and no. Anyway, there it is: take it or leave it. We love your work, Mr. Boylan, but fuck you anyway. Well, that was that. I was in no position to do anything like sue for breach of contract, although that is what it was. I had no agent, and Harry, when pressed, grudgingly admitted he never cared for Adorations much anyway, so I'd get no help from that quarter. (He has considerable influence in the German literary world, and helped get my Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad published over here by Grove.) Out of all this mess I got the lovely cover above, a 50-page sampler, the German translation in lieu of kill fee, and more frustration than the average genre novelist encounters in a lifetime. Now, if on top of all this I also mention that my agent in New York has been trying in vain to sell Adorations (which he considers a masterpiece, poor fellow), for four years now, the picture is complete; the advisability of publishing the damn thing on my own web site, and charging via PayPal for the complete book, becomes more obvious. But what do I know?