In September 2002, Paula Guran wrote an article called "Tribal Stand" for Locus Online. In it she complained that following the decline of the horror market in the late 1980s, the small press was surrendered to incompetents. "And the tragedy is that the most self-aware among this new breed know they don't measure up to Real Writers, and are happy to tread water in an eddy that is 90% pointless, derivative crap, appearing in dreadfully-conceived anthologies full of amateurs, or excreting another novel-length waste of time about vampire cockroaches," she said.

At the time, I had complaints about the piece. I still do. Her complaints about online venues are especially silly, not only because Guran made her bones with them, but because of the number of important professional and semi-professional markets on the Web. Take, for example, ChiZine, which pays five cents a word for fiction, has a real business model (sponsorship by Leisure Books), and shared a judge with the National Book Awards for its annual contest in Stewart O'Nan. Good ol' Fortean Bureau ain't too shabby either, he says conflict-of-interestedly.

But I gotta tell ya, she was right about something, and unlike her, I'm naming names. Naturally, Guran's article caused a lot of shouting and breast-beating in the horror community, and more than a few public responses. One particularly inspired choice was the idea to create a small press anthology of vampire cockroach stories. David Niall Wilson signed on to edit it, and Monica O'Rourke's Catalyst Press, a new publisher that used print-on-demand technology, agreed to publish. To avoid looking like whiny whiners who whine, the antho would be for charity. No payment (not that POD anthos pay anyway) but all the proceeds would go to…well….somewhere good. Maybe a brand-new scholarship, maybe literacy, who the hell knew? Nobody in the project. The submission guidelines were a wonder to behold, though: David Wilson was full of piss and vinegar, calling for high standards and promising vigorous editing for the stories he accepted. Nobody was just gonna waltz up to his micropress charity anthology having shit out some story of a poor slob who dies when the cockroaches in his cupboard suddenly become…vampires! and expect to get in. The rope was velvet, not velveteen. A gentleman knows the difference.

I ignored Cockroach Suckers. I really did. When I want to give to obscure charities, I surrender all the quarters in my pocket to the first busker I see on the street. It's easier than writing a story. But in late 2002, David Niall Wilson solicited me personally with a gracious, if slightly desperate email. As it turns out, when you put out a call for submissions for a vampire cockroach anthology, you get lots of shitty stories! Actually, you get one shitty story, over and over again. I'm sure you can guess the plot. David wanted a story from me because he had heard that my writing was offbeat. Someone wanted a story from me, no waiting! And he had even heard of my writing - that's almost as cool as him actually having read some. Being an egomaniac the personal appeal worked, so I wrote him a 5900-word story with cockroaches. No vampires though; I still have some standards, if only in that "buy me dinner first" kinda way.

That was early 2003. Here we are now on the cusp of 2005. Is Cockroach Suckers on a bookshelf near you? Have the little children learned to read thanks to all the Harry Potter novels we were able to buy for the local bookmobile? Nuh-uh.

You see, Catalyst Press soon "reorganized." My grandmother also "reorganized" recently, but we at least buried her within a few days. Titles were cancelled, including Cockroach Suckers. David was upset, and contemplated putting the book out on his own. His own ChiZine column of the summer of 2003 expressed his annoyance with the latest turn of events. Then Monica reneged and brought back the anthology - she had cancelled it, she said, because she thought that it had suddenly become a non-charity anthology. So we were back on.

Or were we? Catalyst Press supposedly merged with one of the principles of 3F Publications, a very ambitious micropress that promised large numbers of anthologies and novels, paid advances though it was POD, and signed up department regulars and columnists for a forthcoming monthly horror magazine. It too had cracked up on the shores of Lake Reality, but one of the remaining publishers attempted to soldier on in reduced circumstances by joining forces with Catalyst. The resultant company, DeMonNic Books, published…a press release, and single title: Gary Braunbeck's excellent collection From Beneath These Fields of Blood. Then it fell over. Catalyst de-catalyzed itself or something, and was independent once more.

Cockroach Suckers was finally re-announced, and not as a nasty ol' POD title. Instead it would be a fine signed limited edition of the sort horror collectors will pay $45.00 for. A charity, ProLiteracy, was even decided on. David again asked me for help in brainstorming some ideas for the gewgaws, as he wanted to make the edition worth buying. I contacted a friend at Archie McPhee and got him to donate 200 giant toy cockroaches, one for each copy.

Why did I allow someone else to trade on my name for an anthology that I never really cared too much about, and one that was already a year late? Because I was a giant sucker! I'm one of those folks who, when asked for help, helps. When I say I'm going to do something, I do it. Good personality traits in general, I'm sure, but it made me very lonely as far as Cockroach Suckers was concerned, since doing what one said one was going to is apparently a new and frightening concept.

As a signed, limited edition, signature sheets would have to be prepared, mailed off to each contributor for signing, and then returned to the printer so that they could be "tipped-in" to the bound volumes. We had a fair number of contributors, and one of them, Simon Logan, lived overseas. If we wanted to get Cockroach Suckers out by the end of the year, and we did, the sheets would have to go out pretty soon, as it could take a few months to get everyone to do them.

You see, oddly enough, not everyone in the world has nothing better to do than spend all night signing his or her name. Sig sheets can end up at the bottom of an overburdened inbox pretty easily, so they have to go out on time, with plenty of warning, and with communication between all signers. The problem was that Monica O'Rourke didn't know how to handle sig sheets, but was somehow convinced that 20+ people on two continents would fill them out and get them back to the printer in the course of a couple of weeks. Once they had been manufactured by elves, that is. So we waited and waited. PDF proofs were passed around for proofreading, and when a professional copyeditor of my acquaintance went over my story with her usual fine-tooth comb and I sent in the changes…I got chewed out. There were too many changes. The format I sent the corrections back in was read-only (yeah, so was the format I received the proof in!). The complaint sounded like nothing so much as one of Guran's whining muck-eaters. Waaah, we don't want to correct every mistake in the book we're charging $45.00 for!

Treated even more poorly was Simon Logan. He wanted to know when he could expect the sig sheets. We had been waiting for nearly two years now, had no contract, had no neat little slips from the publisher that would allow us to claim a pro rate for the story in the form of a tax deduction, nothing but promises and a pdf file. Simon lived across the Atlantic; mail from the US is not a trivial thing. Did he get an answer? No, he got dismissed and told that he wasn't being a pro for actually wanting some kind of actual information from either David or Monica.

Simon was a real pro though, and he pulled his story. I should have done it too, in solidarity, and am ashamed that I did not. At that point, I had no confidence that the anthology would actually come out, the last two years of Dave Wilson's thunderous "It WILL come out!" rhetoric aside. The antho had also hit the bestseller list on Shocklines.com, an online store that takes pre-orders. That was a good sign, wasn't it? The cockroaches were rearing to go. No sig sheets though.

Then just two years after first getting that email from Dave Wilson, I get another one.

I hate to do this, and I've held off all I can on it, but I'm going to have to concede defeat. Monica hasn't responded to me recently, and obviously there are no signature sheets in the offing. I didn't send the contracts because I had the feeling that they wouldn't get into the mail - I was right. There are other issues I can't mention that have convinced me no further books will come out of Catalyst Press. I have asked a couple of other publishers, but haven't gotten any real interest from anyone for taking this project on. I think you've all waited long enough, and I wish I had better news.

Thanks to all of you for the efforts you put into this, and for sticking with me while I tried to beat the book out of the publisher that isn't.

Surprise!

So, anyone want to buy a 5900-word story about a kid who eats cockroaches while around him the world ends? I can't even call this a lesson learned, because I knew micropress anthologies were 99% bullshit, and that the frequent appeals to charity are often just a smoke screen designed to get a publisher some stories from writers otherwise too good to write for free. The lesson keeps needing to be learned though. The many small presses that have died since Guran's article are already being replaced by the next generation of geniuses. Just tonight I ran into a new publisher called Permuted Press. Check out this neat author-friendly clause from the sample contract on their website:

Negative royalty balances because of returns will accrue across quarters just as positive royalty balances under $25.00. Should four (4) consecutive quarters pass with negative royalty balances the AUTHOR agrees to reimburse royalties to the PUBLISHER to return the royalty balance to zero (0) before the end of the first quarter following.

Are writers lining up to send these shark-eyed publishers who, we can be sure, "love the genre" oh-so-very much, their stories? You can bet on it, pal. This isn't even a scam; even that would almost be forgivable as a scam would at least be a sign that the publisher has some clue how the world works. It's just pure left-side -of-the-bell-curve flailing. When average towers above the small press like Everest in the distance, the time has come to run for the hills. Much like that fabled mountain, the mud-flat bottom feeders aren't going anywhere.

And next time someone butters me up for a free story for some halfwit charity anthology that'll cost a few grand to produce and generate a donation equivalent to a coffee can with an index card saying "PLEASE GIVE" attached to it…please kill me.