A while back a guy by the name of Jeff Duntemann crossed my
Twit Box path. Two tweets in he tossed
me a link to a book he had written called Ten Gentle Opportunities. The plug was so
natural that it made me laugh…and it made me three dollar poorer. At the time it looked like Ten Gentle Opportunities would languish
at the bottom of my reading list – my choices are largely constrained by the Puppy
of the Month Book Club these days – but even if the book sucked, it was worth
tossing him a couple of bucks just to encourage that kind of behavior.
I almost didn’t pull the trigger on the purchase. Too busy.
No previous contact with the author.
No recommendations from third parties.
After two decades of playing long odds on reading materials and losing,
why would I fall back into that old habit?
In this case, Jeff was running in the right circles. Whoever introduced Jeff to me via Twitter was
an author with a name that I trusted. While
Jeff’s taste didn’t align with mine exactly, he was talking in good faith and treated
our differences the way they should be treated – as novelties and not
deal-breakers.
Besides all that, it was clear that Jeff wasn’t part of the
Borg Publishing Alliance. He was a
self-published guy not restricted by the demands of a few New York aesthetes. His work at least carried the possibility of new
ideas and a fresh voice that hadn’t been milked of all personality by the
normal meat-grinder of editors trained the same ways in a few schools to
conform to the boiler plate voice coming out of the big publishing houses.
What kind of Pulp Revolutionary would I be if I can’t
support a guy doing his own marketing for his own writing on his own time?
The bad kind, that’s what.
So I bought the book, and thought that would be the end of
it for a good long while. Well, it now
looks like each month will leave me with a gap to fill. Fellow readers will understand the twitchy
feeling that results from not having a bookmark stashed in a current read. The thought of reading a book sight unseen by
an author about whom I knew practically nothing appealed to me more than
reading Castalia House’s latest blockbuster - sorry, Loki’s Child, you’ll have to wait until October – and so Ten Gentle Opportunities rocketed to the
top of my list.
At a third of the way through this book I can only say thank
god for self-publishers and social media.
This is not a review of Ten Gentle Opportunities – I’m only a third of the way through, so it’s too early to say
more than that I’m loving it – rather, it is a morality play about of the
benefits of the self-publishing model.
It is a call to arms for readers to get out there and take chances on
the little guys. They might not all provide
books as entertaining and different as Duntemann’s, but you’ll face better odds
than you will with the Big Five Publishers.
Better yet, when you hit that jackpot, you’ll have a new name and a new
backlog to start pillaging for even more material.
The social media scene has been a god-send for readers and a
fantastic way to push back against the SJW narrative, but at times the Puppy
crowd tends to focus on the biggest names and the biggest fights. That’s all well and good, but when you’re spreading
around the Pepe Memes and barking back against the Hugo Crowd, don’t forget to
spread the love when it comes to the lesser known lights, because some of them –
like Jeff Duntermann – are bright indeed.