BookAngst 101

The Dope

2006-01-12T21:28:00.000-05:00

"So I bought this novel recently: a foreign publisher gave me a tip, long story short, the agent and the author and me, it's one of those love-at-first-sight things..." --Mar. 24, 2005

Hi, it's me. Max.

Long ago and in a land far, far away, I wrote in this space about editing a novel I'd acquired, and of the singular satisfactions that came from that experience. Of the dozens of posts I wrote during the six or seven months of BookAngst 101, "What makes it all worthwhile" was my favorite, the one that best captured the myriad rewards that the editorial life can provide when the stars allign.

It seemed to strike a nerve with readers too--perhaps because it was about the joy of the process, as opposed (for once) to the innumerable frustrations and disappointments experienced so frequently on all sides of the writing/publishing/bookselling universe. Or maybe it was because it was a story with a happy ending. An editor fairly in awe of his talented author, and grateful to have been granted such access and trust; an author, it might be inferred, who gets the editor she deserves.

Whatever the case, that "report" seems to have represented the high-water mark in the short, happy life of Mad Max Perkins. I gauge this both by the nature of the comments that it elicited, and by the fact that so many of you expressed interest in finding out more about the author and the book.

That interest was both gratifying and encouraging; for me it had the effect of making a little bit less preposterous the preposterous notion that's at the core of every author/editor partnership. Not just that we might be able to make a great book, but also that, somehow, this great book might wind up being embraced to some reasonable degree beyond the walls of our little two-seat incubator.

* * *
Ten months later, that book now exists. It's got a handsome cover, blurbs from a number of generous authors whose work I admire, and handful of pre-pub reviews (including a starred Kirkus, sez he proudly). A second printing is already in the works. Sometime in the next week or two, I'm going to have the experience of walking into a bookstore and seeing this book "live" for the very first time. (A special feeling, that.) One thing that I know for sure: if the books aren't where I want them to be when I arrive, they'll be there by the time I leave. Another thing: I'll linger in a semi-predatory fashion. On two prior such occasions that I know about for sure, my innocent comments to a book-in-hand browser have resulted in confirmed, watched-'em-all-the-way-to-the-cash-register sales. I'll be gunning for more this time around.

* * *
Back in March, a lot of people sent me comments to the effect of

Wow. I want to read this book. How are we going to know to run out and get it when it hits the shelves?

If you're still interested? The novel--DOPE--goes on sale any day now. The author--Sara Gran--has a website, and a blog, and two previous novels. And an editor who, though he should know better, can't help but be excited about what might unfold in the weeks ahead.

Google Madness [from the secret files of N.A.*]

2005-07-17T09:00:00.000-04:00

*Narcissists Anonymous

I. The Slippery Slope.

You try to be strong, to be patient, to take the zen view that worrying it will do no good anyway.

You try to take the advice of your editor, your agent, your friends, fellow writers, your shrink, your analyst, your podiatrist, your psychopharmocologist, your mother [that's how bad it's gotten: you're soliciting advice from your mother], that the best thing you can do now is to block it out and just work:Work on your next book. Work on your garden. Take up a new hobby. [Blogging, anyone?] Take up smoking.

You try to hear--I mean, really hear--those same members of your League of Support Professionals as they say, with that patronizing earnestness that makes you want to slit their well-meaning throats, that it's the Inner You that matters: you've written a great book, you're an artist, you can't let external circumstances over which you have no control become a measure of how you feel about yourself--

--and then you say, ENOUGH! Quit with the laying on of hands! I'm not going to spend the rest of my life in a womb or a plastic bubble or a sensory deprivation chamber. I'm a grownup, and

I'll smoke if I want to! And--
yeah, I know about identity theft & all, but SOMETIMES, dammit, I just don't FEEL like shredding my bills after I've paid them! And--
OK--they can legislate my obligation to wear seatbelts, but not since I was sitting in a fucking CAR-SEAT were they in a position to forcibly strap me in!!!

For a time, this declaration of independence feels freeing. Until...well, there's that clock, in the kitchen--boy does that sucker get loud, late at night when you're all alone. A little less deliberate, but no less maddening, is the slow plink-pulink-puuuuuh-LINK! of the faucet-from-hell as droplets land with unexpected percussive resonance in the basin of the sink. And then there's the irritating buzz of--whatzit, a skeeter?--and as you squash that skeeter and scratch at the one actual site of attack, suddenly it feels like you're covered with insect bites, or fleas, or some horrible skin disease, you're scratching madly at your arms and legs and belly, until at last you throw your head back and howl (again),

ENOUGH!!

***
A junky needs her dope, a bulemic needs his Twinkies. Writers?

Well, what you'd prefer is real data, feedback, some sense that something is happening out there--anything?!?--with/for/in relation to the prospects for your forthcoming book... Absent that? Invariably, you'll look back on this as the moment where the wheels came off--that first time you typed that fateful URL into the Address bar of your computer and hit return. And so it begins.
The vigil....The stakeout....

The hourly Amazon.com sales-ranking check-in.

Gotta get that fix...It doesn't matter that the "data" Amazon provides tells you nothing, of course, or at least nothing you can make any sense of. In the weeks leading up to publication--a moment you've spent much of your life imagining--Amazon.com will be more often visited by the average writer than Nerve or Skank or PornPro or any of the other usual favorites.

And when Amazon fails to deliver the desired reassurance? Well, like those anti-drug lecturers always told us back in grade school: what starts innocently invariably leads to the harder stuff.... And so it goes: the little devil on the left side senses your weakness, taps you on the shoulder, and whispers those two syllables whose effects will prove ever more insidious, ever more seductive--

GOO-
GUL.

"Huh?" you ask.
That left-shoulder Beelzebub hisses encore:

GOOGLE!

And this, my friends, is when the trouble really begins: because once you've taken that maiden voyage--once you've signed your name into the log-book of that turbo-charged search-vessel--you've conscripted yourself to a life of hard labor on the turbulent seas of narcissism... For if you live long enough, and manage to create enough trouble (however minor), you, too, can run a Google search and find that somebody, somewhere, has written about you--an alumni magazine, a catalog for a writer's workshop, a piece of hate-mail identifying you as part of an industry wide conspiracy to fill-in-the-blank ...

Trouble is, no number's big enough... Believe me: I know.

***************
II. A Cautionary Tale.

Friends: Tonight, at long last--having hit rock-bottom; and being beyond salvation, beyond dignity, beyond redemption--I raise my tchukus off this plain pine bench, stand before you all, and say,

Hi. My name is Max
and I'm a Narcissist.
A Hyperbolist.
A Google-Junky who's lost his way.

It's a familiar enough story. I started in the cowardly trade of publishing as a desk-jockey, a copyist, a scrivener with delusions of grandeur. In the beginning it was but a lark--a temporary gig, I'd say with a shrug, exhaling cigarette smoke with a world-weary roll of the eyes. Bigger things--Yale Law, UCLA film school, LSE, Iowa--were always just around the corner. But a decade passed, then another--there I was still, in my 8x8 cubicle with a partly-obscured view of the sotty brick wall across the narrow air-shaft. My hair thinned, then fell away; in the meantime my sedentary habits, combined with my love of Hostess Fruit Pies, wreaked havoc on my once-girlish figure.

Then--Halleleujah!--the new wave of reality television hit. Knowing myself ill-suited for an actual personality overhaul, but consumed, now, with the Lotto-like jackpot potential I'd witnessed so frequently during the Sweeps-Week finales of so many of the shows (to say nothing of a deep-seated [or is it -seeded?] desire to appear on David Letterman), I knew that my time had come. A mid-life makeover was nigh on the horizon. All I needed now was the vehicle through which to create an alternate personae.

Then, in the fall of '04, Time Magazine named Mark Sarvas "Man of the Year" and declared ours The Age of the Blog. And Mad Max Perkins was born.

***
At first, of course, it was bliss. The controversy! The accolades! None other than Maud Newton (who we'd call "legendary" if she weren't way too fly to wear that style) characterized BookAngst as "an indispensable source of information about the inner machinery of publishing. " The afore-mentioned Mark Sarvas declared "We can't remember a blog becoming indispensible as quickly as Mad Max Perkins' BookAngst 101 has." As "Max" I received mentions in the Denver Post, New York Newsday, the Boston Globe, Crain's New York. Even NPR wanted to know: who's this Mad Max fellow, and how do we get him on our show?

***
A month or so after the launch of BookAngst--it was late, I was hungry--I ran an innocent search through Yahoo or MSN. In the "search" field I typed

"Late night delivery, chocolate cake"

and hit return. The result failed to satisfy. So I turned then to another search engine.

GOOGLE!

I was so impressed with the results of THIS "chocolate cake" search that I tried Google another time: I typed in my own name. The result was predictably unsatisfying: it came back with a scant 17 matches, 12 of which rightly belonged to a San Diego-based attorney famous, briefly, for defending a serial killer.

Without giving it much thought, I typed in

"BookAngst"

and fell quite out of my chair. The number of matches read 652,003.

***

Dr. Grumpy O. Bookman recently presented a fascinating post on the subject of narcissistic personality disorder, which includes a list of tell-tale personality traits.

A grandiose sense of self-importance.
A need for excessive admiration.
A sense of entitlement...not justified by [his] attainments.

The list goes on. Every item fits me to a "t".

***

The particulars of my fall are too humiliating to repeat in detail--yet I cannot help myself... Suffice it to say that, as delighted as I was by my IGO [Initial Google Output], I was disappointed that my subsequent Googlings didn't reflect a similarly exponential growth pattern. As my number plateaued--flatlined, really--I spent more and more of my late-night hours trying to find new mentions of the good deeds of Mad Max Perkins. One hour a night became two, then three; this in addition to the time spent on new posts themselves, which became ever-more transparent in their desperation. I was begging for more links, for more mentions, for the bloggists' equivalent of column inches.

Cruel, fickle bastards all! They'd moved on! M.J. Rose's popularity grew and grew, while visitors to my site dwindled to a dozen or so a day. Maud, Mark, Sarah--they no longer paid any attention. The cruelist irony? In late 2004 I won Honorable Mention in the "Bloggist With A Bullet" category; in 2005, mine was named "Blahg of the Year." In barely eight months I'd gone from hot-stuff to has-been. I'd become completely irrelevant.

But the humilation doesn't stop there. So much Googling-till-the wee-hours left me with more than just pale skin and bags under my eyes. In March my supervisor called me into his office. After months of falling further and further behind in my work in the contracts department, he'd had enough. I was given two weeks' severance, plus a half-hour to pack up my things. I stole a stapler.

***************
III. Endnotes.

Gotta get my shit together
Cuz I can't live like this forever
I've come too far & I don't want to fail
I've got a new computer and a
Bright future in sales
--Fountains of Wayne "Bright Future in Sales"

You know that old saw about how you learn who your real friends are when the chips are down? For a long time I'd been out of touch with my #1 touchstone, Dexter (aka Deadly Dee)--I figured he'd corralled a mid-six-figs contract for a whip-wicked comic memoir about life in the land of bookmaking (part THE INFORMATION, part Dave Eggers) and was now waiting in Paris with his new gang of celebrity pals to greet Lance Armstrong as he crossed the finish line of the Tour de France. So I was quite touched--humiliated, too, of course, but those who love you best tell the truest truths, even when it hurts--that, as I stumbled about in these, the last days of Max, Deadly Dexter appeared again:

you might get "sadly missed" on your tombstone, max, but by revealing yourself like some old flasher in the park you'll actually become what you really are, an anonymous cog in the satanic mills of book production, whose mid-life idealism crisis petered out into embarassing showmanship and the kind of ambiguity that makes me, for one, really fear for the future of publishing, if this is all that an insider's effort to change things leads to.... and now, at the end, you rely on hired wizardry and sleight-of-hand, like it was all a staged act to infiltrate your opposition. or maybe you're just the bloke who comes to do the magic tricks at the bloggers annual tea-party. you're quitting a sinking ship if you abandon this blog. shut the fuck up about who you are and keep fighting your corner like the real max perkins would've done. otherwise you'll just mirror your own executive career and let eventual world domination by one publisher takes its course. stay and help the writers, put a beret on instead, join the resistance to establish three things: split the multi-nationals back into indies, put a low ceiling on advances and get rid of the agent system. if you're not up to it then get off my screen for good and stop over-writing your final bow.

About this, Dexter is, of course, right: it is time for me to go, and I am overwriting my final bow, or at least taking too damn long to get it over with. And my posts have shifted--away from those of an insider asking potentially useful questions [about an industry moving further and further away from serving anyone well (including itself)]; tending instead toward easier, more clownish pieces that draw attention to Le Max rather than to Le BookAngst per se.

Narcissistic, that is, rather than something more broadly utilitarian.

On this front, I offer no apologies: it's hard work, this, even when the feedback has both been so energizing and made it so clear how great a hunger there is for some sort of industry perspective, for some sense that people on the inside aren't wholly disconnected from those on the outside.

I agree with Dexter regarding at least one of what he sees as our industry's three deadly ills (as articulated above)--the seemingly endless consumption of one publisher by another--when our only REAL hope is greater diversity & independence, not less. But there's finally nothing much that can be done about this by those of us among the rank-and-file, unless one has a Don Quixote complex and happens to be sitting on huge vats of capital, two variables that don't often co-exist.

If I had a particular goal when I started, it was to better understand how the machinery works, and to learn some new tricks of the trade--and I'm not sure how much we accomplished on that front, to be honest. The business is so f***ing hard now, and there's so much pressure on those working inside it, that either they don't have the time for (shall we say) pro bono discourse about (say) how to do some of the little things better; or they feel that giving away what few secrets they possess will put them at the sort of competitive disadvantage that might, soon, cost them their jobs.

Nonetheless, a whole lot of people--editors and publishers and agents and writers and others with industry experience in marketing & publishing (often under cloak of anonymity, which frankly served everyone well, me included)--DID share their expertise, on a whole lot of topics (midlist, anyone?), for which I'm enormously grateful.

From the end-line, I see that what I really hoped to do was to expand--for my own sake, if nothing else--my sense of what constitutes Our Community. And in this regard--speaking for myself, if for no-one else--I'm enormously pleased by the outcome. As Max I've made friends I'd never have made as not-Max, and feel, now, part of a universe that's much larger and much more generous than I'd understood it to be previously. The rise of blogs generally made it inevitable that a more intimate and honest discourse would emerge, one way or another; but I'll always be thrilled to have been an active part of that conversation, and to have had the excuse to get a close-in view of the passion and intelligence of so many lit-bloggers (there are way too many to mention individually), who if nothing else have demonstrated that books--and readers--are alive and well. And, deserved or otherwise, I take a modicum of pride at having perhaps spurred the emergence of other industry-bloggers such as Agent 007, Sepulculture and Miss Snark.

***
As for me? I'm off to work the program, the 12 steps of Narcissists Anonymous. And to apply myself, whole-cloth, to the business of being an editor. I'm not quitting a sinking ship; I'm just stepping down from the quarter deck (I was never officer material in the first place), and resuming my duties as deck-swabber first class. I return--refreshed and rejuvenated--to "fighting my corner" in the way that suits me best: one book, one author, at a time.

--MMP

P.S. If there's a use for it, BookAngst 101 may, in some limited capacity, continue to exist--as a forum for other industry-folk, say. News on that score to come at a later date.

Max Unmasked

2005-07-12T23:29:00.000-04:00

Bloggers ("Blahgers"--Mark Sarvas, TEV) Panel, BEA June 2, 2005. From L-R: Moderator Mark Dressler; Michael Cader; M.J. Rose; Max the Unmasked; and Robert Gray

As our time together reaches its end, I feel a great sense of relief that I can finally reveal my true identity. It's funny: in the comments to the Mighty Mouse/Fuller Brush post (wherein I dispelled the rumor that I might, in fact, be Karl Rove), an astute reader called me "poncey"--from which he then (rightly) extrapolated that I must be "a Brit." In the months since, I was apparently successful in disguising my poncey-ness--but that early reader had been right all along.

I must say I'm disappointed, a bit, that nobody "got" the hint made so explicitly with my BEA get-up! My costume was variously identified as representing Gandalf; Merlin; and Professor Dumbledore on crack--yet the truth was right there under your noses! That's the trouble with you kids these days--you've lost touch with your roots! I see you on the subway ("and walking all over/Manhattan") as you rock out to Britney singing her version of SATISFACTION ("a man comes on to tell me/how tight my skirt can be") without a clue about where that song came from in the first place!

But here's one more chance, dear people! Instead of telling you my identity, I'll give you one last try at figuring it out for yourselves.

Step One: Look at the picture (above) taken at BEA--notice the fellow in the pointy hat?

Step Two: Now look at this album cover. Notice, again, the fellow in the pointy hat...

A Cry for Help (or: Notes from the Dark Side)

2005-07-11T22:21:00.000-04:00

Ladies and Gentlemen, I hope you'll welcome, without judgment, a new lost soul, who comes before us here at LitBloggers Anonymous to ask for forgiveness for sins past & future.

Ladies and Gentleman, this individual claims to have been, in a more glorious past, a member of "The Editors' Club"--described (so aptly) as

that group of talent-finders and dream-makers who instinctively know what the fine readers of the world will embrace.

But at a certain point our poor Anonymite lost the way, and began to exhibit all the tell-tale signs... Took to watching television (network television!) till all hours of the night; to selling, without remorse, books received via "bigmouth" mailings to the Strand; to admiring, then acquiring, jewelry and wristwatches and eye-wear of a far more gaudy nature then had ever been the case before; and discovering, over time, that the idea of picking up the lunch tab at Michael's was becoming more and more repugnant. The final straw came when, after screaming mercilessly at a poor overworked editorial assistant (and ENJOYING it), this individual realized that there was no horror in the world so horrible as writing YET ANOTHER PIECE OF CATALOG COPY.
"Fini!"
And it was at that moment that another member of that rapscallion breed was born. No, but we must refrain from judgment! Please, all:

Welcome Agent 007!

I have not yet seen the (expired) union card, so I cannot vouch for or verify said (former) membership in the esteemed Editors' Club. There is, however, something about the cadences of Agent 007's inaugural posting that suggests at least a passing familiarity with the secret handshakes and the ol' wink-wink-nudge-nudge-say-no-more! insiderisms known only to We the Gatekeepers of [etc]...

Friends, whether this individual is honorable or not (and if Agent 007 is truly an agent, we can be sure that Honor is more a flag flown than a way of walking), there is no doubt that we must respond to this cry for help. Please, I beg of you: pay a sympathetic visit, and offer a few kind words, and remember:

There, but by the grace of God...

THE END (of Max) IS NEAR!

2005-07-09T00:18:00.000-04:00

Credit cards have gone missing. Keys have been copied. Inappropriate voice-mail messages have been reported...

To Whom (etc):

If you are approached by someone representing himself as "Max" or "Mad Max Perkins," proceed with caution. If contact is made, steer conv. if possible away from media-related topics--known triggers include "David Letterman," "Amazon dot com," "Google," etc. We have no reason to consider him dangerous; however, kindly decline his offers to buy you lunch, housewarming gifts, etc.
--Mgmt.

P.S. As soon as we find him, he WILL be fired.

Promo Gizmo Halo Cool

2005-07-05T19:00:00.000-04:00

M.J. Rose, known by many in these parts as the industry's most persistent voice regarding the need for publishers--and authors--to be pro-active in terms of the marketing of books, has once again put her money where her mouth is. This week the paperback of her Anthony-nominated thriller THE HALO EFFECT comes out from Mira, and--not surprisingly--MJ refuses to settle for the status quo. Among other marketing initiatives (which she writes about at her blog), she hired VidLit to produce a movie-style promo.

Let me say, emphatically, that I think it's a knockout. (If anyone thinks VidLits can only work for funny books, think again.) I was so impressed that I had to track her down and ask her a few questions.

MMP: I loved the HALO VidLit--wonderfully evocative and atmospheric, and it definitely makes me want to read the book. Are you happy with how it turned out?
MJR: Not to overuse the word, but I'm thrilled. I'd seen a lot of Liz's work and knew how well the form worked for humor, as you pointed out, but this was the first thriller she worked on. I couldn't be more pleased.

How involved were you in making it?
MJR: I brought the idea to my publisher and they loved it. And then they blew me away when they signed up to do not one, but three - one for each of the books in the series (July 05, Jan 06, July 06). Knowing that they were going to be putting so much behind this effort, I really wanted to come up with some unusual marketing ideas with the Vidlit once it was completed. But creatively, it was Liz Dubelman's creativity that made it work and her talent that pulled it off.

How long did it take to produce?
MJR: Liz at vidlit.com would be the one to ask--I suspect she can adapt to different timetables. But mine took about three months.

What did it cost?
MJR: Liz charges by the minute--not minutes of her time, but minutes of finished product. It's in the ballpark of $5000 per minute.

How is your publisher using it?
MJR: First we came up with the idea of doing blog ads for the book that link to the Vidlit. So for the next two weeks ads will be all over the blogshpere. I'm thrilled (that word again) that Mira decided to do this. It's pretty innovative and required them to be willing to test an unproved concept. In addition there are some huge email lists that the Vidlit company itself markets each Vidlit to. My ppublisher is also looking for some other innovative venues for this one and future Vidlits but that's under wraps until we know for sure. I do have it on my laptop which I show to everyone I can stop in the street, on the train, at the nail salon, etc., (no, just kidding).

So you're feeling pretty good about this?
MJR: Very. It sure does seem to me like there's a different level of excitement this time than there has been for any of my previous books. Mira has totally supported this novel; everyone from the sales force to the publicity department has been terrific. Yeah, I'm thrilled. (That word again). The icing on the cake is that the book became an international bestseller today. Another first for me.

And what's this "Blog-a-Thon" promotion?
MJR: I got five sponsors to agree to donate a combination of a dollar each to Reading Is Fundamental. So for every blog that links to my VidLit, RIF gets $5. My goal is to get 500 blogs, which translates to $2500.

The campaign is called "Good Books/Good Cause" and if it's successful we'll see about expanding the program to include other authors too. I'm working with publicist Lauren Cerand.

What're you up to so far? How many blogs are on board, I mean.
MJR: We just sent out the first wave of letters to bloggers this morning and there are three more waves to go out. But as of 2 PM today [Wednesday] about twenty-five people have written to say they are already putting up the links.

Who's your editor at Mira? You know me--always looking to get in a plug for a good editor if I can...
MJR: She's not just good, she's wonderful. Margaret O'Neill Marbury, who is executive editor at Mira Books. You know, everyone loves to talk about all the first novelists who get the big push and how lucky they are. That I'm getting this sort of push on book five, well, I'm incredibly appreciative, and I have Margaret to thank.

Stars & Stripes: Kim Ponders, Femme La Guerre

2005-07-02T22:00:00.000-04:00

Kim Ponders is author of a literary novel coming out from HarperCollins this fall called THE ART OF UNCONTROLLED FLIGHT. It retraces the tumultuous life of Annie Shaw from childhood—as the daughter of a Vietnam-era fighter pilot—through to her becoming a pilot herself. Kim—and, perhaps not by coincidence, Annie too—served in the Air Force during the first Gulf War. Mad Max “sat” with Kim Ponders recently to talk about books, gender, self-promotion and life in the armed forces.

Max: When I say “the armed forces,” I mean, of course, the literary community. Have you ever encountered so savage an enemy as a writer wronged?
KP: Savage, certainly not. Writers are a cultivated, crafty lot, though we might think savage thoughts.

Did you grow up wanting to be a pilot, or a writer? Or none of the above?
KP: I grew up wanting to survive. I had no plans to be a writer or flyer until those opportunities came before my eyes, which they did, roundabout the out years of college. What I am is an opportunist, and if something looks captivating, I’ll go for it.

And which career have you enjoyed more? Or is the jury still out?
KP: Writing, certainly. I work my own hours and don’t have to get my uniforms pressed.

Annie Shaw, Air Force pilot. Kim Ponders, Air Force pilot. Hmmm. Care to provide a de rigueur disclaimer about the difference between life and art?
KP: Hemingway said ‘Write what you know.’ John Gardner said, ‘Write only from your imagination.’ Now, I ask you, who’s better known?

Your honor! The witness is being non-responsive! Will you please direct her to answer the question?
KP: Not non-responsive. Crafty. Yes, counselor, I grew up in circumstances very similar to those I describe in the novel. And the scenes that occur before and during the war are based on things I saw and witness, and yes, experienced—because those scenes I chose were, I think, the most evocative and the most telling. I wanted to get at what I thought was the essence of what it’s like to be a woman flying in the Air Force. For the record, I was an aircrew member with AWACS, but not a pilot.
[Ed. note: Here's more back story regarding the writing of her novel.]

The opening sections of THE ART OF UNCONTROLLED FLIGHT reminded me a bit of Mary Karr’s The Liar's Club. Did you read that book?
KP: Of course. It’s a great book. Our lives were not terribly similar. I grew up in Massachusetts, not East Texas, for one thing. My father was a grandiose man and a mystery to me, and my mother died when I was very young. But Mary Karr strikes me, at least from her memoir, as a survivor. The key, the gift, I think, is to be able to internalize things and then articulate them, spit them out again. That’s what Mary Karr did and what I tried to do with THE ART OF UNCONTROLLED FLIGHT.

And then Annie Goes to War. I can’t think of any novels that tell about war from a woman soldier’s p.o.v.—is “soldier” right, by the way, in your case?
KP: No, in this case, it would be airman.

But re: the point of view—and I don’t mean to diminish novels about war written from a female civilian point of view, but are there others about a soldier’s experience from the point of view of a woman? Other than, say, thrillers?
KP: Not that I know of, at least in English. The Russians had women fighter pilots in WWII, and the Israelis have had them for years. Perhaps there are novels from those countries.

What’s the best soldier’s-experience-of-war novel you ever read?
KP: Hands down, it’s Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. I’m not sure if that’s a novel—it might be linked stories. In any case, it’s a phenomenal encapsulation of what it must have been like for a vet to come to terms with Vietnam. In terms of pure novel, I’d choose A Farewell to Arms or Catch-22.

You’ve recently launched a blog, FEMME LA GUERRE—“A take on modern war and the American military from an ex-Air Force flyer turned writer and—can we say it (Gasp)—Woman.” That “(Gasp)” is really part of the subtitle, by the way. Why “Gasp”?
KP: People who knew me from early in my life couldn’t believe I’d joined the Air Force. And then, there I was, an outspoken woman aviator who also read books. A real enigma. In fact, I never gave a second thought to being a ‘woman’ through all this. I just did what I wanted to do. All the arguments surrounding women in the military have always sounded irrelevant. Why should it make a difference that I’m speaking from a woman’s perspective?—and yet, that seems to make all the difference in the world.

So what is this blog, anyway—a publicity stunt for your novel, I assume?
KP: (laughs) Damn straight! It’s the converse of “If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.”

That went way over my head.
KP: Well, there are a lot of literary novelists out there writing literary fiction about firemen and cops and soldiers and housewives and schoolteachers, whether they’ve actually been any of those things or not. And it doesn’t matter—if they’re good, I mean—whether they’ve lived the life or not.

But in terms of marketing a book?
KP: Let’s face it, there aren’t a lot of novels by someone with my background. And everyone says how hard it is to get attention for literary fiction, and it is, obviously. I’m proud of my background, proud of my military career and I feel like I’ve got something to contribute to the public conversation—especially now, with a war on. And if it happens to help sell some copies of my book, too, then great.

In one of your posts you write about the four soldiers—women—who were killed in Iraq last week.
KP: Yes, four women were killed—3 marines and a sailor--in an ambush on a convoy last week. And this incident has everyone up in arms again about whether women should hold combat positions.

Did you have any particular reaction to this news? Different than, say, news that four male soldiers had been killed? I know that the p.c. answer is supposed to be, No, all death is a tragedy--but surely, as someone who served yourself during the first Gulf War, you identified with these women in some fashion, no?
KP: My first (emotional) reaction was one of frustration and sadness. I feel terrible for their families, for all the kids who’ve lost parents over there. But I think your question is a little leading. P.C. or not, I feel the same sense of helpless loss for each of the almost 2000 deaths that have happened. The fact that four women died—the most during a single incident to date—doesn’t effect my emotional reaction, and it doesn’t effect my politics. My second reaction was that, damn, this is going to reignite the issue of ‘women in combat’ that had Congress stirred up last month. I think it’s wrong to resurrect such a complicated argument based on a tragic event and expect the outcome to be some rational solution. The U.S. desperately needs a sane, intelligent national debate on whether and how women will serve in combat. Unfortunately, we’ll never have this debate if the only time it ever comes up is when a crisis occurs. What we don’t need are more emotional knee-jerk reactions, more simple sound bites. The issue itself it not at all simple.

You also talk about a movement afoot presently designed to curtail the number presence of women in combat zones. I read about this in the New York Times, and it mentioned an Army general who was in FAVOR of such a bill. The article indicated that women in the military seemed to take the opposite view--that is, they were in favor of making their presence in such situations more (rather than less) the norm. What's your guess about the mindset of women serving currently? What's your own view?
KP: It’s a complicated situation. The Army isn’t advocating putting women in direct combat positions, but in ‘combat support’ positions. It’s complicated because of the way the Army is redesigning their combat force to be more responsive to asymmetric threats. They want lighter, more mobile units to move around with their own support (i.e. intelligence) personnel—which are by definition ‘support’ positions and frequently women. The problem is that because these units are on the front lines, the ‘support’ positions are coming under direct fire, and firing back. But I believe it’s a political, rather than a military issue. The Army cares about one thing: winning the war. The generals in charge care not a dime about the issue of women in combat. At least I hope they don’t. I hope they’re thinking about the best way to win the war tomorrow. Administrators, policy makers, politicians—these are the people who make the issue confusing—rather that being the leaders they’ve signed up to be, they’re too busy polling the voters to put their spin on the issue. It’s frankly gone beyond the issue of whether women should participate in combat. They do—and they have to. There ain’t enough willing men to fill the roles. Oh, well, I guess we could open the draft. Perhaps that’s a better solution.

Is the General being a chauvinist, or are there reasons why women SHOULDN'T be on the front lines, other than not wanting to be killed? Which obviously is a desire that transcends gender lines...
KP: No, he’s being a realist. Most men are stronger and faster than most women. Fewer women than men can meet the challenges of the front line work. Not all women belong on the front lines—but some do. Some can carry their weight (and others’ too). And, by the way, there are plenty of men who don’t belong on the front line.
No other reason—biases, trauma in POW captivity, sexual issues on the battlefield—strike me as valid reasons to keep women out of combat. All of these things take place with or without women present, though nobody wants to talk about it.

You served on the front lines as well, during the first Gulf War, correct?
KP: It wasn’t the front lines. I flew in a combat support role with AWACS. We flew in well-defended positions behind the line of battle.

How many other women served with you then?
KP: There were a fair number of women flying in those positions with me. I’d say about 10 – 14% of the crew force was composed of women. It’s probably about the same now.

At the time, wasn't there an even more explicit exclusion of women serving under those circumstances?
KP: Yes, women weren’t allowed to fly fighters. After the Gulf War, Congress lifted that ban and the Air Force and Navy started recruiting heavily to get women in fighter cockpits—this, again, was a political issue. Some of the first women in cockpits probably shouldn’t have been there, but the two forces wanted to look responsive to the new allowances. Now we’ve not only got more women in fighter cockpits, many of them are in senior rankings and have combat experience under their belts. They’re getting a lot more respect these days for being strong, competent pilots. And they give up a lot, too. It seems to me that most successful female senior officers are either single or divorced, while their male counterpoints are married with families.

How did your male colleagues—“colleagues,” I guess you can tell I never served in the military—how did the male soldiers treat you?
KP: They mostly treated me fairly and with respect. During a flying mission, a good crew is one that’s extremely professional. You can be horsing around, cracking jokes thirty minutes before take-off, but in the air, we always worked closely and very well together. If anyone ever took any heat in the air, it’s because he or she wasn’t doing the job properly....On the ground, it was sometimes another story. I spent many nights on deployment to Saudi sitting alone in my villa, reading or watching movies. On some crews I was “one of the guys,” but on others, I didn’t quite make the cut. I taught myself French on one of those trips.

So all that stuff about the macho “Top Gun” culture is just Hollywood B.S.?
KP: No—dealing with the fighter pilots was a whole different story. They weren’t used to working with women, like the AWACS and tanker crews were, and you really had to prove to them that you were tough and competent if you wanted their respect.

For instance?
KP: In 1994 or so, we were flying in a Canadian exercise called Maple Flag. All the flyers—over 200 of us—would brief in a big room before the mission, and then we’d all debrief afterward, with someone different leading the briefings each day. Well, I was the only woman in that crowd of Americans, Brits, and Canadians. Every pilot who got up to give the debrief started with a joke, and the joke was always sexually offensive. I sat there listening to them for 2 weeks, and on the last day, I was offered the opportunity to run the debrief. So, when I stood up, the whole room sort of hummed and went quiet. So, of course, I had to tell a joke. And I did. I made it the most sexually offensive joke I could tell at their expense. What do you think they did? They laughed ferociously, and gave me a standing ovation, and wouldn’t let me buy a beer all night.

Beer’s good. I don’t know what the hell the difference is between “brief” and “debrief,” but I’m going to let you take that secret to your grave. When’s your book coming out?
KP: September 20, 2005.

And there you have it—buy now, buy often! We’ve been speaking here at BookAngst Radio with novelist Kim Ponders, author of THE ART OF UNCONTROLLED FLIGHT. You can read all about her at Femme La Guerre and at Kim Ponders.com.
Ed note: We tried our best to link to BookSense, but weren't able to find the book listed there at press time--perhaps because publication date isn't till Fall '05. This may well be remedied by the time you read this. Use this link to navigate the BookSense site on your own.

On Choosing an Agent

2005-06-30T11:59:00.000-04:00

Jessica Brilliant Keener is a novelist and journalist whose work frequently appears in the Boston Globe and elsewhere. Her thoughtful reply to Lauren Baratz-Logsted’s Misadventures in (Mis)Representation hits on what we here at BookAngst 101 feel is the singlemost important criterion for deciding whether an agent is right for you.

Dear Lauren,

Thank you so much for your instructive, forthright post. I think it’s egregious what you’ve experienced, Lauren, but thankfully you have the gift of self-possession and knew enough to get out of those unhappy marriages—or maybe you should think of them as “engagements” because engagements are designed to be broken, if necessary. Obviously, in your case, Lauren, you’ve been right to move on.

I, too, have gone through a few agents but when I think about it, many, many of my writer friends have “gone” through a few as well. It’s not unusual.

Of course, you’ll find many who don’t undergo this shedding process, but if you do, my cheap advice to anyone suffering through it is not to do the typical, writerly thing. Don’t take it all on yourself or decide it must be your fault entirely. It ain’t a crime to find a new agent if the one you have isn’t working.

Before he died, the co-author of my first book gave me some simple advice about agents. It was so simple I didn’t quite get it at first. But I listened to him because he knew about business. He founded Dunkin’ Donuts, and started several other multi-million dollar ventures. (He was appalled by the publishing industry but that’s getting off track--)

He said: FIND AN AGENT WHO CARES.

What does that mean? I think it means several things. It means finding someone who not only loves your work but cares about your work because a caring agent will try harder.

Selling books to publishers is insanely competitive. Agents are competing against how many other agents? (Maybe we should all do some math on how many agents are out there in the marketplace, selling how many books every month? to give us some perspective.)

If your agent cares, she’ll return your calls or respond to your emails within a couple of days. She’ll apologize if she doesn’t get back to you soon enough and will make up for it by being more diligent as you move forward—that’s caring. She’ll let you know, in detail, where she is submitting your work and she’ll follow up with the people she has submitted it to.

An agent who cares will work out problems when they come up, because life is gonna throw you some issues just to mess with your day.

Can you talk comfortably with your agent? Do your personalities click? Do you feel good after you’ve hung up the phone with your agent?

I think these things can’t be overstated. It’s much easier to care when there’s chemistry between you.

If you find yourself second guessing yourself or feeling weird or guilty about things your agent has said, and these feelings begin to overtake what you should be feeling, which is: good, supported, confident, then start looking for someone who cares.

But here’s the funny rub. Much of what I just wrote and what my dear co-author advised me to look for can’t be known or borne out until you enter the new relationship and see how it unfolds. All you can really know at the outset is whether your agent gets your work, in other words, loves it, appreciates it, etc. The caring part, you can only hope, will follow.

Misadventures in (Mis)representation

2005-06-29T05:53:00.000-04:00

Lauren Baratz-Logsted, the author of The Thin Pink Line and Crossing the Line, herein tells of her life as a romantic--that is, as a writer who refuses to settle for anything less than true love. Her essay, “If Jane Austen Were Writing Today,” is collected in Flirting with Pride and Prejudice: Fresh Perspectives on the Original Chick-Lit Masterpiece, edited by Jennifer Crusie and due out from Benbella Books on September 1. Lauren can be visited at http://www.laurenbaratzlogsted.com/.

Her third novel, A Little Change of Face, will be published in July '05.

Misadventures in (Mis)representation: My Life Among the Agents by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

Some might say I’m on the fast track to becoming the Elizabeth Taylor of novelists. See, I’ve been through five agents to date. And God knows there have been times when I’ve wondered the perfect paranoid’s wonder:

Is it me???

And sometimes I even answer myself. Maybe it is, Lauren. Maybe it is.

Herewith, I lay all my dirty cards on the table, tell all my sordid stories about my bad marriages – begun with such high hopes! ending in such dissatisfaction! – to Agents 1 thru Agent 5, and let you be the judge.

Marriage I
Back in 1994, when I left my job of 11 years as an independent bookseller to take a chance on myself as a novelist, I wrote the kind of book many first-time novelists write: if not necessarily autobiographical, it was definitely what you would call a wish-fulfillment book. In the comic mystery Waiting for Dead Men’s Shoes, Mini Monroe, an underachieving bookstore worker, dreams of being in charge of her world. If only she were running the bookstore, life would be so much better. When her boss is murdered, she gets her wish, getting to run the store and solve the crime.

When I signed with Agent One, I thought I had it made, since “One” said my book was going to be big…really big.

Then the revision process started.

It was One's opinion that, the body not being discovered until page 52, the book was a little too cozy. So, over the next two weeks, I went through four rounds of the book, each time moving the body closer to the beginning. This was back in the day when all I had was a word processor, so it took 13 hours just to print out each version, never mind the time spent revising. After the fourth go-around, with the body now on page 1 – page 1! - One called to say the book looked great, now if only I’d…

...and One proceeded to describe exactly the book as it had been when we were in the heady, honeymoon days of our marriage.

I realized then that ours was not a union supremely blessed. So, despite the fact that One represented many best-selling authors, I found the best lawyer in the business to handle my affairs – her name is Dee Vorsay –and had her draw up the dissolution papers. (Which could also be called disillusion papers.) Here’s what she came up with:

Duration of union: three months.
Books together: one.
Manuscript drafts: four.
Submissions made: zero.
Books sold: zero.
Ultimate fate of Novel #1: a box in my basement.

Marriage II
I’d written another book, this time a bittersweet tale about an undereducated septuagenarian who learns her only child will predecease her. The two spend the next year on a physical and emotional odyssey where they see the world and get to truly know one another for the first time.

When I signed with Agent Two, I was asked if I’d mind that the book would inevitably be compared to Terms of Endearment. While the books have nothing in common except that they both feature a mother losing a daughter, I said, “No, I wouldn’t mind.” Terms of Endearment was an award-winner and a genuine cultural touchstone, both as novel and film. Mind? Of course I wouldn’t mind.

After we’d received a few incredibly glowing rejections from publishers – “this book is so sad and funny, but we don’t know how we’d market it” – Two called to say a major studio had faxed the office, looking for a Terms of Endearment type of property. Would I mind if it was sold first as a film rather than a book? I knew that Two’s agency had quite a bit of success with Hollywood. Would I mind? Don’t be ridiculous!

When you are still outside the Pearly Gates [or so they seem, perhaps, to the as-yet-unmarried—ahh, unpublished] you are hesitant to rock the matrimonial boat, lest you find yourself standing, curbside, with a packed bag in one hand and your manuscript in the other, waiting for that lonely cab-ride back to writerly isolation. So for the next few months, I sat on my hands, even though I was dying to know what was going on with the film deal. But finally, unable to contain my anxiety any longer, I called Two to get a status report.

That was when I was told it was actually Two’s partner who handled the Hollywood end of the business; that said partner had to be in the mood to talk to Hollywood; and that said partner simply hadn’t been in the mood lately...

Were these people nuts? Were they on drugs?

I may have never been an agent in real life, but I know this much: if Hollywood was looking for a particular type of property, and I had such a property in my office, I’d walk on hot coals to hand deliver it if need be.

Once again, I called in Dee Vorsay. The text of this round of disillusion papers read:

Duration of union: one year.
Books together: one.
Manuscript drafts: two.
Submissions made: a few.
Submissions made to Hollywood, even after Hollywood asked: zero.
Books sold: zero.
Ultimate fate of Novel #5 [Yes, Dear Reader: I’d actually written a few others since Agent 1, but if I get started on those we’ll be here all day]: a box in my basement.

Marriage III
Though Agent Three and I never had a formal agreement together, we worked closely on another book I’d written [Novel #7], this time an erotic thriller.

In November 2001, Harlequin launched an imprint called Red Dress Ink. I sensed that the editorial sensibility behind these books would be interested in yet another of my novels [#6] I had in my arsenal, The Thin Pink Line, a dark comedy set in London about a woman who fakes an entire pregnancy. I mentioned this to Three, pointing out, Hey, it’s always good to get in on the ground floor with a new publisher. After reading The Thin Pink Line, Three said it was very funny but that sort of thing had been “done too much already.”

[Right: that crowded comedies-about-fake-pregnancies genre…]

When I asked if Three would submit it to just this one publisher, I was told no: Three claimed to know for a fact the editor of Red Dress Ink did not want books with a London setting. I found this so hard to believe that I asked Three for permission to send it myself. This suggestion was greeted scathingly, and dismissively. I went ahead with the submission, and subsequently sold The Thin Pink Line all on my own to Red Dress Ink—indeed, I was offered (and accepted) a two-book contract. They even decided to publish The Thin Pink Line as the imprint’s own first-ever hardcover and came to me with the offer of an additional three-book contract before my debut had even pubbed. Not surprisingly, Three was shocked—shocked!—to receive the divorce papers, which read:
Duration of union: five months.
Books together: one.
Manuscript drafts: three.
Submissions made: zero.
Books sold: none. [Two books were sold during this time, followed by three more… but I did it all myself!]
Ultimate fate of Novel #7 (it was #6 that I sold to RDI): See “MARRIAGE IV.”

Marriage IV
Having felt I’d negotiated the first contract to the best of my ability – I’d read 700 pages of publishing law while waiting for that first contract to arrive – the idea of a publisher wanting to nail down three more books before the first was even out seemed unusual enough that I decided it was time to go back to my dressmaker’s for another fitting. (For one thing, I had no idea what a reasonable advance should be.) So I wooed several agents--

[Memo to CBS:“How to Marry a Wage-Earning Novelist”—think we might be onto something??]

--and, after donning a heavenly strapless gown, strolled down that aisle on the arm of Agent Four.

To Four’s credit, the advance finally wound up being negotiated upwards to double what I’d been offered. But were we a good match? Let’s put it this way: if my favorite Beatles song was “Can’t Buy Me Love,” Four’s was “Money”:
[Money don’t get every thing, it’s true—But what it don’t get, I can’t use! I want money...]
There’s a laundry list of ways in which we were incompatible, but space is short, so I’ll confine myself to a single illustrative story.

Several months before signing with Four, my publisher approached me about writing an online read for them. These are long short stories, approximately 8,000 words, to be used on the publisher’s website as a marketing tool, a little lagniappe for readers where they can get a sense of a new author’s writing style for free. I would be paid handsomely for this, a flat fee totaling nearly as much as the average price for first novels. Even though the verbal agreement to do this had already been made, and even though I’d already submitted my story, Agent Four offered to go over the contract as a professional courtesy. Then, without consulting me first, Four told my publisher I would not be signing it, that the terms regarding world rights were unsatisfactory. Even though this grandstanding set off some red lights in my brain, I wanted to believe in Four. After all, Four had already doubled my money in one regard. But I was still concerned. I’d spent some hours on that long short story and it would be nice to see it published somewhere. And then there was the issue of money… “Oh, don’t worry,” said Four. “We’ll place it somewhere else and for lots more money and better terms.”

Hey, that sounded good to me!

Seven months later, I asked casually “So, what about that long short I wrote? Where do you think we should place it?”

Four was perplexed. “Didn’t you sell it to Red Dress Ink?”

“Um, no,” I said, “because you told them what they could do with their contract, remember?”
Silence.

“Oh.” Four said. “Well.” Four then proceeded to explain how several of Four’s other clients had recently signed similar deals because Four had come to realize the clients found the terms quite favorable.

But while Four had been cutting similar deals for other clients, it had obviously never once occurred to Four to call me up and say, “Lauren, maybe we should see if Red Dress Ink would still like to use your story after all.”

Hey, I’ve been around the block, I don’t expect monogamy (maybe you’ve heard? I’d been married four times by now?!) from an agent, but come on! So I pulled out that worn business card and called up my old pal Dee...

Duration of union: one year.
Books together: one.
Manuscript drafts: three.
Submissions made: one, but not the book we were working on. The book sub'd was Novel #5 and that was only submitted because I handpicked a place.
Books sold: zero.
Ultimate fate of Novel #7: about to be submitted, but obviously not by Agent Four.

Marriage V
Agent Five is the only one about whom it feels slightly uncomfortable for me to tell tales out of school. There was so much I liked, even loved, about Five. And yet…and yet…

Let’s cut to the chase here, because even I’m starting to have problems telling all these agents apart.

A year into our marriage, we reached a crossroads. I wrote a novel that was a departure for me, a serious YA novel. Five read it, loved the main character, and a lot of other things about it too, but had reservations. Further, even if I did revisions addressing those reservations, Five was unsure the novel could be placed, and couldn’t (or wouldn’t) come up with a list of editors to be approached with it.

Anyone who has been paying attention to this saga so far must realize that, having already basically sold five books on my own, I was not about to let a little thing like this stop me, not when I believed passionately in the book, and certainly not when I felt, as I do still feel, that it was the most important piece of writing I’d ever done.

So I contacted six writers I know who’d recently sold YA books. I provided each with a synopsis and then asked two questions: 1) Was this something they thought their editor would be interested in? 2) If the answer to #1 was yes, would they be willing to forward the synopsis to their editor and see if they indeed were? All six said yes, all six editors said yes, they’d love to see it. In the case of two of the editors, they felt the topic might be too mature for their imprints but both offered, should they fall in love with the book, to champion it to the appropriate editors at other imprints within their houses.

What more could I ask for? What more could Five ask for?

More, apparently. Five wanted more. Despite the strong interest I’d managed to stir up on my own, Five was still tepid. I didn’t even hesitate—by now I knew the phone number by heart…

Duration: eighteen months (hey, I’m lasting longer with agents who don’t sell anything!).
Books together: two, sort of.
Manuscript drafts: four, sort of.
Submissions made: three of one book; none of the YA title.
Books sold: zero.
Ultimate fate of Novel # 7 (yes, that book again!): about to be submitted, but obviously not by Agent Five.
Ultimate fate of YA Novel: about to be submitted, but obviously not by Five.

Unlike some of Elizabeth Taylor’s husbands (at least the deceased ones), four of my five agents still have thriving careers. And I am sure they all have done and will continue to do wonderful things for other writers’ careers. But they were not, none of them, the right agent for me.
I’m sure there are those who believe Liz has been married so often because she’s faithless or suffers from lack of sticktoitiveness or is just too high-maintenance. Who knows? I think differently. We—Liz and I—are two of the world’s great Pollyannas. We work hard, we keep dreaming, and no matter what happens, we still believe in the possibility of true love. That our right, special someone is out there, somewhere, maybe just around the corner.

And I’ll go on believing—at least until Friday. Because I’m ready to send out my next novel. And so if I don’t find someone who impresses me enough by then, this time I’m going it alone.

Coda
Since this piece was written, Dear Reader, I’ve remarried! Six – as I call her fondly – and I exchanged vows on Monday, June 20. Six already has placed one of my books in the hands of a baker’s dozen of editors and we’ll be moving forward with two other projects shortly. The champagne still tastes wonderful, the sheets are still clean, and I’ve tossed D.V.’s business card away. As for what the future holds:

We shall see.

How 5 = 13: A Few Comments on Writing, and Other Observations about the New (Publishing) Math

2005-05-30T23:00:00.000-04:00

Herewith, the fifth and final report derived from the "Baker's Dozen" of Mad Max author surveys conducted long ago...As regular visitors to this space know already: In the very early days of BookAngst101, I asked writers to share with me their publication histories. Thanks, once again, to the 13 — Elliot, Jesse, Mary, Keith, Kitty, Allison, Lynn, Rachel, Calvin, Richard, Willa, Carla and Patrick—who replied in such frank detail.

[The clever watch-dogs among you are already working calculators with one hand as you draft a "rant" with the other. After all: even publishers have to admit that 5≠13...right?]

No, there haven't been 13 reports. Despite the fact that I've used the contents of those surveys numerous times in one way or another, most didn't lend themselves to a sustained narrative. But I went back through the material one last time, and found a few gems that every writer will want to post in a prominent place.

"The only dependable maxim I know of in publishing is 'Drunks buy books.' Thus, I always set aside some cash in the marketing budget for booze at readings."

"I've had some success marketing to libraries. Always be nice to librarians."
"Bookstore signings are about as effective as standing in an alley and sellling books from beneath an overcoat."
"Always carry a couple of copies of your book in your backpack or briefcase. I once made a sale in a parking lot to a Fed Ex driver."
"Beware publishers who boast of their marketing capabilities, and use it as a justification of their meager advances."

Survey Question #9: Based on your own experience, what one or two things have had the most impact on the succeses you've achieved so far?

"My ability to hang on to a day job."

"My own dogged determination & thick skin. Also a sense of humor."

"Big hats." [From an author who dresses in period costume for book signings]

"The fine-tuning of my own bullshit detector."

#12: Final Comments?

"My heart remains set on making the most beautiful, potent stories I can create, not on 'being an author.' "

"For me, it's always been about the writing, and that's what has saved me in the end."
"Do it because you love it.... Write because you can't imagine not writing.... What matters most is writing a really good book, a book that can't be ignored."

But of Course! (B)log-Rolling in our Time

2005-05-28T20:36:00.000-04:00

Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that one of my very first posts here began "Welcome back to BookAngst 101. Class is now in session," I've long been curious about the real going-to-school experience offered by novelist (Anthony Award-nominated The Halo Effect, e.g.) / bloggist M.J. Rose, whose agit-prop advocacy of forward-thinking book promotion at her site Buzz Balls & Hype isn't just energetic and thought-provoking, but frequently yields the sort of here's-what-you-can-do specificity represented in this recent guest-post by Kevin Smokler. Curious enough, in fact, to want to take the course myself, though for reasons of time constraints this hasn't been feasible.

When I noticed that M.J.'s "Buzz Your Book" course was being offered again, though, I thought I'd do a little faux-journalism--not just give the sort of friendly (b)log-rolling endorsement one friendly does for another [sidebar for newcomers: M.J. Rose has been a vocal champion of this site], but try to track down someone who's actually taken the course.

One such "graduate" is Andrea Buchanan, whose first book, Mother Shock, about the real experience of parenthood, is perhaps best characterized by its subtitle: "Loving Every (Other) Minute of It." The peripatetic Andi Buchanan is managing editor of Literary Mama, and has several anthologies coming out in the months ahead from Seal Press:

It's A Boy: Women Writers on Raising Sons (Nov. 2005) with Jacquelyn Mitchard, Jodi Picoult, Jennifer Lauck, Marion Winik, and others;
Literary Mama: Collected Writing for the Maternally Inclined (Jan. 2006) featuring the best writing from the online literary magazine Literary.com; and
It's A Girl: Women Writers on Raising Daughters (May 2006) with Hope Edelman, Jacquelyn Mitchard, Katharine Weber, and more.

Ladies and Gentlemen, please give a warm Mad Max welcome to Andrea Buchanan! [Crowd, urged on by menacingly-assembled "APPLAUD WILDLY, YOU BASTARDS!" signs, applauds wildly.]

Hi, Andi. So how did you find out about MJ Rose's "Buzz Your Book" class?

AB: I first came across it online a few years ago, when I was looking for something to help with guerilla publicity for a website. Then I got to know MJ on Readerville and finally connected the dots.

What made you decide to take the course?

AB: I did a ton of work promoting my first book, and as excited as I was about the anthologies I have coming out this year and next, I couldn't shake off the feeling of dread just thinking about the work I had ahead of me in terms of PR for these next three books. I felt like I had a pretty good handle on what worked to build buzz for my first book and what turned out to be a waste of time, but I also knew that it was going to be really hard to do alone. In short, I felt overwhelmed. So I thought MJ's class might be a great place to get inspired, become enthusiastic about the promotion part of the publication process, get a fresh perspective on what pushing these books might entail, come up with new ideas, and brainstorm with someone who knows the industry.

Was it worth it?

AB: Definitely. Doing the class exercises helped me get motivated again, and helped breathe some fresh life into ideas I'd only half-considered before. Just knowing I wasn't going through it all alone was a big motivating factor. Now I feel excited about things, I feel proactive and prepared, and I have a great plan that will support and complement the work my publicist and publisher are doing.

What would you say is the single most valuable thing you took away fromit?

AB: To not be complacent -- to not talk myself out of "pie in the sky" ideas, or be satisfied with the first thing that pops into my head.

To sign up.

Happy to Report

2005-05-22T22:46:00.000-04:00

I think of this one as the anti-rant, a happy report from Darlene Ryan, author of Rules for Life and A Mother's Adoption Journey.
I didn’t start writing to end up on the Today Show or the New York Times best-seller list. But if either of those happens I’ll be dancing in my green yoga pants and calling everyone I’ve ever met. I’m not even writing to get rich. Not that I would be offended by a big advance, should Random House come calling. I write because I like it, because I’m pretty good at it, because I’m a lot nicer to be around when I’m writing than when I’m not.

Yes I want to be published. Yes I want to be paid. I didn’t make enough money last year from my writing to live on. But I did make enough to buy a new refrigerator and pay for my kid’s skating lessons. Pretty cool. I have three books and a dozen or so articles published. No I haven’t been published by a “big name” publisher or in any magazines like Redbook or Good Housekeeping, but I’ve worked with some talented editors at reputable companies. I haven’t given my writing away and I haven’t paid for it to be published.

I’ve been a fitness instructor, a commercial copywriter and a late night disk jockey and I like being a writer more than anything else I’ve done. (And I loved working in radio.) I like it on the days when everything I’ve written sounds stupid. I like it on the days when getting each word on paper is like pulling out my nose hairs with a set of pliers. I make stuff up and people pay me for it. I’m not a doctor saving people’s lives. I’m not a teacher, teaching twenty-five second-graders how to multiply. I’m not a plumber up to my elbows in, well, you know what. I make stuff up.

I had a snazzy book launch party for book number two and I got to sign lots of books. Also pretty cool. A friend found book number three in a bookstore in New York City. That was enough to get me dancing in the previously mentioned green yoga pants. I get a rush out of seeing one of my articles in print. When I hold a new book for the first time I’m a wild as a five year-old who’s had too much chocolate. Sure I’d like to have more readers and make more money. But whining about how unfair publishing is isn’t going to make either of those happen.

Publishing is a business. That means at the end of the year they need to have made a profit. That means they buy manuscripts that will make money for the company. So if the choice is between a relationship book with a catchy tag-line and a flip, funny young author, or a book that suggests relationships are (Gulp) a lot of work, penned by an academic, guess whose manuscript they’re going to buy? Guess which book I'm going to buy? I know relationships are work, but I like catchy lines and flippant people. I also know that a bowl of broccoli is a lot better for me than a Hershey bar with almonds. But guess which one I run for when life gets rocky?

I like my current editor a lot. But if he had to choose between a young adult novel penned by Jessica Simpson or one written by me, I think he’s smart enough to take the slam-dunk.

Publishing houses are not charities. They don’t have to be fair. They don’t have any obligation to nurture new writers. If an agent or an editor doesn’t like my work that may be a matter of personal preference. If sixty-seven agents and editors don’t like my work it’s a pretty safe bet that what I have isn’t saleable. Maybe the market is saturated. Maybe my manuscript doesn’t fit any established niche. Or maybe the writing just plain sucks. So I’ll write something else.

Sure, I want a book that’s a best-seller. Sure, I’d like to be on Oprah or the Today Show. Or both. And I’m trying to make that happen. But if it doesn’t, I’m still happy with my writing career.

Rant? or Fine Whine? You be the Judge

2005-05-18T00:04:00.000-04:00

[The second Rant Invitational reply to be posted at BookAngst 101, following on the heals of FINE WHINE I: An Unpublished Writer's Rant. Max had intended this post to be entitled FINE WHINE II--he found himself torn between the merits of this particular writer's tale of woe and the fact that it is, well, another tale of woe. It seems there's a thin line between rant and whine...]

"THEY'RE JUST NOT THAT INTO ME"

Maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised. It’s not like I don’t get how the trade publishing game is played. It’s just that I didn’t think it would come down to this. It looks like I’ve I’ve unwittingly (and painfully) become an example of how easily you can slide down the commercial publishing ladder to the rung of unmarketable goods.

For the last three years, I’ve been offering advice by way of forum posts and articles for wanna-be, up-coming and already-published authors on [popular blogs and websites]. I’ve had four non-fiction books published over the last fifteen years, all by major houses. I’ve had the minor success of seeing my work translated into foreign languages. But while I’ve been well-published and received decent but unspectacular advances, I’ve never managed to “break out” as the publishing world calls it, to make real money, much of a publishing name, or more than mediocre sales. I’ll never be a "brand."

I’m just your garden-variety, everyday Expert and Authority with a successful career of gritty, in-the-trenches experience. And I’ve been blessed with a pretty good way with words. But no matter how clever I think I am, I can’t sell my latest proposal. Here’s a brief resume to help you see why it stings so much.

Over a professional career of 30 years, I’ve published (and often been paid for) over a hundred articles in professional journals and popular magazines, dozens of book reviews and commentaries, and hundreds of columns on topics related to my expertise. This doesn’t count all the paper presentations I’ve made at conferences or workshops I’ve given. But let me give you a bit more to make my point.

Because of the intense interpersonal nature of my work, in my private life I’m a rather reclusive guy who shuns trivial interaction and avoids most social gatherings. I’m basically more into the life of my own mind, which includes my interest in creative written expression.

But when it comes time to promote my work or I’m called by a journalist for an opinion, media savvy oozes like nectar from my every pore. I’m verbal, articulate, opinionated, and knowledgeable. Clever sound bites spring from my tongue on demand. And I’ve got the proverbial platform to go with it—although, I’m finding out, this platform appears to be on more shaky legs than I thought.

Here’s what I mean. In submitting this last proposal, we included in the package to editors an eight minute DVD of a live, in-studio tv interview done long ago that was dynamite. My agent wouldn’t have included it if he didn’t think it might help. But it didn’t make any difference. And maybe it even hurt. Maybe these young editors could then see I was too old when it was made and even older today. Of course, if the publishers didn’t want to spend anything or make much effort to market my book, all the media savvy in the world wouldn’t make much difference. But at least I was trying to show them what I had done and could do if they wanted to support me.

The list of agents I’ve managed to run through over the years reads like a who’s who. I started at the pinnacle, with [one of the most prominent literary agencies]. My first agent has become the leading go-to guy for those with industrial-strength platforms, wishing to cash in on their fame and celebrity. They want a book and the ego perks that come with it but most of them don’t know how to write. No problem—-he gets them a good ghost writer and they attain instant success as best-selling “authors.” He routinely makes deals for these people in six and seven figures. I only wish he could have done the same for me.

The next guy literally wrote the bible that writers currently use to research publishers and agents. He’s a skilled entrepreneur but, unfortunately, wasn’t able to help me make a better deal with the publisher than I already had made myself. But at least he had the decency to reduce the commission I still had to pay him for his efforts.

The agent who sold my last book is well-known, highly respected, and very selective in whom she chooses to represent. She has acquired a stable of well-known and reviewed Big Shots who have, over the years, made her a fortune. She didn’t show any interest when I came to her with the idea for the current proposal that hasn’t sold. In fact, she told me she had sold something similar years before that “bombed” and that I should find someone who didn’t have a bad memory of this type of topic. She thought the topic would be better as a movie than a book, that the written medium wasn’t the best for it. Not wanting to give up on my idea, I considered myself politely dumped and moved on.

The guy presently representing me has sold more books over his long career than any of [my] other agents and owns one of the largest agencies in the business. It’s not like he hasn’t gotten the proposal in the right hands. That’s not the problem.The problem is they’re just not that into what I’m offering.

Maybe this sting of rejection is what it feels like to be pushed aside just at what ought to be the height of my writing career, just at the time when thirty years of expertise and four books ought to make a difference.

I think what it’s come down to is this: Who needs a middle-aged expert in relationships to tell twenty and thirty-somethings about the importance of gaining insight into the past of the partner they’re trying to get a commitment from? All you need to do is listen to a totally unqualified “dude” in the same age group who will gladly share his experience and conclude that “he’s just not that into you.”

This afternoon I overheard two forty-something women in a bookstore. One smiles to her friend and says, “I wish that book was around when I was younger.” And I’m thinking, my God, it’s not that simple. Relationships are much more complex than these kinds of cutesy slogans.

But who wants complicated answers when simple ones are so much easier to understand? Nobody wants to be bothered having to read fascinating, complex stories of men with commitment hang-ups, as they struggle to understand themselves and find they’re way toward intimacy. Today’s readers—both men and women—want their prescriptive answers in a gulp-down form, something they can drink like a slush—not something they have to chew on.

Who wants to know about personality types or problems that prevent men from committing to women when you’ve got all kinds of off-the-cuff unqualified authors who will be happy to give you the benefit of their limited real-life experience? Have you read some of this realtionship advice stuff? I mean, way too much of it is just embarrasingly amatuerish in style and content. And yet, it sells. Publishers buy it and so do readers.

Who needs to peek behind the consulting room door to learn what makes men tick when everyone’s personal business is hanging out there on nightly reality tv, tabloid journalism and digitally splattered out on blogs? What used to read like stimulating and captivating case histories now seem tame in comparison to the everyday publicized Misgivings of the Guilty and the Shameful. Anything less than someone being caught in flagrante delicto isn’t juicy enough to capture our attention, you know?

Look, the truth is that most of these unqualified authors haven’t lived long enough to have much idea of who they really are—let alone offer advice to others. But this doesn’t stop the publishing world from not only welcoming their pablum but paying them a pretty penny for it.

How about the editors who are the gatekeepers for what gets taken seriously? The scary thing is that these editors sitting in judgment of my proposal are often barely old enough to grok what they are being offered. From their point of view, it doesn’t matter—they just need to know what sells.

I have lived long enough to see the demise of the expert—at least in the trade publishing world genre of advice and relationships. Everyone is now an instant expert, an instant Amazon reviewer. The internet has allowed everyone to have their voice, even if they still have to search deep within to find it.

So, it looks like another mid-list non-fiction author goes down in flames, unable to sell his latest proposal. Track record not good enough. Topic not hot enough. Too old, not cool enough. Now I know what it feels like to be marginalized. But I know, it's not personal--it's just business.

Not-So-Fine Whine: On the (Much-Desired) Passing of the Wah-Wah Peddle

2005-05-17T00:05:00.000-04:00

Quick: who was the all-time master of the Wah-Wah? Gotta be George Harrison, right? The quiet Beatle, a gifted musician and song-writer disinclined toward self-promotion or hyperbole, one who tended to let his work speak for itself. After the strum und drang of the Beatles' breakup, it was George who first and most emphatically declared himself a free man, capable of carrying on quite nicely on his own, starting with ALL THINGS MUST PASS, a triple (!) album of mostly terrific songs and gorgeous guitarsmanship. His use of the wah-wah pedal (which bellows the sound of an electric guitar in somewhat the same fashion as when a trumpeter wields a mute, resulting in the eponymous "wah") became a signature in the early '70s, but it was never more than a gloss on the genuine chops that made him who he was.

I suspect there were some musicians of the day—now aging acid-heads, retired software-developers, Arizona real-estate brokers (you know who you are)—who resented George’s early post-Beatle burst of success. Who claimed it wasn't about talent so much as a certain cuteness factor, accented ever-so-slightly by being in the right place at the right time. [And who would've had a legitimate gripe if it were Ringo, rather than George, they were targeting.]

Wah-wah
You made me such a big star
Being there at the right time
Cheaper than a dime...

"Wah-Wah" (from ATMP) showcases everything we like about George Harrison: his wit and self-awareness and humility, his sense of melodic drama and his keen knack for the catchy riff. [There's that other thing, too--some like it, some not so much--the sense that, in every song, he might actually be addressing God directly...] As "Wah-Wah" sashays through its seasons, George contemplates the possibility of life without his signature side-kick:

Wah-wah
I don't need no wah-wah
And I know how sweet life can be
If I keep myself free
From the wah-wah
I don't need no wah-wah
Wah wah!

It didn’t hurt to have been a Beatle. But George was (obviously) more than just the wah-wah--he had enough chops that even if they took away his wah-wah (and/or his bandmates), he'd never have to resort to a day job.

***
Fine, Max, very interesting--but where are you going with this?

***

OK, it's true: this post isn't about George Harrison or wah-wah pedals; rather it's a cautionary riff (if you will) meant to scare (some) writers clear of
The Path of the Wah-Wah Peddler

Peddle [sic], which counts among its synonyms words like "flog” and “sell” and which connotes a relative disposability of the items being, umm, flogged. Recently I received a number of "Rants"--replies to the Mad Max “Rant this Space” Invitational--and virtually every one of them, to one degree or another, was both self-promotional and self-pitying. Neither is surprising--first of all, the nature of a "Rant" more or less requires that one has a wrong to Rant against; secondly, what has BookAngst 101 itself flogged if not self-promotion?

And yet. As an editor, as a member of the industry about which both examples [below, to follow] are ranting, I found myself reacting unfavorably--even (I confess) unsympathetically--to the Rants and their authors. My first impulse was to walk on by--to neither respond nor to post them.

Then it occurred to me: Many writers lament never getting any real feedback from editors, about how the "not right for our list" kiss-off isn't even remotely instructive. So I've decided to take that lament at face value, and give some real feedback--

or, to put it another way, I've decided to be a consummate shit-heel, by using two of these Rants to purposes perhaps other than what their creators intended.

It's not that I disagree with them wholly, or that I can't see merit in their respective perspectives. Yes, there are obstacles (lots) to access; yes, the publishing industry, like the culture generally, is disposed toward youth, hipness, currency, platform, etc., sometimes to the detriment of those with more experience and perspective but less likely, say, to win a guest-host's squat on OPRAH.

On the other hand, if these represent the ways in which (some) writers reach out to the publishing industry, and if said industry (represented by Max) is put off by the strategies these writers employ, then these strategies aren't working....And maybe (I'm not certain, but maybe) this justifies my turning the bright lamp of the Rant back upon their creators. Even if they hate me for it, maybe it'll prove useful for others.

***
The first came to me with a subject line that read, "An unpublished writer’s rant"--and I confess it was two days before I even opened it. Which was exactly his point...

[Next up:FINE WHINE I: AN UNPUBLISHED WRITER'S RANT.]

Fine Whine I: An Unpublished Writer’s Rant

2005-05-17T00:04:00.000-04:00

[Submitted to BookAngst 101 by an Anoymous Reader/Writer, via email, with the subject head "AN UNPUBLISHED WRITER'S RANT":]

Admit it... you’ve stopped listening already!

You saw “unpublished writer” and your eyes glazed over and you quickly clicked over to Bookslut before defiling yourself with the anxious whining of a new writer.

Therein lies the rub... I can’t get your attention without being published, and I can’t get published without your attention. For the unpublished writers amongst us who are sans MFA, short on contacts, and long on aspirations, the obstacles to a publishing career are daunting. The work's not good enough... so write better... but the only valuable feedback is locked behind those doors marked “only Pros need apply.” I get no feedback from a form letter saying, “this material isn’t right for us.” Sure, it’s easy to write another book, but will it be better? Oh sure, I’ve taken writing classes from nobodies, and I’ve been told I can write. So can a million others, apparently, as well as the Shakespeare-typing-chimpanzees.

How do you pluck that one possible out of a big stack of impossible? Is it possible that you’ve made your mind up before you’ve even resigned yourself to the icky chore of dispensing your slushpile?

I’m just sayin’.

***

To which Max responds:

Sorry, but this is self-pitying crap. Yes, you're right: I did shy away from your subject line--because (even before there was a Mad Max Perkins) I get dozens of unsolicited emails a day from writers wanting me to read their masterpieces. I recognize you're just trying to get through to somebody--but this ain't the way to do it. And it's not because you don't have an MFA or took "classes from nobodies": trust me on this, I delete them all without prejudice. [And--personally?--I'll be much less inclined to give you a open-hearted read if you've got an MFA than if you don't. Not a big fan of the production-line industry responsible for so many More Fucking Artistes...]

If you're not getting published, it sure ain't because you're not part of the "In Crowd." This conspiracy-theory gobblety-gook is a favored excuse for people who haven't got the talent or haven't got the drive, or both. The world is lousy with literary agents; and literary agents only get paid when they make a sale; so they're a competitive and fast-acting group. From my perspective, there are basically two reasons why a writer doesn't have an agent: either the writing's not quite good enough, or the writer hasn't applied himself seriously--doggedly--to finding one.

Whether or not publishers should have a responsibility to read material submitted to "Dear Slushpile," the reality is that most no longer accept unsolicited manuscripts. If you think this reflects the hard-heartedness of today's market place, you're right: publishers are enormously understaffed relative to yesteryear, which means that there are far fewer sets of eyes per submission than used to be the case... Another reason why your initial focus should be on getting your work to agents: they might actually read it.

This week's inspiring story about a writer discovered on the slush pile strikes me as the exception that proves the rule--and my guess is that his/her career began perhaps two decades ago.

“Only Pros need apply”...I get no feedback from a form letter saying, “this material isn’t right for us.”

First of all, damn right: pros ONLY, please! The business of writing, and of publishing the work of serious and talented writers, is, indeed, a matter of PROFESSION in the profoundest sense. If you write as a hobby, that's wonderful for you--but I have no place in that experience, and it's naive of you to expect me to be reassuring if your work fails to engage me. My professional responsibility is to find writers and books that I feel have literary and commercial merit (and it's not coincidence that there's often a strong corrolation between the seriousness and professionalism with which writers approach their craft and the extent to which I'm likely to be impressed). I have neither time or motivation to engage in feel-good correspondence for its own sake.

Finally: I accept the charge that this is a low blow, an easy shot--but, to my mind, anybody who says "it's easy to write another book" probably isn't putting nearly enough time and energy--enough professionalism--into the work in the first place.

[Tomorrow: FINE WHINE? OR RANT? YOU BE THE JUDGE]

Anatomy of a Career

2005-05-16T01:47:00.000-04:00

[This author's comments arrived yesterday in response to a January post on the topic of realistic advances. I don't know which I find more astonishing, the arc of the career or the fact that this happy story begins with--and didn't end on--the slush pile. Whoever you are: congratulations, and thanks for sharing this.--Max]

My first advance was $10K from a major NY publisher. (This was also, BTW, an unsolicited, unagented submission.) I earned back that first advance, landed myself an agent, and received a contract for a second book for $35K. In subsequent years, deals for my third and fourth novels followed, and each time my advances increased. Each time I earned out. For my fifth and sixth novels, I received my first 2-book deal and six figure advance. I am currently under a three-book contract for which I received a mid-six figures advance.

Perhaps most people would look at my early miniscule advances and sneer, and it could be said that a larger advance might have earned me more attention from the marketing department. However, I always made a profit for my publisher, and they stuck with me as I gradually built an audience. I've still never been on the Today show or had my publisher run a national ad, but my last two books both spent several weeks on the NYT extended bestseller list.

I give all the credit to my wonderful editor, agent, and in-house publicist who had faith in me and allowed my career to gradually build momentum. Would it have been great to receive a huge advance and publicity campaign for my first book? Well, maybe. I'm not so sure. I ended up at the same place; it just took a little longer.

No advance of any size could buy me what I have today: a great relationship with my publisher, an editor whom I adore, and the ability to continue to do the work I love.

Mad Max Survey, Vol IV: They Lied

2005-05-03T08:00:00.000-04:00

After two books at a midsize house established suspense novelist RICHARD as “one to watch” (relatively modest advances, and a high success-to-expectations ratio), a bigger house came calling. He’d been pleased with the efforts of Publisher #1—when the publicist he’d hired (at his own expense) got some traction, they responded nimbly to the opportunities by increasing distribution and extending (substantially) the co-op spend. Both books earned out their advances, and there was good feeling on both sides.

But Richard’s editor left, and other changes were anticipated as well. Publisher #2 came forward with a larger offer (a two-book deal) and a promise to position Richard’s third book as its lead title—major promotional support whose stated goal wasn’t just to break Richard out but to establish him as a brand-name author and get him “on the lists.” Given the change underway at his original publisher, the move to Publisher #2 seemed a no-brainer.

As it turned out, it nearly ruined his career.

RICHARD:
Six months after the deal was struck, my new publisher signed an established bestseller for a huge sum of money. You think: this can’t possibly have an impact on my situation, since the publisher’s goals for me are the same now as they were when they signed me. You tell yourself—thinking like a business person (how naïve…)—that they really do have to keep at least one eye toward the future; and so while a big-name author helps them in the short run, and perhaps even raises the visibility of the imprint for the good of the rest of us, in the long-term they understand that if my career takes off, there’s an even greater upside for them. And if not me, then another writer at my level: point is, surely they understand that they’ve got to continually restock the pond, make sure they’ve got fresh brands on the rise as the old ones lose steam. They do, right?

They do not. The arrival of the big name changed completely how they viewed me, and apparently made it OK for them to bail out on all of their promises to promote me and my books. The marketing budget, the tour, the co-op—all out the window. From Book 2 (Publisher #1) to Book 3 (Publisher #2), my sales dropped 60%. And this for a book (which was finished when they bought it--in other words, they knew exactly what they were getting) that everyone agrees, even today, is the best I've written.

The worst part of it is that I had no clue about any of this—about their change in attitude, or priorities—until the die was cast. I don’t know what we’d have been able to do if they’d been honest with us, or that the additional efforts (and money) I might have expended in the service of doing the publisher’s job would have stopped the bleeding entirely; but I’m certain I could have had an impact, because I’d done some of that with Publisher #1, to good effect.

But the promises that convinced me to move publishers in the first place had been so emphatic that there seemed to be no doubt about their vision both of what my future might hold and what they’d need to do to get me there. So I stupidly buried the paranoia and doubt that any sensible author has about such promises, and trusted “the plan” without having any sense—until it was far too late—that they’d effectively pulled the plug on my budget (and those of others too) so as to shift that budgetary pool to their new, already-established bestseller.

Yes, of course: in hindsight I wish I’d stayed w/ Publisher #1, despite the departure of my editor. But there’s no lesson to be drawn from that, really, because you never know how things will turn out. The bigger mistake, the one I beat myself up over, was taking for granted that anything my publisher promised would come to pass without endless vigilance on my part.

That’s the lesson I draw from this: that as a writer, it’s my responsibility (I mean mine and my agent’s, jointly) to make sure the details are being attended to. To know what the right questions are, and to never underestimate how early I should be asking them, nor how persistently. I’m not saying that you should anticipate having an antagonistic relationship with the publisher per se. But approach the endeavor with a clear-eyed professionalism, and don’t be afraid to ask questions and require answers to those questions—make it clear through your demeanor and responsiveness A) that you’re not going to give them a reason to go anything but all-out; and B) that they’re not going to be able to bullshit you.

Which doesn’t mean they won’t. Nor does it mean, of course, that one’s success is guaranteed—obviously the odds are always against us, even under the best circumstances, we all know that. But the bottom line is, I also know, now, that I’ve got to work every bit as hard at all facets of the publishing process—including marketing myself—as I do on the writing itself. I hate doing it—but I can’t risk the possibility that somebody else might not come through. And so I don’t.

Filthy Lucre: Some Thoughts on the Profit Motive

2005-05-02T23:05:00.000-04:00

Far be it for me to take someone else to task for anonymity; but I found one recent anonymous post (in response to Vol. II of the Mad Max Survey: Keith, the thriller writer) especially wearying, spouting as it does received wisdom about the lock-stock correlation between the size of the advance and the extent to which a book will (or won’t) be well published.

If this writer thinks his publisher didn't do much for him after receiving his large, life-changing advance, he should consider that the effort would have been far less if his advance had been small … I've heard this "I got too large of an advance" story before and it defies logic. Sure, he didn't earn out. But who's to say he would have earned out with the smaller advance? Smaller advance would have certainly meant smaller effort by the publisher, smaller interest by the media, and smaller sales all around.

As an editor in good standing who has paid seven-figures for books, and who has far more frequently paid five figures, I’m here to dispute, emphatically, the claim that publishers never publish well books they don't pay a ton for. And before anyone accuses me of striking a pose designed to contradict the ingrained cynicism/skepticism with which publishers are viewed—after all, people so enjoy demonizing the ugly for-profit instincts of publishers, and have such uncanny insight into the ways this ugliness motivates us, above all other things—I’ll speak not of art, or of supporting the little guy, but as the bottom-line capitalist I am. Because here’s the truth about what a “small” advance represents to me: it’s a chance to earn a profit—

To turn a (relatively) modest investment into a (potentially) lucrative return… From the Latin lucrativus—from whence comes the rallying cry of investors since time immemorial:

“Hey, man—
let’s make us some
FILTHY LUCRE!”

Do publishers pay tons of money for books sometimes? Yes. Do they sometimes support such investments aggressively? Often, yes. But it's specious (and down-right illogical) to suggest that the inverse is true—that books bought “small” are necessarily doomed to be published that way. Again, I won’t play the “for the love of literature” card; rather, it stands to reason that, if we buy a book for $50,000 (a “small” advance, according to some), and publish it well, there’s a far greater likelihood of

Getting…into…the BLACK

The failure of a book for which a small advance has been paid is no more guaranteed than is the success of those seven-figure mega-deals that get headline ink in the trades. Are there publishers whose eyes, as a matter of course, glaze over when they see such books on their publishing grids? Yeah: stupid ones. Smart publishers are opportunistic. Sometimes opportunity presents itself in the form of bestselling authors for whom huge sums are paid based on the expectation that huge quantities will be shipped out, generating a stream of receipts that, even when not profitable by every conceivable measure, can nonetheless make a huge contribution to operational overhead. But nothing represents a greater (theoretical) opportunity for publishers than a book bought low that can be sold aggressively. These situations represent the ultimate win-win for author and publisher alike.

What does this outcome require? It requires vigilant activism on the part of editors, and it requires the trust of the people managing/supervising those editors. As the number of publishers shrinks; as the remaining publishers grow in size; and as the number of titles being published on each list increases, especially relative to the number of people needed to publish them well; it is, of course, inevitable that those charged with overseeing those lists focus greater and greater portions of their resources on titles & authors that have a proven track, or on which large bets have been placed—this is what Anonymous means by “chasing the money.”

But under these circumstances, editors have opportunities to be mini-publishers, even—no, especially—for these relatively smaller titles. Their managers are counting on them to do precisely that. And at the end of the day there is nothing so satisfying, so thrilling, so rewarding—for everyone involved—as putting the right book into the right hands at the right time, and turning a project for which expectations are modest into a lead title. Is part of that thrill the realization that you may have earned a terrific return on your investment? Well, this is a business--what do you think?

Mad Max Survey, Vol. III: Big v. Small

2005-05-01T22:58:00.000-04:00

PATRICK, a literary novelist, published his first book with a prestigious New York house, then published his next two with a university press.

BIG ......For my first novel, there was a generally good vibe leading up to publication. I had some issues with the publisher, though—the corporate behemoth and so forth—issues that seemed all the more clear-cut when my publicity director was fired the week before publication. The new pub director knew little about the book and as a result very little happened. Despite good reviews and moderately good sales (plus a good sub rights deal), the experience led me to want to explore other options.

SMALL ......I wound up publishing my next two books with a university press. I was drawn in that direction initially because I had heard they kept books in print and cared deeply about literature. In fact, I thought the editing was vastly superior with my faceless NY publisher. I'm not sure my editor at the university press ever read the book. They went into publishing fiction with the idea that they' make a lot of money to support scholarly monographs but they had no idea how to market fiction. Again, good reviews and even a minor prize, but low sales, due in part to lousy distribution and p.r.

I did a second book with this press, thinking we had all learned something from the first. In this case, I worked very hard for the book and sales were modestly better but many of the same problems remained. And while they sold out of their first edition within six months, they weren't willing to go back for a second printing. Another minor complaint is that while there was some movie interest, the publisher had no idea how to handle this, and fumbled the opportunity. Sub rights is a major problem with small press and university presses. Every so often they get a paperback deal but it's purely by accident, in my opinion.

BIG v. SMALL ......At the time I felt I’d been lost in the shuffle with my New York publisher; on the other hand, there's just no question that their professionalism and attention to detail made a huge difference. One small example: with my last book with the U.P., I almost didn't get noticed in PW or Kirkus because the press didn't get advance copies to them in time. This despite having gotten good notices on my previous novels—very annoying, given the importance of these publications to bookstores, libraries and the trade. On the other hand, while the first book was pulped within six months, my university press books are still in print. That means a lot to an author.

THE WORK ......Looking back on twenty years of frustration and some limited success, I think the most important thing is perseverance. Too many writers are willing to give in to pessimism because of the problems all mid-list writers face these days. For me, it's really always been about the writing, and that's what has saved me in the end. If I didn't love to write, I'd be in trouble.

I think that book tours and other publicity gimmicks are largely a waste of time. I know all the arguments for them, how they encourage booksellers, etc, but few things in life are more dispiriting that standing around in some bookstore in some distant place addressing five or six people and a pile of your books. Okay, you get to sign stock and sell a few that way, but in my view it's not worth it, especially in view of the way NY publishers view these kinds of sales. Ditto with interviewers, most of whom are clueless and have little idea of who you are and what you've done. A special place in hell should be reserved for these nitwits.

WHAT I KNOW NOW ......I just sent a new novel to my agent and have decided that unless I can get a decent deal with a NY publisher, I'm not going to publish it. For me, it's all about distribution and publicity. With the decline of review markets, it's just very difficult to get your book in front of the public without a big NY house behind you. Having said that, I'll also say that I think these literary blogs are the most interesting and exciting thing I've seen in publishing in twenty years. I have no idea what the audience is but I'm always impressed with the energy and intelligence of the bloggers.

______________________
PREVIOUS INSTALLMENTS:

Mad Max Survey, Vol. II: Keith, A Thriller Writer

2005-04-28T12:47:00.000-04:00

THE TROUBLE WITH BIG ADVANCES.
KEITH: A thriller writer.

Keith’s career opened like a television ad for a European sports car: Zero to Sixty in Under Five Seconds. He was “an absolutely unknown 28 year-old” when his novel caught the attention of a powerful literary agent. The novel—an upmarket thriller featuring a female protagonist—went out to key New York editors. Keith was a publisher’s dream come true: a young, attractive thriller writer with commercial storytelling instincts, literary chops and—Halleluiah first novelists!—absolutely no prior sales track to have to contend with.

The submission generated instant buzz; an auction date was quickly set; and in the end, seven U.S. publishers came to the table. Novel #1 sold to a top editor at a venerated house for a hefty six-figure advance, along with “heady marketing promises”: an extensive tour, end caps at major chain bookstores, and national media appearances. The book quickly sold in numerous foreign countries. It seemed almost too easy—a dream score

KEITH:
Here's my story. I call it a cautionary tale about the trouble that big advances can lead to.

BOOK ONE:
Though the editor under whose imprint I was to be published was one of the pillars of her house, I was assigned to her assistant, who was just beginning to come into his own. He was very excited about the book, and worked, I honestly believe, his hardest to promote it in house. (How much weight he had to throw around, however, is less clear.)

The book received a two-page spread in the catalog, and the first printing was in keeping with the sizeable advance. Yet there were problems from the start. The cover my publisher finally settled on was hideous—and though I had approval of the cover art written into my contract, the process was so belabored and fractious that by time the final cover was decided, it was way too late to do anything about it.

The book came out to stellar reviews, and many—from a starred PW to a glowing NYTBR, and pretty much everything in between. Yet the cover was so hideous that the major chains refused to feature it. In the end, despite the glowing reviews, my sales were disappointing. The mass market team (the publisher's sister house) took its cues from the hardcover performance, didn’t position it aggressively etc., and the results were exactly what you’d expect. r.

[For the record, I was sent on a book tour for the hardcover—an absolute waste of time and money, in my opinion.]

BOOK TWO
The same publisher acquired my second book as well, with the advance being a third less than the first advance; I saw it as a vote of confidence that they wanted to stick with me. But with the lackluster sales of the first book dogging them, the marketing department decided to position the next book less as a thriller than as a mystery, and focusing their promotion exclusively on mystery book stores. They said it was their way of finding a niche. Again, my book came out to perfect reviews—we picked up PEOPLE this time, one of the few who’d given us a pass on Book One. But they shipped a much smaller number; I went on a dismal book tour to mystery book stores; and hardcover sales were even lower than for the first book. At the time I didn’t grasp just how significant this downward track would prove to be. As before, there was zero marketing on the part of the paperback house, which made its (dismal) publication a self-fulfilling prophecy.

BOOKS THREE AND FOUR
My original publisher offered me a two book contract for books three and four, though once more at a diminishing advance: I got the same advance for books three and four combined as I’d received for book two. By now the junior editor had moved on to greener pastures, but I’d formed a close relationship with the woman under whose imprint I was published, so we decided to proceed without another editor, with the implicit understanding that I wouldn’t get quite the same level of attention regarding the day-to-day as I had in the past.

Again, there were the same stellar reviews, the same dismal tours to mystery bookstores and appearances at Bouchercon, the annual mystery writers' convention. Only now the focus on the mystery world was seeming more and more like a bad idea: I write political thrillers, not mysteries. My third book was published just after 9/11, as we were poised to go to war with Iraq. This may sound heartless, but the fact remains that my book couldn’t have been more topical; had it been nonfiction, it might well have been a bestseller. The publisher made absolutely no attempt to tie the marketing in with current events; on the other hand I can't blame marketing entirely, as distribution was by now my real enemy.

Everyone—authors and editors both—has a story about how 9/11 took the legs out from underneath a promising publication. Yet unlike so many, I continued to get terrific media—all for naught. Here’s an example: one of the stops on my book tour was Minneapolis, and came immediately on the heels of three separate articles about me and the book in the Star-Tribune (a review, an interview, and a profile). But my publisher had managed to book an event in the Twin Cities; instead I wound up a tiny mystery bookstore thirty five miles away. Worse yet, the bookstore had NO STOCK. So my escort and I had to go to every bookstore in the area and buy them out of their few copies.

My fourth book also dealt with timely, trenchant subject matter, and had a terrifically exotic setting—and received no marketing support whatsoever. It was only now that I came to realize that my editor, fantastic though she was on the page, and as a human being, had little interest in or grasp of the ins and outs of marketing a book, or even generating excitement for it in house. As my British editor once remarked, "J. is from the old school, and sees marketing as something altogether vulgar." Had I known then what I know now…

BOOK FIVE
What had been obvious to my agent for some time now became plain to me: I had to find a new publisher. Yet this would prove much easier said than done. Many top editors at large New York houses were itching to read my manuscript, and I traveled to New York to meet with potential new editors, who were consistently "blown away" by the book, and "very excited to work with me." However, not a single one of these editors would be allowed by their marketing departments to make an offer, because of my sales track.

Moral: there really is such a thing a too-high an advance, and mine is a case in point. Had I started smaller and earned-out, it's possible that, in the aggregate, I wouldn't have made quite as much money. But I wouldn't be in the insane position I find myself in now. I've been published in a dozen different languages. All four of my books have received near perfect reviews. My European sales are respectable enough that I have made two promotional trips abroad this year alone. I have a contract with a major British publisher for two books. And yet if I'm going to continue publishing in this country, I'm going to have to do so under a different name.

PREVIOUS INSTALLMENTS OF
THE MAD MAX SURVEY:
A BAKER'S DOZEN: OVERVIEW
VOL I: PAPERBACK WRITER

A Baker’s Dozen: Mad Max Author Survey

2005-04-27T00:36:00.000-04:00

“For me, it’s always been about the writing, and that’s what has saved me in the end.”—Patrick, novelist

In the very early days of BookAngst101, I asked writers to share with me their publication histories. 13 authors replied to my survey, giving frank and detailed accounts—not many happy tales here, I’m sorry to say—and then generously answered my follow-up questions. I’d like to thank Keith, Kitty, Lynn, Richard, Patrick, Allison, Rachel, Calvin, Elliot, Jesse, Mary,Willa and Carla* for being so trusting, and so forthcoming. (It’s especially valuable, I think, because your backgrounds represent a perfect cross-section of the business: writers of fiction and nonfiction, across the span of literary-to-commercial; adult books, childrens' and YA; published by major New York publishers, university presses and a variety of small regional presses....)

I’d intended to use your experiences as a database from which to sketch out a composite of the writing-and-publishing life. But as I sifted through the details I came to see that there weren’t a lot of larger lessons to be drawn that we didn’t mostly know already:

Editorial turnover breaks authors’ hearts and leaves them compromised in ways the consequences of which are sometimes never undone... Overwhelmed and/or inexperienced publicists—the closest thing to “marketing in action” that many authors ever come into contact with—rarely seem to be up to, or invested in, the task of promoting mid-list authors... On the other hand, be careful what you wish for: almost to a person, these authors came to the conclusion that the book tour, on virtually any scale, is not simply a waste of time & energy but, in fact, an exercise in public humiliation... To top things off, it appears there really is a special ring in hell for the nitwit radio and newspaper personnel who purport to be working the “book beat” yet fail to read the books (or sometimes even the press material) by the authors they’re interviewing.

These are all real and significant concerns, but I suspect they’re not much of a surprise to professionals on either side of the aisle. It’s taken me rather a long time to recognize that the larger value of your replies isn’t so much in the aggregate “data” they provide, but in the narrative particularities of your experiences, and in the way you expressed them.

Seven months, in fact. In retrospect I wish I’d crafted my “survey” so as to invite a more discursive approach: I asked for nugget-sized details and got them, but the form of my questions elicited replies that, in some cases, don’t translate well for a larger narrative. And so, while pieces of all 13 interviews have informed various aspects of this blog for months now, and excerpts from many will appear in a series of “survey recap posts” I'll run over the next couple of weeks, fewer than half of your replies have translated effectively into stand-alone entries. I apologize to those of you whose stories aren’t reflected here, or in much depth, despite your having taken the time and effort to give such full reports. But seven months is too long, already, to have held onto to these; and it seems it’s better to put out some of these narratives than to keep them all on ice because of my inability to frame the others in a fashion that does you justice.

Watch this space for more Author Survey posts in the near future.

--Max

P.S. Don't forget, folks--we're still accepting applications for the Rant Room. space is going fast, though, so get yours in soon!
____________

*For the record: with the exception of self-proclaimed “Paperback Writer” Lynn Viehl (whose response to the survey was posted back in January), all the other writers are presented by alias, and in some cases with a detail or two changed, in order to safe-guard anonymity.

Max for a Day: Rant this Space

2005-04-25T13:25:00.000-04:00

A reader of this blog recently suggested the need for

"a forum where publishing insiders can vent (anonymously) about the challenges of their industry, and maybe offer/get some sympathy and support."

I don't know about the sympathy/support side of the equation, but I can attest to the psychic benefits of ranting. And then there's the confidence boost that comes from deceipt: by posing as a publishing insider as I've done, and posting pseudonymously, I've come to see myself as being more steeped in the pubishing process than most mailroom employees can claim.

And so I thought it might be interesting to open up the gates a little--to give you (Dear Reader) not just a chance to vent but also to bask in the glory that comes with being a part of the glamorous blogging community at this particularly glamorous moment in time. Think of it (as I do) like being Super Hero for a day--the chance don the brightly-colored cape & costume, and to demonstrate to all the world the full range of your genius [sic], your keen insights, your ability to take a bullet for the good of human-kind. Sure, there's the risk of public humiliation--on the other hand, what if you emerge from the experience not just alive but with a broader, stronger sense of your own self-worth?

[In my own case, there's little doubt that my time at BookAngst 101 has contributed directly to my best performance evaluation ever, and I'm currently on the short list to be promoted to Assistant Manager, Mailroom Operations. (Keep your fingers crossed, will you? I'll let you know how it turns out...)]

Remember the ad for the 96-pound weakling who, sick of getting sand kicked in his face, turns to Charles Atlas for guidance? That used to be me...except that my dyslexia prevented me from getting Charles Atlas's phone number right, and my apathy prevented me from trying again... As you can well imagine, this inaction (combined with many others, of which this was but one example) contributed to a low self-image and a predilection toward conspiracy theory, fast food and video games. And so, for much of my adult life, I've had the rather unsatisfactory experience of being a 96-pound weakling stuck inside a MUCH larger body. Think Ignatius J. Reilly. Think Gilbert Grape's mom.

But that all changed when I became a pseudonymous blogger. Donning the Mask of Max is the opportunity for the office-bound to (as the ad says) "Be all that you can be." To vanquish, in this newly (if only metaphorically) buff and bodacious state, those bullies who tormented us on the personal beaches of our respective pasts.

And now, for a limited time only, you too can share in this liberating experience! Here's how!!!

1. Pick a topic about which you feel strongly, and draft a "rant" of whatever length works for you.
2. Send it to me via email.
3. If I like it, I'll post it to BookAngst 101.

Now for the fine print:

Mad Max, that is, the original Mad Max Perkins, distinct from potential "Max for a Day" candidates, reserves the right to make all final decisions about content to be posted at BookAngst 101. Max is not so much worried about sloppily constructed arguments as he is about someone having something of genuine insight to say, which could reflect poorly on Max's perceived expertise. Max is willing to edit/comment on topics that strike him as worthy or serious or cogent or exceedingly silly, but warns in advance that there's a inverse corrolation between the amount of work to be done on a piece and its likelihood of getting posted. This offer is subject to alteration or cancellation without warning.

Let the venting begin.

P.S. Anonymity is optional.

Hiya

2005-04-21T23:46:00.000-04:00

Sorry for the hiatus. Right now I don't seem to have the juice to be posting regularly, and have decided neither to force it nor to force a decision about when--or whether--BookAngst 101 will be back in session.

So for now I'm setting my solar panels in the yard and letting them recharge awhile.

Thanks to you e-mail pals who've checked in w/ me to offer good cheer and make sure all's well. All is well, and is better still because of your good wishes.

--Max

Stacked and Packin' : Alive & Well in the Land of Books

2005-04-13T12:00:00.000-04:00

Books, books, everywhere you look! Stacked to the rafters, high on the hip; on the front page of the New York Times, in high-rotation ads on Fox TV, in obits and litblogs and AP Wire postings. Suddenly the book biz has a personality again. Watch out, Teach for America: you'll have to fight a lot harder for those young Yale Dartmouth & Amherst grads next year.

Here's Judith Regan announcing her move to Los Angeles, promising Left Coast culture a shot in the arm--and my favorite kettle-calling-pot comment, from an unidentified Hollywood exec, who said, in the Daily News:

"Judith has succeeded by going for the lowest common denominator...While that makes her a standout in the book-publishing industry, it's not really so special out here."

Here's Pamela Anderson giving a boost to our collective silhouette in STACKED, the sit-com (premiering tonight) that the Calgary Sun describes as "FRASIER with boobs" [Headline: "Stacked not a bust"] and showing Middle America just how much fun reading can be. Speaking of fun, producer Steve Levitan compares (perhaps optimistically) STACKED's potential for romantic high-jinx with CHEERS's Sam-and-Diane [with Elon Gold in the "Sam" slot], and admits he had another sexy, literate, laff-riot couple in mind:

"I thought a lot about the Marilyn Monroe-Arthur Miller dynamic when I was writing this," Levitan said [in the NYTimes]. "Here was this blond bombshell who surprised a lot of people by being with this New York intellectual and vice versa. That's always been a fascinating relationship to a lot of people."

Here's Saul Bellow, resplendent in death, coming across not as egghead-genius but as hip-cat Jimmy Stewart, inspiring financial brokers across three continents to whisper a single word of investment advice: "TWEED." [Methinks I see a t.v. movie on the horizon... Bellow, Hunter S. Thompson, Arthur Miller--A Bookish Brat Pack of the Dead, with a made-for-t.v. amalgam of Andrea Dworkin and Gloria Steinem as protofeminist sidekick.]

Here's the launch of the Litblog Co-op, offering at least the possibility that serious, unhyped literature isn't doomed in the marketplace.

Here's the Iowa Writers' Workshop conducting an American Idol-like search for a new director to replace the legendary Frank Conroy, bringing beloved-but-not-bestselling writers Richard Bausch, Jim Shepard and Ben Marcus an extra measure of attention before ultimately selecting Lan Samantha Chang.

Here's Harvey and Bob, given the opportunity to slip free, blameless, of the book trade, and chosing not to.

Here's Jonathan Burnham and Rob Weisbach and Carole Baron and Ivan Held and Lee Boudreaux and Jennifer Hershey taking on new gigs, new challenges, and sending an energizing ripple through the industry.

Smirk if you will--and the opportunities are numerous--but can this really be a bad thing? Sure, Pamela Anderson's co-stars in STACKED are sure to be chubby, cross-eyed dorks. Sure, if there's reason to celebrate Judith Regan's move west, it probably has more to do with the notion of "addition by subtraction" than with culture per se. And--sure--the shifting of leadership players of late doesn't address, in any way, the more fundamental concerns of the industry.

But you can't have everything. Meanwhile, there's always this low-tech 19th century truism that is no less a rallying cry today, nor any less true:

Change is good.

Read This! United by Love

2005-04-09T04:58:00.000-04:00

"Marking a departure from the solitary life of reading and writing, about 20 independent literary bloggers announced Friday that they will begin working together in hopes of drawing readers to books they feel deserve more attention, while seeking to generate more and deeper public discussions of literature....Mark Sarvas, who drew the project together, described the effort as less an awared program than a conversation starter.

"We want to shine a light on literary fiction likely to get overlooked and lost in the shuffle...The mission is to see what happens when 10 to 20 lit bloggers get behind a title and push hard. Does it make a difference?"

--L.A. Times article [April 9, 2005] on the Litblog Cooperative

One Night in the Heart of the City...

2005-04-05T23:49:00.000-04:00

Scribes in tights...super-duper lit-kits--except, hey! Where are the washboard abs?

Let's face it: when you need somebody to see behind the mask? To comprehend what (dr)evil lurks in the hearts of men?

Call a woman.

Patricia Storms has BookLust. Pass it on.

Me & Liz: A Cautionary Tale; or, DEATH TO THE BLOGS!

2005-03-31T12:01:00.000-05:00

Y'all must be feeling pritty darn good about yerselves, you super-cool revolutionary sweethearts of the blog, eh? Am I right? Written up on consecutive days in the Times...getting your names in bold-face (I won't name you, but you know who you are) on Tuesday, March 28--just a day after the same paper credited you with putting Liz Smith--the One, the Only, the Barbra Streisand of bold-face--out of business...

Hey, hotshots--a word of advice from someone who's been there, eh? Liz Smith's story--and, indeed, my own--demonstrates just how devastating the fall from great heights can be, and how fast it can occur. So keep that in mind as you turn your backs on the likes of Liz & Me.
***
Let's start with Monday's NYT Business section. The title says it all: "In the Blog Era, Liz Smith Wonders if There's Room for the Pro."

[An aside, if I may: is there such a thing as too exact a title? Should that particular NYT editor get a raise for precision? or a good talking-to about how, readers being scarce enough as it is, we don't want to make it too easy for them to skim past the article itself whilst walking from the kitchen to the den before they log onto Gawker?]

Tell the truth, cruel-hearted 21st century techno freak: the INSTANT you saw how Liz, that doyenne of discretion, but also the face of old-school gossip, had admitted defeat, what did you do? You dropped to one knee and performed that classic Tom Cruise "celebration of one's own greatness" maneuver, didn't you?

[You know the one, don't pretend otherwise: Clenched fist jerked crisply, Kung-Fu style, to shoulder, elbow pulled tight against your side-

--as you say, in a sharp whisper that sounds like a single blast of steam heat,

"YES!"

or, worse still,

"SCORE!!!"

...as in,

"Score another victory for us renegade bad-a** anti-capitalist blogster dudes & dresses--we drove another anachronistic 'print media' sweetheart out into the cold." A triumph of NOW over THEN, of YOUTH over AGE, of INTELLECTUAL over INSTITUTIONAL, of WORKING JOE over THE MAN--

HOLD IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Listen up, blogmeisters! Before you get all gussied up for that TIME MAGAZINE TREND OF THE CENTURY cover photo, let's look at the facts. Nirvana, you're not. Sure, you represent the chaos and freshness of revolution, but in fact you graduated from a fancy college just like the rest of us--

[worse, you probably even have an M..F..A..!--]

and, sure as shootin', you didn't have to work an on-campus food service job, struggling madly to keep up as wave upon wave of blue dining-hall trays marched toward you with conveyor-belt doggedness; were never put in the position of having no choice but to dig, with your own sorry fingers, into the depths of those scratched-plastic juice glasses to retrieve from their bottoms the soggy, half-eaten remains of tapioca pudding, + innumerable cigarette butts; all this for $1.25 an hour, just to make ends meet...

C'mon, admit it! You're living in Park Slope or Hoboken, Berkeley or Ann Arbor or Toronto, with a bijillion-dollar sci-fi rack of computer gadgetry to make your blog smooth and shiny. You've got a cushy day job--OK, maybe you even work hard, and even like it (sorta), or at least like the bon-bons your paycheck pays for; or else you're milking the interest on Grand-Mama's inheritance; either way, this is a secret you keep from your blogroll regulars so that you can present as a Terry Malloy down-the-docks scuffer ("I coulda been a contenda," you bellow with anguish at your 84" flat-screen t.v.)

(But I digress...)

We were talking about my close personal friend, the lovely Liz Smith, who at 82 looks better than I did at 22--and about how all you Dave Eggers-trained smarty-pantses cluck dismissively at the old values--sweat kept secret, secrets held close, true to yer school, et cetera. And about the little snicker you won't admit to at the thought that you & your gang are taking over the world... Same as the way you pshaw publicly every time the NYT or some other establishment rag tries to get a "handle" on you and your funknographic gaggle, which of course they always, like, get so wrong... And yet if a Cool-Factor judge were to issue me a warrant to search your place of fiction commission--that is, the place you do your blogging, the place where you assume your Alt-Shift personae--I guarantee we'll find you've got a secret scrapbook of printed mentions that you keep under your floorboards, and this week's Times' articles will be right on top.

***
Oh, Liz--I feel your pain! Like you, I'm too principled to play the Nasty Nellie game--and look at the cost. They email me; they say, Hey Max--serve us some Dish or we're gonna cut you off. They want the nitty-gritty on why Y got fired; how M maneuvered around A to wind up with J's job; which literary agent is consumed with Reefer Madness; and which top editor swizzles the spit between her teeth, driving her assistant mad. I know all this stuff, of course I do--but I've never forgotten your advice: when in doubt, imagine the shoe on the other foot. What if this were said about you?

So I stay between the white lines--and because of this, they turn away. Oh, Liz! In the beginning it was magical! We here at BookAngst had no business plan, we were operating by the seats of our pants. But it worked, Liz! And, oh, the accolades! We went from 0 to 60 in no time flat. Suddenly NPR was calling, Oprah was calling; Publishers Weekly wanted to do a profile; there was a whole blog devoted to trying to figure out our true identity. [No, they never did get it right.] Meanwhile, at BookAngst 101 we had 6,000,023 hits in a single day. That's a lot of hits!

But it doesn't last, does it? (Though your run has been far, far longer than most.) Quite recently I was having lunch with an agent, and we were talking blogs. Unaware of my own pointed interest in the conversation, he was raving about all those po-mo lit-crit tech-head groove-sters, Marvelous Maud and Bookslut and Sarah the Idiosyncratic and ElVar and Beatrice/ix and Nathalie the GalleyCat and--well, pretty much everybody in the known lit-blog universe... except... AHEM...

"Sure, sure," I said, "But what about that, whatzit, BookAngst, the publishing blog?"

He squinted a moment as though trying to concentrate in a loud restaurant. (OK, it was a loud restauant.) I prompted him further: "You know--that Mad Max guy?" Finally the squint gave way to a flicker of recognition--and then

He. rolled. his. eyes.

"Oh, God, yeah, I know that one--isn't it such a bore? The guy obviously doesn't know anything about publishing; maybe if he had some good gossip or something it'd be worth it--instead he goes on and on about the dullest topics. Reaganomics, corporate mergers, blah blah blah."

That night I dragged myself home and discovered that I'd had nine--9!--hits in the previous 24 hours; and two of them were come-ons from porn sites.

***
Well, Liz, at least they're still writing about you. Whereas Tuesday's lit-blog-fete made no mention of....well.... Anyway, now that the writing's on the wall, Liz, I depend on your example to show me the way to a graceful exit. As to all you hot-shot blogsters riding high atop the crest of the moment, just remember:

Payback's a bitch!

Trans-actional Query

2005-03-30T16:47:00.000-05:00

A Two-Parter:
1. Those of you urbanites (readers, writers, riders, writers who read, riders who read, etc) who travel by mass transit (subway, bus, light-rail, barrel-rolling-down-hill, etc):

A. Do you pay attention to the adverts that one sees in subways, on the sides of buses, etc. --1-800-LAWSUIT ("You, too, may want to sue the producers of VIOXX"), e.g.?
B. Have you ever seen BOOK ads in such places?
C. If yes, has an ad ever (even just once) caused you to say (to yourself), Oh, I didn't know that was out--that is, did it register in a favorable fashion?
D. Have you ever, even just once, bought a book because of such an ad?

2. Those of you publishers (editors, editorial assistants, marketeers, publicists, persons working in the mailroom, actual publishers, etc) who've ever been involved with a book that included mass trans adverts in its marketing bundle:

A. Have you ever had the experience of someone saying (aloud), Hey, I saw your book ad on the M1 bus uptown, on Madison? [That's just an example; answers need not be limited to viewings on Madison Avenue.]
B. Did you feel that the ads played a role in increasing the book's visibility?
C. Would you do it again? If so, what did you like about it? If not, why not?

As always, feel free to respond to me directly (via email: madmaxperkins@hotmail.com) and/or anonymously.

What Makes It All Worthwhile

2005-03-24T23:29:00.000-05:00

So I bought this novel recently: a foreign publisher gave me a tip, long story short, the agent and the author and I, it's one of those love-at-first-sight things... Thing about it is, you know from the first clause of the first sentence of the first page that you're in the hands of someone great, a real god-damn talent. So we do a deal, I could not be happier, and I know for sure the feeling's mutual.

Life's hard in some ways, though, so despite the good vibe, it takes me a little while to edit the manuscript (yes, even love-at-first-sight things get all scuffed up in the margins, at least the ones I edit), so now I've read it, close, two times. I call her up, tell her all over again how great the book is, that the ms. is on its way, just a few minor things. She says great, look forward to seeing your comments.

Yesterday, 6:07 p.m., I realize I've got a phone message from herself, this writer I mentioned earlier. I call her; she's gone through the manuscript now, has some questions. We talk through a couple of points, then we get to this one note I scribbled up the side of a page. She says, I have no idea what you're talking about here. I laugh, I re-read it, re-orient myself, finally figure it out. Oh, OK, I say, she can't do it that way because back here on page...

...and suddenly it occurs to us--her first, then me--that even though I'd given this book two pretty close readings, and knew it to be a thing of genius, there was one thing I didn't know: what the book meant. Turns out that I'd totally misread something really important--which meant two things at once. First, yes, that I'm a dumb-ass; but second, that maybe she hadn't built her scaffolding quite so cleanly as she needed to to avoid dumb-asses like me from maybe missing something really important.

OK, I can hear you writer-folk out there: OUCH! You wanna know how bad things are in publishing? An editor, and a supposedly stand-up guy too, buys a book HE DOESN'T EVEN UNDERSTAND! The only thing that could be worse is if he then tried to get her to change it to fit how he'd (mis-)read it in the first place--Oh, please God don't tell me he...

Well, OK, it does sound bad, I admit it. Especially since about 30 minutes of our one-hour conversation was, indeed, spent on my trying to sell her a line of bullshit about how, even though it wasn't the ending she intended, she should give her subconscious the benefit of the doubt, one knows not how worketh the creative process, et cetera.

Yeah: sounds really bad. But--know what? It was actually fantastic. Two pros, a writer and her editor, working together on a thing they're both profoundly invested in. You wanna talk creative brainstorming? What's that old-saw college textbook essay about the writing process, the one that includes the actual marginal doodles, and the doodling reveals a moth, and thus Annie Dillard wrote "The Death of The Moth"--remember that one? Well, let me tell you: we had a whole goddamn room full of moths. Except they're not moths, thank God, they're bricks, and we're figuring out how to build a house, from scratch, just the two of us.

And, sure--say what you will about how this whole thing started with some dumb-ass editor misreading the work of an author he supposedly admires utterly--but as the dumb-ass editor in question, I'm here to testify that for the hour we were on the phone, dropping our plumb-lines and positioning our cinder-blocks, I was the happiest man alive. Because we were in it together. GOD what a great job I have sometimes, to crawl inside with the master crafters; and not just watching, either: for some inexplicable reason, I'm afforded the opportunity now and again to work alongside...

***
We knew we'd had a productive session--easy for me to say, because all I did was say, "What if?"; when we get off the phone at about 7:00 last night, I get to go home; she's the one who has to do the actual work. I tell her to give a yell when she's ready, figuring it'll be a couple of weeks, maybe more.

***

Tonight--the time-stamp reads 10:17 p.m.--she emails me back. Here's a new crack at the ending, she says. When you get a chance, she says. "It's still a little rough," she says. "But you'll get the general idea."

So I open the attachment and start to read, and it's l.a.f.s. all over again. In one try, she nailed it--solved not just the problem of, shall we say, my little misunderstanding, but in twenty pages (and 27 hours, no less) she amplified and intensified all of the central emotional currents. I was stunned, elated--moved nearly to tears a couple of times. In my reply (time-stamp: 11:36) I told her (in not quite these words) the simple truth, which is that she's a genius, and that she's turned a brilliant book into a masterpiece.

And then I wrote "this is what makes it all worth while." And then I hit "send." And then I felt so god-damn good that I sat down here to tell you all about my incredible good fortune. To give an example, in case anyone ever asks, of why someone might ever want to be an editor.

Time-stamp: 12:46 a.m.

Size Matters--but How?

2005-03-21T17:39:00.000-05:00

Fascinating to note that, in the days immediately following Hachette Livres' Tim Hely-Hutchinson and others at the London BookFair speculating that the trend toward global publishing conglomeration would likely continue until the landscape was dominated by "three or four" major players, Geraldine Fabrikant reported a strikingly opposite trend in a series of articles in the New York Times, March 16, March 17 & March 18.

"Viacom said yesterday [March 16] that it was weighing a plan to divide its businesses into two public companies, a move that would unravel years of empire building by the chief executive, Sumner M. Redstone."

Ms. Fabrikant noted that Viacom's announcement was the second in as many days

"by a media company preparing to split up assets. On Tuesday, Liberty Media announced that it would spin off the Discovery Holding Company. Those plans raise the question of whether, after a decade of building media conglomerates, companies will start breaking them up. Already there is a drumbeat among investment bankers to promote such splits....

Fabrikant supported her coup de grace--that "with the announcement that he is now considering a breakup of that empire, [Redstone] has admitted his acquisition strategy did not work"--with the comments of Richard Greenfield, a media analyst at Fulcrum Global Partners:

"It is a momentous event that Sumner is willing to admit he was wrong and get smaller...He is totally reversing everything that has occurred since 1995 and totally undoing all the size and scale that he hoped to create through acquisitions."

As fashionable as it is--at this blog and elsewhere--to bemoan the seemingly endless publishing merger-mania that has created an industry dominated by seven or eight behemoths, it would be naive and dishonest to compare the enormous complexity of the composition of businesses contained within a multi-component entity like Viacom with the relatively like-minded goals of the publishing imprints Viacom has gathered beneath the Simon & Schuster umbrella--S&S's Adult and Children's divisions, Scribner, Pocket Books, The Free Press, Fireside, Touchstone, Atria Books, Washington Square Press, MTV Books and several others; collectively they make up but a small portion of Viacom's overall "media portfolio."

It would likewise be dishonest to suggest that, from an institutional perspective at least, there are not immediate advantages to be seen in, for instance, the no-longer-so-recent merging of the "Little Random" imprint of Random House with Ballantine Books. In terms of its ability to attract and build certain kinds of big, commercial authors, Little Random's hard-cover publishing arm was always disadvantaged (as have been Knopf, Doubleday and Hyperion, to name just a few) by not having a dedicated and closely integrated mass market division. Damn the purists who say Little Random has been corrupted: from a strictly-operational perspective, merging RH with Ballantine made sense. They could now offer the same sort of "full-service" publishing operations--hardcover, trade paperback and mass market, all carefully coordinated (theoretically, anyway) by unified management--that are found at S&S, HarperCollins, Bantam Dell, the Time-Warner Book Group and the Penguin-Putnam Group.

AND YET.
And yet....

* * * * * * * *
Remember the Laffer Curve? The Laffer Curve was a crudely drawn illustration of a "theory" (I use quotation marks because, as far as I'm aware, it was utterly unsupported by data, but was nonetheless given credence by economists and policy makers in the early 1980s) documented (legend has it) on a martini napkin, whereupon one Arthur Laffer drew for a like-minded Milton-Friedmanite (of the sort who then dominated Ronald Reagan's inner circle) a bell-shaped curve. The outline of the bell represented represented a theory of the psychology of taxation and the relationship between tax rates and total tax income. The tax rate was charted along the horizontal axis (because, after all, this was a graph, not simply a drawing of one of the bourdon at the Cathedral of Notre Dame), while revenue was plotted along the vertical axis The principle was simple: as the tax rate (charted along the horizontal axis) increases, so does the income the government collects...

...until it reaches its apex, the very top of the bell...

[Now I need you to visualize the outline of our martini-napkin cathedral bell: it starts at the bottom left edge and flows upward with ballerina-like grace as it move from left to right--until it reaches its apex, at (roughly) the center of the napkin, and then, in a perfect mirror-image of its ascent, begins to fall.]

The principle that Laffer's curve so elegantly protrayed was that, once tax rates become too high (i.e. once the bell reaches its apex) investors will be so disincentivized to continuing investing, and wage earners to continuing producing--that all parties to the economy will be so demoralized by the intrusive effects of Big Government upon their wallets--that productivity will diminish. The natural consequence, of course, is that tax income will also fall--ultimately, to nothing, zero. Nada.

This simplistic (and no-doubt Max-imally mangled) explanation of Laffer's simplistic theory (upon which, for the record, Reagan's infamous "trickle down" theory of economics derived: cut taxes, and the money will come! Cut, especially, the tax rates of corporations and the wealthy, and they'll continuing striving, building, investing, ever upward, thereby expanding by virtually unimaginable proportions the tax base!) is, I acknowledge, wearisome. The point isn't really to discuss Laffer's laughable notion, but to discuss the principle (considerably better supported by documentary evidence, I might add) behind the principle, called

The Law of Diminishing Returns.

[As defined in The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition. 2001]

"In economics, law stating that if one factor of production is increased while the others remain constant, the overall returns will relatively decrease after a certain point. Thus, for example, if more and more laborers are added to harvest a wheat field, at some point each additional laborer will add relatively less output than his predecessor did....The principle, first thought to apply only to agriculture, was later accepted as an economic law underlying all productive enterprise."

It's fair, by now, to ask where the hell I'm going with this ramble, given my concession that the organizational differences between publishers (even as currently, and inelegantly, configured), and the infinitely larger media conglomerates of which they are a part, is a bit like comparing grapefruits to grapevines. The answer is the question: have we, as an industry--as currently configured--reached the point of diminishing returns?

It cannot be insignificant that, within days of each other, Sumner M. Redstone and John C. Malone both concede that their respective plans for global market domination have not yielded the results promised to their shareholders? And, let's face it, there's only so much back-office compression/"redundancy reducing" that can be done before the workers themselves become overwhelmed to the point of, umm, diminishing returns.

Back to Geraldine Fabrikant in the New York Times. "'In large conglomerates, size and complexity is the enemy,' said Bruce Greenwald, professor of economics at the business school at Columbia University. 'Often, executives can't focus carefully on each of the businesses, so they don't run as well.'"

Is it not possible that our industry, too--pared to the bone as it is in terms of personnel, so as to deliver up the best short-term results possible to our share-holder--suffers, and increasingly so, from these very same disadvantages? Might there not be some wisdom to be gleaned from reconsidering Mr. Hely-Hutchinson's course and looking, instead, for ways to decentralize, to break down into smaller, more narrowly focused units?

Techno-spaz strikes again: I really did create a Laffer curve, but can't figure out how to "implant" it

2005-03-21T12:21:00.000-05:00

Max's home-made replication of the historical martini napkin upon which, it is alleged, Arthur Laffer made history...

Bravery at the Top: Rainmaker R & D

2005-03-17T22:41:00.000-05:00

Recent corporate restructurings / layoffs /call-them-what-you-will at Bertlesmann, Penguin Putnam and HarperCollins continue (it might be argued) to beg the question of whether, or to what ultimate end, there are real gains to be made in the merger-mania that's consumed publishing (and the rest of the corporate world) in the last umpteen years. In the short-run, of course, such "internal tinkerings" (here I mean personnel cutbacks rather than mergers--the elimination of redundant positions and/or expensive employees) are one way of better serving the "needs" of MultiMerge shareholders, in terms of cutting cuts and thereby increasing profits--again, I stress, in the short run.

There are of course many other views about how shareholders' longterm interests might be as well (if not better) served by the publishing divisions of these larger companies--one that comes to mind is that we make sure to support the up-and-coming writers of today to ensure that we will have bankable "brands" capable of getting around without canes and wheelchairs ten years from now. When one considers recent full-page "milestone" advertisements in the New York Times for books like THE DA VINCI CODE, BEL CANTO and THE KITE RUNNER--books that have sold (according to the ads) in excess of 10 million, 1 million and 1 million copies respectively--one can argue that such ads are good for the publisher's profile, and perhaps crucial to author/agent relations. And--perhaps--celebrating such "breakout" successes is good for the industry, in that it sends signals to those outside the typical book-buying demographic that "reading is fun." (Whether that demographic is found reading the New York Times is debatable, but even so...)

This approach, though, seems to come directly from the current Administration's theory about the proper allocation of scarce resources, which has as its theme song (mother of all ironies...) Billie Holliday's "God Bless the Child"

Them that's got shall get
Them that's not shall lose

What if, instead of the Bush/Chaney/Rove allocation of those resources, we were were to employ something like a WPA approach? Let's take the $150,000 ($50k per for a full-page black & white ad, more for color) those three ads cost and stread it around some--toward "emerging stars"--$30,000 each, say, for six writers "on the verge." To me, whether spent in additional co-op or in a series of small repeater-ads (the more impressions the better...), this constitutes an investment in the potential brands of the future.

Another double-page NYTBR ad for Danielle Steele? Full pagers for James Patterson...John Grisham...Nora Roberts... Robert B. Parker...Lisa Scottoline...Michael Connelly...Jackie Collins? They're done because, well, because that's what's done. But--and meaning no disrespect to any of these fine individuals--where are we as an industry going to be a decade from now if we're still promoting the same authors we've been promoting for the last decade? Brands eventually do lose their lustre (anybody know what John Gray's up to these days?), plateau, and fall off. So if Job #1 is reinforcing the brands that are working, Job #1A should be building the brands of the future.

Which requires being encouraged to take the the long view. The problem is, such planning is in short supply when Publishers' performances are measured not over a five-year span but, rather, quarter-to-quarter. They have to "make their numbers" each quarter, certainly each fiscal year, or they'll soon be on the street. Which places an almost impossible burden on the shoulders of these few individuals. There's your own private survival on one side--and then there's the responsibility of the very future of our business on the other... You publishers/eds-in-chiefs--Michael Pietsch and Michael Morrison and Gina Centrello and Bill Thomas and Jamie Raab and Will Schwalbe and John Sterling and Brian Tart and the rest of you--are walking an incredible tightrope. Because the constant scrutiny of your performance relative to your budgeted tagets functionally discourages you from engaging in what we might, in other industries, call R&D. And yet, for the business to sustain itself--and this is why your jobs are so incredibly stressful and demanding--you've got to be able to do exactly that: take chances on writers, and stick by writers, who won't necessarily become bankable brands (if they ever do) within three months, or even three books. With the fate of your kids' college educations on the line, you've got to be able to say to those people above you--the ones who talk to the suits above them, at Viacom and NewsCorp and Time-Warner and Bertelsmann and so on--that sometimes real money must be invested now on "product" that won't really come to market for five years. CEOs--and even shareholders--in pharmaceutical companies understand this. Why not in our industy?

It's a virtually impossible position you're in, and I admire and salute you for undertaking it. I wish you bravery and great success; that you're able to leverage the success (and even some of the assets) that a Sandra Brown or a John Sandford brings you to make sure that the 30 year-old second or third or fourth novelist has the time, and the support, to become the next-generation of hitmakers; and that you are blessed with CEOs with the long-term vision to match your own, CEOs with the vision and guts to explain to their shareholders why a 4% return is sometimes preferrable to an 8% return, because the difference has been reinvested into the piece of infrastructure most essential to our business: talented writers, the next generation of rainmakers.

"I Have Seen The Future, And The Future..."

2005-03-14T00:12:00.000-05:00

is...VidLit!

VidLit [insert TradeMark symbol here, if you've got one handy; I don't] first came to my attention with its promotional animation for YIDDISH WITH DICK AND JANE; the book has been (I'll say, without any actual data in hand--perhaps someone else can help?) a terrific success, and it sounds like significant credit for this success goes to the VidLit promotion--and to Little, Brown's marketing department, for its out-of-the-box thinking.

More recently MJ Rose brought to our attention two new VidLit creations: one for a business-y book called HOUSE OF LIES (Warner Business Books)--which has the wonderful subtitle "How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and then Tell You the Time"--and another for Bertice Berry's novel WHEN LOVE CALLS YOU BETTER ANSWER (Broadway Books) (a comedy, I take it, from the animation), both of which are totally engaging.

There's more to be said about VidLit--preferably by people who actually know something about it/them; and nobody's saying this is right for every book--

[Though I confess the thought of what they might come up with for Kathryn Harrison's THE KISS does give me a perverse thrill]

--but THIS STUFF IS COOL! FUNNY! CREATIVE! CHECK IT OUT!

ALL YOU PUBLISHING MO-FOs ESPECIALLY--THIS STUFF IS GOOD! CHECK IT OUT! (And if you're NOT a publishing mo-fo, but know someone who is, please forward this along. It's easy: at the bottom of this post there's the universal "email-a-friend" back-of-an-envelope logo. Click on that icon, and go from there.)

DISCLAIMER
Now: when I say "the future is VidLit," I don't necessarily mean VidLit per se, and/or VidLit exclusively. The proprietors of VidLit may, for all I know, be corrupt, foul-mouthed exploiters of Third World labor; and/or producers of what Judith Regan refers to as "smart sex" (otherwise known as "pornography"); and/or played some scurrilous role in the "Swift Boat Vets for Bush" campaign (in which case they'd know Carl Rove's secret handshake)... So we're not necessarily giving them any humanitarian awards at this point in time--we're just saying we like their stuff.

Furthermore, VidLit may be but one of several deserving wearers of the "the future is" mantle: surely there others out there doing similarly original and exciting work--like JibJab, perhaps? creators of "This Land," the most singularly, and hilariously, nonpartisan skewering of our two most recent political candidates--

Hey, JibJab--you given any thought to book promotions? Don't forget--publishers are cheap sons-a-bitches...

Well: there's good stuff going on out there; whether it costs a fortune or not I don't know; but everybody should CHECK IT OUT!

P.S. The VidLit fine-print says these demos won't perform properly on dial-up; they worked OK from my dial-up line, they were just a little slow to load. Be patient; it's worth it.

Hoop Dreams* [This edition contains a new "P.S." for our friendly neighborhood Grammar Cop]

2005-03-13T14:53:00.001-05:00

The very first response I received to last weekend's Pity Party/Invitation for Inspiration was from an inner-city high-school teacher in Los Angeles named Alan Lawrence Sitomer. His exploits in the classroom make for an interesting story--he won a prestigious "Teacher of the Year" Award in 2004, and also put together a free SAT essay prep site for students who couldn't afford the $1000 such a prep course normally costs. But Alan was writing to ask a question about his YA novel just being published by Hyperion's Jump at the Sun imprint called THE HOOPSTER. His question wasn't remotely like the usual authorial rant; he wasn't asking whether/how he'd been "dissed" by his editor, or whether his agent had gotten him a respectable deal, or why there'd been no billboards or launch parties or full-page ads for his new book. In fact he lauded the efforts made by everybody involved (including his editor, Wendy Lefkon) and said they'd done everything imaginable to "make me feel respected, intelligent and valuable."

What he want to know was this:

"How will I know when they [Hyperion] feel good about their return on investment in me? My advance for this this three-book deal (it's the first in a planned urban trilogy) was quite fiscally responsible and fair from the publisher's perspective - and by that I mean nowhere close to quit-my-day-job numbers but solid in my eyes.(Then again, I am a teacher, so any dollars look like big dollars... LOL!)
"What I want to know is, HOW WILL I KNOW WHEN THEY FEEL LIKE I WAS A GOOD BUSINESS PARTNER? Is it sales and dollars? Is it cachet* and awesome publicity for the publishing house? Good reviews? What is the yardstick an author such as myself should be using?"

My first impulse upon reading this wasn't to reply--it was to applaud... genuflect... give the guy a hug, and a noogie, and offer him a place on my couch if he's ever in NYC. Some of us on the publishing side have been doing this for so long, and have so often had guns held to our head regarding advances for high-profile authors, that we forget that the vast majority of writers (especially in their early days) are often deeply anxious about "earning their way." The simple explanation is that authors whose books don't sell have a hard time getting published again--but I'm convinced that Alan's question reflects that, at a more profound level, many writers have an old-fashioned (some will say naive) desire that the deal be a good one for both parties. I've worked hard on this, and I want to get paid as well as possible, but it's important that you come out of this more or less as well off as I do.

And this, folks, is one of the reasons that editors sometimes love writers, and love (despite the difficulty of doing so) publishing first-time authors. Because they (the writers) aren't jaded yet (some never become so) and actually want you (the editors) to benefit from this joint endeavor; for their book(s) to be checkmarks on the good side of the corporate ledger that somebody in finace is keeping on each and every editor. Above all, I think, it's that they really want this experience to be a good one, and a shared one--and that, at the end of the day, you the editor are really proud of, satisfied by, and stand to benefit from, the fruits of your author's creative blood sweat & tears.

So: God bless you, Alan Lawrence Sitomer; may THE HOOPSTER and its two sequels (the first of which is written and called HIP-HOP HIGH SCHOOL) bring you and your publisher great riches and great success. Now to your questions:

"HOW TO GAUGE PERFORMANCE BASED ON SALES & DOLLARS"
The simplist formula for assessing your book's performance is whether or not it "earns out" its advance. Your book retails for $16.95; assuming that YA book royalties are structured the same way adult books are, we'll average your royalties at 12.5% per copy sold; $16.95 x 12.5% means your royalty account "earns" $2.12 for every net copy sold. Thus if your advance for this book were $35,000 [Alan admitted that agent Al Zuckerman had secured him a three-book, six-figure deal], you'd need to sell 16,509 copies to reach $35,000 in royalty income. Do that--earn your advance back on the hardcover alone--and everybody's going to be very, very happy.

But let's say you only net 10,000 hardcovers--now you've "earned" $21,200, so to break even you'll need to earn $13,800 in paperback sales. A $10.00 trade paperback x 7.5% royalties= .75 per copy sold; so in this scenario you'd need to sell another 18,400 copies in trade paperback. You'd then have "earned out" the original $35,000 advance; any additional sales would then start to accrue to you in the form of royalties. (For the record, there are other pieces that can contribute to the royalty "pool," such as foreign rights income, book club sales, etc.)

"HOW REVIEWS & CACHET* FACTOR INTO THE EQUATION"
This is a two part answer. The simplest view is that great reviews and cache matter to the extent that they wind up generating sales. If your sales have been mediocre but you get great reviews (like the positive Kirkus review and the numerous 5-Star raves on Amazon HOOPSTER has already garnered, for instance!), perhaps that will translate into being nominated for a Prize. And if winning that *rize means selling more books, terrific. [I don't know if there's a Newbery Award for YA fiction--but if there is, and you win it, I suspect the Los Angeles public school system will be looking to hire someone to replace you right quick.] And--yes--this, too, will generate terrific publicity for your publisher.

The fact that you have a three-book contract with Hyperion, though, means that the reviews and accolades you accumulate for HOOPSTER, even if they don't immediately translate to sales, gives Hyperion ammo to use for the next book, and the one after that. This is one of the advantages to a multi-book deal--it gives you some reasonable sense that your publisher is going to stick by you, just as it gives your publisher additional incentive--and addition time--to recoup its investment.

Keep in touch, Alan. I'm running a pool for who plays you in the movie... My money's on Topher Grace...

*POST SCRIPT:
Special thanks to the (anonymous) eagle-eyed etymologist who both intuited that our use of the word "cache" instead of "cachet" wasn't a simple typo, AND who so generously explained the difference between the two! Next time, don't be so shy about your identity--we'd like celebrate the important work you do, pointedly policing petty-minded mediocrity whereever it raises its ugly, ungrammatical head.

King of America / Son of Sam

2005-03-12T03:00:00.000-05:00

Tonight is Soul-Restoration Night at the offices of BookAngst 101, and it's Elvis Costello who's driving the pink Cadillac. [To get this out of the way: we've forgiven him (and Diana Krall) for the travesty that is NORTH.] Tonight we're dipping into some personal favorites--IMPERIAL BEDROOM, PUNCH THE CLOCK, KING OF AMERICA, plus the odd hit here and there on some BEST OF compilation I've got handy.

And so we'll start with PUNCH THE CLOCK--forgive my craven pull toward topicality, for this is the album that contains the pop masterpiece (and, surely, every writer's secret fave Costello composition) "Every Day I Write The Book." No doubt I'll take grief from all manner of biblio-/audio-/Costell0-philes by starting here, with one of his most popular "hits" (with all the bad connotations that word carries) rather than something more obscure--but sometimes even masterpieces are popular, and masterpieces come in all shapes and sizes; and I defy you to play this song at high volume and not hook everybody in the room.

Chapter One, we didn't really get along
Chapter Two, I think I fell in love with you
You said you'd stand by me in the middle of Chapter Three
But you were up to your old tricks in Chapters Four, Five and Six

Meanwhile, the most swingin' background singers since Lou Reed's unforgettable Colored Girls in "Walk On the Wild Side" carry you away with their own version of "Doo, doo doo, doo doo, doo doo doo," singing back to EC the refrain:

I'm giving you a longer look
Every day, every day, every day I write the book

And if you haven't already fallen in love with EC yet:

Don't tell me you don't know the difference
Between a lover and a fighter
With my pen and my electric typewriter
Even in a perfect world where everyone was equal
I'd still own the film rights and be working on the sequel

[And then those exquisite background singers carry the song through the fade-out with a fabulous counterpoint to EC's lead vocal...]

Ahh! A thing of finger-snapping, hop-off-the-sofa beauty...

The funny thing is, I remember, about a hundred years or so ago--just when KING OF AMERICA came out (that would be, umm, 1986, kids)--about his explaining how PUNCH THE CLOCK was, for him, some sort of epitome of the lie that the "Elvis Costello" personae had become. I didn't really grok the whole story then, and so I won't try to reconstruct it now...but I don't know how any album that could contain both "Write the Book" and the heart-breaking "Shipbuilding," a love song that concludes

It's all we're skilled in
We will be shipbuilding
With all the will in the world
Diving for dear life when we could be
Diving for Pearls

Threaded throughout is Chet Baker's haunting trumpet solo, one of the last of his life, and quite possibly the one that brought everyone around to thinking that he was an unappreciated genius (a view I don't share, despite the loveliness of his playing on "Shipbuilding.")

Yet I did read that article in which Elvis disavowed PUNCH THE CLOCK and, more generally, the "thing" that Elvis Costello had become--a classic angry young man hiding behind a veil of irony. And I guess he'd grown tired of it, felt constrained by it. Then he put out the KING OF AMERICA lp, in which (for that album anyway) he abdicated the crown/persona of Elvis Costello; and claimed that henceforth he'd be known by his God-given moniker, Declan MacManus. Layering the complexity further is that the cover shows him looking vaguely ridiculous--but not hiding behind a wink-and-a-nudge--wearing a gaudy full-regalia pawn-shop crown. And there's this lyric in "I'll Wear It Proudly"

If they had a King of Fools then I could wear that crown
And you can all die laughing because I'll wear it proudly

KING OF AMERICA is a fascinating album; much of it reads like a immigrant epic, the sacrifice of identity in exchange for the promise of America's streets of gold. Here, in "Brilliant Mistake," he seems to be speaking of himself in third person:

He thought he was the King of America
But it was just a boulevard of broken dreams

By the end of the song he's dropped the disguise entirely, concluding (in first person)

I was a fine idea at the time
Now I'm a brilliant mistake

And then, in "American Without Tears," there's this:

Now it seems we've been crying for years and for years
Now I don't speak any English, just American without tears
Just American without tears

Of course, perhaps we shouldn't make too much of this notion of Elvis Declan Patrick Aloysius MacManus Costello's identity crisis--his next LP, BLOOD & CHOCOLATE, was released under the name Elvis Costello and the Attractions. Go figure...

But let us return again to KING OF AMERICA and "Brilliant Mistake," and celebrate Costello's unparalleled capacity for the sort of precise, concise and unforgettable skewering that would, I dare say, make even Oscar Wilde bow his head in respect. Here we find the narrator meeting a woman about to interview him:

She said that she was working for the ABC News
It was as much of the
alphabet as she knew how to use
Her perfume was unspeakable
It lingered in the air
Like her artificial laughter
Her mementos of affairs...

I love Elvis. I no longer like every cut of every album he makes, but nonetheless he ranks, unquestionably, as one of the most consistently great songwriters since he appeared on the scene with MY AIM IS TRUE in 1977. Sure, there've been many other great songwriters in the interim, but none (in my opinion) who've maintained such a high level of songcraft for so long.

Which is what breaks my heart whenever I listen to the dearly departed Elliott Smith, who killed himself a year and a half ago. Elliott Smith was a brilliant guitarist (EC never pretended to be more than a rhythm ace); perhaps because of his superior musicianship, ES's compositions had a dynamic range and variability that EC's have never had; his melodic sensibility was (this is no exaggeration) of the same sophistication as the Beatles'; he had the same lyrical dexterity as EC--but never, ever, hid behind the veil of irony. Indeed, if there's a flaw in the fabric of EC's life's work, it's the extent to which irony is such a constant plaything.

And maybe that's what's kept him alive all these years. Smith seemed to have no filters whatsoever. The result is a catalog of genius that is virtually unprecented, but far too brief--and a life that ended in suicide. The last album that came out before he died, FIGURE 8, opens with a song called "Son of Sam," in which ES credibly inhabits the psyche of a murderer, and reveals, at the very end, a touch of what made him so different...

I may talk in my sleep tonight cause I don't know what I am
I'm a little like you, more like Son of Sam

Between that and undisguised anguish of "Everything Reminds Me of Her"

Everything reminds me of her
This evening
So if I seem a little out of it--Sorry
But why should I lie?
Everything reminds me of her

we find a rawness and vulnerability that Costello acheives perhaps once, in his aching inquisition of his lover's infidelity in "I Want You" (from BLOOD & CHOCOLATE).

I want you
Did you call his name out as he held you down
I want you
Oh no my darling not with that clown
I want you
You've had your fun you don't get well no more
I want you
No-one who wants you could want you more
I want you
Every night when I go off to bed and when I wake up
I want you

Here Costello strips it all away, bellows his heart-ache in a way that--like so much of Elliott Smith--is quite unforgettable.

Fruits of the Pity Tree

2005-03-11T14:00:00.000-05:00

So a week ago I said: I'm gassed, I'm wheezin', I'm old & gray before my day. Hoping, of course, for a little tenderness--yeah, that's the truth, I threw a little pity-party, and am SO grateful that some of you came! Admittedly, not all of you did--most of you proceeded onward with the business of talking about the business (annoying well, in fact--my absence in this regard seemed not at all problematic). But enough of you said 'Oh Max, please don't go' that it reminded me of a quote offered up some while back by Ami McKay--who had, at an earlier time, detected a note of resignation and responded in a manner much beloved by the pity-prospecting proprietor of BookAngst 101:

"And Max the king of all wild things was lonely and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all. Then all around from far away across the world he smelled good things to eat so he gave up being king of where the wild things are. But the wild things cried, 'Oh please don't go - we'll eat you up - we love you so!"
from "Where the Wild Things Are" by Maurice Sendak 1963 - Harper Collins Publishers.

So thanks, to Ami and others, for the love & pity, and also for the several good topic suggestions--about which, hopefully, you'll be hearing more soon.

Print-on-Demand: Tell Us What You Know

2005-03-07T12:08:00.000-05:00

Somebody--we'll call him Umberto--recently inquired as to the pros & cons of print-on-demand publishing. Fact is, I don't know jack about P.O.D., so I thought I'd turn this question over to all y'all. Anybody have an experience w/ P.O.D.--cautionary or otherwise--that they'd care to share? And we'd of course welcome any terrific success stories you've heard--about somebody like Umberto publishing in this regard, after which the book winds up in the hands of an agent, leading eventually to a fat contract....

It's important to note that Umberto is, shall we say, under-capitalized; he has no financial resources to promote his P.O.D. book... Here's his letter:

Dear Max,

I'm an unagented wannabe writer that has struggled to get published. I have a publisher who likes my latest work and they want to have a go at it. I'm tickled--but there's a catch. They are a Print on Demand publisher. No advance. Not much in the way of promotion. Ball's in my court on that end really...

Well, I signed their one year contract and am now a couple of months from my novel's release date. And I'm nervous.

There are no funds to promote my book beyond a meager website, a blog of nonsense, and frequent postings to genre related online sources...

So Max, tell me...was this a mistake on my part? or was it the best choice available (to be published or not to be published?)... Have I hurt my chances with big time publishing houses by going the POD route first? I'd appreciate any thoughts you and/or your readers might have on the subject.

--Umberto

Invitation

2005-03-05T00:32:00.000-05:00

I'm running out of gas. If you have a topic you'd like to write about pertaining to the world of book publishing, or a question you'd like to see discussed that seems appropriate, please contact me by email [madmaxperkins@hotmail.com] and let me know what's on your mind. Thanks. --Max

Return of the Returns

2005-02-28T16:23:00.000-05:00

America's most eloquent bookseller, Robert Gray, picks up on the topic of returns today at FRESH EYES: A Bookseller's Journal. My paraphrasing his views would only serve to illuminate the differences between nimble & not; and seeing as how I'm already well-supplied with sources for potential self-loathing, I'll instead give you a snippet of the original--here he speaks of the adaptability of indie booksellers--which, I have no doubt, will encourage you hop the e-train and enjoy Bob's essay in its entirety.

"The independent bookstores that survived the late-twentieth century decimation period did so by adapting to circumstances....We're bibliosailors, reading the breezes and the waves, trimming and unfurling sails, tacking when we have to, and, most importantly, keeping watch for unanticipated wind shifts. We survive, if we survive, by being alert."
--Monster Horror Theater Presents:Return of the Returns, Feb. 28, '05

Say You Want A Revolution? End the Returns "Subsidy" of Booksellers

2005-02-27T20:50:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Booksquare for bringing to my attention Doug Seibold's "cri de Coeur" in the BookStandard, Returns Suck: So Do Something About it. Like Doug [former bookseller and now president of Agate Publishing in Chicago], I know nothing about the historic origins of this ridiculous policy, nor even do I know to what extent previous (or even current) coalitions of publishers have tried to find a way to get booksellers to acknowledge--and participate in amending--the policy.

My sense (again, based on no research whatsoever; I'd love if those more knowledgeable would set the record straight) is that the rationale behind the unlimited-returns policy on publishers' parts was a way of subsidizing a retail niche that has almost always operated at the thinnest of margins--and, so, as a way to encourage booksellers to take risks they'd otherwise be loath to undertake, they essentially said, "Don't worry--you don't sell 'em, we'll take 'em back, full cedit." It's funny: publishing gets lambasted for emphasizing "brand name" authorsto the exclusion of others--but imagine a typical bookseller's order if the policy of (virtually) unlimited returns were to be banished. Naturally ALL orders would be diminished, including the James Pattersons of the world. But those that would suffer most would be first books by unknown writers. It's heartbreakingly common for a first literary novel to ship between 3500-6000 copies. What would those numbers look like in a universe with no returns? The consequence, ironically enough, is that the proportion of brand-names to fresh new writers would get even worse than is currently the case.

On the other hand, such a policy--or, to speak more broadly, the elimination of this "subsidy" that publishers provide booksellers through current returns policies--is that it might force booksellers to do something that, historically, they're pretty lousy at: promotion. We LOVE to love independent booksellers, and much of the applause they receive for hand-selling is indeed well-deserved. On the other hand, for all of the hand-wringing that goes on about the big chains driving the independents out of business, for most of my authors on book tour, it's the Indie stores that draw the smallest crowds. A sign in the window that someone sees in passing at 8:00 that morning isn't going to persuade him to come back 12 hourse later to hear this author read. As an editor recently said to me,

Who really cares if the bad [independents] go out of business? The horror stories of authors who travel miles for a reading that was a) scheduled the night of the big game in the same neighborhood and b) not advertised anyway, is not the fault of publishers. It's the bad independents--the same stores that everyone bemoans when they go out of business. Maybe the ones that went out of business did so because they weren't run like a business. I shopped in my neighborhood independent for 13 years before I moved, and NOT ONCE did anyone ever offer to recommend a book to me. What kind of store is that?

One of the things we all bemoan is what seems to be the diminished shelf-life of front list titles. Surely there's a way to link these two issues in some meaningful fashion, i.e. rewarding booksellers who keep the titles on display longer by some sort of sliding-scale returns schedule with an inverse relationship to the amount of time the story keeps the book out there: the longer they keep the book, the higher percentage of their initial costs are recoupable. [Here again I must confess: It may well be that a strategy/pricing schedule of this sort already exists.]

It's naive to think that returns policies that have been in place for decades are likely to change in any meaningful way. On the other hand, Booksellers, consider this: an unwillingness to reform on this score gives publishers all the more incentive to develop more and more aggressively their own direct-to-consumer outreach. And I'm fairly certain there's no store out there who relishes that outcome.

BUY THIS BOOK! A Guided Tour of an Approach to Marketing You Don't Already Know About

2005-02-24T10:57:00.000-05:00

One of the reasons I stumbled into the blogosphere a few months back was in hopes of learning more about how other people market their books--online or otherwise. Fact is, when my in-house people promised "web outreach" as a key component of a marketing plan, I never really understood, specifically, what the hell they were talking about; and wondered, on occasion, if there was actually much more to it than making sure Amazon.com posted the right jacket art...

Finally I got up the nerve to start asking my stupid-person questions. Not so long ago MJ Rose at Buzz, Balls & Hype told me about something called a "virtual book tour" that she'd had success with. Huh? Then last week I saw that a company called Virtual Book Tours (VBT) was putting together a "tour" for a novelist named Tom Dolby. Terrific, I thought--but what's that actually mean? What are the mechanics? Who comes to the party, and in what numbers? How much does it cost? And--the big question--does it actually sell any books?

So I went to the source, and asked the author--Tom Dolby--if he'd give me the low-down. He agreed to provide a first-hand accounting of his "tour," which follows. At the same time, our friend MJ interviewed the man behind Virtual Book Tours, Kevin Smokler; Tom's chronicle, below, serves as a useful complement to MJ's terrific interview, "Betting on Bloggers" --or perhaps it's the other way around? Whatever--point is, even a technospaz (like me) can, by reading these two pieces, come away with a clear picture of what, for the right kind of book, is an exciting and innovative approach to marketing.

One such book is THE TROUBLE BOY, a Bright Lights, Big City-like novel about (to quote PW) "A Yale-educated gay freelance writer [who] navigates the shark-infested waters of Manhattan hoping to score a screenplay deal and a loyal boyfriend." PW concluded that "Dolby's writing is smooth and his flashy scene-setting spot-on. "

I'm pleased to introduce Tom Dolby, who has agreed to take us with him on his journey through the blogosphere--a case study, if you will, of his first Virtual Book Tour.

THE VIRTUAL BOOK TOUR: A CASE STUDY

by Tom Dolby

BACKGROUND
My debut novel, THE TROUBLE BOY, was published in hardcover a year ago (2/04) by Kensington Books. It's the story of a young man's coming of age in post-millennial Manhattan; considering that it was a first novel--and one with a gay main character, at that--it was a successful launch. It received coverage on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle Datebook section, was excerpted in the New York Times, and was mentioned in both the Page Six column and the Lifestyles page of the New York Post; it was also covered by Publisher's Weekly, Out, The Advocate, Instinct, Genre, and many others. I went on a five-city tour which attracted excellent crowds, in several cases standing-room only. The novel was a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller, a #1 Amazon.com Gay & Lesbian bestseller, and was the highest-selling Main Selection ever of the InsightOut Book Club, shipping more than 5000 copies. In the end the book netted roughly 10,000 copies in hardcover. My website had strong traffic, and I had received hundreds of emails from readers begging me to finish my second novel and/or to come to their hometowns and make an appearance. All in all, a good showing for a first novel.

THE INTERIM
As I prepared to have my agent go out with my second novel, tentatively titled THE SIXTH FORM--an exploration of the relationships between two teenagers and two adults (one gay, three straight) at a New England boarding school--I felt sure that it had the potential to reach an even bigger audience than did THE TROUBLE BOY. It has become, over the three years I'd been writing it, a complex investigation into (as one friend put it) "the fallibility of personal narrative." In the meantime, though, the paperback publication of THE TROUBLE BOY was approaching...

THE CHALLENGE
Everybody knows that trade paperback releases historically receive little or no press; short of publishers putting money into marketing (which, no surprise, only happens for really big books), there is scant fanfare. Yet because of my positive experience with the hardcover--and my desire to build a larger audience for the eventual publication of THE SIXTH FORM--I was determined to find a way to get it noticed.

THE SOLUTION
That's where the the Virtual Book Tour came in. Kevin Smokler, a San Francisco-based literary organizer/editor/writer, came up with the concept of the Virtual Book Tour a few years ago, just as the blogging craze was gathering steam. The idea is this: for a modest fee--far less than a one-month retainer for a good publicist--Kevin "places" his authors on a dozen or so high-traffic blogs over the course of one day. Once he agreed to take me on as a client, he put together a roster of eleven different blogs, all of which would be linked together and accessible from his Virtual Book Tour site, as well as from my author site. He attracted such notable literary blogs--the bold-faced names of the blogosphere, if you will--as The Elegant Variation, Beatrice, Backstory, and Zulkey. To reach the gay market, Kevin booked me on such popular blogs as Towleroad, Bradlands, and OhlalaParis. And just for fun, on Largehearted Boy, an MP3 blog, he had me create a "Trouble Boy mix" of music that I had rocked out to while writing the novel. Kevin set the date of my tour for February 15. Passwords in hand, I started on my journey.

THE PROCESS
Being a confirmed workaholic, I spent a good portion of the week leading up to the VBT preparing content, writing essays, answering Q&As, and making sure everyone had images of the book cover and an author photo. (So many decisions: Did I send one that was serious? Smiling? Sexy? The beauty of the VBT was that I got to choose.) Aside from a few conversations with Kevin and a tutorial from Mark Sarvas on using The Elegant Variation's blogging interface, everything was done online, via email. Though I am neither, the Virtual Book Tour is a perfect vehicle for misanthropic, interview-shy writers--as long as they're willing to spill their guts over email.

Figuring that the lit crowd likes to read about lit stuff, and the gay crowd likes to read about gay stuff, I tailored the content for each site according to its demographic. For the literary sites, I wrote critical essays, including one on the connections between gay fiction and chick-lit ("Bright Lives in the Big City") and another on what it was like to write in the voice of a straight woman in my new novel ("What It Feels Like for a Girl"). For one of the gay blogs, I wrote a piece called "Just How Real Is It, Anyway?" about the similarities between my life and that of my main character's. I did Q&As with several of the blogs in which they got to pick the questions that would appeal most to their readership. (A favorite from SFist, a San Francisco-based blog: "In your opinion, what's the most debauched club on the scene today?" Hell if I know. Lately, debauchery for me has consisted of drinking too much green tea. Read my novel instead.) Two of the sites took the content into their own hands, and posted reviews that were snarky, yet also astute. At The Elegant Variation, I was the guest blogger for the day; I posted nine entries, from interviews with writer friends of mine to commentary on current events to personal posts, such as one about my second novel arriving on my agent's desk that day. The readers at TEV were a fabulous bunch, a virtual version of the Algonquin Round Table, except that instead of being vicious, they were all unfailingly polite.

After I had posted the majority of my content, the actual day of the tour was relatively low-key. Touring virtually isn't a job for the technologically averse, but I wouldn't say it was all that difficult, either. During the day, I fielded emails, read and responded to comments, and judged contests on two different sites, the winners of which would receive a signed copy of my TROUBLE BOY paperback. I posted an "end of day" entry on TEV around 10pm EST, and I was done.

THE RESULT
According to Kevin Smokler, on February 15, 2005, content about me and my book reached more than 50,000 readers; this made my tour the second most successful he has done to date, trumped only by that of novelist/web guru M.J. Rose (and I'll take second place to M.J. Rose any day). What kind of sales did this effort result in? It's difficult to say exactly, but I do know that my Amazon numbers shot way up, and booksellers that I visited in Manhattan over the following several days appeared to be constantly in the process of restocking their copies, so I know it had a positive impact.

More importantly, as an author, I am interested in building a long-term audience. Naturally, I want to sell books, but most of all, I want to create allegiances with my readers, those fans who will continue to buy and read my novels years from now. From the emails I've received and the comments I've read, I know I'm developing a fan base who will tell their friends about my books, will attend readings, and will write about my work on their own blogs. As with much of book marketing, energy begets energy--not simply hype, but that ineffable phenomenon called word of mouth. To be able to create that from the comfort of my laptop, all through the medium of writing, beats sitting behind a table at Barnes & Noble any day.

Click here to order THE TROUBLE BOY, just out in paperback from Kensington Books.

The Curse of the Cardigan: Some Thoughts on Editors and Bookselling

2005-02-21T16:16:00.000-05:00

There's a trend afoot in publishing--more than a trend, really; an institutional shift--to keep editors as far removed from the sales side of the business as possible. The marginalization of editorial in this regard seems, I think, to date back the old saw about editors always having their heads in the clouds & not having a realistic sense of what will sell.

Here, for instance, is a true story, which occurred about six years ago. A well-respected New York editor, puffing his pipe as he reads the New York Review of Books, comes across an essay he finds fascinating. Hmmmm! he thinks, reaching for the phone. Two minutes later he has its author on the phone.

"Dr. Windbag," the editor says, "This is Walter Cardigan, I'm an senior editor at MultiMerge Inc. here in New York, and I've just read your penetrating article on the socioeconomic implications of our national obsession with coffee, and I believe this could be a very important book!" At which point Prof. Windbag indicates that Sir Andrew is representing him; and Cardigan--moving with uncharacteristic speed--manages to coax a three page proposal on the subject, for which the Wylie Agency extracts the modest sum of $275,000. Windbag's credentials are impeccable, his comb-over is, when shot from the left side, barely noticeable, and it turns out Chip McGrath (then the editor of the NYBTR) had studied under him at university. All signals go! ...until Cardigan gets to sales conference, and discovers that the reps are finding CAFFEINE NATION: The Semotics of the Coffee Bean tough sledding. He raises a hissy-fit, the reps wind up demoralized--both due to the hissy-fit, and to the fact that a senior editor thought this clap-trap, which they'll ship 6,250 copies, to be worth $275,000.

So I guess we have Walter Cardigan to thank for the ever-widening schism between editorial and sales. Because the shift, though gradual, is now nearly complete: Where I work, editors simply don't attend sales conferences any more. We used to--indeed, we used to present our own books. Then we moved to a modified editorial presence--a select crew of editors, along with the marketing and publicity team, would participate in the presentations of their books (and other authors' too) on a rotating basis. In time we stopped being invited altogether.

Why? One explanation is that reps feel inhibited to say what they really think about a book, or a jacket, or a title, or an announced first printing (etc) if the editor is in the room. (Ever hang out with sales reps? Shy & retiring they ain't...) Another reason is that some editors are better presenters than others, and some have a better sense than others of the sort of info that reps actually need. (I don't dispute either point, by the way--although wearing a marketing hat by no means guarantees a terrific stage presence).

Above all, though, I suspect it's a matter of expense: as MultiMerge has grown, and with it the number of employees, the costs of sales conferences has risen. The response has been to limit attendence; and so a smaller team--publishers, associate publishers, publicists, marketing managers--present the books, while the editors stay home.

Now let's go back to the old saw about editors' heads being in the clouds: if this is true, is providing said editor with a feather pillow really the best solution? In my opinion, a better way to save money than to exclude editors from sales conferences is to sack those editors so clueless and disconnected that they lack the skills to present a book compellingly in the first place! The truth? From the very instant an editor has an inkling she might want to acquire a manuscript or proposal she's reading--long before she's even gotten other reads or spoken to the agent or made an offer--she is already thinking about how to sell the book, about who its readers are, about comp titles and covers and so forth. For me, anyway, the process of falling in love with the writing of a book is inextricably linked to the process, at the earliest stage possible, of formulating its "pitch." If it's good, I'm selling it before I've even bought it...

Are editors trained in sales per say? In terms of selling to accounts, the answer is, in most cases, no. On another level though, a huge percentage of an editor's daily energy goes into selling. Convincing an agent that you're the right editor for him to submit such-and-such a project. Convincing other overwhelmed editors that the thing is so good that they'll actually be glad they set aside their other work to read a chunk of yours. Convincing a publisher that you have a vision for how to publish it, that it's worth $X+6 that you'd like to offer rather than the $X-4 that she wants you to pay [editors often lose that argument, by the way--such is the nature of a publisher's job]. Upon its acquisition, convincing key in-house people to read the book in the dreaded manuscript form (prior to bound galleys), and likewise finding potential blurbists to do the same. At launch (the first in-house presentation of the new season's books to the heads of sales, marketing, publicity, subrights, etc), finding a way to convey what's remarkable about the book in 90 seconds or less, to a group of people who, by day's end, will have heard perhaps 300 such presentations. Then there's the title information sheets (which sales use in the field) and the flap copy, the proper "presentation" of the author (overseeing author photos, shaping talking points, in some cases media training)...and so on.

ALL this energy and expertise we put toward pre-selling the book, from inception to publication--yet when sales conference itself rolls around, we're left off the invite list. For a couple of years now I've been telling myself that this sort of thing is cyclical, that the pendulum's due to swing back. Now I'm not so confident.

It's obvious that I see this as a short-sighted view. If the problem is that the editors are clueless about the realities of the marketplace? All the better reason for them to be there, to have to hear their books taken to task for being poorly positioned, for sending mixed-messages that make them hard to sell, etc. If the problem is that sales reps feel inhibited to speak up in front of editors, then institute a gag-order: editors are to listen and learn, but not rebut.

If I were a Publisher--if that were my job, to run a company--I'd insist that every editor go out on the road with a sales rep for a few days every year or two. Sure, it's a pain in the ass for the rep--but, again, we'd institute a gag order. The editor sits in on the sales call, listens, but doesn't get to say a word. When the buyer says "Pass" on three of the editor's own titles in that particular catalog; when the rep gets nine seconds to begin to pitch something before the buyer's eyes glaze over and she shakes her head--hard lessons much needed. Call it educational by humiliation.

Yesterday I riffed about how authors were in some cases discouraged from developing any sort of relationship w/ other members of the houses that publish them. This is, ultimately, to the detriment of the book's chances of success. The same is the case--moreso, in fact--through this artificial, institutional division between sales and editorial.

A Dumb A** Notion

2005-02-19T20:00:00.000-05:00

In my last post (about how much I love Valentine's Day) I quoted MJ Rose's post (about how much she loves being infantilized by publishers) and indicated I might have a thought or two more to say about the editor who appears in this little vignette:

An author who just finished taking my buzz class today told me her editor wouldn't give her the last name of a sales rep who did something lovely for her last book. "Just write to her and give it to me and I'll get it to her," she offered. When the author asked why she couldn't just send it herself, the editor said: "We can't have our authors communicating with sales reps."

Perhaps it was unfair of me to call this editor a dumb a**; what I should have first acknowledged was that she was doubtless just following company policy, stupid though it may be. The official rationale behind such policy is that the editor is the conduit for all author/company exchanges, in both directions (i.e. from the author and to the author)--if another editor wants to ask my author for a blurb, that request will (or should) come to me, because I'm in the best position to know the disposition of the author toward such requests--to know, that he is feeling anxious about completing a draft of his current book, and is consciously trying to cut down on "outside" distractions (e.g. book reviews, magazine articles and--yes--blurb requests)--and, so, to know that this is a particularly bad time for such a request. In that direction, such policy makes sense: an editor, attuned to his authors' individual circumstances, can (if needed) serve as a gate-keeper/filter/contextualizer for the various queries and requests that various departments might have.

In the other direction, though? In a company as large as MultiMerge Inc (the corporation for which most of us work these days), it's in the best interests of both editor and author for the author to have and maintain as many personal contacts within the company as possible. The reasons for this are self-evident: more contacts=the possibility for more love. An editor is but one person; and since it's rarely the case that any of my colleagues is going to care as much about my authors as I do, it's a critical (if unacknowledged) aspect of my job to increase the love, to extend to as many departments as possible an awareness of the author behind the book, the author as (gulp) human being [this tends to work best in cases where the author is, in fact, a human being]--to get others to be invested in, indeed feel responsible for, my author's success.

It boils down to this: an editor's job is to do everything in his (legal) power to further the success of his author. Sometimes this means helping out in arenas (marketing, publicity, promotions, subrights) that are officially beyond the bounds of his responsibility, to ensure that the proper attention & care are being given. Sometimes this means placing a boot where it doesn't, institutionally, belong--in the back, say, of the marketing department or the publicity department or the art department, arenas that are technically outside the editor's official sphere of oversight. Often it means schooling the author in the various ways she can help herself: building visibility by writing for magazines; developing and maintaining relationships within the writing and reviewing communities; taking an active role in self-promotion (via websites and blogs, e.g.); expressing gratitude toward all booksellers, even the ones who've just done a lousy job promoting your reading; building a database of bookselling contacts, and engaging them as personally as possible--by sending thank-you notes after events, and Christmas cards, and personally inscribed ARCs of the next book; maintaining similar contacts with readers who come to your events and website; and so on.

Now let's return to the editor mentioned at the top of this "essay." Friend, tell me this: why would we encourage authors to be so attentive to the bookseller AND the customer, but discourage the same behavior toward the people actively involved in selling the book? It's a stupid policy--a dumb a** notion designed, no doubt, to protect the delicate flowers in sales from the pestering of pesky authors. Yet sales reps as a group are among the best and most passionate readers in the world; they play a HUGE role in an author's chances for success--and, in my experience, they generally love the opportunity to interact to some degree with authors they admire. [And if they don't especially admire your author? An earnest expression of appreciation for a job well done is likely to do wonders...] So when an author wants to take the initiative to write a thank-you note, why not give her the address? Do you really think the rep is going to complain?

According to the letter of the law, you behaved appropriately by following MultiMerge policy; and you're likewise blameless for any minor deleterious effects following said policy might have. You're just being a dutiful and conscientious employee--and fair enough. But sometimes duty requires you (to borrow & misappropriate a notion put forth long ago by Jonathan Galassi) to be something of a double-agent. If institutional stupidity presents a roadblock to your author's success, then some degree of circumnavigation is called for....And while working for a corporation as large as MultiMerge often means having to contend with (among other things) a remarkably extensive list of regs & policies,

Statute XI. Clause B: "Editors shall be responsible for and answerable to all Author queries and concerns, and shall serve as primary conduit for same..."

its size also allows editors perhaps slightly greater opportunity to work both sides, since the consolidation of MultiMerge's back-office operations (through its multiple mergers) has left all parties spread, shall we say, a little thin. I'm not advocating for murder, or thievery, or a Tanya Harding-like sabotaging of the competition--just for advocacy itself, and the recognition that the more genuine connections your author has in-house, the greater her chances for success. And, so, for yours.

Publishing 101: Infantilization & You, Plus Some Curse Words and Some Thoughts About Valentine's Day, May it Rot In Hell

2005-02-17T12:52:00.000-05:00

One thing we can all agree on: good riddance to Valentine's Day, am I right? I'm sure St. Valentine was a great guy & all, but I'd love to send Da Govna Terminator of California back in time to find the misanthropic bastards at Hallmark or whoever their predecessors were, the black-humorists responsible for this hell-hole holiday, and slit the throats of every god damn one of them. Get the job done just before they walk out of that brainstorming meeting where it was decided that a great deal of money could be made AND a whole lot of people could be made utterly miserable, for a whole variety of reasons, in one fell swoop!

That'd be a pretty funny scene, actually--get Mamet or LaBute to write the boardroom brainstorming, all those mean muthas laughing themselves to tears as they visualize the thousands and thousands of thoughtless and/or befuddled husbands and boyfriends spending the night on the couch, or on the porch, or in the hospital, for having forgotten the Godivas and the roses...

For the finale, though, we'll have to fire the artsy writer and bring in somebody who can really deliver the big ol' can of whoopass... The Wachowski Brothers, say (sorry, Mr. Mamet)--and instead of Da Govna, let's cast Keanu, who appears outta nowhere, steps up on the boardroom table, and says,

"BE MY VALENTINE, MOTHERFUCKERS!"

and blows them all away. Just make sure he incinerates the place after the blood-bath--can't afford for even one copy of that Valentine's Day memo to survive...

***

Over at Buzz, Balls & Hype MJ has likewise decided, enough of these damn Valentines--she's dropped the rose pedals and has come out with pistols blazin':

"TELL US THE TRUTH, MOTHERFUCKERS!"

By "us" she means authors:

"Authors probably have less control over their own careers than any group of professionals but it takes us years to understand that. Long past the time it would have benefited us to know it. Most of us go into the dark the minute our agents negotiate our first sale and stay there the rest of our careers. So we don't find out when our book has been all but abandoned pre-publication. Or that there was poor sell in. Or that the coop's been scrapped. We're somehow not entitled to be told what is about to happen and get prepared. The non-communication is more than emotionally scarring, it is unfair to us professionally. It infantalizes us."

All of which is, sadly, true. ALL YOU NEWBIES OUT THERE, LISTEN UP: You, and your agent on your behalf, need to be pressing for answers from Day One. Yes, there are periods of intense contact and then long periods of quiet, and some of this quiet is inevitable. But once you're within, say, six months of pub, it's time to begin pressing your case in a serious way. [Details, you say? Ahh, yes--but I'm tired, so I invite you to read back issues of BookAngst 101, and/or Buzz Balls & Hype, or Publishers Lunch, or Paperback Writer, or talk to any writer who's been published anytime in the last 30 years, cuz sure as shootin' that writer's got tales to tell.]

But there's probably no business for which the old saw "if I knew then what I know now" is more apt. Doesn't matter whether you got $25k or $250k, Newbie: NOBODY's safe, so get yer schoolin' started NOW.

There's more I wanna say about MJ's post, but it's late and I'm so damn tired, doncha know? So maybe I'll come back another time and explain why, sometimes, we "motherfuckers" (no, she didn't really say that)--"editors, publishers, publicists"--can't (or won't) tell the truth... And for sure I'll offer my humble opinion as to why the editor MJ mentions, the one who refused to let an author correspond directly with a helpful sales rep is

A DUMB ASS

But for those nuggets, I'm afraid you'll just have to wait a bit...Goodnight & God speed...

Simon Says: Don't Say "Too Many Books"

2005-02-15T15:19:00.000-05:00

Here's the second half of Simon Lipskar's essay on the dangers of proclaiming "too many books" as the core problem facing publishing today. For the first half, see "Too Many Books"

On the topic of "too many books, " I'm struck by the fact that the authors preaching the gospel of the sheer overabundance of titles seem to take for granted that they'll be exempted from this new ethos. It’s those other undeserving books that would get snipped – not their own, nor those of authors they like and admire.

Another thing that bears serious consideration is that the business consequences of this would go beyond what authors expect. Were publishers actually to publish significantly fewer titles, the likely result would be an even greater focus than is currently the case on existing brands, as they would look to amplify what already works rather than try to mount new authors. We’d see more spin-off series using a branded author’s name (written by underpaid and/or uncredited ghosts), because with fewer slots to fill, it would make sense to try to build on already existing readerships rather than try to create new ones—it’s simply easier to do. You’d see more titles by non-book celebrities, as publishers tried to borrow existing brand identities to sell product. We’d see publishers give up much earlier on titles that didn’t get significant preorders, focusing even a great percentage of marketing and promotional dollars on the thing that looks like it’s going to work, or the thing that worked last time, or the thing “written” by the most recent winner or host of that year’s reality TV phenomenon.

Is this really what we want?

And what’s the consequence of publishers focusing in an even more pronounced way on existing brands and trends? Undoubtedly, it means that the business as a whole would grow stagnant and increasingly unhealthy. Readers’ tastes change with time, and one advantage to the (admittedly great) number of books published today is that it helps provide publishers with hints about which direction those tastes might be headed next. This Boy’s Life was a harbinger of the explosion of interest in memoir during the nineties, in the same way that The Perfect Storm and Into Thin Air exposed a hunger for perilous true-life narrative. The fact that publishers have the space to take chances on many different kinds of books means that the success of one of the many unlikely candidates might illuminate a previously untapped niche in the market – one that both makes for lots of good business and many happy readers.

Who’s to say whether, faced with fewer slots for new material, Scholastic would have taken a chance on Harry? At the time, it was common wisdom that the market for children’s fantasy was moribund. The extraordinarily vibrant landscape for fantasy that has emerged, both in children’s and adult publishing, was precipitated by the phenomenal success of everyone’s favorite student wizard; imagine if his stories had never found their way into print. Who’s to say that Viking would have published Bridget’s obsessive scribblings about cigarettes, dieting and the search for Mr. Right if they had agreed that there were just too many books? A new and commercially lucrative category, chick lit, might not have come into being. These categories may appear overexposed or unexciting to us today—but at the time those books came out, their respective publishers were, in fact, taking a leap into the great unknown.

We need this natural ebb and flow, the rise and fall of categories and mega-authors. Twenty years ago, the kind of commercial fiction that dominated the bestseller lists looked remarkably different than today’s. But if publishers began calcifying their lists, hoping to extend existing brands rather than taking chances on new ones, what would the results be? Similarly, are you confident that, with so many less slots to fill, publishers would have bought your own favorite unexpected treasure of recent vintage? Would they have published The Lovely Bones, Bee Season, The Nanny Diaries, Running with Scissors, Fight Club, or [insert your favorite book that didn’t sell for six-figures here]? I think we can safely say that fewer books would make for a smaller market for new material, and a particularly reduced market for books that aren’t high profile acquisitions.

I’m not saying NONE of these books would have been acquired. But I am saying that, in a world in which publishers took heed of the “too many books” decree, it’s conceivable that few if any would have made the cut.

All this notwithstanding, I’m very much in your camp regarding the reasons that I’m guessing spawned Max’s blogging in the first place: we’re all frustrated by today’s publishing game, and we’re all having a hard time explaining/understanding why so many good authors are not getting readers at all (never mind the readers they deserve), why so many books get returned in the blink of an eye by booksellers [did they even open the boxes?], are ignored by critics, forgotten by their publishers and unknown to readers. And I hate it. When it happens to one of my own, I don’t sleep. I get depressed. I get angry. That it’s happened before (and so frequently) doesn’t lessen the blow. Like most agents and editors I know, I take it very, very, very personally.

This is what I do for a living: someone I probably don’t know, an author who’s maybe written her first novel, sends me her manuscript. I read it. It makes me laugh, or cry. It moves me, scares me silly, or transports me. And I think to myself, other readers might like to have this same experience. I’ve got nothing to go on other than my own taste – and faith. Faith is the key word here. It’s the sacred contract. I have to have faith that at least one editor at one publishing house will see what I’ve seen, that he’ll convince his publisher to make some space on an already crowded list for this new novel. And then we’ll all have to have faith that readers will find our beloved book. But, ultimately, we all know, deep down, that it’s a lottery.

There are things we can do to reduce the odds – publishing well and aggressively certainly increases the likelihood of success. But it’s only buying more lottery tickets; it’s not guaranteeing success. And that’s the rub. Nobody knows, really, what’s going to work. Nobody. Which of the many, many books published every year – which of the “too many books” – will be the one to reach out and touch an audience of more than just a handful of admirers is as unknowable as it gets. And so, publishers take chances, they acquire lots of first novels, they keep on publishing authors whose sales aren’t all that terrific.

Because despite everything, despite mergers and corporatization, despite the continuing decline of the American independent bookseller and the rise of non-book mass retailers who’d be just as happy to sell t-shirts or frozen chickens as books, publishers keep on publishing too many books. Because, well, because of faith. And because it’s good business.

We owe Max a debt of gratitude for providing a forum that we can use to brainstorm solutions to the real problems. But, for heaven’s sake, no more of this received wisdom about “too many books,” especially not from the authors out there! Because—and here’s what really keeps me awake at night, when the anxious hours are upon me: publishers just might start listening.

"Too Many Books": Shots Across the Bow, Vol. IV

2005-02-14T11:59:00.000-05:00

A number of readers here at BookAngst 101--enough, in fact, that I'd planned to cover the subject as Part 4 in my recent "Shots Across the Bow" recap--have said that the real problem w/ publishing today is that there are just too many books. Considered from the micro-level, it’s a seductive argument. I, for instance, am constantly frustrated by how much competition my books face for review attention, shelf-space, marketing dollars, etc. Surely all these things would be easier if there was less competition—so fewer books makes sense for me, no? One pen-pal who had a dissenting opinion was Simon Lipskar, a literary agent with Writers House. He explained to me why I was absolutely, categorically wrong. I was so impressed by his argument that I asked him if he’d share his views with the gang here at BookAngst. And so he has.

Ladies and Gentlemen, let's give a warm Mad Max welcome to Mr. Simon Lipskar.

Too Many Books? Not So Fast…

Too many books. Among the laundry list of the problems afflicting publishing today one hears enumerated, none is so popular as the notion that too many titles are being published. It seems so logical, so transparently obvious, so quantifiable — just look at all the deals for first novels that were posted, just last week, on Publishers Marketplace — that nobody even gives it a second thought. In an industry where the results of what we do baffle virtually everyone involved – Why did this book succeed? Why not that one? Who knows?! – there’s comfort, perhaps, in being able to say one thing confidently. And so we say it, again and again, like a mantra. Too many damn books.

The various and sundry disseminators of this little maxim come from a variety of vantage points. Readers, bemoaning the veritable avalanche of books for sale, complain that they don’t know how to choose amongst the panoply of offerings. Reviewers, kvetching about the number of glossily bound ARCs the publishers send them, complain that publishers don’t even bother to try to understand what would motivate them to cover a particular book in a particular venue. Booksellers, caterwauling about the overwhelming number of titles on each publisher’s list, complain that they can’t possibly take a real position on more than a few at a time, resulting in a “my hands are tied” shrug and an “order to previous book’s net” mindset that kills authors’ careers, causes more unearned advances than any other single factor and drives publishers, agents and authors to the point of literal insanity.

From a certain perspective, of course, each of these constituencies have valid arguments. I could go on at some length debating them – for example, one could easily maintain that the number of books published represents a Garden of Earthly delights for the reader, with every possible taste and interest addressed and consummated – but I won’t. But there’s another constituency that I do want to take issue with; this group is the #1 proponent of the too many books school of thought. Oddly enough, it’s authors themselves.

Let’s start with the obvious question: what is it that you, as an author, hope to accomplish by complaining about there being too many books? Are you hoping, indeed praying, that publishers will start to listen, and that they’ll buy fewer first novels next year, maybe prune a few low-selling standbys, and thereby have the time and money to pour more attention and cash into promoting the books they publish (such as, and let’s cut to the case, your own)?

If that’s the case, I’ve got some bad news for you: it just might be your book that they’re going to trim off their lists. Do you think, somehow, that yours is going to be the last one through the door, after which your publisher is going to barricade the gates and proclaim, in loud, lusty tones, “These books and these books only shall pass”?

And then your book has entered into the Holy Kingdom of Books That Have Big Marketing Budgets—is that it? And thus it will find the readership that you and your spouse and your parents and your friends and your agent and your editor know you deserve? [And lest my tone be misread as solely mocking, please know that I empathize: I wouldn’t be in this business if I didn’t believe so strongly that all my authors really do deserve large and adoring audiences.]

Alas: I don’t think so. The more likely outcome is that, if you’re writing finishing your first novel, you might as well leave it unprinted or in the drawer. If you’re an author in mid-career, with nothing particularly inspiring to note on your sales record (despite the glowing reviews and acclaim from one and all), you should probably be thinking about that long-delayed return to full time employment. There is nothing – NOTHING – I find more terrifying than the idea that publishers stop buying lots of first novels, that they stop believing in the merits of sticking by their own authors if their careers haven’t hit pay-dirt by Book #2.

Be certain: it’s the first novel that I’m just about to submit that likely wouldn’t find a home under these circumstances; it’s the author whose work I adore who’ll be dropped because his last book underperformed, and for whom I would suddenly be unable to find a new publisher. And think of the terrible irony here—that publishers would have been encouraged to do so by the very constituency that has the most to lose: authors themselves.

This is a consummation devoutly not to be wished.

TOMORROW: Why Chick Lit Matters [sic]

Apocrypha: the Final (or First?) Word on the Craft of Writing

2005-02-12T16:00:00.000-05:00

Concluding Words

That is how things turned out for Nicanor. The city of Jerusalem remained in the possession of the Jewish people from that time on, so I will end my story here. If it is well written and to the point, I am pleased; if it is poorly written and uninteresting, I have still done my best. We know it is unhealthy to drink wine or water alone, whereas wine mixed with water makes a delightfully tasty drink. So also a good story skillfully written gives pleasure to those who read it. With this I conclude.

--Maccabees II:15

The final passage of the Old Testament, deemed "Apocrypha" by Martin Luther and so excised from The King James Bible. Taken here from the Good News Bible, with thanks to ABR.

SHOTS ACROSS THE BOW

2005-02-12T15:50:00.000-05:00

A fiery intercourse--an orgy of opinion, one might say--hath been had here in Max City in recent days. Lots of interesting questions raised (and a few voices too), all good. I thought I'd try to pull out and highlight a few threads of particular interest.

Bowshots, Pt. 2: Beyond 'A New Yorker's Map of the World' (and Costco Too)

2005-02-12T15:40:00.001-05:00

Comment:
"You say that a couple of publishers are doing an active pre-pub outreach to readers. But I'm curious how they're finding these readers....I still think this is a question of reaching out to the typical consumer, who the publishing industry refuses to believe lives outside of New York City, and could care less if another book about publishing executives and their nannies ever makes it to the shelves... And I still maintain that they're not effectively reaching those markets."

Dear MLH: I don't dispute that we're not effectively reaching those markets; but in terms of that outreach to readers I mentioned, I can assure you (because a number of my own books have been sampled thusly, and I've seen the unedited readers' reports): they represent the broadest possible cross-section of America's diversity. They come from all parts of the country (rarely, in fact, do they hail from New York), they represent the broadest possible range of education and literary sophistication--and they do, indeed, shop at Costco. ["Not that there's anything wrong with that!"]

For the record, I'm a proud, card-carrying member of the Costco Collective...

Across the Bow, Pt.1: RETAIL

2005-02-12T15:40:00.000-05:00

Question:
"Why don't publishers open their own retail outlets?"

A decade ago the Doubleday Bookstore still resided on Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan (where, I'm told, William Faulkner worked briefly circa 1921); and my understanding is that there were other Doubleday Bookstores scattered across the country. These did not, however, sell only Doubleday books. I've no idea to what degree the publisher oversaw, or was involved in, the bookstore operations, nor at what stage it was decided to shut them down. Nor do I know what led to the closing of the McGraw Hill bookstore on Sixth Avenue in 2002; nor the small store Harper & Row had in its lobby for many years. But not so very long ago Manhattan was dotted with booksellers bearing the colors of one publisher or another.

At the present time I'm aware of no publishers who serve also as their own principal retailer. It's interesting to note, though, that as the country's largest retailer of books (Barnes & Noble) is blurring the lines by publishing more and more books under its own imprint each year (think they get favored placement and a discount on front-of store promotion rates?), the publishing industry seems to be gearing up to return the favor by offering consumers the option of buying direct. This option has always existed--individuals are always free to call a publisher's customer service department and order a copy of a particular book. But what we're certain to see going forward is a less passive approach--publishers actually reaching out to consumers in a variety of ways (online, initially).

My understanding is that W.W. Norton, the last of the "major" independent publishers, was the first to actively pursue this line of direct-selling; in the last few months we've heard of similar initiatives from Bertelsmann and HarperCollins.

It'll be interesting to see whether B&N has the gumption to get up on its high horse about how this sort of "direct to consumer" selling represents a conflict of interest, given its own most recent expansionist proclivities. And won't it be ironic if B&N, in seeking to protect its market share from publishers' direct-selling initiatives, winds up aligned, this time, on the same side of the table as the Independent Booksellers whose ranks they've had such a deleterious effect on?

Bowshots, Pt. 3: Costco Redux

2005-02-12T15:30:00.000-05:00

Angry Young Man had this to say:
"And a word about Costco: They carry a very specific type of book and are incredibly price sensitive. They are not a bookstore, and not just any book can be sold in there. The same is true about your other mass market retailers. This isn't a matter of publishers marketing poorly. It's a matter of the stores' business models. They aren't going to take your first time author's literary novel unless that book is a TV book club pick. They just aren't."

Mad Max has this to add:
Furthermore, if they DO take a first-time author's literary novel, or indeed any book by someone not yet VERY well known, God help that author. Dollars for donuts, those books won't sell, and they'll come back in droves, and that novel's sell-through will sag under the burden of those returns. Yes, there are lots of discerning Mom-and-Dad Costco shoppers (present company included)--but that's not where we shop to find literary fiction. It might be where we pick up a (deeply discounted) copy of the new Michael Crichton or the new Tess Gerritsen as a Christmas gift or a Mother's/Father's Day present--or, perhaps, a literary bestseller like the newest from Phillip Roth or Margaret Atwood. But we buy them there because they're cheap. Discoveries? We make those at our local brick-and-mortar, or at Amazon, or on the recommendation of a good friend or librarian.

Mary O'C. (unaware of the potential wamma-jamma Max would preface her comments with) responded to AYM's comments with some cheery good news:
"A friend of mine, Jane Guill, has just been told her book [NECTAR FROM A STONE]--a serious novel by a debut novelist--will be stocked at Costco. It hasn't been published yet (due in March), so it's not a TV book club pick... yet! I realize this is the exception, not the rule, but it does happen."

To which Max, in hopes of counter-acting his wamma-jamma, adds LINKS, knocks wood, and offers reason for optimism:
At first glance, this novel does seem like it might be a good candidate for Costco, despite the fact that Ms. Guill isn't (yet) a household name. Meaning no disrespect to the quality of the writing, it's not being presented as a literary novel, but rather as a rich and well-research historical drama with romantic overtones. Could work; hope it does; and hope, too, that Ms. Guill (or Mary O'C.) will let us know if it does.

"Publish" as a Verb: Books on the Half-Shell, Part II

2005-02-09T20:48:00.000-05:00

The number (and quality) of responses to last Sunday's post (The Half-Life of Shelf Life, Feb. 6/'05) indicates the degree to which MJ Rose, as usual, has her finger on the pulse of some of the industry's most critical issues. But she went further than identifying the problems--she even offered some possible ways of attacking these problems. My reply to her original Test This posting did her a disservice, in that in only addressed half (if even that) of what she had to say--the issue of in-store placement, and the extent to which publishers have leverage over same. MJ responded thus:

If the publisher isn't going to do radically different promotion and marketing for the book to get the buzz going - the shelf life alone won't solve the problem....So Max, sure, the way it is, just upping shelf life wouldn't work; but testing a new marketing plan and then upping shelf life might.

So now I'd like to go back to her original "Test This" post, where MJ pointed to a few of those "radically different promotion and marketing" ideas:

Even in the film industry - and movies are probably closer to books than anything else - each film is promoted for months to the CONSUMER before it's released. And what's more about hundreds of thousands of filmgoers see every film FREE before it's released to get buzz going....A book should have a two to three month pre-promotional push to the bookseller and then it needs to have a two to three month pre-[pub] promotional push to the reader and then it needs to have a two to three month [publicity and marketing campaign].

It's impossible to argue against the advantages those first two tiers of pre-pub promotion would bring--obviously the more people, booksellers AND readers, who get fired up prior to pub, the better.

But how do you pay for it? Not for a huge lead-slot title, but for something on a more modest scale?

Because (as anybody reading this is sure to know) there are books that get precisely the sort of pre-pub push MJ's advocating. Iain Pears' AN INSTANCE OF THE FINGERPOST was a textbook example of an author being sent out on tour months in advance of publication, to swap spit with booksellers all across the country and explain why this massive (700 p. hardcover) really could appeal to a broad audience. The strategy worked beautifully: the booksellers got on board, the book went out in big numbers; Pears then went out on a second tour when the book was published; Riverhead supported it (if memory serves) with a first-rate advertising campaign; the book was widely and well-reviewed--and its visibility and sales were such (it became a huge bestseller) that it all the shelf-life it needed, and then some.

But this was, without question, Riverhead's lead title. And under such circumstances, publishers are (occasionally) willing to go out on a limb, to (as we describe it) "overspend" in marketing and publicity up front in hopes that the per-book marketing spend won't look so outrageous over time--assuming, of course, that the book takes off and the number of copies in the marketplace grows and grows. So--now I'm speaking hypothetically; I don't know any of the specifics of the Riverhead campaign--let's say Betty Brightstar's Big Book ships 50,000 copies initially; and the money we've spent getting there--the A(dvanced) R(eaders) E(dition)s, the meet-the-booksellers pre-pub tour, the on-pub tour, the ads, the co-op, the website, et cetera--comes to $200,000, a.k.a $4.00 per book. (A whopping sum, it must be said.) But let's say things go well and those 50,000 copies become 100,000 copies (now you're down to $2 per book) and eventually 200,000 copies--well, now your marketing spend for Big Book was just a dollar per--which means you're a genius, because your initial outlay has paid off in spades.

Fact is, most publishers have one or two or three such books on every single list. And though the details vary (the big-scale pre-pub bookseller meet-and-greet is still a relative rarity, for instance); and though these titles still represent the great minority of the total number of books published; nonetheless we do see, fairly frequently, isolated examples of the sort of publishing that MJ is referring to.

[Sidebar: if there are, say, 20 such "make" books from various publishers in a particular season--I'm not including already established bestsellers, but "hot" new titles & authors that publishers are excited about and put significant moolah and expectations behind--on average perhaps three of those books come close to being, by any stretch of the imagination, a "success"--and generally two of those three can be deemed such only because the author has two additional books under contract, and the visibility of Big Book--even if sales didn't measure up--may pay dividends for books #2 and #3.
Overall, going for the Big Book home run is--by a huge percentage--a loser's game.]

Now back to our regularly-scheduled programming: somehow I doubt that these are the books that MJ's stumping for--because these are the books that are already going to get their fair share of resources. My sense is that MJ sees a way that these general principles--perhaps applied in different ways, and/or on a slightly smaller scale--can and will work for books with first printings more in the range of, say, 15,000 copies. And this, of course, is what we're all (many of us, anyway) dreaming about: how can books published in "real" quantities--that is, quantities that represent to so-called "average" book--how can these books, and their authors, succeed? What is the model/mechanism whereby books published at a relatively modest scale can, nonetheless, be published (read: as a verb) instead of (as so often seems to be the case) simply tossed out there to fend for themselves (read: D.O.A.).

So: color me intrigued. But there's one thing I still have a hard time getting--and here I'm hoping MJ Rose and Michael Cader and others can light the path: for a modest-scale publication, how do the economics of these three-month pre-pub efforts work? I look back again to MJ's film industry comparison; but because the financial stakes--and the potential upside--for a "big" book pale in comparison to even a "small" movie, that analogy doesn't apply in any practical way.

Then what analogy does? What am I missing? Please walk me through it, help me see how these things can, with some imagination and initiative, be accomplished.

--Max

P.S. One of MJ's readers, ScriptGirl, said: "Why can't they leak a first chapter -- or hell, even a first few paragraphs -- to create buzz ahead of launch? We do that in the film/tv biz all the time." In fact first chapters are frequently sent out by publishers, made available through linked sites, and so forth. Also: I'm aware of at least two publishers (and there are probably more) doing active pre-pub outreach to readers, soliciting volunteers to read and appraise a free copy of a forthcoming book, in exchange for letting the publishers use those reviews for publicity--posted to author websites, sent out in e-blasts, etc.

If you know of anything else along these lines, please let me know.

P.P.S. For more on this issue, from a bookseller's perspective, see Bob Gray's excellent Herding Booksellers: Shelf Life & the Co-oping of Lit.

The Half-Life of Shelf-Life

2005-02-06T12:32:00.000-05:00

MJ Rose's expressions of frustration [see her Feb. 3/'05 post, 'Test This'] with the way publishers conduct business goes way beyond the usual ranting to address a number of broader issues about the industry. She covers a lot of ground, and there are a number of points I'd like to comment on (and may, later), but for now I want focus on just one of those issues, the matter of shelf-life and in-store promotion. She explains:

"Word of mouth takes at least 12 - 14 weeks to build....[For a book to succeed] it has to stay on the shelf in plain sight for [two to three months]....Yet the publishing industry continues to give a book - at best - 3 to 4 weeks of promotion and co-op."

I don't know the source of MJ's data, but in a perfect world, 12-14 weeks sounds like a plausible gestation period for word of mouth buzz to build organically. Certainly there's no doubt that the hardcover shelf-life for a book that doesn't immediately catch fire is growing shorter and shorter. For editors as much as for authors, there's nothing more depressing than seeing returns starting to come back six-to-eight weeks after publication. Which happens all the time.

MJ's right: in most cases (hell: in the best cases) publishers secure from 2-4 weeks of "placement" and/or co-op for new titles. Those books you see at the front of the store? For the most part they're there because the publisher has paid for them to be there--think of it as a "slotting fee" of the sort that General Mills pays to get supermarkets to stock Cheerios.

To my mind, co-op (the umbrella category for money spent getting bookstores to place, promote and sometimes discount books, in addition to getting them to place news about the book and author on their websites, in monthly newsletters, etc) is the most effective allocation of marketing dollars. Placement matters most. I'm not going to get into the "do ads sell books" debate here; but there's little doubt that getting your book placed on the "New Fiction" table at the front of the store for an extended period of time, or in an "endcap" display or a step-ladder display or in the front window--these things can make a huge difference.

But one aspect of this that MJ doesn't address is how decisions about co-op spending are made, and who it is that makes them. Tacit in her criticism--that publishers don't support the books long enough for them to come into the public's consciousness--is the notion that the choices in this regard are ours to make. The only way that could be true is if the booksellers themselves were passive participants. They are not. We publishers articulate our desires, convey our priorities, tell them how many copies we want them to take, and try to convince them that we mean business (when we do) by demonstrating the marketing and publicity campaigns planned for each book. And part of the ammunition for convincing them of this is to put our money where our mouth is through co-op--to give booksellers an incentive to take a bigger position, to promote it longer and so forth.

In the end, though, it's the bookseller who makes the final decision. And there are lots of reasons why a bookseller won't always play ball. Don't like the jacket. Don't like the title. Didn't like the author's previous book. Don't like the author. Don't like the category. Used to like the category, but now it's played out... And then there's the old-fashioned gut-check: 'I read this book, I think it sucks, and so all this stuff you're offering me, day-glo keychains and skywriting and a full-page ad in USA TODAY, they don't mean a hill of beans--my gut tells me I'm not going to sell many; and as a consequence I'm not going to take many, nor am I going to commit to putting this on the front fiction table for as long as you want me to. Even if you pay me to.'

In other words: for books (as opposed, say, to breakfast cereals), a willingness on the publishers' part to pay doesn't in all cases guarantee front-of-store placement.

Success breeds success, of course: if a book catches a wave and is selling well, booksellers sensibly are going to keep pushing it, keep giving it good real estate--sometimes with the publisher kicking in addtional co-op, sometimes not. But what can be done about ho-hum early sales? If a book's not selling right out of the gate, and a publisher cannot convince the bookseller to extend the front-of-store placement another two weeks, or isn't willing to outlay the additional expense? The publisher wants the same two-to-three month shelf-life MJ endorses (longer, even, to be honest), in hopes that a word of mouth buzz might finally start generating the sales that the original marketing push--reviews, book tour, f.o.s. etc--failed to do.

But does the bookseller? Does s/he have the luxury of waiting for a book catch fire? Certainly there are titles that a bookseller adores and so gives an extra chance for success, thus keeping them longer than perhaps their initial sales warrant; then again, such a title, almost by defintition, would have been the beneficiary of a bookseller's enthusiastic handselling; and, usually, a hand-sold book = a successful book. So the love-it-but-can't-sell-it-but-am-keeping-it-on-the-shelves-anyway scenario is a truly rare one.

I suspect, too, that when MJ refers to a two-to-three month run, she's not talking about a B&N keeping two copies of a novel (from, say, a 20 copy order, of which they sold 6 and have now returned12) upstairs in the stacks; she means face-out or on a table. Actively merchandized. But if a book's not selling after four weeks, what's the motivation for a bookseller to keep a stack of the books in prime real estate? Strip away from the bookseller the "specialness" we tend to attribute to those passionate about books, and what you've got is a retailer trying to stay in business. And the way a bookseller stays in business is by selling books. Full stop.

So: is it likely that the chances for a hardcover catching fire will improve in its fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth weeks if it hasn't already before then? My experience suggests otherwise: almost inevitably, the further we get from pub date, the less likelihood there is that a book's going to get "discovered" and embraced. The media moves onto to other titles, other opportunities; and each day dozens of new titles arrive in cartons and get unpacked, each with its own set of promises and expectations. And what inevitably happens is that these new titles push the old ones out, and the same Darwinian process begins again. And again, and again, endlessly.

So it's not enough to say that publishers are too cheap or short-sighted not to set up enough co-op (etc) to ensure that a book catch hold. Because there's another factor at play: the simple reality is that bookstores can't afford to hold onto merchandise that isn't selling. And so when they identify such merchandise, they tend to replace it with something new.

I'd love to be wrong about this; I'd love to be told that MJ's vision of the (potential) relationship between shelf-life and buzz is viable, and that her proposed test--to seriously extend co-op on a select group of titles & therefore have some real data to build on--sounds realistic and likely to produce the desired result. And there's a very good chance I am wrong: what I know of the details of co-op and in-store merchandizing (or think I know) has been amassed largely through osmosis. Marketing and sales departments rarely "open their books" for an editor's (or author's) scrutiny--not, I think, as a matter of secrecy so much as a factor of the imperfect realities that they face: the machinery of publishing such a huge volume of titles and putting out three lists a year would come to a grinding halt if they had to submit to marketing "audits" on every 8500-copy novel... But to get back on point: it's quite likely that I've gotten the nuances of the bookseller/publisher dance wrong as relates to co-op; and it's certain that others with more direct experience--booksellers, sales people, marketing directors--can provide much greater specificity.

So I hope booksellers, marketers, reps, and anybody else with experience in this realm will jump in here and share your opinions and expertise.

Stop the presses! Labor unrest threatens blogosphere!

2005-02-03T10:07:00.000-05:00

PRESS RELEASE FROM THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Mad Max Inc.

Given that BookAngst 101 is our sole material asset;

[Which means--since BookAngst 101 doesn't exist except as a figment of some incomprehensible bandwidth something--that we have none];

We the Board of Directors hereby notify our share-holders that the ops center @ BookAngst 101 is undergoing technical difficulties. Or, more accurately, aesthetic difficulties. Our crack creative and technical staffs had been brainstorming--or, more accurating, headbutting--over the design of the site. Unkind things were said about the "technological deficiencies" of the production department; Creative was then given a harsh critique of its decidedly 20th century sensibility; and so what started out with finger-pointing among the staff, and with nobody willing to take responsibility for their various f*ups--

[it's SO hard to find good help these days!]

--eventually escalated into a full-out civil conflagration. And, as happens among the working classes from time to time, the focus of the rage soon shifted; the two opposing sides realized they had common "issues"; and suddenly it was management under fire. Can you imagine? A workers' uprising! Complaints about the pay, the hours, the unsanitary working conditions... But the straw that broke the camel's back? Not so much the pile-up of complaints from our shareholders, but, rather, the fact that management chose to post those complaints prominently on bulletin boards throughout the shop.

THE SITE HAS TOO MUCH COLOR!
USE UNDERLINE OR B.F., BUT NOT BOTH!
YOUR LINKS ARE HARD TO FIND!
MAX IS A POORLY-DISGUISED SHILL FOR "THE MAN"!
YOUR CUSTOMER SERVICE DEPARTMENT SUCKS!

Morale at the shop had simply bottomed out--and just when it seemed things couldn't get any worse, management's most dreaded fears were realized:

the employees staged a sit-down--right there, on the assembly-line floor!--and production

* BOOM!*
--came to a complete standstill.

But please rest assured, trusted Shareholders: a resolution is in the works. A top labor negotiator has been brought in, along with grilled cheese sandwiches and milkshakes (and, later, six-packs of beer), and eventually cooler heads prevailed. At this juncture, we are cautiously optimistic about the progress of the talks; new investors are being approached, new management strategies are being discussed, the possibility of profit-sharing is on the table--and we expect to be operational again very soon.

In the meantime, we appreciate your patience. We at Mad Max Inc. believe your confidence will be rewarded by robust sales, not just in the fourth-quarter but carrying on well into the new fiscal year.

--Mgmt.

RANKIN ON RANKIN: Just when you thought it was safe t'go back in the pie shoppe...

2005-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00

Having donned the riot gear and taken a shelling, Mad Max tried a diversionary tactic--an ale-fueled HOORAY! for Ian Rankin--that allowed me to slip unnoticed through the bathroom window, crawl along a narrow ledge, then leap two stories into a passing haywagon--whereupon (the plan was) a lovely maiden would salt my wounds and lead me to safety.

Ahh, but wouldn't you know: application of the salty salve was barely underway when the rogue swordsman known as Deadly D upended the haycart (farewell, my Florence Nightengale!) and held me at knifepoint, backing me dextrously toward the mouth of an open-air sewer.

nice move, max [quoth he]. you side-stepped the riot. only your pie-proof rankin hardcover has roots in the other story. seven books in, low sales, a handful of readers in public libraries, and rankin's editor decided to drop him off the side in a cost-effective re-shuffle. a timely golden dagger award...and guess who took the credit?

My first impulse was to say--yea, kind sir, tell me: who did take the credit? Does it not always (and rightly) belong to the author himself? Worse, I nearly began to argue on behalf of the loathsome publisher--after all, had they not stood by Mr. Rankin for seven books despite what D. had described as "low sales"? Is that not worth something? But I bit my tongue, knowing that, otherwise, I'd wind up drowning offally, or with a cut throat.

So instead I said:

Forsoothe, Gallant D.--spare me a moment longer, for I believe the man who knows the truth lives in the straw hut just up the close [translator's note: that's "alley" in American]--on Scrivener's Block, I believe they call't? If we find Good Man Rankin home, perhaps we can sort this out without further harm?

D. was reluctant, having earlier witnessed (nay, anticipated) my hay-wagon escape; but the gentleman eventually granted my request. He tied (and loosely enough, causing no more pain than was necessary) a yoke about my hands and led me up the hill; whereupon a handsome if unshaven fellow did emerge, squinting into the late afternoon sun; and, after hearing the nature of our debate, did admit himself to be IAN RANKIN, and, being somewhat knowledgeable on the subject, he had this to say:

"I don't think my editor took much of the credit... but it's true that when I delivered BLACK AND BLUE, knowing in my heart that it was a meatier, altogether better book than my previous outings, my publishers saw it as 'just another Rebus'. By that time I was seen as mid-list, selling a few thousand from book to book, but not growing fast enough to make me worth promoting. However, my agent campaigned on the book's behalf, and my publisher eventually put some marketing money behind the book, as well as introducing a new livery which worked so well we're still using it (and being copied by every second crime novel coming out of the UK, it sometimes seems)...
"The book was to be published mid-January, and on Jan 2nd there was a review in the London Times which said 'There won't be a better crime novel published this year'. That gave me a real thrill. The book got further rave reviews and sold
moderately well (I think it was my first hardcover to go into a reprint). Still didn't make the UK top ten, but got close. Come November, it won the Gold Dagger, and the paperback went on to sell four times as many copies as my previous efforts. My next hardcover scraped into the UK top ten... and my publishers decided they really did like me after all.

"Prior to this (my editor later confided) she'd been fighting my corner, as her bosses wanted me dumped. Their point was: they'd laid out money on me, tried marketing me and touring me, and I was staying resolutely mid-list... so why not release me and let someone else take a shot?

"I am still with my publisher; still use the same editor. In fact, when she left the company, I asked her to keep me on in a freelance capacity. She's a good editor."

I was honored (and relieved, now that my hands had been unbound) that Ian Rankin himself would speak so freely; and Dexter, too, seemed satisfied; and soon we three were tossing down tankards of ale and clapping each other on the back; and later, after dark--wouldn't you know it, a Mr. Smith emerged from his hut, and a Ms. Rowling from hers, and we sat round a great fire telling tall tales and drinking a peaty single-malt and toasting the likes of Peter Robinson and Michael Connelly and...well, the list was long, but my recollection isn't.

...and when I awoke, I was back in the 21st century, with the residue of several shaving-cream pies still on my face, and sand in my hair, and I wondered where I was and whether any of this had really happened...had Dexter and I really been transported, somehow, to some back-in-time Edinburgh? Had we really drank into the wee-hours with...no, it wasn't possible, it must've been a dream....

Then I reached into my pocket and found a print-out of several emails...

"the story about the murder in my neighbourhood is entirely true - first murder in this 'toney' suburb for around sixty years, and happens six months after I cross the tracks from Deadville..."

[signed] Ian Rankin

I [heart] IAN RANKIN!

2005-01-27T18:50:00.000-05:00

And if you don't, already, yourself, it's almost assuredly because you simply haven't read him yet. And to demonstrate why you, too, might love Ian Rankin, we need look no further than the epigraph to his new Inspector Rebus novel (set, as they all are, in and around Edinburgh, Scotland), FLESHMARKET ALLEY.

"The climate of Edinburgh is such that the weak succumb young...
and the strong envy them."
--Dr. Johnson to Boswell
Run, don't walk...

Riot Gear to the Ready

2005-01-25T13:26:00.000-05:00

A GOOD TIME WAS HAD BY ALL
Well--hasn't this been fun! A rage-riot, right here on my own doorstep!

I'm torn. Part of me wants to do a riff on Rodney King and say, Hey, can't we all just get along? Can't you see, authors? Deep down we really want the same thing... But of course it's not as simple as that, and far too many writers out there have sufficiently unhappy experiences in the world of publishing not to respond to this sort of pie-in-the-sky view with some pies of their own (tributes to Johnny Carson, perhaps?)--delivered not by silvery tongue but by tin-foil pie-dish, filled with shaving cream, delivered one after another in rapid succession to the face of the would-be silver-tongued editor with the nostalgic, or is it sentimental, or is it duplicitous, view of the relationship between writers and editors... All in good sport, though, right? Well, not really; and so, having failed with the non-aggression pact, I feel a sudden urge to wander into the fray, like Bill Buford AMONG THE THUGS. After all, this kind and well-meaning Max, you never really believed in him anyway, right? So fuck it: let's rumble...

But ol' Max isn't the only one wiping shaving cream from his eyes--we here at BookAngst 101 are equal-opportunity nasty-bashers; the vitriol seems to be fairly evenly dispensed. [Though I find it fascinating to note that AGENTS seem to escape the barrage--how is it Dexter the Delightful has thumb-tack-filled pies for every editor he's ever worked with or even heard of, yet has crap-all to say about his agent, who presumably presided over those crucial introductions in the first place?] So Max ultimately chooses the path of fewest bruises, opts for fingertips and keyboards over elbows and two-by-fours--especially since, if hooliganism were to win out, Max himself would find himself down for the count in a pitifully few seconds...

DIFFERENT POINTS OF VIEW
How best to describe this "discourse" that has gone on here over the past few days? Here are a few nominations:

From an Editor, in response to writers

"Welcome to the bitterberry patch, where contributors are paid by the bushel"

From a Published Author, in response editors

"Beware the word 'passion,' which is code for you're about to be f**ked up the a**, prison-style"

From a Blogger, in response to fatigue

"21 good reasons to shut this f**king blog down and return to my just-60-hours-a-week work schedule of yore"

In the end, of course, none of these suffice. And so forward we stumble.

MAD MAX, MEET SAD SAXE
There are a whole lot of comments I'd like to respond to that people have posted on this site in recent days, some positive, some negative and some flat-out lunatic, but the one that most efficiently gets at what, for me, is the crucial, centerpiece issue of our recent conversation is this comment from writer who identifies himself as Sad Saxe Commins and who, in response to Sunday's riff on subjectivity, said:

"I'll take a little less passion and a little more scratch."

To which I respond: say what you will about the limits of passion--but the inescapable fact is that,
Without passion, there IS no scratch.

A particular imprint publishes, let's say, ten hardcover books a month. That's one imprint within (as in most cases) a larger publishing entity whose other imprints--let's say there are four more--are also publishing, respectively, eight, seven, five and four hardcovers a month. In this model that's 34 hardcover publications per month. And let's assume for the moment that the very worst suspicions articulated here and elsewhere about publishers are true: that, left to their own devices, the only books to which publishers will allocate any marketing attention are those authored by the likes of Michael Crichton, John Grisham, Mitch Albom, Phil McGraw, and anything bearing the words "Perricone," South Beach" or "Atkins" in their titles--

So: what do you honestly think? --that those of us (editors) NOT represented on that list of "brand-name authors," who've nonetheless invested, say, two years of our lives into helping an author craft the best book possible, attended to the million and one details that actually constitute the bulk of our days and nights [as opposed to attending those revelatory "pub crawls" Delightful Dexter regales us with, wherein the true "duplicity of editors" is revealed...in this country, at least, we're too busy actually trying to publish our books to find the time for such scintillating sport] that might make the difference between an invisible publication (i.e., of the "well, at least it's out there, right?" variety) and one that actually reflects months of advance planning, strategizing and an infinite number of one-on-one conversations with various people in the bookselling chain, from publisher to marketing director to publicity team to subsidiary rights people to sales managers to individual sales reps to individual booksellers (yes, many of us do that too), the scratching and clawing that constitutes pretty much our every working day--

--do you honestly think, after all that effort, under these circumstances, that those of us without a massive "brand name" author on our list at this particular moment of time, are going to sit back passively and watch our books simply go down the drain? That we'll be content to sit back and say, well, it's Zadie Smith's month, so I don't want to create waves? Oh, Patricia Cornwell is more important, so I don't want to distract "the team" from doing what matters most?

--if that's what you think--and, clearly, it's the way a lot of writers see it--then it's time for Mad Max shed his sonorous baritone and robes of false benevolence and step out from behind the podium from which he delivers his Sunday morning pastorals to say--no, scream--

You haven't got a f**king clue!

Because--guess what? We editors are ambitious fuckers too, just like writers are. We want our books to succeed not simply because we want the best things for the authors we care about, the authors who bust their asses to the same extent that we bust ours, but because their success is ours too! Contrary to what Dexter the Delightful says, there is no Gentleman's Safety Net in which editorial mediocrity is rewarded with a plush new job someplace else. My books don't sell over a period of time? Guess what: I'm toast. Time to see if there are any openings at the post office...

So when I talk about "passion" I'm not talking about that which is bathed in the heavenly light of beneficence--or have we forgotten that, sometimes, passion=urgency, stridency, desperation even? And so it is that publishers and associate publishers and marketing managers and publicists and local sales reps come to hate editors--not because we're trying to ruin their lives, destroy their careers, crush their spirits, etc. (as is the case with writers, or so it's reported here), but because we won't stop hounding them! We won't stop bitching and moaning, pinching and pulling, begging, bartering, cajoling, asking for more of their time, more of their resources, offering up our own time--doing whatever we can to make sure our books, our authors, get a slice of the marketing pie; that opportunities are seized; that, despite the odds against it, smaller books, too, get published. Not just printed and distributed, but published.

A little less passion, a little more scratch, you say? Here's a story: when, several years ago, an editor was hired away from Pocket to take a new job Doubleday, there was an author he loved that he insisted on bringing with him. A thriller writer whose previous novels had netted--TOPS--8500 copies, who probably hadn't earned out his relatively modest first advances, who after just a couple of books, already had a downward sales track. Is this guy a winner, a slam dunk? No: what he is is a thriller writer that his editor, Jason Kaufman, has worked with from the start, somebody he believes in and wants to stick with despite (let's say) modest sales. When Jason tells his new publisher about this writer, his publisher hasn't even heard of the guy, and probably couldn't care less. Doubleday already has John Grisham, Mitch Albom, James Bradley, and lots of other big best-sellers. But Jason convinces his new employer to let him bring this decidedly midlist author with him. Why? Because he's personally invested, because he feels PASSIONATELY about him--because he believes that the guy has what we publishing whores refer to as "break-out potential."

Dynamite Dexter, Sad Saxe and many others out there may not admire Dan Brown's THE DA VINCI CODE. But what started the fire that lead to TDVC becoming one of (if not the) bestselling hardcovers in modern history was not some by-the-numbers calculation by some hooded group of marketing executives, but the passion--yes, I'll say it again: the PASSION, and follow-through, of one editor; of his belief in an author's talent; of his confidence that the author had a book in him that could catch fire at a larger level.

If Jason Kaufman had NOT taken Dan Brown with him to Doubleday; if another editor, equally smart and talented but perhaps less personally invested in Dan's career--me, say--had inherited, edited and published it, THE DA VINCI CODE almost certainly would not have become anything like the phenomenon we all know it to be now.

So go ahead, rake me over the coals for citing a middle-brow thriller instead of the more serious work of Robert Coover or Dexter Petley or David Markson or Toby Olson--I assure you, I've published more than my share of extraordinary writers who have not yet had the day in the sun they deserve. An editor's passion guarantees NOTHING--except, perhaps, an honest chance. Something can go wrong; in fact, something usually does. But the absense of passion? That situation does come with a guarantee: failure, pure and simple.

There's No Accounting for Taste; or: "'Subjectivity' for $500, Alex"--Mad Max Finally Speaks in His Own Defense

2005-01-23T14:00:00.000-05:00

PEACHES, PEARS, CHOCOLATE ECLAIRS
Or perhaps I should say: broccoli rabe, collared greens, zuccini. Because, while there is (to my knowledge) no individual or coalition thereof who couldn't find something satisfactory in a presentation of peaches, pears & chocolate eclairs, I can think of at least one such--namely, me--who'd choose creamed corn over broccoli rabe & co.

I know, I know: this doesn't reflect well on me--which is exactly the point. There's no accounting for taste.

As much as I want to like collared greens, know that I should like collared greens, and tend to scarf up everything else that appears on the same plate as collared greens, the truth is, I'm not a fan. Zuccini and eggplant? My mother, who was not gifted in the practice of the culinary arts, compensated for lack of skill (especially where these vegetables were concerned) by sheer volume, and so zuccini remains, essentially, a lost cause. [I must gratefully acknowledge, however, that my wife's exquisite (slow-cooked) eggplant parm has removed at least one topic of discussion from the psychoanalytic checklist.]

Broccoli rabe? Anthony Bourdain himself couldn't turn the tide.

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER (?)
But food is not the topic today. Today's goal (from my perspective, anyway) is to finish at last a "post" I've been working on (but, for a variety of reasons, have been unable to finish) for days; and by now so many people have weighed in on the subject that the comments I'm prefacing now are almost entirely beside the point. But--hey!--I wrote this stuff, what am I gonna do now, just gonna toss it out?

LATE-NIGHT SURPRISEOn Jan. 18 '05, M.J. Rose posted on Buzz Balls & Hype a literary writer's honest assessment of her experience in publishing. Despite getting wonderful reviews and having several New York Times Notable Books to her credit, she had nonetheless become marginalized by her publisher(s), as payback for her having committed the unpardonable sin of writing serious literary fiction that never won the Oprah lottery. This was complicated by the firing, over time, of two editors who had been terrific advocates for her work. She refused to wallow in self-pity, and expressed real generosity toward the best intentions of her editors; and her remarks struck a chord with me. I wrote what I'd meant to be a sympathetic, empathetic response that I posted here sober dopeat BookAngst 101.

The next night she responded to my comments (M.J.'s Jan. 19 '05 entry) in ways that surprised me and which seemed, on first glance, to be a complete misreading of my meaning—which is to say that the “generosity” I'd so regally bestowed (high-powered editor speaking to discouraged author) turned out to be (from her perspective) nothing of the sort. She inferred from my comments that the real problem with work that doesn’t succeed in the marketplace is that it’s just not good enough.

I read this at 1:30 in the morning at the end of a day full of frustration and petty disappointment, and was quick to don the martyr’s robes unapologetically. Huff, thought I: Her bitterness hath bent the eye. In retrospect I realize what troubled me more was that her response undercut notions of myself I’m quite attached to: that I am an editor of the Old School, someone keenly attuned to the hardships of the writing life, a patron, a kindred spirit, et cetera, ad nauseum. It also introduced the possibility that my unconscious motivation hadn’t been sympathy/empathy per se, but rather to use the opportunity to present myself in some sort of grandiose/self-aggrandizing light… [Look up grandiose in the dictionary, somewhere in there you’ll see the phrase “self-aggrandizing.” But if the shoe fits…]

With fresh eyes, and the guidance/insights of a number of the “comments” posted by other readers, I was able to see this from her perspective. Was I high-handed, patronizing, self-congratulatory? Perhaps I was all these things.

In the time it's taken me to respond to her comments, she has written another, friendly clarification of her views, and lots of others have posted their comments, here and at M.J.'s site. Here at last, for what it's worth, is my reply.

DEAR ANONYMOUS LITERARY WRITER:
I'm sorry my comments missed their mark so awfully. I confess it has taken me some careful scrutiny (aided by the comments of other readers who have helped identify where I misspoke) to understand how you came to infer from my comments that the many

"powerful and beautiful and excellent books published that do arouse passions all along the yellow brick road, and which still do not succeed"

in the marketplace are in any way a reflection of the excellence of those books. For all the reasons you detail, and for perhaps a dozen more besides, the universe of bookselling is a horror-show, a source of disappointment and frustration for virtually every writer I know. A million things can, and usually do, conspire to derail a worthy publication; and, for the most part, it’s virtually impossible to predict ahead of time what they might be—only that they will.

At the risk of infuriating you further, though, I'll say again, emphatically, that I do believe the most critical piece of the equation is the excellence of the work itself. That's only part of the equation, though; and I didn't mean to suggest “that the book fails because it [is]n’t quite good enough to arouse the editor’s passion”; nor that the blame for a lackluster publication belongs to the author. The reason these positions--that A) the work matters most and B) the lack of success isn't some sort of "objective" accounting of the merits of that work--aren’t contradictory is this: the notion that there's an objective standard of excellence that articulates itself through the marketplace is bunk.

AND because [bear with me a moment longer]: if the quality of the work is the most important part of the equation, a close second is the chemical bond that forms between the author, her work, and the person who will chaperone it through the publishing process. And that person is your editor.

In your 2nd response (M.J.'s Jan. 21 '05 post) to my email, you said I'd implied that

“if a book arouses passion in the heart of the editor, and in other hearts along the way - that is, if the book is really good - then it will succeed. Declaring that a book will succeed if it's really good has an inverse corollary, that is, if it doesn't succeed, the implication is that it's not really good.”

I do, of course, see what you mean, except for one thing: I wasn't suggesting that your book had failed to arouse your editor’s passion, not even for a second. To the contrary, I'm quite confident that it did; and I’ll wager that part of what makes your editors (as you say) “great” is because the strength of the bond between you, the confidence you have that they really have understood what you were trying to accomplish. They've read your books, they've loved them; perhaps they helped strengthen them in some ways editorially; they conveyed to you from time to time their admiration for your artistry and craftsmanship, and that they were proud to be publishing you and your work. You came to trust their judgment, to feel that (for the most part) they’d be there with you in the trenches—a true ally who had your best interests at stake.

[For the uninitiated, I’m not saying that editor/author relations are always peachy-keen; but that, most often (in my experience at least) the dust-ups and arguments that periodically transpire between author and editor reflect not essential antagonism, but a shared sense of the stakes, of the extent to which this thing--the book, and publishing it well--matters. There are sometimes disagreements about what the proper course of action might be at one time or another; but I’d argue that these arise from what is, ultimately, a shared desire.]

Now I return to the importance of, and nature of, the close chemical bond that forms between the author, the work, and the editor; and to a couple of things I took for granted or failed to communicate clearly in my original, perhaps-not-so-sympathetic comments.

As I mentioned before, you took from my comments “that the book fails because it wasn’t quite good enough to arouse the editor’s passion.” Starting there, then, it's clear: my saying "the work itself [must] bear up again and again to the scrutiny of the many, many sets of readers along the yellow brick road to publication" implies that only the great books survive this scrutiny. That, in other words, there really is some sort of objective standard by which books are judged, and a book's success or failure in that regard is a direct reflection on its [somehow quantifiable] literary merits.

What I took for granted was that we all know this not to be true; that we all have far too much experience of the maddeningly arbitrary and quixotic nature of our business to believe there’s any real correlation between quality and success. Many worthy books get published (though there’s little doubt that the amount of truly literary work published by mainstream houses has diminished by a significant proportion in the past 15 years), but only a small proportion enjoy more than modest success.

In this way, of course, you’re quite right: few of the books that inspire an editor’s deep confidence and passion succeed. This, again, would seem to undermine my argument about the importance of an editor’s passion. But now we must take all that we know about the brutally arbitrary nature of what hits and what doesn’t; and then add to the mix something else that I perhaps took for granted in my original comments--

--that individual taste is a completely subjective beast.

This expresses itself in all sorts of ways*–which, if looked at from one perspective, is at the core of freedom of expression, democracy and all that other crap. (But that, as they say, is a whole nuther story.) An editor, perhaps moreso than the general populace, has to learn early—and sometimes even take solace in—the nature of this subjectivity; otherwise he would become incapable of making decisions, slowed as he is by doubts that this [manuscript, proposal, etc.] might be worthy, according to some objective standard. We must leave issues of “objective standard” to the academics; the only useful yardstick for an editor is his own personal judgment. What lights an editor's fire is some combination of intuition, admiration, recognition--things that (for me at least) are impossible to define. Which is why the notion of there being some quote science unquote to the publishing process is, in any number of ways, hogwash. From an editor’s perspective, at any rate, the only science that enters in is the aforementioned chemistry.

Therefore: it’s not an editor’s job to assess material from some sort of balcony of objectivity, but rather to find material that strikes a personal chord in one way or another, material for which the editor has an innate sense--of who its natural readers are, of how to market to those readers, and so forth. It doesn’t matter to me (though, in retrospect, it would likely matter a great deal to my boss…) if somebody else thinks COLD MOUNTAIN is a great novel. I didn’t; and had that submission come to me, the chances are very good that I would have passed on it—despite knowing full well that somebody else would fall in love and buy it…

(For the record, editors often do know this when we pass on a book—we can often recognize its merits, and know that someone else is going to buy it, and that there's the possibility that we're going to look like fools if this book turns out to be a huge success. It's a fear I can live with, because unless those merits organize themselves in patterns that set my heart pounding, I’m not the right editor for that book... There are, of course, many other occasions where I absolutely fail to recognize a book's merits, and have only my own subjectivity to blame… Think what you will about THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY—some editor read it, was moved by it, convinced her bosses to buy it, and wound up selling a bi-jillion copies…)

At the risk of sounding like a mamby-pamby creative writing cheerleader, one can (if one choses) take some solace that even a slew of rejection letters doesn’t truly represent the actual, objective quality of a manuscript—it simply means that the right editor hasn’t read it yet.

ANYWAY: My thesis is this: the book's success is linked, in some alchemic way, to the quality of the manuscript--as understood/experienced by your editor! This isn't to say that s/he is responsible for the quality of that manuscript, or even that the manuscript is, in fact, more or less excellent--objectively--based on your editor's response to it. But it's an inescapable part of the calculus that your editor [assuming s/he is your editor by choice--circumstances in which an editor leaves and a project winds up being handled by someone else are extremely difficult, I recognize. That, too, is a topic for another day.] is your editor because s/he loves your f-ing work! If someone doesn't love your work? See above, under "subjectivity": s/he is not the right f-ing editor for you.

Does it seem I'm still laying the blame for an unsatisfactory publication at your feet? There's no guarantee that anything will ever go well--as you yourself put it,

"there are powerful and beautiful and excellent books published that do arouse
passions all along the yellow brick road, and which still do not succeed."

I couldn't agree more! But more often what happens is that--even with the passionate support of the editor--the journey down this yellow brick road is perilous, and (because of the subjective nature of reading) very rarely elicits the same passionate response from a majority of those stationed along the parade route. But sometimes--and this was the lottery-like, pie-in-the-sky one-in-a-million circumstance you took issue with--sometimes it does happen.

Such is the case (so far, anyway) with a first (and very literary) novel I'm publishing, for which I paid a five figure advance, for which my publisher had (upon its acquisition) admiration but modest expectations. I then began to do what all editors worth their salt do--I set out to stoke the engine, to fuel the fire of the publishing machinery, through a variety of not-terribly-original initiatives, as I've done for every book I've ever cared about. In this instance, though, the response has been just a bit different, a bit more...coherent. In this case, with exactly one exception, every person who has read this book has come back to me dumb-founded, amazed, astonished, delighted.

Will this book succeed? Only time will tell. Experience warns me: don't get too excited, fella--you've been here before. Yes, I have--I've had books that, in one fashion or another, seemed poised to explode and fell somewhat short of doing so; to date I have no DA VINCI CODE or Nathan Englander or Jonathan Safron Foer or (name another runaway outta-the-blue bestseller) on my resume. There are, needless to say, MANY gauges of a successful publication besides having a runaway outta-the-blue bestseller.

But back to our original conversation: in this case, the book I allude to but don't name--a book that is still many months from coming into the public eye--in this case, I have no doubt that my passion for the book, combined with the extraordinary quality of the manuscript itself, seems to be making a real difference.

Will the cash register go k-ching? That's impossible for me to know. The only sound I recognize for certain is the pitter-patter of my heart.

Sincerely,

Mad Max Perkins

P.S. I hope that my ending like this doesn't come across as yet another stroke of self-congratulation and/or insensitivity, rubbing my author's good fortune (and my own) in the wounds of those whose experience has been different. The fact that this book is getting great reads up and down the line is, itself, impossible to explain. I've published books I've loved as much, books I believed in as ferociously, books for which my own expectations--and my colleagues' expectations too--were as high or higher. Everything seemed to be in place--yet "IT" didn't all quite come together in the spectacular fashion every editor, and every author, dreams of... Contrary to popular opinion, lots of books (though admittedly a small proportion of all books published) get the passionate support of their editors AND are beneficiaries of real marketing muscle. Of those, one in a million becomes THE LOVELY BONES.

Did I say that? Really?

2005-01-20T01:55:00.000-05:00

(There goes my last chance of being honored with the Author's Guild humanitarian of the month award...)

Here's a rather unexpected interpretation (M.J.'s Jan. 19 '05 entry) of yesterday's "sober dope" posting. Not sure what to say, so for now (uncharacteristically) I'll say nothing.

sober dope. :-(

2005-01-18T22:11:00.000-05:00

M.J. Rose's January 18th post at Buzz Balls & Hype presents what, for me, is a heartbreaking letter from an anonymous literary writer.

Heartbreaking because this writer's experience--of traveling horrible distances to do a book signing that isn't promoted, and which nobody attends--is replicated to one degree or another by virtually every writer I've ever known.

Heartbreaking because it happens dozens of times every single day, to writers of all stripes (not just literary), reflecting a culture that does not treasure its authors as once it did.

Heartbreaking because writing a book and getting it published, and being the editor who discovers and gets the opportunity to work with that writer, can be for both parties such a deliriously beautiful experience, full of love and optimism and the promise of great things--and then, too often, even when everything goes as planned, things don't go as hoped; and the result, too often, is--well, heartbreaking.

But the final and most powerful pang comes for this author's unexpected generosity toward--and respect for--the editor(s) with whom s/he has shared this particular heartbreak. Says, "Rely on your publisher for nothing, when your book comes out. If they do anything, you'll be pleasantly surprised"; but also says, "Your editor is not betraying you. Your editor may well be fighting hard for your book, but [is] unable to surmount the opposing forces..."

That such kind-heartedness exists even in the face of such disappointment: this moves me. It motivates me. This author understands that, for so many of us, it's not about product or units or bestsellers per se--it's about publishing books we believe in by authors we admire, publishing them with as much care and pride and vigor as we can.

I don't concede. I don't think it's true that editors are powerless, or that the marketing departments call all the shots. I'm not saying it's easy; I'm not saying an editor can move the mountain every single time; and I'm not saying that the stack of disappointment--for editors, I mean--isn't always quite a bit taller than its opposite. Passionate advocacy won't carry the day even 50% of the time. But without passion, all is lost. And it's still the case that, sometimes, an editor's passion--even for a "small" book bought for an unspectacular sum--can set in motion a chain-reaction that ends happily for all--but only if the work itself subsequently bears up again and again to the scrutiny of the many, many sets of readers along the yellow brick road to publication. And in such a case, the power an editor possesses comes, ultimately, from a single source.

The work itself.

Advancing the Notion of (...ahem...) Realistic Advances

2005-01-16T20:24:00.000-05:00

[Ed. note: I want to thank all the editors and agents--including the three new "posts" below--whose feedback to my "midlist" queries have been featured here over the past week and which have inspired such robust and productive commentary. ]

1. "ADVANCES IN LINE WITH THE LONG ODDS" The true problem is that we all pay too much for these books. We often pay advances that don't truly take into consideration the odds against one of the books selling more than 7,500 to 10,000 copies. If advances for this type of project were more in line with the long odds, then perhaps "midlist" wouldn't have become such a dirty word.

Yet the truth remains that we're all eternal optimists; and every week one of us editors falls in love with something that's a long shot for breakout success, but that we want to place a bet on. And the fact that every once in a while something does break out--that these bets do, occassionally, pay huge dividends--allows our corporate overseers to encourage this sometimes-costly optimism.

I just wish we could all exercise some restraint, and not to make that bet too big, though, because it ends up hurting us all. Including authors. I'm sure authors and agents would hate to hear me say this, but there's really no downside for us trying to keep our advances more in line--because if the book is the one-in-a-hundred that does exceed expectations, authors will keep making money in royalties commensurate with the success of the book. And when they are overpaid, and sales don't meet expectations, it usually hurts the author's career in the end.

--EDITOR-IN-CHIEF (Anonymous)

2. "THE UPSIDE TO ADVANCES THAT EARN OUT" When I speak at conferences and authors bitch and moan about not wanting to be in the 'midlist', it makes me a little nuts. I tell them that 'midlist' applies to the majority of a publisher's list, and that it's not such a bad place to be. For one thing, a 'midlist advance' is usually in the $20,000-$75,000 range. While many authors and agents don't exactly have orgasms over advances of that size, the upside is that those advances are much more likely to earn out. And when the advance earns out, the author has a much better shot at selling his/her next book for a higher advance.

We also tend to expect a certain number of our midlist books to 'break out' and become more successful than we'd planned, either because the final manuscript is even more fantastic than expected, or because current events or something in the media happens that makes the book topical and gets it more press attention than we'd originally bargained for. I tend to think that's it's always better to be a come-from-behind midlist author than to be one of the hotshots who scores a $500,000 advance. Being saddled with great expectations can really suck. The hotshots can only watch helplessly when the book sells 25,000 copies and suddenly the publisher stops returning their calls. A midlist author who was paid $50,000 and sells 25,000 copies is going to enjoy a nice lunch at Michael's--and the likelihood of a much more substantial advance for the next book.

--EDITOR (Anonymous)

3. "SPEAKING OF PEJORATIVES..." I agree with you that the midlist represents a more significant portion of the business than it's commonly given credit for. In publishing as in so many other fields, everyone likes to talk about the stars, not the workhorses that carry the bulk of the load.

But what does this mean? That midlist titles deserve more respect than they get? I suppose that's so, but it's because of the quality of the ideas they contain or their execution or their ability to entertain, all of which is independent of their commercial impact. If you're just looking at commercial impact, the truth is that no individual midlist title does deserve a lot of respect, even if the category as a whole deserves more than it's generally afforded. And even as a whole, the category has shortcomings. Unfortunately, the overhead involved in publishing a book that sells 10,000 copies is roughly the same as for one that sells ten times as many -- you have to negotiate for roughly the same amount of time, you have to edit the same number of pages, you have to do the same amount of proofreading, you have to paint as many covers (i.e., one), you have to pay the same plate charges, etc. So from a business point of view you're much better off publishing one 100,000-copy seller than ten 10,000-copy sellers.

Speaking of pejorative terms, though...if you really want to talk about a term that has acquired an unfair connotation, how about "mass market paperback" or "paperback original"? Say those words at a gathering of publishing machers and it's as though you uttered the phrase "direct to video" at an A-list Hollywood event...

--PUBLISHER (Anonymous)

"The Majority List": Agents Join the (Midlist) Fray

2005-01-14T01:22:00.000-05:00

THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD: Three Upstanding Agents Speak Out About the Meaning of 'Midlist,' Past & Present

MARY ANN NAPLES
The Creative Culture (literary agency)
I don’t use the term “midlist.” To me, it is one of those terms that are used by people not working in publishing (or at least not working as an editor or an agent) that sets up ridiculous divisions that enable the media to make unfair generalizations about what we do.

It seems to be true that many, many books published these days have first printings below 15,000 copies. This is our reality. But behind each of those books there is an editor, an agent, and, of course, an author, who believe that the book can sell many more copies. We go into this believing that our books can strike a chord with readers and the culture, and that if the right things happen for said book, then it can take off. I don’t think that editors and agents are so jaded that when we sign books up, we believe we are signing up “midlist” books—books that will never grow in sales past a certain point. So I guess I am saying that midlist seems, to me, to be a retroactive term, one that can be applied once all the dust has settled and the book in question has either taken off and sold lots of copies or has languished and everyone is looking for someone to blame.

* * *

LITERARY AGENT (ANONYMOUS #1)
My feeling is that the term is a holdover from a previous era in publishing, one in which midlist truly was the backbone of the industry. There was no pejorative connotation. In fact, I think the term "midlist" acquired its negative associations precisely because the word became hopelessly irrelevant and useless in describing a bookwith a certain level of sales, neither corporate-bottom-line-altering nor hopelessly four-digit.

The reason is that, today, the effort it takes to publish a "midlist" book is the effort it takes to publish a "top of the list" book. What I mean is that nobody can possibly hope to sell 15,000 copies of a hardcover novel -- by a debut author or one who's less than a brand name -- without spending the kind of marketing and promotional dollars one would associate with a lead title. In the last few years, I've had several novels get the real "big book" treatment from their publishers -- expensive marketing and advertising campaigns (let's say at a minimum cost of $75,000 and probably more like $100K+), printings from 30-50,000 copies, etc. -- all of which ultimately sold between 12-15,000 copies. And even though nobody was pretending, in each of these cases, that the sales numbers demonstrated any great success in the marketplace, in terms of establishing an author and making waves, the net results are that all of the authors are probably ones you've now heard of, unless you don't do much reading of contemporary fiction. Interestingly, all of them, without exception, have gone on to bigger and better deals for their future works (for the most part with the same publishers that made the efforts in the first place). Because what all those dollars bought were industry and bookseller attention, resulting in things like PW First Fiction picks, Book Sense picks, healthy piles of reviews, strong foreign market rights sales, etc. In other words, the money bought buzz, buzz which traveled from the industry to the general public (or at least the somewhat committed reader portion of that public), buzz that made the authors desirable and valuable commodities within the strange universe that istrade publishing -- but the buzz didn't really buy sales, or at least the kind that would have substantiated the money spent.

All of which underlines my point: to get solid "midlist" numbers, you have to publish in, if not the biggest way possible, certainly the next closest thing. Which means that the word, as used to describe books that sell 15,000 hardcovers or so, is past its expiration date. I'm not sure what word we can use to describe these books, but it does tell me that the old idea of midlist as books you love and publish and hope to get attention for, but that aren't going to get marketing dollars, is as moribund as the term itself.

* * *

LITERARY AGENT (ANONYMOUS #2)
Descriptions of the term have always struck me as disingenuous. The first definition I remember hearing applied to authors who sold in the 25,000 copy or less range. Some other usages seemed to suggest that it applied to authors who sold in the five figures. Huh? A net 60,000 hc sale is big stuff, seems to me. I think the term "midlist" was most often tossed around by people who believed the first print announcements they saw in PW. An announced 25,000 print means an actual of about 7,500, right?

Your 15,000 figure makes sense, though I might want to say about 90 percent of authors would meet that definition. I think all it means today is an author who is not hitting a national bestseller list. So yes, the term is out of date. It belongs to an era when our P&Ls posited routine 25,000 copy hardcover sales followed by a 3x trade paper reprint. Rather than a public relations campaign, I think it needs burial in a pine box, no obit. Why? First, because when people say "midlist" what they really want to say is "bottom of the barrel." Second, because absolute numbers mean nothing in this business. A clean net sale of 25,000 hardcovers could be a considerable triumph for a first timer with low expectations, or a disaster for the next book by David McCullough. The number should not carry a label with it. I think people should be clear that we are talking "majority list" here, not midlist, and that the threshold number separating those with routine publishing experiences from with breakout possibilities has to be around 20,000 copies first year hc net. Above that, things can start to happen. Below that, and you're getting the routine print-stock-ship-and-move-on treatment from your publisher. Of course, everything is relative to expectations.

Hotdogs, Chickenhawks, Mustard & Cream: Two Editors Talk Midlist

2005-01-13T17:34:00.000-05:00

MORE ADVENTURES IN THE WORLD OF MIDLIST PUBLISHING!

GERRY HOWARD
Executive Editor-At-Large, Broadway Doubleday

To paraphrase "Born Under a Bad Sign" (and isn't it wonderful that Cream is reuniting at the Royal Albert Hall?), if it wasn for midlist, I wouldn't have no list at all. Well, that's not precisely true, but it is true enough. I don't know what it says about me, but the majority of the really successful books and authors I've published started life as midlist fodder -- and sometimes just barely that. To wit: Robert Mason's CHICKENHAWK, Chuck Palahniuk's FIGHT CLUB, Walter Mosley's DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS, Irvine Welsh's THE ACID HOUSE , James Welch's FOOLS CROW, Paul Auster's IN THE COUNTRY OF LAST THINGS, David Foster Wallace's THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM -- no sensible accountant would have looked at any of those books in their gestational period and said, "You know, I think this one's going to be a moneyspinner." Just one of many many differences between accountants and editors. Furthermore, the whole midlist-who cares? mindset scants the highly profitable activities of trade paperback editors, a lot of whose work involves careful list maintenance and below-the radar reissues that really pay off in the long run.

A story: In 1983 my friend Luann Walther, then at Bantam, gave me a tip that they were letting go a perfectly wonderful oral history of the civil rights movement by Howell Raines, MY SOUL IS RESTED, in its mass market edition. I was at Penguin and we both knew that this book could find a nice place in the high school and college adoption market. So we paid Putnam's, the original hardcover publisher, $5000 for reprint rights and off we went. That book is still in print in Penguin after twenty years and twenty reprints and I'm sure has sold well north of a hundred thousand copies.

Stick to your knitting and you eventually get a hell of a lot of sweaters.

* * *

MARJORIE BRAMAN
VP & Executive Editor, HarperCollins

There are, as I see it, two different definitions of midlist. There are books that, by their very nature, represent the dreaded kind of midlist--and quite honestly, as an editor, it's this variety that I try to avoid. These are the books--and we all know them--that are often very readable, but in the end, just don't seem necessary. And I don't know any editor who wants to spend the kind of energy and time a novel demands on a book that's not necessary. Doesn't mean we don't like it--just that we can live without it.

Then there's the other kind of midlist, the kind that is necessary, but for which there might not be a huge demand. Think about a grocery store. While a grocery store might carry a great many jars of mayonnaise--everyone uses mayonnaise, and lots of circumstances call for mayonnaise--it's important to carry mustard too. Even, perhaps, in greater variety (spicy; Dijon; good ol' fashioned yellow...)--because while fewer people use mustard, those who do have a passion for it are very particular about which style of mustard best suits them. And furthermore, what would a hotdog be without mustard?

So, to twist this metaphor around somewhat unconscionably, midlist books--the good kind of midlist--are like the mustard of the bookstore. Maybe not as many people want those books as want you-know-which-book, but still, they exist--and they exist in part not because their commerce is instantly obvious, but because an editor is unable to walk away, unable to say no. Which, by the way, is what is called love--and what's meant when editors say "I have to LOVE a novel to buy it." That's not just something we say, it's true; furthermore, if I love a novel, isn't it logical to think that there's some small (or even not so small portion) of the readership who will love it too? Yes. Most definitely YES.

But how to reach them? What's the difference between a very good, freshly told coming-of-age story from the midlist and THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES? Is it marketing? Word of mouth? Does that book have something that no other coming-of-age book that was published that year have? What's the difference between a book like THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB and any other non-romance "smart women's fiction" (yes, that's how I would describe that book and NO, it's not a pejorative)--the title? That's the big question.

The optimistic me is always looking at books like the two mentioned above, and others that find their way onto the bestseller lists (THE LOVELY BONES; THE CURIOUS INCIDENT...) or even just break out of the clutter that makes up the New Releases wall at B&N (THE FAMILY TREE; LITTLE CHILDREN...). These are books that through whatever magic, are neither "literary" or "commercial"--the standard neither-fish-nor-fowl derogatory definition of midlist--and yet, they found "their" readership...and beyond.

So yes, for two reasons, the midlist is the back bone of publishing. One, because everyone needs to spice up their hotdogs, even if they don't eat hotdogs every day; and two, because you never know, one day everyone wakes up and on the very same day, has a taste for something that cries out for mustard. And then you got yourself a bestseller.

'Does a rose by any other name....' Further considerations of the malodorous connotations of the term "Midlist"

2005-01-12T23:59:00.000-05:00

As noted in a previous post, I've been thinking about the notion of "midlist," and recently sent out a bunch of queries to a bunch of editors and agents; and received a number of responses, which you'll find here in due course. Here's the core of my letter, followed by the first of many replies.

I’d love to know your thoughts on the term “midlist”—partly because I think it’s a term that has an unfairly pejorative connotation, which, in turn, perhaps fuels misconceptions about the realities (even today) of the vast majority of the titles that are published today.
If, for instance, we were to define midlist as books for which the (actual) first printing is less than 15,000--and in my opinion a considerable majority of first printings fall into that category--then mightn’t it be argued that midlist publishing still, in some way, constitutes something like the back-bone of publishing? Or is it, in fact, our equivalent of the Mendoza Line?
I’m thinking the term is in need of a public relations campaign… I would love to hear any thoughts you have, including, even, what you see as the category’s first-print parameters.

The very first response came from Daniel Menaker, longtime New Yorker editor and currently Executive Editor-in-Chief of the Random House Publishing Group.

DANIEL MENAKER: I’ll expose my ignorance and say that the only thing I know about the Mendoza Line is that it sounds like cocaine jargon. If midlist publishing refers to books that go out at 15 k or less, then the situation resembles what it was at Starbuck’s until recently, in which the smallest coffee you could get was a “tall.” Is there a term for lower-than-midlist books? What would it be? Hypolist? Lowlist? Teeny-tiny books?

Publishing seems to me at a point where it wants to be (and to some extent, for the time being, anyway, is managing to be) increasingly “hit-driven.” The trouble is that as with movies, there is no way to guarantee that the key to the ignition of the hit you’re trying to drive will actually turn and the engine will start. So I’m not sure about ["midlist as"] backbone—to rather violently switch metaphors in mid-paragraph—but I do think that books that go out at less than 15k do and will continue to function as stem cells that can and occasionally do develop into those fully formed organisms called bestsellers. And even when they don’t but receive wide critical acclaim or add in some significant way to our culture of letters, they add luster and pride to the house that publishes them and may help to attract new hitdrivers to that house.

We all have to continue to publish such books, it seems to me, and do so with pride and with as much imagination--which is not the worst substitute for a big marketing budget--as we can, in the hope that, unless what appears to be a recent change in reading and book-buying habits becomes permanent, eventually more readers will rediscover the joy of discovery. If you and your readers will visit the website of Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a Random House writer and author of “Fooled by Randomness,” you will find a number of brilliant analyses of the phenomenon of outlier events, one of which is, for instance, the emergence of this or that movie star, and another of which is the surprise bestseller.

Yes, I think a useful first-print-run definition of midlist books is 15k or less.

The Tortoise and the Hare...In Which We Attempt To Rehabilitate the Term "Midlist"

2005-01-11T22:30:00.000-05:00

Recently I've been thinking about the term “midlist.” What does the word mean? What characteristics does a midlist title possess? Is a book born a midlist title, or does it become one, retroactively? Is membership determined by the size of the first printing? by the net sale? If an editor pays $250,000 for a book, can it, under any circumstance, be deemed a midlist title? Why is the term "backlist" viewed so favorably, when the connotations of "midlist" are so all-fire nasty? At what point did the word acquire such...smelliness?

Seems there's no insult more insulting than being characterized as a midlist author... But why? When did the term cease to mean "dependable seller" (similar in this way to "backlist"), as it had for generations? And is there any hope of "rehabilitating" the term, giving it a make-over, a face-lift--of returning to it, if not glory, then at least a modicum of its former dignity?

Hopeless, you say? [Yes, a lot of you do...More posts on this subject to follow.] I say, maybe not. Let us consider the parable of the Tortoise and the Hare...

THE HARE
I buy a stunning literary debut from Nicole Aragi for $175,000. There is much in-house enthusiasm. The author is young, smart, leggy and well-connected. Her book garners glowing blurbs from Ann Beattie, Emily (but not Charlotte) Bronte, and Rick Moody. It gets rave reviews in EW, People and USA Today--but a blah book report (errr, review--sketchy plot summary + curious commentary on dubious issues of grammar...) from Janet Maslin, and NO ANNA QUINDLEN ENDORSEMENT. There was only one printing, 14,300 copies in total; a net hardcover sale of 7900; and another opportunity (still t.k.) to pick up additional readers in the forthcoming trade paperback.

In the post-mortem, how do I grade this performance? how do I spin it? Well. It's not easy to drop into casual conversation phrases like "a memorable debut," but it can be done. Then I shrug knowingly--conveying factors that were outside the realm of my control--and explain that we gave it a genuine front-list push, generated lots of buzz, lots of good will for the author, et cetera. "It just didn't quite catch fire. " Another shrug, Tony Soprano-style--whattaya gonna do? Then I declare my passion for the writer, my determination to make hay with the paperback, and to start all over again with the next book...

We lost money, yes, but--hey, literary fiction's a tough racket, and we did a respectable job of setting the table for an author whose star is only going to continue to rise. (Next time around, though, the advance'll be a bit lower...)

THE TORTOISE
Another literary agent, Emma Parry, calls me up, says she's got this wonderful work of narrative nonfiction by an unknown historian, a book about a somewhat obscure 18th-century mesmerist. Sounds small, I say (to myself), but Emma has a good eye for this sort of thing, and convinces me that the guy has cured himself of the dread palsy of the academic writer, so I say, Sure, I'd like to take a look. And she's right, it's good. The author's not at Oxford or Harvard--try Boise State--but he's written an impressive book about a fascinating character whose life intersected with all sorts of Important Characters. Three publishers offer, but at a lower level than Emma is accustomed to; and eventually we settle on an advance of $50,000.

The timing gets screwed up--he'd committed to teach summer school when the book is published; and, smart though he is, he's neither got Clark Kent looks nor a charismatic personality. [Memo to self: talk to Au. about his comb-over.] Publicity opportunities, subsequently, are limited, but the book is nicely, broadly reviewed. Nonetheless, we're mildly surprised to hear that the NYTimes will be reviewing it, then terrified when we discover that it's Michiko Kakutani who's chosen it. But she gives it a thumbs up, and a nicely blurbable quote for the front cover of the paperback. It caps off a satisfying if modest publication.

At post-mortem time, we review the numbers. The first printing (of 7200 copies) is followed by three more; at the end of the day we've shipped 13,200 and netted 8600. With a trade paperback to follow. The author plans to write another book; with his teaching load it'll be three years at least before he delivers; but the experience is a good one, and we give him a raise to what we'll euphemistically call "high five figures."

So how do I talk about this one? Well, naturally, I describe My Guy as the next Simon Schama. But set aside the hyperbole a moment, and the answer's simple: what we've got, in this case, is a classic midlist success story.

Questions? Comments?

Holy Grail According to Max

2005-01-10T22:33:00.000-05:00

Recently I sent out emails to about 600 of my closest pals (editors, mostly), asking a handful of the important questions --

if you're having lunch with Mort Janklow, where should you take him?
what's a good place to get collar stays (the brass ones)?
when you take a nap in the middle of the day, is it best to A) close your office door, or B) turn to face the window and pretend to be reading a manuscript?

-- that every young turk in publishing (whether or not your "Turkishness" was officially acknowledged recently by PW) needs answers to. I've sent out any number of similar email queries to my colleagues in publishing over the last several months, and have received replies to virtually none of them--until very recently. Based on the tone of some of these recent replies, it appears that I've reached a tipping point of sorts--that is, I've officially become a nuisance (or worse). One of the best & coolest editors in town brushed aside my question and referred obliquely to

"people who pretend to know something about publishing but in fact do not." [Could he mean me?]

Another top editor went into somewhat greater detail.

"Max, I saw Michael Cader’s column vouching for your being a good guy, etc. I have to say, though, that I don’t really understand why any editor would want to give away – beyond his own firm – knowledge capital he or she has amassed over the course of a career. It is effort expended without tangible return. I understand that you see this enterprise as working in everybody’s favor, and maybe I’m shortsighted for not “getting it,” but it seems to me that the best can be hoped for is that somewhere accessible on line there’ll be a sort of “best practices compendium” for everyone to access – and I wonder if most houses don’t in fact already create something tantamount to that by pooling staffers’ ideas."

To the first comment, I say, guilty as charged: I don't know jack; how I got as far as I have in this business is anybody's guess; and I'm scrambling now to see if I can learn a few things before it's too late.

But this second comment? If only!

The "best practices compendium" is precisely what I've been looking for (call it the Holy Grail According to Max)--a database full of good ideas; it's the reason, in fact, I started this blog, in hopes of stumbling across material worthy to be included therein... We used to have such a compendium here (where I work), but its contents have been badly pilferred... Remember the library's copy of the 1977 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue that you snuck into some behind-the-stacks cubby, only to discover that the pictures themselves had already been ripped from the binding? Well, it's like that: there's a folder here marked "best practices compendium," but the only things it contains are a 10-year old Esquire article on "Publishing's White-Hot Center," a yellowed pamphlet from 1962 that instructs "gentlemen" on the art of tying a bow-tie, and an advertisement for a cutting-edge personal computer called the TRS-80.

A "best practices compendium"--just think of it. Question is, do any publishers exist today that actually have/make time to pool the ideas of their employees, to brainstorm in hopes of coming up with fresh approaches to the same old problems?

I suspect there are a lot of us inclined to thing that the better question is, What's the point anyway? Is a bright baker's dozen gathered around a conference-room table going to come up with a practical & implementable alternative to virtually unlimited bookseller returns? to the centralization of all aspects of our industry? to the collapse of the mass market business? to the virtual disappearance of serious literary publishing by mainstream presses?

Well, pessimism be damned. It's time for me to make my first big acquisition of 2005--so if anybody's got a "best practices compendium" less than five years past its expiration date, I'm buying. And let's move quickly--I'm in the mood for a pre-empt...

PAPERBACK WRITER: Vol. I of the Collected Responses To the Mad Max Author Survey

2005-01-06T01:02:00.000-05:00

Long ago, in a land far, far away—that is, back in October ’04, just a couple of weeks after the launch of BOOKANGST 101—Mad Max sent out a “Call to Writers” survey asking for intimate responses from published authors to a series of questions about how their books had been marketed and published.

By now most of those who were brave enough to respond are surely convinced the whole thing was a hoax; the plain truth is, Max bit off more than he could chew. The writers’ experiences were so different one from another that it was impossible to extrapolate from them the kind of “quantifiable data” he’d hoped they’d yield. Each had its own distinct arc and required its own distinct narrative. Today’s is the first of those…

[GENERAL NOTE: Thanks to all the authors who've participated in this survey; and thanks, too, for your patience. More pieces based on your comments are in the works. --MMP]

One of the most unexpected responses to the survey came from a self-proclaimed "Paperback Writer," a woman who makes no bones about writing “genre” fiction—indeed, there are few genres she hasn’t mastered—who writes six to eight novels a year, under such names as S.L. Viehl, Rebecca Kelly, Jessica Hall and Gena Hale. Six of her novels have been Locus science fiction bestsellers. (Memo to tyros: don't call it "sci-fi"--the proper shorthand is "SF".) Beginning in March '05, writing as Lynn Viehl, she launches a new series called the Darkyn novels--the first of which is IF ANGELS BURN.

[Announcer's voice over p.a.: Ladies and Gentlemen, please give a warm Mad Max welcome to LYNN VIEHL!!! Crowd roars as LV enters, STAGE RIGHT, and sits in a chair across from The Host, who is wearing a handsome Brooks Bros. Haz-Mat suit. Interview begins.]

MMP: First off, Lennon & McCartney's "Paperback Writer" is one of the hippest & catchiest songs the Beatles ever recorded. It also happens to be the title of your blog. I suspect this is not a coincidence—because in the same way there's not a hint of irony or apology in the song, I get the sense that you've had your fill of authors looking down on you as a "paperback writer" and, in fact, you're pretty damn proud of what you've accomplished. Care to comment?

[As LV begins to answer, the Announcer's voice can be heard over the p.a., singing, in operatic baritone: It's a steady job/And I wanna be a paperback writer]

LYNN VIEHL: I did name the weblog after the Beatles tune, which always makes me laugh when I listen to it. I'm very proud and happy to be a working writer.

M: I have to say: of all the people who responded to my "Call to Authors," questionnaire, your story struck me as the most upbeat. You seemed not to have met the same level of disappointment and frustration that a lot of the other authors spoke about. Were you sugar-coating? Or is it that, because you're writing paperback originals, you come at this with a different—perhaps more realistic?—set of expectations than many so-called "literary" novelists? LV: I've had my disappointments, but not many, and they made me work harder. I didn't know anything about the industry and I never met another writer until after I was published, so that may have something to do with it. My only expectation was simply to see my name on the cover of a book, and I've done that twenty-six times in five years.

M: You also seemed to be among the best paid of all of the respondents.
LV: The reason my writing income is in six figures is because I write very fast, I'm aggressive about finding work, and I'm willing to work 12 to 16 hours a day at the job.

M: If you don’t mind my asking, what's the most you've ever been paid for a book? And how many do you generally write per year?
LV: The largest advance I've been paid for a single novel is $25,000.00. I write six to eight novels a year.

M: So far you've written science fiction, inspirational fiction, romance, romantic suspense... and now you're about to launch the new "Darkyn" series (from Signet), which is described on your website as "dark fantasy." The first of these, IF ANGELS BURN (great title, b.t.w.), comes out in March '05; its sequel, PRIVATE DEMON, follows in Dec. '05, and Book III, DARKNESS HAS NO NEED, about 8 months after that. Tell me a little about the series.
LV: The Darkyn novels evolved from a series of short stories about vampires that I wrote for my readers and posted on my old web site. The basic premise for the series is, what if humans were the monsters, and vampires the victims?

M: Have you finished writing Book II yet? And will the series continue on past Book III?
LV: I am right in the middle of writing book two. My contract is for three novels, but it's an open-ended series, and I've outlined five more novels. If the series does well, I'll keep writing them.

M: Back on November 22--so 3+ months prior to publication of IF ANGELS BURN--you launched a very spiffy website, Darkyn.com, that features a nifty animation--you described it as "big, splashy, almost like the traler for a Hollywood movie," as well as dramatic use of audio, a chat room... And in a little over a month, you've already got more than 30 fans actively interacting on the message board. Whose idea was the site? Who designed it, and how did you find them? How much did it cost? And who paid--you, or Signet?
LV: The site was my idea, but it was designed by Metro DMA. I wanted the best designers in the business, and several people in the industry recommended them. The site design, hosting and publicity for it cost about 20% of my advance for the three books. I paid for the entire thing myself.

M: What do you hope to accomplish with this site?
LV: My schedule doesn't allow me time for most of the traditional methods of self-promotion, such as book signings and appearances at conventions, and I don't think they work anyway, so a web site was the logical alternative. I'd like the site to be a place where readers gather and talk as well as find out more about my work.

M: And how do you go about getting attention for it? Do you have your own database of names that you've collected from your previous books, people you notified when the site went live? Does Signet have a list?
LV: I've never done this sort of thing before, so I've never had a database. For the site launch, I contacted people in the industry I thought might be interested, obtained their permission to send them a press release, and built a one-time-only mailing list (I hate SPAM so I was careful to ask first.). I also sent PRs to all the newspapers in my home state, the major national newspapers and a select number of industry and trade magazines. Signet probably has their own list, but I didn't involve the publisher.

M: How is this potentially different from what you've done before? And what's your sense, at this point, of how well it's working?
LV: I've only ever done active promotion for one novel before this, StarDoc—my first novel, which was a LOCUS bestseller, as were all four of its sequels—and did the usual postcards/flyers/ bookmarks/book signings/convention appearances. Despite the expense and time sunk into that publicity, it did virtually nothing for the book. I wasn't comfortable with it, either. I'm not much of a public figure and a lot of traditional self-promotion has a desperate feel to it that I don't like. Or maybe I'm just not that desperate.

After StarDoc I dropped all the self-promotion, built my first web site for my readers and from there just stayed home and concentrated on writing books. My numbers gradually built and all of my books sold well. The web site became a place where I interacted with readers, and many of the stories I wrote for them eventually became novels that I sold.

The Darkyn site is basically growing at the same rate that my first web site did. If pre-orders keep rolling in, I'll probably get a larger first print run (that was one of my strategies, to build momentum for the books.) My readers are delighted with it. Signet tells me the book buyers are very interested in the first novel, and they've assigned a publicist to handle the press inquiries. I've made a bunch of new contacts in the industry. I'm invested in this for the long-term, so all this works for me.

On the down side, I had hoped to see more buzz on the internet about the Darkyn site launch, but that didn't happen. Could have something to do with the fact that my press release collided with Thanksgiving week, and I was polite and conservative with distribution, but it's easy to make excuses. I’d thought that the fact I haven’t promoted myself in quite a while, combined with Metro DMA's reputation would generate some interest, but the lack of self-promotion may have actually worked against me this time. As one industry pro told me, "I've never heard of you. Why should I bother checking out your web site?"

Even the down side is good. Writers don't like being served humble pie, but without regular helpings we become total ego monsters.

M: Aside from the online piece, what plans does Signet have to promote the series? And/or what plans do you have, separate from them?
LV: Signet has planned to promote the series over on their author promo site, writerspace.com. They've been very supportive in providing me with everything I needed for the web site designers, too, especially the art department. I will be maintaining a presence at the web site, and sending out excerpt chapbooks to select conventions, but my writing schedule is very tight, and that's all I have time to do.

M: As I mentioned earlier, you have a blog called “Paperback Writer. Do you see blogs principally as vehicles for a more intimate kind of communication, or do you see them potentially benefiting writers in a commercial way? Differently, I mean, from the posting boards at the Darkyn site?
LV: I had some second thoughts about even mentioning my weblog in this interview. My first weblog, StarLines, became a magnet for trolls and stalkers, and I got tired of dealing with that. Paperback Writer was something I started writing privately for my friends, and I've been journaling almost daily since 1974, so I enjoy it, too. I've disabled comments, and I'm trying to be more politic, so this one might work out better than the earlier one did. It's a wait-and-see experiment.

M: In the original author survey, I'd asked what marketing efforts, in your experience, had been the least effective in terms of selling books. You answered "self promotion, going to conventions." Yet to my next question--What would you like to see happen for you/your books in the future—you gave an answer that concluded "I'll do the rest on my own." Is that not self-promotion? Can you clarify what you mean?
LV: I should have said "traditional self-promotion" because the whole booksigning/postcards/ bookmarks/convention thing is outdated and virtually worthless in a marketing sense. Writers need to pursue new, inventive avenues to market their books. That's what I've tried to do with my website.

[Announcer's voice over p.a., as author exits: Ladies and Gentlemen, IF ANGELS BURN, the launch volume of Lynn Viehl’s Darkyn series, goes on sale in March 2005. Interview ends.]

YOUNG TURKS & OLD FARTS

2005-01-05T01:25:00.000-05:00

Young Turks

2005-01-05T01:15:00.000-05:00

OK, time to raz the young'uns...

Yessir: it's time the Young Turks celebrated in this week's Publishers Weekly (The Next Hot Young Thang(s) by Steven Zeitchik, PW, 1/3/05) get their well-deserved ritual hazing--for being hip, young, talented, and not publicity-averse. Not an actual shit-kicking, mind you, but enough of a heckle to bear witness to the sort of public embarrassment befitting their crime (youth, talent) over the next few days--enough to raise more than the occasional blush to their youthful cheeks. For legal reasons I can't be explicit as to how you might accomplish this.

[I expressly do NOT condone swirlies, paddle-wacking, keg-chugging or any of the other college fraternity shenanigans that might appear, say, in a Tom Wolfe novel.]

And you'll find, those of you who partake of this particular sport, that it has a residual benefit: it allows you to rid yourself of the green slime of envy in a quasi-acceptable fashion! Instead of pouring glue into a Young Turk's keyboard, say, use a congratulatory slap on the back as a way to plant a sign that reads

"I love my mommy!"

All in good fun! And in case you don't know the targets of these high jinks (and most every house has one), the under-35 so-and-so's who've been designated for greatness are:

[Tuxedo-clad announcer enters, stage right, steps into a boxing ring, and is handed a microphone bearing the World Wrestling Federation logo. "LADIES and GENTLEMEN! Let's give a LOUD WWF Smackdown welcome to the FUTURE of AMERICAN CULTURE!" Crowd goes wild.]
[From stage left, ten YOUNG TURKS are seen waiting in the wings, clad in hooded silk robes, each carrying an armful of carnations. As their names are called, they enter the ring and raise their fists over their heads, acknowledging the ecstatic crowd.]
"And HERE THEY COME! PLEASE WELCOME
Tim Duggan, HarperCollins!
Chris Jackson, Crown!
Gillian Blake, Bloomsbury!
Geoff Shandler, Little Brown!
Sean McDonald, Riverhead!
Molly Stern, Viking!
Becky Cole, Broadway!
Richard Nash, Soft Skull Press!
David Levithan, Scholastic!
Nancy Hinkel, Knopf Books for Young Readers!

[Crowd goes wild, begins chanting: "OUR YOUNG TURKS! OUR YOUNG TURKS!" The Turks, embarrassed, humbled, but undeniably proud, blow kisses and toss carnations. CREDITS ROLL.]

But seriously: congratulations to all y'all. If the last list of Turks PW selected, seven years ago, is any indication--Eamon Dolan, Jon Karp, Ira Silverberg, Carolyn Carlson, Alane Mason, Amy Einhorn, Geoff Kloske, Matt Weiland, Holly McGhee--your futures are very bright indeed.

In the meantime, enjoy the vast quantities of unsolicated manuscripts that are already on their way to you now!

Old Farts*

2005-01-05T01:10:00.000-05:00

*Old Farts is a time-honored title of respect for those no-longer-so-young Turks who've been around long enough to reap the benefits of experience...

Attention Young Turks:

Your first order of business (once you've recovered from the hazing and celebrating) is to read an invaluable work of publishing history-slash-scholarship that appears this month at Backspace.org, by literary agent Richard Curtis, which describes (with the drama of a train-wreck) the changes in the paperback business that have so drastically altered the business.

It's must reading for anybody interested in the state of publishing today. Imagine a time, not so long ago, when supermarket and truck-stop mass market book racks were stocked and managed by scores of men and women--"jobbers"--working out of the back of their station wagons...

"Publishing in the 21st Century, Part II: Paperbacks--The Tail that Wagged the Dog"

(Thanks to novelist Jenny Siler for alerting me to this article.)

"Hail the Litblogs"

2005-01-03T01:41:00.000-05:00

"The recent explosion of literary weblogs has to be the most encouraging development in recent memory," writes novelist/"Book Beat" columnist David Milofsky in Sunday's [Jan. 2 '05] Denver Post. In which he converses w/ Mark Sarvas, Maud Newton, Carrie Frye and Traver Kauffman, among others (including yours truly).

MS: The Elegant Variation.
MN: Maud Newton dot com.
CF: Tingle Alley.
TH: Rake's Progress.

BEST OF BLANK: End-of-Year Ruminations & New Year Aspirations. [The Longest Post of the Year (So Far)]

2005-01-01T21:00:00.000-05:00

1. The Making of Lists

2005-01-01T20:50:00.000-05:00

So where do you stand on these ubiquitous End-Of-Year round-ups? As the clock winds down, the lists pile up; everywhere you turn, folks smart and dumb weigh in with their "BEST BLANKS OF 2004" lists. Best Book, Best Movie, Best Theater Experience, Best Album By A Teenage Girl Wearing Imitation Punk Rock Jewelry, Best Massage Parlor, et cetera...

It drives me crazy--so little variation, generally, in any category--so, naturally, I wanted to get in on the action. Nothing like conformity/unanimity to make a fella feel snog as a bog in a blog in such uncertain times....

You may say, ENOUGH with the g.d. lists already! Spare us, Max! Besides, look at the date! It's 2005 already--you missed your chance! Leave us be! To which I respond, Hey, brothers and sisters--do not constrain me with your bourgeois notions of linear time! Genius answers not to the tyranny of the clock!

No, indeed, brothers and sisters, there's a far BETTER reason for me not to weigh in on the BEST BLANKS of 2004. Like, for instance, the fact that I have no basis for forming any opinions about the quality of any of the cultural product the previous 365 days hath produced. Opinions of this sort require one to have imbibbed in some of this product... And the sad truth is, I was rather too much the teetotaller in toothousandfour.

Is it literally true that the ONLY books I read in 2004 are the ones I published? Nearly so. And while several of those really were, in my humble opinion, among the best books of 2004--

[several of them actually DID appear on "Best Books" lists put out by ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, and KIRKUS REVIEWS--demonstrating once again why never to underestimate the benefits of end-of-year payola...]

--the real reason you didn't get a BEST BLANKS list from me (and I'm sure you were waiting w/ bated breath...) and won't hear my opinions on the merits of books by Phillip Roth, Bob Dylan, Margot Livesey, Stephen Greenblatt, Jenna Jameson (and so many others I'd have expected to include on my list), is simple. I didn't read 'em.

So, OK, Max: what do you have for us? Any delightfully off-beat recitations of idiosyncratic punctuation? Predictions about the five Scandinavian novelists most likely to appear (in translation) on the New York Times bestseller list in 2005? An opinion, perhaps, about the spinetingly-ness of the newest Clive Cussler novel?

Alas, no... (Though I will say, with the unshakeable confidence of one who has neither seen the movie nor read its reviews, that MEET THE FOCKERS is surely a piece o' shite, regardless of what $46.1 million in opening weekend boxoffice receipts might say to the contrary. Cripes a-mighty, folks--do we as Americans really miss DHARMA & GREG that much?!)

Nor do I have anything perky or encouraging to predict for the year ahead (2005) in publishing--except (again) to crow that a number of my own books, coming soon to bookstores near you, have been getting wonderful starred reviews in the usual prepub venues, have been chosen by the kind folks at BookSense (not that I've ever seen evidence that being a BookSense pick translates into more than a six-pack's worth of additional sales...), and so on. Trends? Predictions? Hell: I just want my own books to sell lots of copies. The rest of you be damned.

Ahh, but enough about me, darling: how do you like my dress?

2. Data [Variety=Raw; Grade=Low]

2005-01-01T20:40:00.000-05:00

The best I can offer by way of summarizing any piece of 2004, I'm afraid, on this first day of 2005, is a pitiful batch of numerals--blog-stats [drumroll, please] that report the results of a Visitor Survey I posted here at BOOKANGST 101 a couple of months ago. I was curious: who the heck reads this thing? --who, brothers and sisters, are you? So I asked, and you answered, and the data has been milled. Statistical analysis is a subject of great personal interest, and (as usual) my lack of expertise will not dissuade me from drawing a few fascinating conclusions. (Did I need to see the FOCKERS movie to render a reasonably astute judgment? I rest my case.)

Brothers and sisters, the raw data. You identified yourselves as follows:
26%....."Author--book(s) published or under contract"
17%....."Writer/Reviewer published in newspapers/magazines"
17%....."As-yet unpublished writer"
07%....."Media Reporter/Blogger"
10%....."Publishing: Editorial"
02%....."Publishing: Ed-in-Chief/Assoc Publisher/Publisher"
07%....."Publishing: Publicity/Marketing/Sales"
03%....."Literary Agent"
03%....."Bookseller"
08%....."Other/Just Curious"

OK, kids--let's get out our calculators.

3. Conclusions? Just As We Feared...

2005-01-01T20:30:00.000-05:00

Here now are the fascinating conclusions of our data, processed:

■ 67% OF THE RESPONDENTS ARE WRITERS
MadMax Statistical Analysis Reveals:
THE REAL CRISIS IN PUBLISHING IS THAT WRITERS

have too much time on their hands;
aren't working hard enough;
need to find some new hobbies;
all of the above.

So, dear authors: next time it takes you six months to come up with that sure-fire, break-through opening paragraph, remember that there are those out there--Stephen King, Nora Roberts, James Patterson Incorporated, Bernard Cornwell, to name but a few--who write two, sometimes three books a year. You can be damned sure they're not wasting time cruising the blogosphere...

■ JUST 22% OF THE RESPONDENTS WORK IN THE INDUSTRY
MadMax Statistical Analysis Reveals:
THE REAL CRISIS IN PUBLISHING IS THAT "INSIDERS"

Are a secretive and distrustful lot, inexplicably protective of the keys to their success
Are too busy packing for the Hamptons to respond to surveys from crank blogsters
Get too much junk email from porn-sites and crank blogsters
Love Bob Marley's song "Down-presser Man" precisely because they see themselves in the title role, and envision keeping their boot-heels planted firmly on the necks of writers till the end of time, or the end of publishing, whichever comes first
Know "expert" information when they see it (or, in this case, when they don't)
All of the above

■ 7% OF THE RESPONDENTS DESCRIBE THEMSELVES AS "OTHER" MadMax Statistical Analysis Reveals:
THIS NUMBER, SINCE IT MATCHES THE "REAL" LEVEL OF NATIONAL UNEMPLOYMENT, IS STATISTICALLY INSIGNIFICANT. WE KNOW HOW YOU SLACKERS ARE SPENDING YOUR TIME, AND IT AIN'T PRETTY.

■ 3% OF THE RESPONDENTS ARE BOOKSELLERS
MadMax Statistical Analysis Reveals:
JUST THREE PERCENT?! DIDN'T YOU READ "A LOVE-LETTER TO BOOKSELLERS"?!