Who can compete with Olivie Blake?

Adventures in the alternate universe of book publishing

May 13, 2022

Welcome to the 148th edition of SHuSH, the weekly newsletter of The Sutherland House Inc. Hit the button—it’s free:

I’m occasionally asked why Sutherland House publishes only non-fiction. I have a couple of answers. My background is in journalism and narrative non-fiction, so it made sense to start with what I knew. Also, the North American market for non-fiction is underserved compared to fiction.

To me, the fiction market looks overserved (in both the literal and the Vanderpump sense of the word) and hypercompetitive. Most publishers prefer to publish fiction; there are more publishers than ever; there is a tsunami of self-published fiction on Amazon and other sites. How many novels are launched in North America annually? I can’t find a reliable number but it’s likely several hundred thousand.

With all that noise, it’s difficult for new fiction releases to find an audience. Agents tell me it is now common for established authors to sell just a few hundred copies of a book that was several years in the writing, in part because of the competition, and also because of the wild, unpredictable, season-to-season swings in literary taste.

If I were an ambitious publisher of fiction, I might convince myself that I possessed an eye sharp enough to make a go of things, notwithstanding the oversupply. But I’d have real trouble dealing with other realities of the fiction market. Like the book at the top of this page.

Study that cover for a minute.

At first glance, it looked to me like the placeholders you see in publishing catalogs when the art department is late with a book’s real cover. Or like something hacked by a lazy self-publisher from a picmonkey template.

Grey on industrial grey? I considered that the grey might represent the ether and that an unadorned page would help the book stand apart among today’s flamboyantly over-designed covers:

But I still leaned mistake, or lazy, or dumb.

I came across Alone With You in the Ether last Sunday night. Lydia Perovic’s new release for Sutherland House, Lost in Canada, was in the top 100 bestsellers on the Amazon Canada site (excerpt here in the National Post). I was curious to see what was at the very top of the list. And there it was:

I saw that Ether was self-published and guessed that the author had bought a couple hundred copies of her own novel on a Sunday evening to elevate herself all the way to #1 (it’s that easy). I made a note to check the next day, expecting to see Ether, without benefit of more author purchases, back down around #123,381.

I checked on Monday, and Tuesday, and Wednesday, and Ether was still #1, not in some obscure category but sitewide in books.

It was then that I noticed the 469 reviews, which is a lot for a self-published novel on Amazon Canada. (Several Miriam Toews books have fewer, and her highest total, for the much-celebrated Fight Night, is 857.)

I looked at Amazon US and Ether was bouncing around the top five on its sitewide bestseller list. It was #2 in literary fiction, right behind Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing, and ahead of a bunch of Colleen Hoovers.

My next thought was that Ether must have made news. It was bought for a TV series, or anointed by Oprah or Reese. Or the author was canceled. Or dating a K-pop star. I searched.

Nothing:

The book was nowhere, except at the top of Amazon. It was absent from the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists. I checked the paperback fiction list and the sci-fi list at Publisher’s Weekly, the bible of the US book publishing industry.

Nada.

I word-searched the title of the book on Publisher’s Weekly to see if an article or a review or anything else had been written about it.

Zip.

I tried Publisher’s Lunch, which covers everything that moves in fiction.

Zilch:

I finally had a little luck searching the author name. Up popped this charming photo courtesy of the LA Daily News.

The attached article, published two months ago, doesn’t mention the two-year-old Alone With You in the Ether but it does introduce Alexene Farol Follmuth, aka Olivie Blake, as a young Los Angeles woman and new mother who got her start writing fan-fiction and webtoons (with the illustrator Little Chmura) before churning out self-published novels for the science fiction/fantasy/romance crowd.

The occasion for the Daily News piece was the release of Ms. Farol Follmuth’s new young adult novel, My Mechanical Romance. That led me to her Twitter feed where I learned that she now has an agent and that My Mechanical Romance was published by Holiday House, a well-established children’s publisher.

Digging back on the feed, I found a few tweets about Alone With You in the Ether from the time of its release, including this one in which she admits that the cover, while a deliberate choice, is a head-scratcher:

Ms. Farol Follmuth’s Twitter following is modest for an author: 1900 followers and, as you can see, there wasn’t much activity on this particular tweet.

I invested $4.07 of Sutherland House money in the Kindle edition of Alone With You in the Ether (the paperback is $16.31).

While I’m not the intended audience, I like to think I can recognize decent prose and/or a talented storyteller.

I read the first five pages (following the Margaret Atwood rule). It did nothing for me.

I next logged in at TikTok (where the algorithm filled my home page with a video of someone named rose.friederike eating her skin-care mask). Typing Ms. Farol Follmuth’s title into the search bar, I knew I was on to something before I’d even finished. TikTokers seemed to be struggling with the title but there was obviously strong interest in the book:

With the whole title entered, I was introduced to Ayman at @aymansbooks. Her reaction to Ether was different from mine: