H P Lovecraft, page 11 of 14

Earlier this year I was asked to contribute to Lovecraft Black & White, a volume of original illustrations inspired by the works of H P Lovecraft, published by Dagon Press in Italy, and today my contributor’s copy arrived! There’s a lot of high-quality work here, which puts my offering rather in the pale, I can’t help thinking. I was among three who chose to depict “The Music of Erich Zann” — or “La musica di Erich Zann”, I should say, as the book is in Italian, of course.

I took the “black & white” literally and didn’t use any greys — everyone else seems to have! Here’s my pic. The main idea was to try and represent the music Zann used to calm the things beyond his cosmic window with a blending of occult and musical symbols:

Despite not being able to read the text, I love this short comic strip, which seems to be about the development of the young H P Lovecraft’s imagination. I must put the text through Google Translate to find out:

Here’s a couple more pages from the book:

(Part 1 of this report, about creating the Alice at R’lyeh booklet, can be read here.)

Now I’d spent actual money getting the Alice at R’lyeh booklet printed, I had to promote and sell it. Not my favourite thing. Some artists & writers are happy to shout about what they’ve done, and frankly, I envy them. Self-promotion is a talent that is, I can’t help thinking, as valuable as being able to produce promotion-worthy content in the first place. I’m sure there’s a part of every writer/artist that wants to crow about what they’ve done, but for some (me included) tapping into it can be difficult. I tend to feel, whenever I produce something I like, that what makes it likeable to me is some rare, personal quality, that, if I’m lucky, might be shared by at most a scattering of oddballs and misfits classifiable by no known marketing category. So I’m the last person to want to convince anyone to buy something I’ve produced. But, if you’re self-publishing, that’s what you’ve got to do.

I have to admit I never exactly shouted at the top of my voice that Alice at R’lyeh was available to buy. But here’s a summary of what I did do.

Website. Old-fashioned, perhaps, in these endlessly new-fashioning times, but you’ve got to have a website. I stopped short of buying a domain name for the project, mostly for reasons of expense, but also because I think, increasingly, unique and meaningful domain names are only of use if you’re promoting something through non-internet media. If you’re being interviewed on the radio, for instance, I guess you have to be able to provide an easily memorable way of accessing more information about your project. But even then, with a sufficiently unique name (or some memorable tags), a Google search is just as good. Search for “Alice at R’lyeh” on Google, and you get my site — so, job done, there.

The major website-related decision I took was to put the text of the poem online, and to provide a freely downloadable PDF of the booklet (with graphics at web-level dpi, both for size reasons, and to encourage people to buy the booklet if they wanted a printed version). Why do this? I could have just put up a teaser so people had to buy the booklet for the whole thing. I’d like to say I was influenced by Cory Doctorow‘s ideas on giving away what he writes as both a free ebook and a paid-for printed book — as I was to a certain extent — but the decision really came down to the fact that I didn’t want anyone being disappointed with the booklet when they finally got it. I have no idea if not having the whole thing readable on the website would have led to more sales, but my main aim, in the end, wasn’t sales, it was just to have what I’d written read by people. To that end, the website was the primary tool.

Of course, what I really wanted to know was that people were reading the thing — either by spending time on the poem’s page, or downloading the PDF. I’d already set up Google Analytics to provide me with stats on my whole website, but now wish I’d put something a bit more basic and specific in place. For two reasons. (1) Google Analytics offers so much data, and so many options, that I can’t find a simple access count for either of the key pages. (2) I tried setting up a filter to provide me with data specific to the Alice at R’lyeh section of my website, but for some reason it resulted in a filter that displayed data relevant to everything but the Alice at R’lyeh section of my site. Plus, there’s an old bit of my site (Getting More Out of GarageBand, about Apple’s GarageBand, and not updated since 2005!) which annoyingly gets so many more hits than any other part, however new. So, I’ve no idea how many people have read Alice at R’lyeh online or downloaded the PDF.

Reviews. There are two sorts of reviews. Those you solicit, and those that pop up spontaneously. I solicited one review for Alice at R’lyeh (at Grim Reviews). But discovering the odd spontaneous review that people put up — however brief — was a real joy. I’m still quite nervous of following links to any mention of Alice at R’lyeh, but am so glad when I do and someone has something nice to say. This one from Homo Sum, for instance — brief, but above all, it’s obvious the guy gets it. And knowing you’ve been “got” is, really, the best reward self-publishing can lead to.

Conventions & shows. I didn’t go to any conventions and shows myself, but thanks to the extremely lucky coincidence that I have a brother with a newly (and professionally) published book out, who very generously offered to put a bouquet of Alice at R’lyehs among the Rainbow Orchids on his table, I learned about the power of selling at conventions and shows. They are obviously the route to go. I don’t know if it’s just because people can see the product, or because the sort of people who go to conventions have curious minds and quirkily individualistic tastes, but Garen got through virtually all the copies I gave him, at a much faster rate than my internet sales.

The odd thing, to me, was that those shows were comics shows. I felt at first I ought to put a sticker on the booklets — “Warning: Poem! Not a Comic!” — but it didn’t seem to matter. Garen told me people were quite okay with it being a poem. And this is one thing I came to learn as part of the self-publishing experience, that different subcultures have very different attitudes to self-publishing. In the UK comics scene, there is a thriving self-publishing community, which sees the fact that something is self-published as a genuine plus-point. It actively welcomes the diversity of the sort of things people produce when they’re let loose on their own. Other areas, though, see self-publishing as an active minus-point, if not an outright automatic rejection. Searching for places to send a review copy of Alice at R’lyeh to, I often came across “no self-published work” notices, which started to annoy me as much as the “no fantasy, science fiction or children’s fiction” notices you find in The Writers & Artist’s Yearbook list of literary agents.

It’s sort of understandable, I suppose, given the context. A self-published comic is a very different thing from a self-published novel. A comic, for instance, has to be drawn, so takes a bit more effort and ability to produce. Also, as you, the punter, can take in the drawing at a glance, you can know instantly if it’s likely to be your sort of thing. (It doesn’t lead to an instant judgment on the story, of course. But if you don’t like the story, you’ve still got the artwork.) A self-published novel is more difficult to judge, and because it takes less skill to write a bad novel than to produce a bad comic, it’s statistically more likely that a self-published novel won’t be as good as a self-published comic. Still, I think there have always been various areas of culture more open to people doing their own thing. When I used to listen to Jazz FM (not being into jazz much, but my stepfather was), I was struck by how all jazz musicians accepted and complimented what each other did, however at odds it was to their own approach. It was a world in which everything was valid. Compare that with pop music, say, where you often get people dissing each other left, right, and centre. (I can’t believe I actually wrote “dissing”, but now I’ve written it, I can’t find a substitute. It may sound like I’m pathetically and outdatedly trying to be hip, but the word stays!) Anyway, there’s room for a whole blog post on that topic. Suffice it to say, I’m extremely grateful for the reception Alice at R’lyeh got from the UK comics community, considering it’s not a comic at all, but a poem.

Google AdWords. Google kept sending me these promotional offers to use £75 worth of free AdWords advertising. If you haven’t come across this, AdWords ads are those brief text ads that appear on the righthand side of Google searches, and also pop up in other places, like eBay. I thought, “Why not use it for Alice? It’s free!” So, keeping a careful eye on the amount I was spending (you can’t automatically cap the expense with AdWords, and in the end I actually went £5 over my free £75 because I realised I was looking at the wrong page on the AdWords control panel), I engaged in a fortnight’s Google AdWords campaign. It’s difficult to judge how effective this was, as I was also, at the time, listing on eBay. But I’d say, if it hadn’t been free, AdWords would certainly not have justified its cost for a small, self-published project like mine. Plus, I got annoyed every time I saw my own ad on eBay or Google — it was costing me!

eBay. After the conventions, eBay was my big seller. I’ve had more sales via eBay than via my website. The main factor here, of course, is that Alice at R’lyeh is a Lovecraftian project, and I suspect a lot of the sales were to people who look out for and collect Lovecraftiana. “Lovecraft” is one of my few regular eBay searches, so I just hoped there would be other people who did the same. Turns out I was right. Of course, the unfortunate thing here is that this doesn’t generalise to other projects. People bought Alice at R’lyeh because of its Lovecraft associations. They certainly didn’t, for instance, search eBay using my name (I didn’t even bother to put it in the headline description). So, I’m not sure how useful eBay would be for a more original project.

Those, then, were my approaches to promoting and selling Alice at R’lyeh. The main lesson, I think, is that each project will have individual quirks (in this case, the Lovecraft connection, and the illustrations giving it something of a comics overlap) which will help sell it, so each project has to be considered on its own merits. One thing you’ll notice missing from the above is any mention of Facebook or Twitter — I’m still getting to grips with social networking, so, obviously, those are pretty much untapped resources, for me.

The main thing about self-publishing is something that should be true about creativity in general. It should be fun. It isn’t always, and you can easily forget to enjoy it, but I think if you keep reminding yourself that it should be enjoyable, and use that as a guide to what to do next, then at least you know, at the end of it, that you made a profit in that sense, even if you didn’t financially.

(And I certainly didn’t make a profit financially. First off, I forgot to factor in PayPal and eBay fees, which wiped out the small margin I’d allowed for in my costings. Then the price of postage went up. Oh, and I indulged in a few “promotional items”, just for the hell of it, such as these mini-cards from Moo.com:

…And a t-shirt from yourdesign.co.uk, which didn’t really work. So I did an Edgar Allan Poe baseball shirt as well:

…which did!)

I’ll finish off by mentioning the two best moments of the whole project. One was each time I got an order from a new country. I ended up selling, as well as to the UK, to the USA, Australia, Finland, the Netherlands, and Japan! (A real surprise, that last one.) I don’t know why, but there’s something inherently satisfying about putting those little mental flags around the globe. (I didn’t actually put Alice at R’lyeh flags on my World Domination Globe. Honestly I didn’t.)

The other great moment was when MorganScorpion contacted me, out of the blue, and offered to record a reading of the poem. Apart from the thrill of hearing the poem read so well, it was the fact that this was, as it were, an artistic/creative response to what I’d done, and it certainly capped the whole experience. (If you haven’t heard the reading, you can do so via the Alice at R’lyeh site, or to Archive.org, which also has other readings by MorganScorpion.)

Anyway, that’s the report. Thanks to everyone who’s bought or read the booklet, and I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed the process of getting it out there.

(If anyone has written similar reports about self-published projects, please put links in the comments section, as I’d love to read them.)

What is “Lovecraftian horror”? Lovecraft scholar S T Joshi’s new anthology from PS Publishing, Black Wings, attempts to answer the question by offering 21 examples of the form, plus a quote from the master himself (from which the title of the anthology derives):

“The one test of the really weird is simply this — whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim.” — from “Supernatural Horror in Literature”

But you always have to be wary when dealing with a writer’s own definition of their chosen genre. It’s certainly not the same as a critic’s definition, because a writer will be trying to encapsulate what they are aiming for when they write, not to provide an objective summing up that can be applied to all authors working in that genre. Even when the writer in question is moonlighting as a critic — as Lovecraft was when he wrote “Supernatural Horror in Literature” — he’s still being led on a leash by his muse. What Lovecraft was really defining in the above quote wasn’t weird fiction but Lovecraftian horror — or to be properly pedantic (because any reader who responds to Lovecraft’s fiction has a right to form their own idea of what works in it and what doesn’t) it is Lovecraft’s idea of Lovecraftian horror. All this is just a preface to saying that answers to the question “What is Lovecraftian horror?” can only ever be subjective, and I’m sure no two readers of Black Wings will come up with the same list of which stories in the anthology they think ought to be called Lovecraftian and which don’t.

Nevertheless, it’s interesting to see what Joshi’s chosen writers made of the term. It was, I assume, deliberately selected as not “Cthulhu Mythos fiction”, and it’d be interesting to know what Joshi’s brief to his authors was. He certainly didn’t say “No mythos fiction!” because some of the stories collected in the book are mythos stories. Perhaps it was simply down to the selection of writers with taste that meant there were no lists of Eldritch Entities’ names, nor effusions of Necronomicons, scattered like yesterday’s bestsellers amongst the libraries of occultists the world over. (“Oh, you have a first edition arabic text, too?”) The Cthulhu Mythos had its origins in two factors: one was Lovecraft’s attempt to realise his fictional ideal, the other was as a name-swapping game for a group of jobbing writers. And, let’s face it, it’s really only the first factor that we, as readers, want more of. The second is just a bit of fun.

So, what is Lovecraftian horror? To judge by the content of Black Wings, here are a few possible answers:

Cthulhu Mythos stories. Of course. The best Cthulhu Mythos tales, after Lovecraft’s own are, for me anyway, the subtlest in declaring their allegiance. Here, there are plenty whose reticence means you could shoehorn them into the mythos if you wanted to — identifying this or that glutinous god with one of Lovecraft’s entities — but that would be beside the point. Michael Shea’s “Copping Squid”, though, has its feet firmly placed in the Mythos camp — it’s one of the few tales in the book to mention a Lovecraftian entity by name — but provides an essentially modern twist on Lovecraft’s approach. One of the things that, I think, Lovecraft would never have done, is admitted the desirability of actually embracing the nihilism represented by Cthulhu, Azathoth, and so on — for him, that direction lead to nothing but madness and death. The aestheticisation of horror — turning it into something the protagonist wants to become part of — was something that had to wait for the likes of Clive Barker and Thomas Ligotti. It still ends in madness and death, of course, but in the hands of those writers, that’s not necessarily presented as a bad thing. Shea’s story is closer to this approach, and it certainly worked for me.

Stories featuring other (non-Mythos) characters from Lovecraft’s fiction. Three in Black Wings make reference to Pickman, none of which necessarily end up as Cthulhu Mythos stories. Caitlín R Kiernan’s “Pickman’s Other Model (1929)” is the most directly a sequel to Lovecraft’s original, whereas W H Pugmire’s “Inhabitants of Wraithwood” makes the most subtle use of Pickman while still making him (or his art) central to the plot. My favourite of the three, though, is Brian Stableford’s “The Truth About Pickman”, which manages to be at once a scientific explanation of the horrors of Lovecraft’s original tale, and an effective horror on its own. Unlike the Ann Radcliffe school of Gothic (and Scooby Doo), where all the fantastical elements are explained away at the end, in this case the explanation doesn’t detract from the horror, but rather gives it a straitening twist.

Stories featuring Lovecraft as a character. There’s surprisingly little of this in Black Wings, considering how readily Lovecraft’s personality and biography lend themselves to fictionalisation, and how many people (ahem) have used him in this way. In two stories, we have Lovecraft as a ghost, dream, or hallucination, but my favourite to brush up against Lovecraft the person was Ramsey Campbell’s “The Correspondence of Thaddeus Nash”. I love Campbell’s writing anyway, but it’s always nice to be surprised by an author into liking them even more. Here, Campbell presents a tale for Lovecraftians, written in a form Lovecraftians will be familiar with: the collection of letters, in this case those of one Thaddeus Nash, addressed to the Old Gent from Providence himself. On the way towards telling a suitably vastating horror tale, Campbell’s Thaddeus Nash has a few snipes at Lovecraft’s writing, so this story manages to raise a smile as well as a shudder.

Stories about people who have a strong relationship with Lovecraft’s fiction. Sam Gafford’s “Passing Spirits” was the most affecting tale in the book, for me, and the one I’d least want to describe as horrific, even though its subject matter is certainly dark. A man dying of a brain tumour starts hallucinating Lovecraft, and various characters from his writings. The contrast between Lovecraft’s pulpy horrors and the real-life horror of dying from a terminal illness was powerful in a much more than horrific way. Gafford’s tale even ends with the traditional Lovecraftian climax, but transcends the mere imitation of a narrative device by turning Lovecraft’s crescendoes of horror into a kind of redemptive attainment of meaning in the face of death. Definitely one of the stories that will stay with me.

Stories doing what Lovecraft did, but without explicit reference to the Mythos. These, to me, were among my least favourites in Black Wings, but it would be unfair to blame them for not meeting my expectations. But I felt that, generally, those stories that were about vastly powerful but hidden monsters, lurking behind the paper-thin veil of human ignorance, then making a brief appearance only to submerge once again — always with the threat that they are at any moment going to come back and wipe us all out with the flick of a tentacle — weren’t doing anything Lovecraft hadn’t already done, and done much better, and moved on from. Having said that, one of my favourites in the book — “The Broadsword” by Laird Barron — might just as easily fall under the same description. The main difference between Barron’s tale and the ones that failed to grip me was down to how he presented the horrors. (I actually found Barron’s tale, perhaps thanks to its build-up of mundane detail, the scariest in the book — and not in a pleasantly scary way, it really did scare me!) “The Broadsword”s horror elements had that weird irrationality you find in, for instance, tales of alien abduction — surreal as much as frightening — and this, for me, gave them the necessarily unbalancing twist that separated them from the more traditional Mythos approach of merely trying to convince you it’s all real. Here, the weirdness of the horror was powerful enough, without any need for realism.

Stories about dreams. This tends to be an overlooked area of Lovecraft’s fiction — it gets swept into the dustpan of Dunsany’s influence, and it’s all too easy to think of these tales as not really being Lovecraftian at all. But dreams pervade Lovecraft’s non-Dunsanian fiction, too — “The Call of Cthulhu” starts off being about dreams, of course, but even something like “The Shadow Out of Time”, with its transportation of the mind into another time (and body), and its final nightmare journey through a subterranean ruined city, owes so much to the peculiarities of the experience of dreaming. Darrell Schweitzer’s “Howling in the Dark” was, I think, the story to get closest to Lovecraft’s blending of the laws of dreams to the laws of reality, and the way that dreams, for Lovecraft, could be at once greatly desired and greatly feared. The case could be made for “Howling” being a Mythos tale, but I think its Lovecraftian roots are just as close to those stories which exist on the borderlands of Dunsany’s influence, such as “The Other Gods”. I tend not to like tales about dreams — all too often it’s an easy way for the writer to be surreal without being meaningful — but Schweitzer’s was one of the more powerful stories in Black Wings, and all the more so because it surprised me into liking it.

Others. Some of the tales are less obviously Lovecraftian. In a way, as Lovecraft’s own experiments with horror, the weird and macabre, covered so much ground, and as Lovecraft is such a pervasive influence on all 20th Century horror — indeed, his contribution may be said to be the defining element that separated 20th century horror from what came before — any piece of weird, horrific, or macabre fiction could be called, to some degree, Lovecraftian, barring a pastiche Victorian ghost story. There were a few stories in Black Wings whose Lovecraftianism wasn’t obvious to me. They might well have worked had I read them elsewhere, but as I was expecting a Lovecraftian element, I tended to finish them feeling a little let down. But, as I say, that’s all down to my own personal definition of what “Lovecraftian horror” might be, and how it differs from that of the contributors to Black Wings. Overall, there were definitely more hits than misses.

Lovecraft is certainly a phenomenon in 20th and 21st century literature. There aren’t many writers you can imagine inspiring this sort of anthology. I could picture a Borgesian anthology (and Borges himself could have contributed his “There Are More Things” to Black Wings), or a Kafkan anthology, but what others? What other body of writings could be built on in this way, without resorting to mere imitation? And, more importantly, would anyone buy them? They certainly will buy this Lovecraftian volume, and I very much doubt anyone who does so will be disappointed.

Only one more thing needs to be said — that cover (by Jason Van Hollander, whose story “Susie” rounds off the book) is worth the cover price alone. Now that is Lovecraftian art!

GOD SAVE THE KING!