Twice in the past twelve months I’ve found myself taken aback by the death of a Hollywood actor.
First was the death of Gene Hackman, and then earlier this month, the passing of Robert Duvall. Both were generation-defining actors who played some of the most memorable Hollywood roles in the last fifty years.
They were also the kind of resilient actors who brought a hushed, understated presence to their roles. While masculinity is under attack in certain quarters for its toxicity, these men portrayed a quieter, sturdier kind of masculinity worth emulating.
Former Associated Press Hollywood correspondent Bob Thomas, who died in 2014, was the primary writer of this obituary.
In other words, the writer of Duvall’s obituary died twelve years before Duvall’s obituary was published.
I’ve long been fascinated with the writing process behind obituaries. It’s a journalistic art form clouded by a professional secrecy uncharacteristic of journalism and its desire for transparency. (“Democracy dies in darkness.”)
Obituaries for the powerful and famous are written years in advance of the person’s passing. These obits are not complete, however. A pending obituary remains open and subject to further edits if some new and significant chapter of the person’s life blooms.
Papers and wire services will prepare and sit on hundreds, even thousands, of unfinished obituaries, each a miniature biography-in-development of a full and public life. Newspapers and wire services jealousy guard this corpus of material, not even acknowledging they’re preparing an obit for any particular person. Only death seals an obituary shut, like nailing a coffin closed.
All this prep work is due to journalism’s tight deadlines, since an obituary is expected to be published within hours, not weeks, of the subject’s death. These realities shroud the whole process with a morbid pragmatism that borders on the absurd.
This is what led me to write my short story “The Obituarist,” published by North American Review and collected in my book A Concordance of One’s Life. The story regards a professional obituary writer who, faced with his own mortality, contributes an interview to be used for his own obit.
From the story:
My editors and my fellow obituarists have a little list, The Nearly Departed we call it, celebrities and politicians and artists and authors whom we agree are not long for this world. The unlucky are crossed off the list the same day their obit hits the back pages of the Times. The unluckier are those added when that slot opens. There is no announcement, no press release of their addition. My subjects are not informed privately.
A few years after NAR published “The Obituarist,” I wrote a post for their blog explaining my inspiration for the story, as well as the peculiarities of the obituary writing process.
One peculiarity is when the obituary’s subject outlives the writer, such as what happened to Bob Thomas and Robert Duvall. Back in 2014, I learned that a similar situation happened when Mickey Rooney passed away. I’m certain there’s many other examples to be found.
Sometimes the paper prints the obituary while the subject is still alive. This famously happened to Mark Twain (“The report of my death was an exaggeration”), but also to Axl Rose, Abe Vigoda, Alfred Nobel, and more. One of my favorites is the note Rudyard Kipling sent to the paper which printed his obituary: “I’ve just read that I am dead. Don’t forget to delete me from your list of subscribers.”
Another peculiarity is much rarer than the prior two, that is, when the subject is permitted to read his obituary before his death. In at least one case, a paper acquiesced to publishing an obit knowing that the subject was not dead: Huckster and showman P. T. Barnum convinced a New York newspaper to print his, just so he could read it before passing away a few days later.
So, while I mourn the death of Robert Duvall, I also tip my hat to AP writer Bob Thomas, who passes into infamy in a manner unique to the career of an obituary writer.
Last time I wrote about publishing my back catalog on Kobo and making all my older books nonexclusive to Amazon. This is called “going wide” in independent publishing circles. I mentioned I had been meaning to do this for some time, but kept putting it off. If you’re wondering why, it involves a ten-year backstory about my rocky relationship with non-Amazon distributors.
My first push toward independent publishing came from attending the 2014 AWP Conference & Bookfair in Seattle. Amazon was all over the conference, hosting multiple round table talks on Kindle publishing, seminars on how to publish on their platform, and handing out free CreateSpace print-on-demand samples. Although mildly skeptical, I returned home convinced it was worth an experiment or two.
The first book I published on Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing was A Concordance of One’s Life. It’s a short story collection—essentially my MFA thesis put into book form. I had zero expectations of big sales or shooting up the bestseller list. If things went pear-shaped, I lost little.
The process was amazingly smooth. I slapped together a passable cover using photos from my phone. I published it on Amazon with ease, and lo, my first book was available. Sales were in the single digits. That’s fine, it was a start. My San Francisco novella Everywhere Man soon followed.
In 2014, it seemed natural that I should publish my books everywhere I could, and I began researching other options. Smashwords was my first stop.
Smashwords is an old-timer in the e-publishing sector, predating even Amazon (I believe). Its founder is an e-publishing evangelist who even e-published his own book to spread the good word. Unlike Amazon, which has quality standards they expect authors to follow, Smashwords accepts anything: Word documents, crappy PDFs, even plain text files. If it could be read, Smashwords wanted to host it.
This meant, of course, that my books were side-by-side with some truly awful options, both in terms of writing quality and reading comfort. The site’s layout was archaic, and had few options for book discovery.
What’s more, Smashwords offered no easy way to read the books or documents you downloaded. Amazon had free Kindle Reader apps and a Kindle standalone handheld device. Both automated buying, downloading, and reading books. With Smashwords, the reader was on their own.
Sales on Smashwords were nearly zero. The only way I was going to get people to find my books there was to spread links to Smashwords myself. If I was going to do that, I would rather send them to Amazon, which made it far easier to load my ebooks on a Kindle reader. For years I offered my first two ebooks for free on Smashwords. It made no difference in downloads.
I also tried Barnes & Noble. Unlike Amazon and Smashwords, B&N was immensely unfriendly in 2014 and reluctant to deal with an independent writer. They went so far as requiring me to file for a B&N vendor ID, which was the same ID used for selling goods in their physical stores, from books to candy to stuffed animals. I managed to get my first two ebooks up on their web site, but like Smashwords, they offered no way to make my books known to their browsing customers. What’s more, their Kindle-like handheld reader (“Nook”) was overly expensive, underpowered, and did not sell well.
Next came Apple Books. Like B&N, they were also reluctant to deal with independent writers. They made establishing a publisher account feel like I was dealing with a bureaucrat who could not stop rolling his eyes as I filled out the form. Worse, they don’t support buying a book on the Web—you had to launch their Books iPhone or iPod app to search the Apple Store. And, like the others, there was almost no way to get my books in front of people who might be searching for a title like my own.
That’s when I got to Kobo’s Writing Life, which is Kobo’s e-publishing system. Kobo was far more welcoming than Apple and B&N. Publishing books was almost easier than Amazon’s KDP. They offered resources for writing and editing their books, and links to print-on-demand publishers if I wanted to offer a paperback on their site.
Like the other non-Amazon platforms, though, discovery was again a problem. Once more, it was upon me to spread links to my Kobo pages far & wide so readers could find my books. And, I don’t believe Kobo at that time offered an ebook reader of their own, leaving readers on their own to load their purchased selections on a reader. (I might be mistaken about this last point, however.)
Ten years on
Reviewing these options over ten years later, it’s remarkable how little has changed.
Kobo remains the best of the non-Amazon bunch. Their publishing system is similar to the 2014 experience, but it was always easy to use and navigate, so I’m fine with that. It still has its publishing resources list, and its book details pages (where a reader can examine the book before buying) look about the same as before.
B&N learned their lesson the hard way and made publishing books on their web site much, much friendlier. Their publishing portal operates much like Kobo’s now, and it appears it’s easier for a new writer to sign up. Smashwords was sold to Draft2Digital, but the web site stands more or less as it was when I first logged in. Apple remains a cold and unfriendly business partner.
The biggest remaining problem with these platforms? Discovery. I’ve used the word a few times already. Let me explain what it means in this context.
If you go to the home page for any of these booksellers, you are presented with bestsellers and new books and old standbys from the Big Four publishers—Penguin Random House, Macmillan, Hachette Book Group, and HarperCollins, and their numerous imprints. While Amazon also gives these big-name (and high-paying) publishers lots of screen real estate, you will also find titles from independent authors mixed in, especially on their Top 100 lists for the various genres: Westerns, science-fiction, biography, and so forth. Not so with the other platforms.
Amazon also offers independent authors the ability to advertise their books. Advertising can be set up a few different ways, but it’s usually a per-click price auction. The author gets to decide what search terms or what kind of content the ad should be placed near. This is an amazing way to let readers know of your work.
Per-click advertising is unavailable on the other platforms. Kobo toyed with the idea, but never followed through.
Likewise, Amazon will advertise your book—for free—through “Others bought these similar books” and “Suggested titles” lists it shows on book detail pages. This is another great way for readers to discover new books—if someone enjoys cyberpunk, it’s likely they’ll at least want to know about my take on the genre.
The other platforms only offer a “More titles by this author” on a book page. That’s it. Worse, this feature is broken, and has been broken for over ten years. Here’s why.
Amazon has a concept of author pages, where a writer can group their titles under their name and biographical blurb. It’s sort of like a bookshelf of all the author’s works. That’s why you can click the link to my name on any of my book pages and go right to my Amazon author page.
None of the above platforms—including Kobo—have such a concept. Their “More titles by this author” lists are nothing more than a lazy search of all books on their site with the same author name. When you have a name as common as “Jim Nelson,” that means books by complete strangers are presented as mine.
This was annoying, but forgivable, in 2014. It’s maddening in 2025.
I wrote Kobo support about this in 2021. As with per-click advertising, they said author pages were something “we are looking into the possibility for the future.” They’ve yet to follow through. Remember, their systems know which books are mine—I uploaded them to their servers through a single account! Yes, things get more complicated when a single author has multiple publishers, but that doesn’t excuse using a simple keyword search to locate an author’s books.
Year after year, Amazon has listened to independent authors and improved their publishing system to accommodate our needs. Is it perfect? Not in the least. But I do see a continuous process of refinement unseen on the other platforms. That demonstrates to me a level of commitment the others are not making.
I’m not here to tell you that Amazon is a wonderful company. You may have real issues with their size, their sales model, their profits, their international scope, their practices, or their founder’s politics. I won’t argue with any of that.
But for ten years now, Amazon has treated me more like a business partner than any other publishing platform out there. Not a peer, perhaps, but at least a partner of sorts.
That’s an awful lot of grumbling on my part. Why move my books to Kobo now?
My Kindle Unlimited page reads have dropped considerably in the past two years. Sales have dropped too. I don’t write the kind of books that move big numbers of copies. That throne is currently held by romance, fantasy, and hard science-fiction multi-volume series, with lots of battles and excitement, and plenty of sex and plunder. I prefer standalone novels centered around one or two characters, and stories with a solid beginning, middle, and end.
On the advertising front, the booming Kindle publishing market has brought with it inflated per-click prices. I’m seeing $2+ per-click(!) auction prices for certain high-value, high-margin book categories, a price I’m unwilling to pay, since a click is no guarantee of a sale.
With my back catalog having a harder time finding an audience, it’s time to expand their availability, especially since I’ve learned that folks in Commonwealth nations seem to prefer Kobo.
For some time now, I’ve been planning to make my older books available on ebook platforms not named after South American rainforests. After a couple of years of putting it off—I’m a notorious procrastinator—a friend and professional acquaintance in New Zealand asked why he couldn’t get my books from Kobo, his preferred platform. That set me in motion.
(It was not my first time hearing this suggestion. A reader from Canada asked me the same question a few years back.)
The remaining novels are enrolled in an Amazon program called Kindle Select, which offers writers a number of nice features. For me, the most desirable benefit is that it places my books into Kindle Unlimited, which is a kind of Netflix-style book buffet, where subscribers can read as many books as they want for a monthly fee. KU was a great way for readers to be introduced to my work, and for awhile there I saw a lot of my books being read through that program.
Unfortunately, Kindle Unlimited readers have dwindled off for my back catalog (it tends to favor newer releases). So, as my older books fall out of Kindle Select, I’ll add them to Kobo. I’ll start moving my back catalog to Barnes & Noble and Apple Books as well. (This is called “going wide” in independent publishing circles.)
Aside from Kindle Unlimited, why did I wait so long to go wide? I’ll answer that question next time.
Illustration from Erotic Review for “At the White Sands Motel, 1956”
I once wrote erotica by accident. Writing and getting the story published is a wild tale.
If you know of anything of my output—my novels, my interactive fiction—that might surprise you. You’ve probably never read anything by me that remotely involves the sex act: No kinky sex, no ho-hum sex, not even missionary style. Generally, I shy away from that kind of thing. Getting a story published in an erotica magazine still tickles me to this day.
The story-behind-the-story begins in a creative writing class. The instructor offered us a list of writing prompts. We were to select one and write an opening.
The first speed bump in this tale is that these prompts were communicated to us orally. The prompt I selected regarded a teenage lifeguard named Hamke. Years later, I learned I had misheard the details. The prompt did not include the name “Hamke” or anything about a lifeguard. How I managed to screw up so much remains a mystery lost to the shroud of time.
In any event, the name and occupation stuck. I assumed it was a German name, as I’d never heard of it before. (Apparently, I’m not alone.) While I enjoy swimming, I’ve never known a lifeguard nor worked as one. Why this prompt caught my interest, I do not know. Over the following week I roughed out a first draft about a teenage Hamke standing guard over a motel pool in Nevada. In need of a title, I jammed one onto the front page of the manuscript: “Living It Up at the White Sands Motel.” (I believe it was a riff on the quip about a cheap lodging being a “low-rent Shangri-la.”)
Around this time, I dated a woman also enrolled in the creative writing program. She was experimenting with poetry about the body. She read many of my stories, which is generous—even when you’re dating a writer, that’s no guarantee they’ll actually read your output. She called my work cerebral, and noted that my characters seemed “detached” from their physical nature. She challenged me to write a story where the main character’s physicality is centered.
Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean “write about sex” or “write about someone with a smokin’ bod.” It could mean the main character is physically challenged, or has suffered some grievous physical damage they’re recovering from. It could mean some aspect of their body defines them in a material way (which is something I had in mind as I wrote my Bridge Daughter series of books.)
In this case, I went for the obvious: Hamke would have sex. More than that, he would lose his virginity.
I poked and prodded at the manuscript—draft after draft—trying to tune all the off-key notes. In workshops, peer writers would scratch their heads trying to figure out what to make of this strange story. There was a lifeguard with a flat-top and a weird name, an empty motel in the desert, and an older couple from New Jersey who invites him to their air-conditioned room for an afternoon romp. By this time I’d renamed it (still flailing for a proper title) “At the White Sands Motel, 1956.”
I submitted to the usual literary magazines, searching high and low for a place to land it. The rejection slips came back a bit more quickly than the other stories I’d sent out. Perhaps the complaints I heard in in the workshops (“‘Hamke?’ Is that Jewish?”) was now confounding editors. The sex was not graphic, but it was on the page and not merely alluded to. The wife was acidic and domineering, and her husband frustratingly passive. Wide-eyed Hamke, who was simply “along for the ride” (so to speak), was not a character to stand up and cheer for.
Enter London-based writer Saskia Vogel. By chance, she came into the bar I tended while working through graduate school. She was working on a study of kink; I despaired over a short story about a lifeguard losing his virginity. We swapped email addresses and kept in touch after she returned to England.
Around this time, fellow grad student Lizzy Acker mentioned off-the-cuff she was developing a new San Francisco reading series with the theme “funny / sexy / sad.” The work writers presented had to feature one of those elements.
“You know,” I said, not entirely innocently, “I have a story that’s funny, sexy, and sad.”
It’s true: Hamke’s fumbling and awkward loss of innocence is funny. The wife impatiently orders Hamke across a tour of her body as though teaching him to drive a stick shift. It’s sad, too. As one workshop instructor remarked, the boy is robbed of a positive formative experience.
Lizzy included me in the series’ opening night line-up, and the reading went uproariously well. Maxfield’s House of Caffeine was packed. The audience reacted with every twist and turn of Hamke’s awkward journey. They burst out laughing at all the right moments. Red-faced parents held their hands over their children’s tender ears. People were moved by the ending, and a couple of tears were shed. The applause knocked me off my feet. It was, by every measure, the best reading I ever gave.
How the hell could I not get this story published?
Then, an interregnum. I separated from the girlfriend who challenged me to write about the body. I separated from my appendix, and a few months later, I busted up my right shoulder. I separated from graduate school. (Well, a degree was conferred, how’s that.) Hamke’s story remained a magnet for rejection slips. Meanwhile, medical bills ate through my meager bartender savings.
With no more excuses, I returned to full-time employment. The first year with my new company, the sector we were involved in hosted their annual conference in, of all places, the Canary Islands.
La Palmas de Gran Canaria. (Photo by the author.)
That’s how, six months after staring down bankruptcy and unemployment, I found myself on a semi-tropical island in the Atlantic a mere 500 miles from Marrakesh. I rented a cheap open-air room overlooking the Las Palmas promenade and a pristine sunning beach. After the conference concluded, I stayed for another week to explore the island and write.
During this vacation I received an email from Saskia Vogel in London. She heard from an editor friend that the UK-based Erotic Review was in need of fiction. Didn’t I have a story about a guy having sex for the first time?
In that low-rent Shangri-la, the couch doubling as my bed and the drapes billowing from the breeze coming off the beach, I hustled one more edit pass out of my aging Hamke story. Thankfully I brought my writing notebook computer with me. This was not a time when Wi-Fi was a sure thing in a rented room, especially in an out-of-the-way place like Gran Canaria, but I in this case I was set. I emailed my little story to editor and publisher Jamie Maclean.
Before I did that, though, I used the Wi-Fi to study up on just whom I was submitting to. My search revealed I was not soliciting some amateur outfit. ER had been around since before 1995, and had published numerous erotic books on top of a monthly subscription-based magazine. Their readers spanned the UK and North America. Not only had I never published a work of erotica, I’d never been published by a magazine that survived solely off subscriptions.
With a healthy taste of self-doubt in the back of my mouth, I pressed the Send button. Then I did what I usually do after submitting a piece to a magazine: I got my mind off things. I went downstairs. I walked the promenade. I had a couple of drinks at a beach bar, and got my toes in some sand.
When I returned to the room, I of course checked my email, fully expecting to find nothing. Instead, an acceptance email waited in my inbox. Compared to the usual turnaround times for literary magazines—one sent me a rejection two years after submission—this was lightning fast. Later it dawned on me that my accidental vacation spot had contributed to the quick response: I was in the same time zone as London, where ER was published.
Three months later, a contributor’s copy of Erotic Review and an international money transfer arrived at my apartment in California. My Hamke story was out there.
And that’s how I became a writer of erotica, scribbler of filth and peddler of smut.
Postscript:
My tale might be seen as a reversal of Ray Bradbury’s strategy to seek out unusual places for his work (such as Gourmet publishing his “Dandelion Wine”). I sought out unusual places to publish an erotica story, and eventually found a natural home for it.
Being published in an erotica magazine has become a point of pride for me. I never set out to write erotica, and I’ve never considered pursuing it since. I once read that no one writes erotica under their real name. Well, I did, although when you have as generic a name as “Jim Nelson,” perhaps it doesn’t matter.
Erotic Review is a class act. They continued to stay in touch. I received editorial updates and invites to ER parties (which, sadly, were all in London). They even sent digital Christmas cards, such as the one above.
Recently ER changed hands and is now retooling under a new editorial staff. If you’re interested in supporting the relaunch, visit them at ermagazine.com.
I’ve written in the past about the profession of obituary writing. My interest is rather simple: I wrote a story years ago about an obituarist (kindly published by North American Review) and I’ve remain interested in the vocation since. It strikes me as a unique field of work to compress a person of note’s life down to six or seven informative paragraphs without simply being encyclopedic.
More interesting to me is that most obituaries are written while the subject is still alive. If newspapers are going to stay in the business of publishing timely work, they have to be. Who wants to read the obituary of a one-hit wonder or has-been star six weeks after their death? The magic of the obituary is to be at once timely and timeless.
One danger in the obituary business is premature publication. It turns out there’s a history of notables who had the pleasure of reading their own obituaries, from Axl Rose to Abe Vigoda to Alfred Nobel. I won’t bother quoting Twain about exaggerated reports, but Rudyard Kipling may have topped it with his letter to an editor: “I’ve just read that I am dead. Don’t forget to delete me from your list of subscribers.”
Mindful of current events in the United States, I found myself reading over Wikipedia’s entry on P. T. Barnum. The man’s life was surprisingly varied. While he’s most famous as a huckster and a showman, I didn’t know one of his first ventures was publishing a crusading newspaper (which might explain his later skill of manipulating the press) or that he didn’t get into the circus business until age sixty, when his greatest exploits and promotions were well behind him.
In ill health in 1891, he persuaded a New York newspaper, The Evening Sun, to publish his obituary while he was still alive so he could read it; he died days later at the age of 81.
In my short story, the obituarist remarks that writing one’s own death notice stands outside the bounds of professional decorum. But to bless one’s obituary be published while on death’s door, all for the pleasure of reading it before you pass—P. T. Barnum was quite a man.
Margalit Fox wrote an eye-opening Times essay in 2014 on the art and craft of writing obituaries, so I’m familiar with her name and work. The recent NPR interview coincided with the release of a documentary on Fox and Weber, Obit: Life on Deadline, which I certainly look forward to seeing.
My own interest in all of this comes from a short story I published years back in the North American Review called “The Obituarist”. Researching and writing that story led to my own interest in this underappreciated field of journalism.
Like Ann Wroe’s thoughts on the profession, Fox and Weber share fascinating insights on this odd but rewarding career path. There’s a goldmine of wisdom in the interview, but it’s this observation that stood out for me:
And I think the other great attraction is we are the most purely narrative genre in any daily paper. If you think about how an obit is structured, we are taxed with taking our subjects from cradle to grave, and that gives obits a built-in narrative arc, the arc of how someone lived his or her life. And who doesn’t want to start the day reading a really good story?
