[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign hello and welcome to our new year of small publishing in a Big Universe. I am your host, Lisa Jacob. This month we have an interview with Mel Gildon, a prolific author coming from our sponsors. This month Water Dragon Publishing has Worlds Apart, Worlds Together by Lorna Hopkins Keith Graveside Press, a vampiric anthology, and A Terror of Stars by Alexandra Seidel in its tiny Terrors program. The White Veena by Akshiya Worlds Apart, Worlds Together by Lorna Hopkins Keith can two peoples, alien to each other, coexist on the same world? Ping, a small lavender furred humanoid has discovered that her people's undersea habitat is not as perfect as the high chiefs believe. As mistakes in the biocomputer and damage to the structure mount and the chiefs ignore her warnings, she is eventually called upon to lead a new colony on land with the aid of the humans who live there in the human colonies. Kalen and others become concerned by the friend as their technology is far beyond that of the humans. Will both peoples survive? Taking place in the same universe as Cityfall and Bubbles of Time, Worlds Apart Worlds Together is available from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobold, Smashwords, and other online booksellers. For more information, visit their
[email protected] welcome to Small publishing in a Big Universe, and we have with us today Mel Gilden, a prolific authority of lots of books from way back when and even today. Welcome to the podcast.
[00:02:24] Speaker B: Why, thank you so much.
[00:02:25] Speaker A: And when you first started out, was publishing easier or harder than it is now, do you think?
[00:02:34] Speaker B: Well, the thing is that these days it's almost impossible. Most of the really big publishers are owned by companies that make a lot of other things. They sell soap and cornflakes and automobiles and all that stuff, and a book is just another product for them. That's one thing. The other thing is they're really interested in the next big thing. They're looking for the next Harry Potter. They don't want to do what I used to call the long hail. What that means is they buy a book from you and instead of trying to make all their money back at once, they can make their money back over a period of years. And they can buy a lot of books like that, mostly kids books, science fiction, westerns, romances. And they're considering the long tail rather than the big bust all at once. But they're not. They don't. They're too big and they want everything right now. So that makes it very difficult. So I got lucky with Wildside Press because they called me, because as you say, I've been doing this for a long time and they have read my books and liked them. And they said, well, do you want to join up with Wildside Press? And the great thing for me about Wild side Press, there are a lot of other very small presses and some of them are really good. I don't want to say anything bad about anybody, but the great thing about Wild side is that they're going to pay all the bills. In other words, they're going to pay the editing bill, the book cover bill, any other kind of bill is connected to the actual publishing of the book. Whereas all the other publishers say, oh, you have to help us pay for it. And so I thought, wow, this is a deal. Why, it's Wild side Press. So I joined up with them. The only thing they don't do is advertising, and that's unfortunate. I have to do whatever advertising gets done, which is one of the reasons I signed up with Facebook. Because on Facebook I can talk about myself a little bit. And I'm hoping that that will allow me to sell more books.
[00:04:16] Speaker A: Are you still writing now?
[00:04:18] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Oh, good.
[00:04:20] Speaker A: Do you have anything that you have now that you'd like to promote?
[00:04:25] Speaker B: Well, yeah, I sure do. Some years ago I was writing books for Byron Price, Visual Price, P R E I S S. I wrote what we call the Zoot books. It was about an alien with an enormous nose and he wanted to be a detective here on Earth. He was a big fan of Philip Marlowe's. I thought, well, these are great. And I wrote three of those and did pretty well with it. And so what I have now is because I didn't own any of those rights, I took a different character and a different set of characters and a little bit of a different approach. And so I wrote books that were kind of like the Zoo books, but not exactly. They took place sort of in the same universe. It's a fantasy version of Los Angeles. Because I've been living in LA since I was, I don't know, five years old. And now I'm much older than that, so I write those. So the current books that people might be interested in is one called Dangerous Hard Boiled Magicians and another one, which I just finished, was called the Goddess Vanishes. So now I'm working on a third one, but I don't really want to talk about that yet because I don't even have a plot. All I've got is sort of a list of things that the hero is going to do, but that ought to be out pretty soon, anyway, those are two of my favorites. But I've, as you say, written a lot of books. A lot of books, most of them science fiction, most of them kids books. And I really just enjoy the process because I don't always think that I'm going to make money. I wrote a series of books for Beverly Hills 90210, but they were based on the TV show very much so I didn't have to really invent anything. And I wrote a couple of Star Trek novels, which I really enjoyed doing because I've been a Trek. Don't tell anybody. I've been on Trekkies since 1966, but that was very enjoyable. I wrote the Captain Kirk book and I wrote the Jean Luc Picard book and I really had a good time with.
[00:06:12] Speaker A: Now it seems like publishing, anybody can do it with Amazon and a computer. Do you find it that publishing is, especially the science fiction market is becoming a little bit saturated with people who don't edit?
[00:06:27] Speaker B: Yeah, I believe that's true. Anybody who can publish all the time. And that's always been the problem and it's still the problem now with this new way things are going. A lot of times people who don't really know what they're doing cannot even sign up with the smaller publishers because they're very proud of themselves as publishers. Only good things, but Amazon doesn't care as long as you pay them. Now, it's possible that a lot of the Amazon books are terrific. I don't know. And I also know that a lot of them are not very good because they're written by people who have more enthusiasm than talent. But I don't want any names because I don't know any name. All I know is that when you buy a book from Amazon, you're taking a chance, you know, it might be terrific.
[00:07:05] Speaker A: Do you take a chance on reading new authors or do you just kind of stick with established authors? Or do you read any at all?
[00:07:12] Speaker B: Oh, I read a lot. I read a lot. But I find myself reading old stuff. Like sometimes I'll sit down with a Robert Heinlein novel. I say, oh, I'll just read the first chapter and the next thing I know it's six hours later. And I've read the whole thing. And there are other writers like the Arthur Clark and Isaac Asimov and all the big names that you have probably heard of. As a matter of fact, I just read Childhood's End again and I just read the City and the Stars again. And I really enjoyed those, just as I enjoyed Half space that will travel and a lot of other stuff that Heinlein wrote. As I say, a lot of stuff that's out there is unreadable.
[00:07:46] Speaker A: When you write for kids, assume that a certain grade level.
[00:07:51] Speaker B: Well, there's two things that people look for. They have middle grade and then they have something else which they call children. And they're actually two different things. But it depends on who you read because a lot of people have different definitions of what they are. When I write a kid's book, I don't worry about that stuff. I write the best story that I possibly can and if a kid can read it, that's great. If the kid has to look up a word now and again, that's a good idea too. But I don't worry too much about that stuff because it seems that everybody has a different idea of exactly what it means.
[00:08:24] Speaker A: That makes things a lot easier because a lot of people these days are writing to market.
[00:08:29] Speaker B: That's right, they sure are. And I have done that. I have done some of that, but I don't necessarily enjoy it. And so I wrote a bunch of these fifth grade monster books. I once wrote a novel for him called Britney Spears as a three headed Alien. That was fun. It was a little tricky because Brittany herself could never actually appear on stage in the book because we didn't have rights for that. We only had rights to use her name. But I just wrote and wrote and I thought, well, this is great. And I think I had a good time and sometimes I go back to stuff that I wrote years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, and I say, gee, that's really good. How did I do that? Can I do that again? And I've talked to a lot of writers who are my friends and we all say the same thing. How did I do that and can I do it again? And that's what happens. Certainly. That's what happened with the science fiction that I wrote in those days and with the Star Trek novels and with the fifth grade monster books.
[00:09:26] Speaker A: Do you self publish, use a small publisher or are traditionally, I'm assuming you're traditionally published.
[00:09:33] Speaker B: Well, no, no, they don't let me in. Well, that's because, as I say, what they're mostly interested in is the big bang. They want any book that I might sell them. They want to sell a zillion of them right away. Not maybe hundreds of them a month over a period of months. That's not what they want. They want it right now. They want it right now and I cannot do that. I know it. And they know it too, because when they look me up, they find I'm in the mid list, which means that I'm some guy that sells a certain number of book, but I'm not Harry Potter and I'm not J.K. rowling and I don't know that I will ever be either of those things. But they see what I am and they say, oh no, that's not what we want. We want the next big thing. And so I don't get to go to traditional publishers very much. They just don't want me. And it doesn't matter how good I am or how new it is. As a matter of fact, this is kind of funny because I get letters occasionally from fans and people who want advice and they say, oh, Mr. Gildan, you're so lucky to be a great writer and to be able to write and send your stuff wherever you want. And I have to write back to them. And I say, no, that's not true. You're the lucky one because the publishers don't know anything about you. All they know is the book in front of them if you send them a book. And that's all they knew. And they read it and they say, I wonder if this is the next big thing. And so they buy the book and if it is the next big thing, they'll buy the book after that. But if it's not the next big thing, you're out just like I am. So I was very luck come up with Wild side Press, which is a small press. And there are things that I would. Whether they do, for instance, I'd rather they do some advertising, but they do most of the payments for all the things that I would pay for from another publisher. And they have been very good to me.
[00:11:16] Speaker A: Have you ever considered self publishing?
[00:11:19] Speaker B: No, no, no. The whole idea of it makes me nervous. I will tell you something the first time, and this is, oh, maybe around the year 2000, and I talked to a lady on the phone and I told her who I was and she seemed vaguely impressed for a while and then she said, what's your platform? And I said, huh? Those were my exact words, huh. Because I, to this day I'm not entirely sure what that means. That means I do all the advertising and all the, the editing and anything that they don't want to do, which is just about everything. Because you go to modern traditional publishers and they say, oh yeah, we'll publish your book. But that's all they do. Maybe they'll give you a cover, maybe they'll do editing, but maybe not. But they want to know what my platform is. In other words, who I'm writing for and whether I'll do the COVID and whether I'll do the editing and all the other things that publishers used to do automatically. And so most big publishers, the big three, Thurman, enormous businesses in Europe, mostly I don't want to deal with them. And obviously they don't want to have anything to do with me. So that's kind of a problem. It is too bad. I'm not the only person with that problem. I have a friend who lives around here in Los Angeles. I don't want to say his name, but he's pretty damn famous and he writes stuff and he's well known and well liked. And he just went over to a small press because he didn't like the way the big press was treating him. And this happens all the time. Even though he could have stayed because he is famous and important, but he just didn't like what was going on. I have a book that I purchased a year or two ago about Maxwell Perkins, who was the number one editor at Scribners many years ago. And on one of the pages he says, and he wasn't making this up. This is something they did for everybody. Here are the things that we're going to do for you after we buy your book. And there are all these things. We'll do the copy editing and we'll do the advertising, and we'll do the COVID And anything you need done will be done by us. And that's not the publishing way anymore. They don't want to do anything that they don't have to do.
[00:13:23] Speaker A: Are they expecting the author to do a lot of the legwork?
[00:13:26] Speaker B: Absolutely. Absolutely. They're expecting to do everything. But I will tell you because I think it's important. I'm still a member of the Science Fiction Writers of America. The members are people I have never heard of, and the chances are very good they have also never heard of me. I'm sure they're wonderful young writers, and I'm sure they write wonderful stuff. But I don't know because I don't read their stuff. I go back and read Robert Heinlein again now. I'm not sure that's the right thing to do, but.
[00:13:53] Speaker A: So what are some advice that you could give to new writers these days?
[00:14:00] Speaker B: I would say the first thing is you have to love the work because you're not necessarily going to get paid what you're worth. If you try to go through the big traditional publishers. Unless they love it and they think you're going to be the next big thing, they're not going to buy your stuff no matter how good it is. You have to love your work. You have to love what you're doing. If you like your own stuff, I think that's a good idea. This is really up to you. Advice is only advice. Advice is not something you don't have to do any of the things that I'm saying except love to work. Love the work is always, is always true. But the other things are, you know, you never know what's going to happen.
[00:14:36] Speaker A: Where can people contact you?
[00:14:38] Speaker B: I'm@mel gildon.com thank you very much for your time. Thank you for asking.
[00:14:47] Speaker A: Bite A Vampiric Anthology from the guilt ridden mortician to the drunk vampire on the front lawn from Decaying Castles in Chernobyl, this collection of stories will bring you 23 tales that will leave a mark.
Byte is available this month in hardcover, paperback and digital editions from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Smashwords and other online booksellers. Or support your local independent bookstores by ordering it through bookshop.org for more information, visit their
[email protected] thanks again to our guests. We plan on publishing another episode next month. If you want to know more about small publishing in a big universe, visit our
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[email protected] this podcast was recorded and edited by yours truly, Lisa Jacob. Executive producer is Stephen Radecki. Theme and ad music is provided by melodyloops. Enhanced transcription services are provided by Lisa Jacob. This month's episode was sponsored by Water Dragon Publishing and Graveside Press. You can listen to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and most of your favorite podcast services. Thank you very much for listening and talk to you soon.
