My good friend John
A friend in need's a friend indeed
Back in 2015, I had an idea for a multi-author Sci-Fi anthology called PLANETARY OVERLAP.
But, despite being enrolled on a Creative Writing degree, I did not know enough Science Fiction authors to make it work (one). I retired the title, tried to bring it back again for a Lego Bionicle fan fiction magazine (another story for another time) and shelved it once more.
It took a few years to find enough Science Fiction authors to make my book publisher dreams come true.
One such author is John Coon, who you may recognise. We find a lot of readers through each other, so there’s a good chance you already read John Coon’s stuff. Like me, he’s a Science Fiction author (and Poet) who runs a small press. This post is about him, in a roundabout way, because he’s going through some weird stuff and I want to help out.
The infodump from OUTER SPACE!!!
If we return to 2015, we see an almost beardless Phillip Carter scampering around a writing event. This younger, more idealistic Phillip picked an unconventional set of lectures for an aspiring author. He sat through one about publishing (which he found a little bit depressing), another about book marketing teams (which he found very depressing) and another about the whole process, as summarised by an author and her handler, some representative from the big press who had bought the rights to the ideas that crystallised a few inches in front of her forehead (this one Phillip found the most depressing, but also enlightening in its own twisted way).
He did not attend any of the ones on writing. He wanted only to see if he could do the publishing himself, and if querying was worth the effort.
In the big press lecture, with silent nodded permission from the handler, the author fielded questions from the audience mostly unattended. One man in a long dark orange overcoat complained that his book had not yet been picked up, boasted there were “people online very interested” and was almost escorted out for being annoying before he regained sentience and stopped interrupting. The agent/handler said “We are not literary gatekeepers” and whilst the audience laughed, I drew in my notebook in response to that a Sci-Fantasy human with an ornate spear, tribal dress, stood before a desert bereft of books. This ‘literary gatekeeper’ resides somewhere on my bookshelf, even now, eleven years later, though at the time of writing I have lost it.
The dark orange jacketed man would later show up at the pub (where I was trying to network with small presses, knowing I wanted to build my own) and would push his business cards underneath my full pint glass after I had already said no, then taken one anyway after he had insisted, then politely ended the conversation. He had mistaken me for an agent, and for someone who would take kindly to being force fed business cards.
But back in time some hours, in that fateful lecture hall…
Someone else asked the author about the title, remarking perhaps insensitively that it did not seem to fit the book. The author glanced nervously to her handler, then sadly to the audience. With hesitant and not consistent permission, she talked to us about how she did not choose the current title, that the book for many years had had a better, more suitable title that the marketing team simply did not like. The agent turned to the audience and said “But it’s a good title, isn’t it?” and a few old ladies nodded.
The author nodded too, but I could see the sadness in her eyes.
I thought, why go to all this effort to not be happy with the end result?
I think it was then, in November 2015, that I decided to be self-published. This was of course not a permanent decision, but more a choice to see self-publishing as a legitimate, and in some cases superior, alternative to traditional publishing (I did a presentation on this some months later, which wasn’t well received, but which proved prophetic. Andy Weir was one case study).
This set up my eventual friendship with John, another selfpub owner who owns his own small press. We were, despite not knowing each other yet, creating similar businesses at the same time.
My career [alleged] suicide
Fast forward a few years, and I still didn’t know any Sci-Fi authors.
But I was building a new social media presence on Twitter.
Not knowing the complex social nuances of pre Musk twitter, I had stumbled into a speed pitching event and pitched a book. Unfortunately, I had accidentally used the ‘wrong’ hashtag for this pitch, and had about forty almost identical literary agents warn me I might be blacklisted for this thought crime alone, that my book (which I loved and still love, I was chiselling at it last night) could now be doomed.
One said I was “misusing a hashtag just for agents to garner clicks”
What I was actually doing was using the hashtags I had been shown in other author’s tweets…
Another went as far to say “Your book sounds really interesting, it’s a shame that…” before the threat of cancellation, which made it all the more personal, and looking back, hilariously childish.
I don’t remember the rest of them and I don’t care enough to look.
Admittedly, after a weird few personal years this probably stressed me out more than it should have. But the threats of blacklisting from people who try their hardest to pretend they are not gatekeepers to the literary scene (whilst writhing in manic ecstasy when they actually get to be gatekeepers and to threaten to cancel someone) made me wonder if I was now marked for career [alleged] suicide; If my book would be found with seven bullet wounds to the back of its head, wearing its favourite concrete shoes, and somehow on fire despite being at the bottom of a murky lake in this increasingly complex analogy.
All of this because I used a Wishlist hashtag instead of an Author one.
Nobody paused to explain my thought crime politely. They just went feral.
I was judged before I had a chance to explain myself.
And I took it seriously. These people were professionals, speaking on their professional accounts. So surely they meant what they said?
I only mention this because after all of this, I felt quite alone.
One of the first people who cheered me up was John.
I found John on my new Twitter account (yes, dear reader, I got tired of the messages on the pitching one and deleted it). I was new (again), and I was putting the feelers out for a literary/comedy podcast (returning soon) that was tentatively called STRANGE STORIES WITH PHILLIP CARTER.
I struggled to find guests at first. The first person to give me a chance (beside my Bowie expert pal Jo Lion) was John Coon. We met on a joke I posted to twitter, or perhaps I asked him directly to join the podcast after seeing him tweeting about his books. I think it was the last one, but I am not sure.
He said yes to a podcast with seven followers.
John turned up as a professional and offered me his time. I knew from the first few minutes I was speaking to someone who would soon be a bestselling author. In fact in our first episode I told him as much, and made a bet with him that it would be about a year and six weeks.
I think I was about three weeks off my prediction.
Even then, John had (and still has) a day job outside the fiction writing to support himself.
In the years hence, we have become good friends. We share a mutual seething hatred for those writing memes people steal from Tumblr teenagers about how horrible being a writer is. My go-to is “Other hobbies are available”.
My belief is that writing should be fun, not just for you the reader, but for me the writer. Sure, there’s hard parts (I dislike editing) but the fun is in the figuring it out. It’s a puzzle you build around yourself. If you hate writing, go paint instead. Life is finite. Make it fun.
After the show I became good friends with John. We did a follow up show the next year where I got to interview John Coon, the bestseller, and also John Coon, my new friend.
We did a Devilish Bookworms pod together, where I made the cover for THE COSMIC COMEDY COLLECTION inside Minecraft whilst John made the hosts laugh about weird aliens he had invented.
We’ve got a few more projects rolling away in the background. We are both in THE COSMIC COMEDY COLLECTION (Halfplanet Press) and MACABRE MULTIVERSE (Halfplanet Press), and I am in RIPPLES IN SPACE (Samak Press).
And in 2024, after my Utah trip was abruptly cut short due to the ill health of my original host, John rescued me and drove me through Salt Lake City to explore. When I suspected my motel might be a bit dangerous at night (it was), John graciously kept my treasures safe in his car. He took me to a supermarket to get supplies for my motel stay, and picked me up each morning for a new adventure. We went up the mountain, played skiing simulators, and saw deer. He took me to a fancy burger joint that neither of us could really afford, and I had a strawberry milkshake larger than my head (well done America, this is hard work).
We went up another mountain the next day and explored Utah’s museum of natural history, where I took a photo of almost every plaque (about 700 photos) to browse on my flight back to the doomed UK. Thanks to John, I got to see the Jane Goodall exhibit in the months before her passing.
John even kept me in his house like an ailing plant on the last day of my trip, and drove me to the airport. What could have been a very expensive and dull end to my adventure had turned into something inspiring.
And now John might need my help, and I am very far away.
John’s dad got in an accident recently, and has had his left leg amputated above the left knee.
John himself is still waiting to find out if his own hand will be permanently disabled after an accident whilst gardening for his dad, in which he lost the top of his thumb.
“Been a rough few days. I cut off part of my left thumb with battery powered tree clippers. It’s gone forever. I’ll be missing a portion of my thumb for the rest of my life. I was doing yard work for my dad who was hospitalized on Sunday night with multiple fractures in his left leg and foot after being run over by a backhoe. If it weren’t for bad luck, we’d have none. I’d show you a photo of the injured thumb, but it is horror movie level graphic.”
(A part of me was tempted to get that thumb picture and paywall it, but that’s my own twisted sense of humour, and not John’s).
So I wanted to give my friend a morale boost, and helpfully some additional income to keep him going through this hideous time, so this post is about that. I’ve always meant to do a feature post for him, so here it is.
Indiana Jones, in Space.
That’s how John once described the ALIEN PEOPLE chronicles, his bestselling series. And it is a simple, punchy descriptor I remain jealous of after five years. John writes Sci-Fi with style, and I am a big fan of it.
If you are interested in reading John’s books, please do let him know. At this point, right now, it would help him enormously.
Here’s to human authors who need repairing from time to time.
Of all the places I could buy his books from, which offers the best deal to the author?