I self-published my first book because I had no choice. This disappointment was reflected in the two of three prefaces that I had included in the book.
Eventually, I realized that if my 2020 Jokebook had been accepted by a traditional publisher, I would have considered that as ‘mission accomplished’ and ended my writing career. In retrospect, it was not all bad. I now have 29 books in my backlist!
Pre-pre-preface
A few months ago, while trying to contact some book agents, I mailed an editor at a New York publisher by mistake and she surprisingly offered to edit my book if I did not want to go through an agent. After I sent her the manuscript, she thought it was too big and suggested that the book be split into two - one for children and one for adults. In the next few days, the global coronavirus
panicpandemic lockdown was imposed and she became incommunicado. During lockdown, the joke count got close to 3200. With the year 2020 slipping by and no end to lockdown, I decided to self-publish.
More details are available at the end of this book and on my website: www.VSubhash.IN.
V. Subhash
23-07-2020
The publisher was Skyhorse. The editor took my manuscript, asked me to split it and then became radio silent. Skyhorse has released such titles as the Plandemic and CIA Factbook.
Pre-preface
This 400-joke subset of my 2600-joke book has been necessitated due to certain extraneous factors. I did not want self-publish my book. When I find a real publisher, the full version will be published. It has to be a physical book with a real promotion.
They say comedy is dying and it is true. Just look at the humour section of any retailer, online or offline. None of the titles suggest any link to humour. In my search for book agents, I found the book industry to be dominated by women. Just as piggish men make the film and music industries hostile to women, humourless female book agents form a wall around which there is no go. The average female agent will fill a telephone directory-size tome with three or four mildly comic situations and then describe the book as 'full of laugh-out-loud moments'. The few male agents who work for these women are their mirror images. I found one guy mentioning that he does not accept anything described as 'Lovecraftian' because "HP Lovecraft did not like Blacks and that's racist". A writer writes at a higher level than the agent. (Apparently, there exist countless writers who can spin great yarns but cannot write anything resembling a book without a lot of hand-holding by these agents. I think they deserve each other.) If the writer has to come down to the level of such a nitwit, then all writing is doomed. Do these women have some kind of axe to grind against men? How come they are so alike? (Do we need more men in publishing? No. Read my joke about the wimps who broke the 'ceiling' in nursing.) If they control what we read, eventually nobody will read anything out of interest. Unless more women start writing humour, these literary soup nazis will exterminate us.
V. Subhash
20-02-2020
UPDATE (three years later)
In this video, the girl mentions that so much more books are written for women and so much less for men that reading fiction is going to be a 'girl thing'. While she thinks this will make writing books less profitable, she seems unaware that the real reason is the book publishing is today dominated by women in the middle and low levels. Women are chosen for this job because they are risk-averse and will follow orders. The top managements do want to rock the boat for the globalist kleptocracy. They would rather use the publishing business as a sleazy money-laundering operation so they can give million-dollar advances to talentless hacks such as the world's greatest teleprompter reader Obama and the unbelievably entitled and unfunny Amy Schumer.
