Hey! Are you the author of . . .
- Alan Rice
- Dec 5, 2025
- 3 min read
For those of you who've been following, I've been thinking a lot about the publishing side of writing.
Actually, that's not accurate. Writing is one thing, but publishing is quite another.
I mentioned last time that I was frustrated by the fact that so many literary journals restrict the size of the submissions they'll accept. The overwhelming majority of them accept flash fiction, a term new to me until recently. Duotrope, my go-to platform for tracking my submissions, helps by screening venues according to size. A short story is anything between 1000 and 7500 words. More than that and you're into the "novelette" or "novella" category.
I'm not bothered by that. I write what I write, and I've only once shortened a story at the request of an editor. It was good advice; looking at the early drafts and the finished product, the story, "Ubi Caritas et Amor," is much tighter. ("Ubi Caritas" is included in "Are You Okay?") But I've got a couple of pieces - which are actually okay, I think - that are about 10,000 words. You may not see those for a while.
But what's really annoying is the obsession with genre. Those of you who've read my stories know that I've got a particular style, one Duotrope calls "mainstream." At least I'm guessing that that's what they'd call my writing. And in terms of content, I've got one piece which is probably a ghost story. I say "probably" because the ending isn't at all clear. Maybe the protagonist (a writer) just has an overactive imagination. Or maybe the little girl he sees really is the ghost of the girl who drowned a long time ago. In another story, a character complains that he's being stalked by this friendly but distinctly creepy character who turns up at unusual times. Well, he's an alcoholic, so who knows what he sees. But then someone else sees the stalker too. Or maybe not. It's not clear.
So - do I write ghost stories? Horror stories? Suspense? "No, Thank You" is about a little girl on a train trip during the depression. "War Games" is about a geeky high school chess player. And so on. There's no genre. If there's anything these stories (which have all been published somewhere else) have in common is that they raise questions and then refuse to answer them. There's no genre label for that.
Today I got a text message: "Hi! Are you the author of "Are You Okay"?" It was from a firm called Liberty Book Publishers. It's a marketing company, of course, and I played along for a while just to see how far they'd go before they gave up. A lot of their "marketing" is AI-generated; I know from my dealings with a firm calling itself Prime Publishing, borrowing the Amazon logo (or something similar). Somebody, or likely an AI platform, skims the book (or some of it) and decides what it's about and goes on from there. No one actually reads it. It's all guesswork. Prime Publishing got the idea that I wrote horror-suspense-mystery, and its proposed ads looked like they were AI products. The text was sensationalistic, the graphics cheesy, and the end result was pretty awful. Liberty Book Publishers is of the same stripe.
I write because I have a story to tell. Not to get famous. Not to make money. And I'll be damned if I'm going to pay anyone to publish my stories. I'm sure of that. Very, very sure.
Okay, I'm done with my rant. I hope that if you've gotten this far, and haven't read "Are You Okay?", maybe your curiosity will be piqued enough that you'll pick up a copy. (I'm afraid that the cheap copies are on Amazon, and you can guess how I feel about Our Friend Jeff. But you can also get it at Barnes & Noble. And it's a nicer imprint.) I hope you will. And I hope you'll enjoy it. That's all that really matters.
Here's the Barnes & Noble link:
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