What’s an Indie?

The first thing I envision when I hear the word “Indie” is Harrison Ford in a burning bar coming to the rescue of that chick. (you know, the “Indie!” chick). But these days the word Indie is flopped around like so many portly bellies at a drunken, backyard Slip and Slide party.

So what pray tell exactly is an “Indie?” (See examples here and here. This is where I’m going with all this. Save yourself the grief. Skip the blog post and check out this great sale of Indie books.) Most simply it is an independent artist. An independent artist is actually a leech on society, dependent on everyone and their parakeet to throw him or her crusts from their peanut butter and jelly. But in this case the independent part means the artist has shucked off the chafing restraints of the medium’s traditional gatekeepers.

Indie music defies traditional creational and distributional models. Indie literature slips the bonds of genre and the Big Six publishers, etc.

Basically as of late it has been chosen by such go-it-alone folk as a counter label to “self-published” or “vanity press published.” Granted these two terms were most certainly popularized by the establishment to smear independent sorts as vane and unprofessional. These dirty tactics worked for years.

But the first couple of fortnights of the 21st century will be remembered as the final rise of the indie (at least until our devices rise up and overpower us). Soon everyone will release that Indie talent can be just as professional as the mainstream while delivering refreshing newness and quirky pleasure.[divider]

This Labor Day weekend fill your electronic reading devices and smart phones with all sorts of quirky reading pleasures by stopping in at the www.Indiebookblowout.com sale. Friday through Monday every book will be .99! All sorts of genres from hundreds of Indie authors. Most of them aren’t crap either.

The Green Porch is sponsoring this great book, Discontents by James Wallace Birch. Thought provoking and mind-blowing are the first descriptors that come to mind.

Of course we endorse Fistful of Reefer, by yours truly, as a delightful and pulpy mixture of horsepower and horses (no horses were pulped in the making of this fiction).

I can also vouch for The Red Gate by Richard Sutton for a well done historical fiction with a twist of the Gaelicly mystical. (It’s magically delicious!)[divider]

So this Labor Day weekend take a load off and read an indie. But above all, enjoy the show!