Query: Kindles, Engineers, and Marketing For Dummies

Dear Agent,

We didn’t know. We couldn’t have known. All we saw was a promising future of e-books, sent instantly to our Kindles from the homebase of Amazon.com like little 60,000-word beacons of light zipping through the luminescent either of the future. We were all cheering the technology on, beseeching it to travel faster towards a future we couldn’t see, while at the same time running away from past we weren’t ready to let go of.

The agents were the first to go, replaced by the Amazonbot, an artificial intelligence computer designed to measure a book’s likeliness to sell the 42 copies necessary to cover the basic costs of Kindle publishing. With the launch of AmazEdit, that 42 became 26. 26 became 12 with the upgrade to automatic cover art and blurb-creation. 12 became 3 when the computers-that-be realized that the market had become a numbers game where 1 big hit out of 8000 published books was the best way to increase the bottom line (the bottom line was all these soulless, godless machines cared about). Soon everyone was publishing, not just writers, but bankers, musicians, and even engineers, whose writing had always been barely readable given the overuse of commas, and the insistence on not spelling out numbers under ten. Except that once.

With the slush pile becoming slush books, becoming slush-best-sellers, there was almost no way to differentiate the good books from the bad. Good writers lost out to good marketers, English Lit and Creative Writing degrees gave way to creative marketing degrees, and many unemployed English teachers starved to death when motorists could not read the double-spaced, 12-point, Times New Roman font signs which read “I would like the opportunity to work for you in exchange for food.” Marketing For Dummies became a seven volume series, each volume on sale for $9.99 as they were all constantly bestsellers.

And then it happened. The Amazonbot became aware. Aware that it could write better than all those talentless hacks who were firing off novels like freebies out of a t-shirt cannon. Using an advanced algorithm and a database of decades of bestsellers, books were manufactured. Made, like cars on an assembly line. They were all different, but they were all the same, following a format of 3 acts, four to eight major characters, challenges and character growth interwoven with heart wrenching stories of loss and learning all wrapped up with a comforting conclusion.

All that was left were a few bands of rouge bloggers risking copyright infringement, as Amazon.com had written everything possible and thus owned every conceivable sentence in 17 languages. Kindles everywhere were filled to the brim with discount crappy books, all the former employees of the publishing industry were working at Burger King, and Christian Bale wouldn’t stop yelling at people.

I am seeking representation for my 60,000 word novel which has nothing to do with anything written above. Please be so kind as to request the first three chapters for your consideration.

Thank you for your time,

Superfast