I am publishing my unpublishable novel

Tomorrow is the drop date for Mary Monster. You can pre-order it right now, if you're so inclined.

I blogged before that my novel might be an unmarketable mashup of noir mystery, gothic lit, rock fetishism and supernatural suspense. Sure enough, I spent six months trying to find an agent. I got a few bites. A couple even sent me personal letters complimenting my voice. But in the end, no one was willing to rep it.

I'm not willing to let Mary Monster die on my hard drive. So I'm self-publishing it.

In a way, I think that's how it should've been all along. This is a personal book. A passion project. A book I wrote for me.

I've written an unpublishable mashup of a novel

Between January 3, 2013 and February 8, 2017, I put out eight novellas. That's a clip of a new book every six months. What's been the hold-up since?

The good news is I'm on my third draft of a novel. The bad news? I'm fairly sure it's unpublishable.

Mary Monster isn't going to be easy to sell. It's a mashup of urban surrealism and gothic horror. Dance Dance Dance meets Penny Dreadful. My first-person protagonist narrates the story in an awkward combination of 1976 Manchester and 2002 Manhattan slang. He drops dozens of indie music references, some explained and some that'll only make sense to the sort of person who obsesses over The Smiths. Meanwhile, the titular Mary speaks in wholly imagined accents, double entendres and literary allusions.

I tried to embrace all this artifice. In fact, I ran at it. In places I rewrote things to feel purposefully self-conscious, so readers have to slow down and make choices about what to Google and what to let go.

How do I explain this work in a query letter? And even if I could, who'd want it? Fantasy publishers will find my style obtrusive. While literary agents are going to be turned off by all the zombies.

But I can't self-publish, either. The type of people who download self-published fiction are looking for error-free genre fun. That means the first wave of consumer reviews would be terrible. Some jerk would claim my book was filled with typos. Another would drop the where-was-the-editor bomb. And snap, Amazon's algorithm would bury Mary Monster before it got a chance to find a niche.

To publish this book, I either need to find a publisher who believes in it. Or an audience ready to champion it. And I'm not sure either exists.