Once I drunkenly took a dare and made a promise to start a publishing company with zero capital.
I always keep even my drunkenest promises, so long as they don't involve my orifices and a jackfruit, so here it is.
All books are available as ebooks on Amazon (see how that no money thing works now? And see how this venture is only going to last till I get sued?) and will, as soon as I can figure out the tricky pricing business, be available on paper as Amazon PODs,* which to my mind are another type of ebook.
Because many people just need something to sniff, and to hold.
I understand; although I was jazzed to learn BASIC in the 1980s I have a deeply ambivalent relationship with the device age. Although if your caveat is "I don't have a Kindle," please note: Kindle books can be read on any computer.
(And are smartphones really my problem, or is it really that we're all drowning in a sea of seven billion meaningless meaning-seeking souls? Or maybe it's this vaunted democratization of publishing. Shudder. Such an ego-avalanche is as sure to kill the next Confederacy of Dunces sequel as the plutocratic publishing industry of old. Thus my business model: I'm not staking money, I'm staking my reputation as a judge of texts. I have always dreamed of a meritocracy, and this is as close to such a little kingdom as I can probably get.)
I have to warn you though, Amazon charges an arm and a goddamn leg per treepage.
AAAAAANYWAY. I had to write the first two books myself. But within days you will be treated to the opportunity to purchase...
BEYOND THE BUSH!
... a unique slab of dystopian satire that represents the fruit of Juvenal-only-knows how many hours of labor and winnowing over the past decade or so on the part of one Robert Ignatius Dillon.
I was wondering all along whether Dillon's BUSH would turn out to be an incoherent waste of the poor creature's time, but it didn't. It definitely did not. There was a method behind his madness after all, or at least it appears in the end that there was, and that's what matters.
But more on that later.
For now, here are the attractive cover shots of and handy links to the currently available Hopeless cyberproducts:
THE TALKATIVE CORPSE: A LOVE LETTER is the book I finished writing this year.
Although I do have a lovely novel-writing track record with a real publisher, Nine-Banded Books, which released my comic tragedy NVSQVAM (nowhere) in 2011, I didn't feel up to groveling to a publisher (scroll down past the dead bat) for THE CORPSE, because I'm also working full-time as a proofreader while shoveling my way toward the finish line of my sci-fi opus, LYFE, which has been in the works as long as BUSH, and fuck that.
Anyway, here's the cover, very nicely designed by Mike Browarski (WHOM I PAID for his work, you cheap baboons):
It's roughly a year in the life of John Jaggo, an unusually angry but meek victim of the recent turn of the wheel of economic history. Having nothing better to do, he decides to laminate his diary in hopes that future archaeologists will be amused by it. Then he gets blacked-out pissed on Halloween and wakes up to discover he's drunk-dialed a murderous demon. The future archaeologists are more shocked than amused, since Jaggo's reports of his existence are so different from the many copies of popular movies that they've dug up; but arguing with each other over the manuscript certainly keeps them busy.
(If you missed the giant link above, buy CORPSE here.)
Finally, Hopeless Books invites you to e-read my first novel, GIRL DETECTIVES, a comic mystery of misplaced revenge. It also unintentionally served as a chronicle (albeit caricatured) of the last golden days of the newspaper industry in Chicago.
(E-obtain Girl Detectives here, please, sir or madam.)
GIRL DETECTIVES is already available on paper; in fact its original incarnation was as a POD, before the e-reader thing happened; I gave up on shopping it around back in the days when publishers didn't accept electronic submissions quite yet, and I was a "nontraditional student," and didn't have the money to shit my pants, much less mail bricks of paper to dozens of disgruntled slush-pile minions.
Anyway, the paper POD is currently overpriced and I need to reformat it, but the Kindle version is cheap.
Yes, there's murder.
And here's the beautiful cover which Frankie O'Malley of the Safes designed for that paper version, AVAILABLE HERE.
(Overpriced paperbacks, get 'em while they're hot.)
* POD = "Publish on Demand," for those who don't recall those hoary days of the mid-aughts; they keep an electronic file of your text and then print it out one by one whenever someone orders a copy.
