… engaging relationship with novels that may have been missed by traditional publishers.

This morning I read Alison Flood’s post on the Guardian Books Blog “Self-published novels: where to start?”  And perused some of the comments.  The term self-published novel has limited usefulness, especially if you generally read books that are published by not-for-profit publishers.  The bulk of what I read is by authors whose publishers are not commercial entities.  The novels printed by these “art house” publishers are subsidized by grants and donations of people who think that such books are important and deserve to be disseminated.

Recently, while reading Enrique Vila-Matas’ Dublinesque I wondered why there were not more English-language novelists writing books like this.  Then I wondered if it was indeed true that there were comparatively few writers penning novels in English that would attract readers of Vila-Matas.  Or was it just my ignorance of what is available by English-language writers that creates the impression of scarcity in this category of literature?

Given that there were “almost 250,000 books self-published last year,” I feel confident that at least a handful of them might be novels I’d like to read.  But like Alison Flood, I’m not sure how to find these rare offerings.  And unlike the examples given in Flood’s post, the books I would be interested in are (most assuredly) not among the top sellers on any Amazon list.