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Feb 21 2012
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Community, Status of the Novel, Writing Advice

What Can Authors and Publishers Learn from the Music Industry?

May you live in interesting times is a phrase popularly purported to be an ancient Chinese curse. For the publishing and music industries, it might not be too much to say that times have never been more interesting since the beginning of the printed word itself (a la Gutenberg) and the invention of the electric guitar. Perhaps it’s not so ironic that Project Gutenberg claims to be the first producer of free ebooks? However you view it, change is happening extremely fast. The times are “interesting,” and for a good number of professionals this is a curse. For most, though, it’s a boon.

Still, it’s not clear how the democratization of either the print or music industries can best be used to benefit the vast majority for whom the gates have been thrown wide open. For the past two or three years, however, as I began to put my toe back in the music pond and actually started considering how to promote One Shoe Untied’s music, I’ve been working on this very issue. (It’s beside the point the band didn’t work out.)

Here’s my question:

Why is it considered cool/innovative/grassroots for a band to “start their own label,” but for a writer, it’s still considered “minor leagues”?

In some ways the path to publication as a novelist sounds simple enough. You break through with a literary agent, get published by a New York publisher (one of the Big 6), and PRESTO, you’ve made it. By some estimates, the Big 6 still own distribution spots in about 80% of the brick-and-mortar booksellers stalls. Does it matter that it doesn’t sell well? Yes and no. Mostly yes of course. But there are ways around a substandard first showing, especially if one continues to simply write well. With the hardest part out of the way, breaking through in the first place, it’s not like you’re blackballed because you didn’t hit the bestseller list. On the other hand, for someone like me, a “debut novelist of literary fiction” (yikes!), whose narrative takes place more or less in the course of an hour, few literary agents are going to swing the gates open if for no other reason than it doesn’t exactly smack of bestseller status to a Big 6 publisher (an understatement to be sure). So, Atticus Books and I are trying something new, something we’d like to see as innovative. Lately, however, especially with a national writers’ conference coming up rapidly (AWP), I’ve been worried about how my approach will be viewed in the eyes of the literary community.

The breakdown of the major recording companies had to deal with the breakdown first, and it’s been well-documented that they made massive mistakes. While iTunes has certainly figured out a lot about how to maximize their opportunity to profit from recording artists, the truth is people still widely torrent whatever it is they can’t or don’t want to pay for. While the development of ebook readers has helped the publishing industry avoid gaffes such as hunting down purported offenders instead of seeing the very clear writing on the wall and realizing new ways to monetize opportunities, why are attitudes so slow to change about the means and methods of publishing?

What can publishers and the creators of publishing content (writers!) learn from what’s happened (and continues to) in the music industry? Wilco’s latest release, The Whole Love, was produced through their very own label and they even decided to sing about it in one song (see video). I wonder if it’s not just publishers and distributors who need to “get with the times,” but authors and writers themselves. If I believe in my work, if I can be the best promoter of my material, if I stand to make far higher royalties on my own, and if I can distribute my material by ebook to the world in (more or less) an instant, why is this not being utterly embraced?

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Feb 16 2012
6 Comments
Community, Status of the Novel, Writing Advice

For the Love of a Typewriter: Our Love/Hate Relationship with Social Media

It’s a double-edged sword this social media stuff isn’t it? We really can’t do without it. Not only because we have this kind of fetish for being connected, but it’s just such a powerful tool–literally transforming the world. It’s also a lot of fun, right? Not always fun. Facebook can be a bore and Twitter sometimes feels like everyone is patting themselves on the back for tweeting every 10 minutes (I understand there’s an app for that), with few actually reading.

But, yesterday, as I was reading about Jennifer Egan’s candid discussion from last week about her apprehension of social media, something that had been rattling around in my subconscious surfaced. Here’s one sound-byte:

“Who cares that we can connect?” she said. “What’s the big deal? I think Facebook is colossally dull. I think it’s like everyone coming to live in a huge Soviet apartment block, [in] which everyone’s cell looks exactly the same.”

The power of this little computer-thing that I now type from is its own downfall, at least for one like me who needs to lose himself in his own narrative. Of course it’s beyond amazing that anytime there’s anything you need to know while writing the novel, simply click your browser button, Google the term you need–BOOM!–47 articles plus images of everything you want to know about your given subject. Isn’t that actually a great advantage for a novelist? In a sense, you could almost say that the flow of one’s narrative shouldn’t suffer “old-fashioned” interruptions because you can just incorporate what you need to know seamlessly into your day’s writing. But we all know that somehow it just doesn’t work out that way. There’s a reason why they call it “hyper” links.

You can get lost in the maze of links just from Wikipedia. You can hit the radio. You may feel compelled to check your two email accounts just to make sure everything is okay out there. And here you are reading my blog, wondering what you might do with it. Should you “Like” it (yes!)? Should you bother to comment, link it to Facebook or Twitter? What’s in it for you? Will I now read your blog? Are we all just running in circles clinging to the illusion of connection? See how I get carried away? Maybe all I’m really doing is maximizing my capacity for ADD. So, here’s the question: What about inventing “the new typewriter”?

I’m serious. What about creating an instrument that typed as smoothly as my MacBook, but felt like an instrument at its purest, its singularity? No distractions. Just you and your disconnected, simple machine. It could be huge.

Now, all you have to do is launch it with a massive social media campaign.

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Feb 09 2012
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Book Reviews, Status of the Novel

Dickens After the Party

What with the recent passing of his 200th anniversary, have you had enough about Dickens lately? All kinds of things have floated through the media the past few days about Dickens. Everything from his prodigious imagination, incomparable energy and drive, to the nasty truth that he was a poor father to his family. In particular, he was especially hard on his boys (his story suddenly reminds me of Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart), and also, especially in the end, coldly cruel to his wife.

You may have also heard on NPR how Dickens was writing these things as first drafts for the serial releases he wrote for (sometimes several at a time). Of course there is bad writing, but for the most part we’re reading what turns out to be great literature from first drafts. You’ve probably heard about how his father was a benevolent spendthrift who spent time in Debtor’s Prison, and Dickens, at the age of formative age of 15, got a real taste of working class life.

Dickens is important and massive in the annals of literature. That probably chased away my interest in him over the years. You just kind of assume you “know” Dickens because you’ve read a few of his novels back in college and graduate school or something. Also, he’s strongly associated in my mind with Christmas and Scrooge and Tiny Tim, and subconsciously I think of him as a morality tale writer. The truth is I now find his life, as much as his writing, more fascinating than ever. Of course Dickens’ narratives are profound and rich and anything but one-dimensional moralizing. On the other hand, if we think of how young he was when he died, how his own actions and way of life dramatically aged him, the secrets he took with him to his grave (so many of which are now widely-available public discourse), and I think we begin to very much see a Greek Tragedy (which is its own kind of morality tale).

Dickens is just far enough back that he seems ancient, located as he is in a time that seems irretrievably distant from our online and hyper-electronically formulated lives. As a writer, I think there’s been a kind of synchronicity of psychic development in my own mind meeting up with the timing of this Smithsonian Magazine’s emphasis on “obsession.” I realized, first, that the characters in my first two novels are highly obsessed people. All the characters in The Director of Happiness are obsessed, especially of course J.J. Fleming, the Cool Hunter himself. Certainly in Simon Krimple’s Wager, the narrator is obsessed with figuring out his next step in life and the meaning of Simon Krimple’s death.

Or maybe that’s the appeal of Dickens. His wide appeal to the struggling survivors, his penetrating observations into characters of all kinds. Maybe a New Critic wouldn’t want me or anyone else “meddling” with the life of an author’s past. We cannot (or at least should not) run to an author’s personal background in trying to make sense of the text. The text is what the author wants us to work with. But I think the triumph (of tragic Dickens) is that, at his best as a writer, he seems so focused on his readers. And all the while he was playing out a great tragic and often secretive life in his own five-act drama. And what do we make of his strenuous wishes, and specific requests left in his will to be buried privately and without ostentation and he ended up by public demand to be buried in Westminster Abbey?

Tragic or triumph, we end with irony.

…but if you’re really digging some more Dickens gossip…you can learn about how he sent a ‘handsome allowance’ to his student son for alcohol. Or you can go for more wholesome family fun at Dickens World.

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Feb 01 2012
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Status of the Novel, Writing Advice

How Do You Prepare for a Serial-Release Novel Launch in a Month?

The Gauntlet Thrown: Atticus Books has agreed to release my first novel, The Director of Happiness, in installments of two chapters a week for eight weeks, beginning this March. It works because the novel is written in 16 short chapters, and even with the footnotes comes out at 58,000 words. Pretty short.

How it Works: Well, that’s part of the process. Neither of us know exactly. This is virgin territory. One approach is that readers Sponsor (or Adopt) an Author by contributing to the novel and for it to reach goals along a thermometer line.

Complete the Dramatic Triangle. The first level along the thermometer triggers the author (me) to write the next perspective of the three major characters that form the dramatic triangle, creating suspense for readers as it further develops and complicates the novel. Now the Director of Happiness herself speaks from her own voice. Another level mark releases the third and final section of the triangle’s completion, the voice of the character “E.,” (the main character, J.J. Fleming’s, wife). Another mark can be sending the book into ebook status, and at the final mark the novel is sent into full print production, distribution and promotion following its online release and subsequent success. But the two other perspectives are only released in the print version! Oh, and the real incentive? The last two chapters are held back until it’s fully paid for. If it never is, then I’ve published a portion of what is now only one part of three parts of a novel. I have nothing to fear, and we’ve basically generated some buzz, learned from the experience, and published a portion of the novel.

How Did I Get Here?  In late August I had begun a second novel, and for the first couple of months it easily took the majority of whatever “professional development” time I had. A common enough writer-life problem. Perhaps even more importantly, I spent a lot of time carefully targeting publishers and agents who I would be proud to work with, and less on blitzing in at all costs. I knew I had a “product” I believed in, and it would be worth the wait to find the right place. I’d also been doing a lot of work for C&R Press, and we’d been working on these ideas–all of which sounded potentially great–but how to put them altogether? It was sort of like cold fusion.

Crazy Crazy? or Crazy like a Fox Crazy?  It seems for all the legitimate excitement and buzz in today’s publishing industry about e-everything, that writers of (it’s almost a bad word) literary fiction, cannot (and I will say for now should not) go the self-publishing route. Why not? Well, that’s a subject for another post. The fact does remain, for “hot topic” nonfiction, and often for genre fiction, self-publishing is a viable, even preferable, way to go, especially if you’re authentically driven to get behind your product. Just check out the persuasiveness from James Altucher’s recent blog post Why Every Entrepreneur Should Self-Publish a Book. He backs up his claims from experience with three major publishers. Or from a different perspective focusing strictly on the book publishing industry for writers, publishers and booksellers, consider Book Biz from Tim Byrd’s Under an Outlaw Moon blog.

Something Different about Atticus: While the idea was my own, a way “to get in the door” during a fairly dormant reading period across a great deal of the publishing world, and while the novel has not been officially “taken” by Atticus to print (which is a part of the suggested arrangement), I had no idea how excited I would be. I want to give a shout out to Atticus–specifically Dan Cafaro and Libby O’Neill. If not for the innovative spirit and engaging challenge from Dan to hit them up with ideas even while they were not accepting new manuscripts, I probably wouldn’t have even sent my brainstorm off. Perhaps it has something to do with Cafaro’s background. When he founded Atticus:

…Dan’s book publishing experience primarily had consisted of carving out a niche career in the professional association world, specifically in human resources, aerospace sciences, and performance management. His knowledge of the literary presses, mostly as a bookseller, reader, and collector, gave him a distinct, well-rounded edge to attempt the implausible: create a viable book business whose purpose was to discover voices otherwise lost in a crowded, unforgiving marketplace.

Rewards and Risks: In partnership, Atticus Books and I may be on to something new here.

  • The possibilities for how to promote the work through all the avenues of social media are greatly improved. And as an author I have to literally put up or shut up about whether or not people respond. A challenge and an opportunity.
  • We can promote by doing things like having a contest/bid for the book trailer. A book trailer would be perfect for a project such as this–abstracts of characters and images and some content–all without revealing the end.
  • Certain obvious risks are in play too. How much material do you offer for free? How much do you “let happen” and how much do you set specific goals? How does one structure the opportunities for people to donate and, therefore, support the title coming into existence in print form? And is that really what the primary goal of such an enterprise should be?
  • How much does the publisher get for their energy, promotion and time in general, and how much does the author?
  • How do we measure success? a certain number of readers, a certain number of donations or funds? Or is it like so many entrepreneurial endeavors: simply another step in the long and challenging journey of marketing and branding?

With a release date a month away, we have a lot of work to do, but that very urgency, the very immediacy of generating buzz and maximizing the event of its first release, is the very part of this idea that just might work. If it doesn’t? It will. Okay, OR, we learn a lot and offer it as advice?

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Jan 25 2012
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Status of the Novel

Mission Accomplished? A First Draft

It’s printing as I write. Simon Krimple’s Wager. The first time I’ve printed any of it as a matter of fact. A first draft. 100,000 words later and mission accomplished! 325 double-spaced pages. A first complete draft. Wow. Feels pretty good. A signpost in the sometimes seemingly endless terrain of novel writing.

A first draft is a special animal. For me, the goal this time around was to get it down. Beginning, middle, and end as I’d often tell my students when we’d do a writing exercise. Get something down all the way through. All the way through being the key phrase. In this way, you can justify keeping up with brick-and-mortar things like meeting a daily and weekly goal for word count. You get into the zone when you can, but sometimes you slog forward with prose you know probably won’t make the cut later on. Maybe it’s not the wisest approach. After all, words are words. You can fall in love with sheer quantity, patting yourself on the back for producing some certain amount of words that very well may suck. It certainly isn’t a “best words, best order” approach. But that’s for the craft drafts, right?

I won’t name my goal, and actually the word count itself is less important than the main goal, which was to produce a “complete” first draft in 12-16 weeks, depending of course on where the narrative took me. But I did chart my daily progress. It helped with accountability, too. If I’m counting correctly, this first draft took 20 weeks (but there were a good three in there over the no-school holidays where very little got done and there was a week in Disney), so technically I feel like I was only about a week off in meeting my goal.

Mission accomplished? Well, let’s say I hope it isn’t the equivalent of standing on an aircraft carrier three weeks into the Iraq War and saying the same thing. But I do know there’s a way to go yet. Layers of editing, arranging. In short, the craft. Poet Tom Lux says he loves all the in-between drafts. The first is scariest. Just getting it down. The later drafts of fine tuning can get wearying. The in-between drafts are where so much of the excitement and artistry get done. I believe novelist Richard Russo, who takes about four years for each novel, says something similar.

Perhaps I shouldn’t tell Shelley that part about four years? Yikes, it’s still printing!

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Dec 16 2011
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Status of the Novel

Writing as Recovering

My parents, usually led by my dad, a minister, went through long periods of time when the family gathered for a devotion first thing in the morning around the table. One bleary-eyed morning, a reading from Genesis 32 stood out, probably because the events seemed to come out of the dream-like state I was still in, the famous Jacob-wrestling-an-angel passage. Actually, at first the account says he wrestles a man, and only later says it was God. Jacob goes down the river to get some water and next thing you know he’s wrestling with a “man” until daybreak. Then, and this was a part my adolescent mind struggled over, when the man realizes he’s not going to prevail against Jacob he touches Jacob’s hip socket and puts it out of socket. But Jacob still won’t let go until the man gives him a blessing. As William Goyen points out in his incredible essay on the subject, “Recovering,” the subduer actually asks for the blessing of the subdued. The man never tells Jacob his name, but he does give him a blessing and then Jacob goes on to name the place Peniel, which means The Face of God. As in, he’d wrestled with God face to face and received a blessing and a limp.

I think the reason this surreal scene stands out as such strong literature, and is so frequently used as an illustration for all sorts of difficult experiences–not the least of which is as a direct metaphor for writers of literature–is because of its profound, paradoxical metaphor of the “wound-that-heals” motif. My experience in working through a first draft of Simon Krimple’s Wager (what “counts” as my second novel) has been a similar struggle of recovering. While a great deal of the novel is completely “a work of the imagination,” there is also a fair portion that I draw on from my own life, some of which were pretty difficult times. For those writers who write “for themselves,” which I usually take to mean out of their own sense of aesthetic mission or purpose and not out of a direct appeal to market-driven forces, I think this sense of the struggle is especially true.

The word “recover” itself is fantastic for its layers of meaning. In the transitive verb sense it can, among other things, mean (1) to get back; regain; (2) to restore oneself to a normal state; (3) to bring under observation again. In the intransitive verb sense it can mean (1) to regain a normal or usual condition; (2) to receive a favorable judgment. Reginald Gibbons opens a biographical essay on the subject of “recovering” and writing with the illustration of digging up a coffee can he’d buried years before with artifacts from his past inside. The act of writing, especially going back and “borrowing” from our own experiences, is very much like literally unearthing a part of ourselves and re-examining it in a new light.

There are plenty of days when the whole “literary pursuit” feels like a banging up against an impervious wall. What’s the point? Who will read this? Will anyone even make a dime from all this labor? Who am I writing for? How will any of this change anyone? So, the challenge is in the struggle itself; a struggle with the formless material you’re trying to shape into something of lasting value, the material that in some sense is “other” and in another sense is “self.” You have to keep venturing out into the darkness ahead and hoping to find some light. You have to keep believing that somehow you’ll arrive at a better self at the end of the project, even if that’s not the entire point of the struggle. Or is it?

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