An Open Love Letter to Amazon, or Why It's A Great Time To Be A Reader

When I was growing up, there was a small B. Dalton bookshop and an exceedingly small branch library that were close enough for my mom to take me to in the rather scary area where I grew up, at the Christown Mall. (The police still don't go near my neighborhood without air support. Really. The Alhambra District in Phoenix, AZ.) The libraries in my elementary and high schools were tiny and terrible. That was all I knew, so I stalked those two places. There were no independent book stores that I could go to. I'd pretty much read everything in the library by the time I was 10. I never read classics or anything particularly new. Our branch library had "Little Men" but not "Little Women." B. Dalton got new stuff in, but I wasn't allowed to buy hardbacks because the family budget was limited.  I had heard of a lot of books and writers that I had never seen, and of course the B. Dalton stocked little midlist and almost no backlist. I managed to find major writers at B. Dalton: Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, etc. I don't remember who else.

When I was in high school, the first Barnes and Noble opened near enough to us, at Metrocenter, and I went nuts. They had low-priced classics via the B&N imprint. I had never seen an actual book by Jane Austen or Tolstoy, though I had heard of them. I had heard of Sherlock Holmes but never seen any of Doyle's books. or Agatha Christie. Or any modern non-fiction science books. Seriously, I looked like Tinkerbell flying around in there. I got a part-time job to support my book habit. My mother worried about hoarding. I bought The Pugilist at Rest, a collection of short stories by Thom Jones, at the B&N at Metrocenter, and that book was the reason I applied to the Iowa MFA program, to study with Thom.

I found Amazon in 1995, within a month or two of its debut.  I still remember clicking through it for the first time. I had a panic attack. I actually had to walk away from the computer to compose myself. I was shaking so hard when I saw all those books that I had heard of,--classics, backlist titles, series titles that I had missed, so many books!--and I had to do was click, and they arrived. I found books that I should have known about but hadn't. They had every book by Jane Austen, Tolstoy, George Eliot, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and so many other writers that I had heard about but never seen in print. I had heard the name "Nabokov" in a song by The Police, but I had never seen Lolita. I had never seen a book by Virginia Woolf. Shipping was free if you ordered more than $100 worth, and I always ordered more than $100 worth. And the prices were lower! I couldn't believe how many books I got for $100!

And now, Kindle. Free classics and other books. Lower-priced ebooks. Instant delivery. I read a lot of books that I adore but would have never been published by traditional publishers because they're too niche, and I am so in that niche. Over half the books I buy are "indie," or independently published. The five best books that I read last year were indie. (The five worst books that I read last year were all traditionally published.) I can carry 200 books in my purse.I can find new writers, lots of them. I can buy a whole series by a new writer, including stuff that was originally published a decade or more ago. I can read Aristotle's Poetics on my phone. I can instantly read full-color non-fiction on my (Kid's) Kindle Fire. I love my "old-fashioned" ereader Kindle because it strains my eyes less than a printed book.

Plus, no one can see my hoard, so I don't have a problem, right?

As a writer, I love and use Amazon.

As a reader, Amazon changed my life.

It feels like when I got a car for the first time, and I was free to drive anywhere you want to.

Or like when I got glasses for the first time, and I realized that trees have leaves, not just green smears, and that the streets went a lot farther than I had thought they did.

Or the first time I got a passport, when I thought, I can go anywhere on the planet, anywhere. I am no longer confined by mere borders. 

Or the first time I hooked my computer up to the internet (1994) and found a whole, new world through my text-based browser that I had never knew existed, where people shared everything they knew.

Or when soon after that, my then-boyfriend (now-husband) told me about a secret, magic mantra called Gayathri Mantra that he knew because he was a high-caste uber-Brahmin priest and had gone through a secret religious ritual and that he would never tell me, and so I found it in fifteen minutes online, with several English translations, to the point where I understood it better than he did. Man, he was pissed.

That's what Amazon feels like to me. It feels like blowing up boundaries. It feels like secret knowledge revealed.

I'm sure that I'm a typical high-volume reader, in that Amazon increased how much I buy and read because it increased the number of books that I have access to. Looking back, I cannot believe some of the crud that I read as a kid and even as a young adult because I had no access to better books. Back then, I even reread crud because I couldn't find anything else to buy. I still reread books, but I reread Orlando by Virginia Woolf, and I reread Lolita by Nabokov, and I reread Jane Austen and Tolstoy. And I read so many new, wonderful, varied books, a kaleidoscope of books, a whole world of books.

As great a time as this is to be a writer, it's a fantastic time to be a reader.

TK Kenyon

Escaping My Ex-Publisher: What I Got Back

In 2007, my first published novel, RABID, was published by Kunati, Inc., a small traditional publishing company. I was thrilled because they had 50,000 submissions for their first round and chose 8 books for their first crop.

Yeah, 8 books out of 50,000 submissions. That’s some serious “gate-keeping,” huh?

I had been writing RABID for three years at that point. I had graduated with my PhD in molecular virology, done a postdoc in neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, and had a baby. My brain was scorched. I threw all my emotional baggage in that book.

Despite that, it turned out well, I thought and I still think.

It also turned out to be almost 200,000 words.

My publisher wanted me to cut it down to below 140,000, which I did. I think it came in at 139,996, which is below 140,000 words, and that’s the important point.

My publisher also edited the periods out of my name, kind of like e.e. cummings but with punctuation rather than capitalization, so I became TK Kenyon instead of T.K. Kenyon. I had been T.K. since sixth grade, when there were three “Terri’s” (of various spellings) in my class, so two of us got to choose new names. I chose “T.K.” When I sign my name, I use T.K., and yes, I tap out two periods in there. It’s funny that some people think it’s an affectation, since my publisher did it and I really didn’t have a say in it.

That’s common with publishers: they do stuff and authors don’t have any say in it. The periods in my name, 60,000 words of my first novel, etc.

I had to cut a lot of stuff out of RABID, including stuff that was important but was not the very most important. For example, there was a lot about the community, including some instances of ... hive mind, perhaps we should call it, that happened when several of the characters were together.

This was the po-mo structure of the novel: each scene was written from one of the viewpoint characters (Conroy, Leila, Bev, or Dante,) and had to include one of the other four characters, except that each character got one soliloquy when they were alone and at an important turning point in their lives. Bev’s soliloquy is the very first scene. Leila’s is the last scene. Conroy’s and Dante’s occur at important points in the book.

When all four characters were together, or at least three of them, the community’s hive mind become active. The viewpoint become omniscient and can duck into various minor characters’ heads. I wanted to speak about the gestalt that happens when people gather.

Anyway, that strategy was a casualty of the Great Revision. I went back and restored a lot of that in this version of the novel.

In addition to some additions for clarity and some emotional beats that were recovered, the new version of RABID is about 155,000 words.

Yeah, it’s pretty long, but it has a lot to say.

It’s not a book that everyone will like, which is why I posted this “quiz” a while ago to point you toward whether you should bother giving it a look. I just reread it five times in a row, which is a lot to read any one book. There are some parts in there that I am really proud of. There are some scenes that I’m surprised that I survived writing.

If you read it, I hope you like it. 

The Five Stages of a Writer's Career (according to publishers)

Who the hell is TK Kenyon?

Get me TK Kenyon.

Get me a TK Kenyon-type author.

Get me a young TK Kenyon.

Who the hell is TK Kenyon?

Thanks for reading!

Here’s two interesting 99c short stories for you to read: (More fiction coming soon.)

The Law of Large Numbers (Kindle Store on Amazon)

The Law of Large Numbers (All Formats)

Nag Is Hindi for Cobra (Kindle Store on Amazon)

Nag Is Hindi for Cobra (All Formats)