h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm excited over compiling and self-publishing my first collection of short stories, titled Dungeons & Dayjobs. But if I direct h2g2 readers to a website where they can buy the 170 page, 6 inch by 9 inch paperback, then the URL might be deemed unsuitable for posting on h2g2. Can we compromise? I'll give a link to my website, http://evilbobdayjob.tripod.com , which has a blog and lots of stories and games and essays, and which does not exist solely to promote my book. If you peek at that site looking for a story or essay I wrote, and if you happen across one of the teeny parts that mention my book or how to buy it, then the blame would be all yours. It would be out of my hands sort of, theoretically, not really.

As you might infer from the title, Dungeons & Dayjobs plays around in the areas where fantasy and humor and angst-filled wage-slavery overlap. One of the stories is a novella, one has five chapters and another has three chapters, so I'm not sure how many stories to count that as. Somewhere around 2d6 stories. One of them, "Chicken Fried Love Interest with Cilantro and Asparagus," uses full recipes to express or disguise the ups and downs of a young couple.

Here's a list of the stories:
Trailer of the Temptress
Almost Always, Somebody Lost an Eye
Vampire in The Mountain-Tree
The Wire Tetragrammaton
Chicken Fried Love Interest with Cilantro and Asparagus
My Terrifying, Dry Warrior (five chapters)
Godfella
My Time With The Capitalist Swine
Basqura's Homecoming
Basqura's Horror Story
Basqura's Mystery
Suburban Lanes (novella)


It's not the glorious leap into fame and fortune I had always hoped for, but it's a nice start. If I sell a dozen copies, it will be an improvement over seeing these stories sit in boxes or dusty areas of hard drives where some of them have been hiding a few years.

You may have heard that self-publishing is for suckers. If you buy into that notion, then you're willing to write off people like Tolstoy, Alexandre Dumas, Samuel Clemens, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Ernest Hemingway and dozens of others who paid to publish their own works before hitting it big. (That's the pep talk I keep giving myself.)

So I'm stoked and geeked and really failing to be a good salesman or marketer so far. I need to send out some review copies and really push it on people. I put up flyers on bulletin boards at work, but I caved in and started telling my co-workers I'll get them copies at cost or loan them a copy of it. Should have said FULL PRICE! ACT NOW! But maybe if I get a few cheaper copies circulating, they'll talk about it and increase the word-of-mouth publicity.

If you're curious but not interested in buying it, you can poke around my website and find some of the same stories there for free. Let me know if any of them make you laugh or think or yawn.

Thanks,
Subcom. Deidzoeb
(Robert Thomas Northrup)