| |
|
>You raise an interesting point, though, about the prevelance of females in the publishing industry. I was not aware of tha. Thing is, though, I've found women likely to be weirded-out or critical of my kind of magic, and my kind of writing, because it's not what they think of when they think of women's magic. If I were a Wiccan and wanted to write about my practices, I think I'd have a much bigger market than I do as a perverted Loki-worshipper.
Well, sure. That's true of everybody though. Only certain types of magic books sell. Occult publishing is a fucking shitheap and such a low-level game that one would be much better advised to get as far away from it as possible than to figure out how to win at it.
That said, you are a very talented and *clear* writer and could easily do a kind of Norse Trad for Beginners book that wouldn't be as hardcore as you would like but would sell quite well. But what we are talking about here is marketing concerns. If your book isn't on Wicca or Tarot, and isn't the Satanic Bible by Anton LaVey, chances are, it's not gonna sell more than 2000 copies at the most—which if you get a good deal, should probably make you the same number of dollars. Woo hoo! Crying havoc and soldiering on the New Aeon!
These are problems that effect everybody in publishing, but the simple truth is, magic books geared toward young girls with a Wiccan bent *sell the best.* Books on magic are largely written by women and gay men—and edited, published and marketed by them, too. Overly macho things like the Disinfo Book of Lies are abberations on the rule. The kind of "ontological anarchist" and chaos magic or whatever books that inspired the Invisibles and many of the people on this board are for the most part completely, um, invisible in terms of sales, minor-press efforts read by a tiny handful of specialists that look important if you're one of those specialists, but is a genre that even within the context of the *still miniscule* occult publishing world is so small as to be nonexistent.
I can count the macho male occult writers of note on one hand—OK, Crowley, and even Crowley doesn't sell shit for Weiser, unless we're talking about the Book of Thoth, and that's just because *Wiccan girls* buy it cause it's about Tarot. I've seen the numbers on these things. It's depressing, really. Who else can we throw in for Macho Magus? Parsons? Parsons' shit has been out of print for years. Bardon? Forget it. Me? HAHAHAHAA, I only wish! And I'm a sensitive tea-drinking mellow sort anyway and would likely lose at arm-wrestling to most of the women here.
Reality check. Occult publishing is a marginalized world. The occult is a marginalized world. Holds true for everybody in it. At least at this moment in history it is not critical to the functioning of society, you can't make money at it, you can't get famous at it, it won't help you get laid (at least by humans, ahaahhaahahahahahaha!), you can't put up drywall with it—so *nobody really cares.* That doesn't mean it's not important or noble. It goddamn well is or I wouldn't have put my life on it. But it's a very small sandbox that the kids playing in take as altogether more representative of a wider world with which it holds little overlap.
(Oh, btw, you retain copyright on your piece of course, it's yours to do whatever you want with.) |
|
|
