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Call For Survey Respondents: Independent Authors of Literary Fiction

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Literary Fiction Independent Authors

“It’s Survey Season” by Howard Lake is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Readers of my blog know I am an emerging advocate of independent authors of literary fiction. A few months ago, I published a post called Tearing Down the Wall: Why the Literary Community Should Embrace Indie Authors. In that post, I decried the resistance of the traditional literary community to independently published works of literary fiction.

Well, so now that I’m done bitching about the problem, it’s time to act. So I’m about to try an experiment and I hope that independent authors of literary fiction will help by playing a role.

I’m launching a survey in which my goal–my AMBITIOUS goal, I should clarify–is to publish an epic roundup post highlighting 75 independent authors of literary fiction.

Why 75 authors? Why not 75? It’s certainly more than anyone will find in Amazon’s Kindle store.

Read on to learn more.

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3 Ways That Horrific Events Drive Great Literary Writing

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“Hudson Highlands” by Daniel Case is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

A few weeks shy of my sixteenth birthday, I watched someone fall off a cliff. He plummeted several hundred feet to his death. The header image above shows the Hudson Highlands near Cornwall-on-Hudson, NY, the town where I was raised. You’ll notice the beauty of it. Images like these help promote the Hudson Valley as a wonderful place to visit or live.

For me, though, the part of this image that I always focus on (not quite visible here thanks to the blog post title I slapped on top if it) is the sheer face of the cliffs since it was from one such face that I watched the man fall.

I might say that tragedy planted the seeds for my future as a writer. I’m sure that segue sounds crude given the gravity of what I experienced (watching someone die) and the conclusion I drew from it (that I became a writer). And you wouldn’t be entirely wrong.

But it is a sad fact that much of what drives great literary writing is the intensity of emotion that comes from truly horrific events.

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