Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Book Search

I did a vanity book search via Google today. Ya know, when you search for your own name. In this case, a search for "barry hollander" found lots of interesting and old stuff. Most of it is academic books citing my research, but not all of it. Let's look at the fun stuff.

For example, there's this mediocre short story I wrote years ago for an anthology, or this mention of me having contributed "notable dark work" in the top summary of speculative fiction, or this damn good zombie story I wrote for a top anthology (cover to the left), or (sigh, not proud of this) a story I wrote in a moment of weakness for an erotic fantasy anthology. Got paid for all of them. Money is money.

In all, I sold maybe 50 short stories during my brief fling with fiction. I gave up. Too hard to write that stuff, and way more competitive than academic or journalistic writing, at least in getting acceptances (and a paycheck). Hell, for some of these anthologies they bought 10 or so stories out of 500 submissions, harder odds than getting published in an academic journal. Some magazines and anthologies I was in, they accepted only 1 percent of all submissions. Even JMCQ (the top academic journal in my field) isn't that tough to get in.



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