E-Books Rising

A couple of interesting book stories in the news lately. First, an announcement from Amazon that its sales of Kindle e-books have surpassed its sales of hardcover books for the first time. This is measured by unit sales, which makes a significant difference: Most e-books are priced at $9.99, which is a lot less than the typical hardcover. So hardcover sales are still a bigger fraction of Amazon's bottom line than e-books.

Nonetheless, this is a meaningful milestone, which, together with other recent events (including continuing strong sales of the Kindle device itself as well as the positive response to Apple's iPad), suggests that e-books are in fact here to stay.

I happen to like my Kindle very much, although I don't use it for all my reading. Perhaps partly for this reason, I don't share the fears of some that the rise of the e-book spells the ultimate doom of printed books, either in hardcover or paperback form. History shows that people like their entertainment and information delivered in many different forms depending on the specific content, circumstances, and other factors.

For example, live theater was invented thousands of years ago. Much later, similar content began to be delivered through movies, radio, and television. None of these new technologies led to the demise of any of the earlier ones--in fact, all still exist and each has its unique role. In the same way, the birth of the paperback book didn't lead to the demise of the hardcover. I strongly believe that my great-grandchildren will be well acquainted with electronic books, printed books, and probably a few other ways of delivered verbal content, and that they will use and enjoy them all.

The other news story I enjoyed today is this article from BBC News Magazine about the art of typeface design. As an editor and writer I am not involved in this aspect of the book business--in fact I am often not even consulted about the design of my books--but I am fascinated by it and have an amateur's hankering to dabble in the field. (One of my retirement dreams involves running a little one-man letterpress operation printing fine limited editions of poetry and other artsy stuff. Don't hold your breath waiting to receive my catalog in the mail.)

If, like me, you are intrigued by the esthetic and psychological impact that various typefaces have on readers and their responses to books, you will enjoy the story. And if you haven't already seen the recent documentary film Helvetica, check it out--it appeals to the same rather specialized taste.

Yes, We Still Need Libraries

In the Wall Street Journal, Cynthia Crossen writes about the budget crisis now hitting many public libraries. It's easy for many of us to assume that free libraries are less important today than in the past, but they play incredibly important roles for millions of Americans, from school kids who might otherwise have no place to encounter a wide range of books and senior citizens on fixed incomes who want to nurture a lifelong love of reading to immigrants studying for their citizenship exams and unemployed people who need a place to scan the want ads, read advice books, and work on their resumes. To say nothing of the fact that, in towns and neighborhoods across the country, the public library is often the only place where community events (speeches, lectures, conferences, meetings, exhibits) take place that are centered on books, literacy, and learning.

Supporting public libraries is one of the best things every book lover can do to maintain our society's culture of the word and transmit it to future generations.

Laura Miller on the Brave New Self-Publishing World

It has taken me a little while to get around to linking to it, but Laura Miller in Salon has written a decent article about the rise of self-publishing and its potential impact on the art and commerce of literature.

Read it for yourself and see what you think, but for what it's worth I think Miller is right about some points, a little off-base on some others. She's right, of course, about the abysmal quality of 99.9 percent of the material that finds its way into book publishers' slush piles. It's simply not true that there is a sizeable universe of unpublished masterpieces languishing in obscurity because of the blindness of the editorial gatekeepers.

She's also right, I think, when she says that, over time, new kinds of gatekeepers will inevitably develop to help readers sort through the flood of newly self-published manuscripts being enabled by the new online technologies. We don't yet know what form those new gatekeepers will take, but they will identify the blockbusters of the future and, by their neglect, consign the vast majority of self-published books to more-or-less complete oblivion.

But Miller is a bit off-base, I think, in taking a somewhat monolithic view of book publishing and readership. She writes, in effect, as if the entire industry consists of novels (and perhaps memoirs) that are suitable for a broad, general public and that are competing to attract that kind of readership. In reality, many, many books are nonfiction works aimed at very specific niche audiences--and this is where the new self-publishing technologies can play an important positive role.

There are thousands of topics that are of interest to small but devoted groups of readers who would be willing and able to buy books about those topics, generating sales not in the tens of thousands but in the hundreds. The new technologies make such "long tail" offerings more economically viable than in the past. And the Internet should make it possible for interested readers to find out about those niche books quickly and easily--without having to randomly wade through the flood of slush that Miller envisions as the brave new world of publishing.

Take That You Sexist Pig Publisher!

Apparently this hilarious video is more than ten years old--meaning it actually predates YouTube--but it is a classic must-see, especially for anyone looking for a role model for a bookish daughter . . .

Power to the Author!

While publishing continues to evolve away from the paper and print medium it has been for centuries, power seems to be shifting gradually away from large-scale publishers and toward individual authors. Writers, who in the past might have resorted to self-publishing hardbound books and storing them in their garage, now have a range of e-book options. Now anyone with an electronic manuscript can be his or her own publisher, no longer dependent on one of the big houses for distribution , publicity, and promotion.

With publishers increasingly focused on the big books, first-time authors and others have been pushed to search for new options. One has been smaller houses, which can make books with sales in the four-figures work financially for them, but another is self-publishing and the rise of the e-book. New ways of approaching e-book publishing continue to be devised by companies and individuals. A recent article in PW online details some of these new options.

HOW BIG IS YOUR GOOGLE?

This blog is about Search Engine Optimization (SEO)'s and my opinion on where editors, writers, books might end up if we depend too much on using key words to get our message across.

First we had access to 15 minutes of fame; then the populist attention switched to pulling stunts like those of the Salahis or parents of the hot air balloon child to get on reality TV; now we have another tool for individuals to attract attention--plant the right words and your rank goes up a notch on Google.

This takes those of us involved with the written word to the obvious place. Creative artists will be forced to spend time embedding the word that gets them ranking rather then the one that is graceful or connotes exactly what they mean. Soon articles will be collections of SEO's strung together and the gift of writing will be given over to those people who now respond to jobs listed for "applicants familiar with SEO."

As I am writing this out there someone is putting together a collection of key words in a book similar to collections of names for babies.

The editorial function is bound to be shifted from helping authors with writing craft to how successful the editor has been in lifting past clients' place on various search engines. Much like editors' reputations were improved by helping authors make best seller lists, we will be graded on success with raising ranking.

If I had the mental energy I might have taken the time to write this piece with more Google, archival material, but it seems like such a waste of time. Will this put me out of business?

What do you think out there?

Last Guy With a Typewriter Ejected From Writers Room

I guess this really is the end of an era.

Writing the First Draft of a Novel

Last week, I conducted a roundtable discussion with best-selling mystery author Margaret Coel in a session of the Introduction to Publishing course at the University of Denver, billed as "How a Book is Born." Our focus was on Margaret's 15th--and latest--novel, The Silent Spirit. One of the students asked Margaret about how she works. Her answer was that she usually goes into her office at about 9 in the morning, starts writing, and keeps going until about 12, when she takes a break, then resumes for another couple of hours. Her average, she said, is about 10 pages a day. She works from a rough outline of the novel--which she calls her road map--but said that occasionally the characters start heading for a different ending from the one she had originally projected. Interestingly, she said that she does not stop if she's stumped for the right word, but just puts a question mark there and keeps going. And she doesn't even think about revisions until she has completed the first (very) rough draft of the novel. Only then does she begin the revision process, which she said could take her through several reworkings of the novel. I was struck by this headlong pace she described for the writing of her novel because I felt this same kind of headlong energy as I read the completed work.

Obviously each writer will have his or her own unique way of working, but there may be something to be learned from this one writer's working style.

Read, Read, Read

Not long after Sandi wrote her REALIA post, I heard a terrific interview with Marion Roach Smith, the author of the book to which Sandi referred. (Full title: WRITING WHAT YOU KNOW: REALIA.) When asked the most important piece of advice she could offer to writers, she said Read, Read, Read. Now Arnold's posted a piece on that very topic -- with a thoughtful comment by Irene McGarrity that I am echoing here -- and both of those posts dovetail very nicely with something I've been thinking about a lot recently.

A couple of weeks ago I was talking about point of view in my writing workshop, and I recommended to a woman working on a memoir that she read and analyze a few successful memoirs in order to see how others had solved a particular problem she was having. Another participant, a very gifted writer, then shared that she had gone through Tobias Wolff's THIS BOY'S LIFE line by line, marking the text with a yellow highlighter, in order to understand how he was able to seamlessly insert the adult voice into his story. Then later, as she was struggling to get the action to move forward in time, she went though again with a green highlighter marking passages where he accomplished that.

This talented writer is not relying solely on her talent to help her write her book. She is studying her craft by reading purposefully and thinking deeply about what she's reading. And let me tell you, it shows. So I'm with Marion Roach Smith. Read, read, read. And then write, write, write.

Advice for Writers

Last Sunday's New York Times (May 2) had several items of interest to writers. Deborah Solomon, in her weekly Magazine column, interviewed best-selling author Charlaine Harris about her vampire series (basis for the HBO series "True Blood") and concluded by asking Ms. Harris whether she had any advice for writers. Her answer: For any writers at all, read everything you can and then put your butt in the chair and write. That's all there is to it." Of course there's a lot more to it than that, but there's still great truth in what she said. Everything you read can be a learning process for you--not so you can duplicate what another author has done, but so you can understand how that author has made the novel work.

And continuing in this vein, I was struck by the opening sentence in the front-page review in the Book Review by Christopher Buckley of a new (and first) novel by Tom Rachman called The Imperfectionists, which is garnering raves everywhere. Buckley wrote: "This first novel by Tom Rachman, a London-born journalist who has lived and worked all over the world, is so good I had to read it twice simply to figure out how he pulled it off." A highly successful writer himself (Thank You for Smoking and Losing Mum and Pup, among others), Buckley is still open to learning. He's so impressed with this novel that he wants to figure out how the author did it.

One more reference: Again in the Magazine, Virginia Heffernan writes about "how the digital age is making self-publishing respectable." As she writes, back in analog times, self-publishing reeked of "vanity presses" and had the unmistakable look of something that could only get published if the author paid for it. But times have changed, and she cites that last year 764,448 titles were produced by self-publishers and so-called microniche publishers--up an astonishing 184% from the previous year. She points out that "cheap, digital-publishing technology ... has been a godsend to writers without agents or footholds at traditional publishing houses." And she reminds us that "luminaries like Gertrude Stein, Anais Nin, and Edgar Allan Poe self-published books." So there's a whole new way for authors to get their manuscripts published. And Heffernan cites the names of some companies that writers can go to for printing and, in some cases, distribution and promotion.

The Publishing Life, Hollywood-Style

For last weekend's Netflix movie, Mary-Jo and I decided to watch The Proposal with Sandra Bullock. As soon as I realized it was set in the book publishing industry, I began to cringe inside.

Sure enough, the movie features all the usual bizarre Hollywood fantasies about what book publishing is like, including glamorous editors in designer outfits who spend their days swapping witticisms in posh, spacious offices decorated with modern art and expansive views of the New York skyline (and without a manuscript in sight). Bullock plays an arrogant, high-powered executive, one of whose subordinates--a mere editor--proudly shows off the antique desk he has just bought for his office, evidently on the company budget. (Which publishing houses have such overstuffed budgets that no one notices a mere $75,000 being channeled to an auction at Sotheby's?)

But the capper--and a Hollywood fantasy about publishing I'd never seen before--involves the big publicity coup that the intrepid Bullock arranges: In the face of enormous resistance, she convinces one of the novelists her firm publishes to consent to an interview on Oprah.

Read that sentence again. Yes, according to the makers of The Proposal, Oprah is desperately eager to interview novelists on her show; the hard part is for publishers to talk their authors into appearing.

I suppose there's a lesson for me here--not to take too seriously Hollywood's depictions of the lives of cops, spies, cowboys, U.S. Marines, and Mafia dons. They're probably just as realistic.

BLOG ON

I was avoiding cleaning the bathroom (hey, someone's got to do it) by surfing. I hit my usual spots, fashion, perfume, Amazon, and of course Consult the Editor. I know all the contributors, some of them I know for quite a while. It was not surprising that I could identify them by their voice without looking at the name.

But it reminded me of a tip I learned about writing. Blogs make for great stepping stones. Just as the short story used to serve novelists, so blogs can kick off a career. They are great for practicing and building a style and voice. Each post can be tailored to the blog it serves to learn how to reach an audience.

We can be sloppy in journals. Books that provide exercises can be dangerous since they can fool us into thinking we are writing. But blogs count. People might read them. These paragraphs are a great way to hone skills. I believe blogs are equal to personal essays such as those published on the op-ed page or Modern Love in the NYTimes, and should be written and rewritten until the piece is perfect, not spit blogs out.

If I were following my own advice I wouldn't be posting this without more attention to detail, but the cleaning is waiting. I can rationalize that I make my living as an editor. But you writers out there, think about how many people are exposed to your work in one post. Then blog on.

More Good Books for Writers

Building on Sandi's recent posting and my last one, here are four excellent books on writing fiction that I frequently recommend to novelists.

Writing the Breakout Novel and Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook by Donald Maass. Clear, practical discussions and exercises for novelists, with plenty of examples. After you've done as much work on your book as you think you can, pick up a copy of Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook and do the exercises from beginning to end. I'd bet money that you'll find a way to make your novel more compelling in any number of ways.

Plot & Structure by James Scott Bell. One of the best books I've ever come across on the mechanics of plot and structure and how they interact. Extremely user-friendly.

Gotham Writers' Workshop: Writing Fiction. Each chapter in this book has been written by a different Gotham Writers' Workshop faculty member and covers a particular element of the novel--plot, character, theme, point of view, and the like. What makes this book one of my favorites: Raymond Carver's short story "Cathedral" is included in its entirety in an appendix, and is referred to repeatedly throughout the book in order to demonstrate various concepts.

REALIA

which means educational objects,such as coins or tools used by a teacher to illustrate every day living. In philosophy, things that are real.

It is also the title for a book just out by Marion Roach Smith who teaches a class called "Writng What You Know." The book explores the craft of memoir. Best book on writing non fiction I have ever read.

If a picture is worth a thousand words...

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then an example is worth... I'm not sure, but a lot. In any case, here are a few of the books I frequently recommend as particularly good examples of one literary challenge or another.

Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon. Building tension. Chaon is a master at ratcheting up the tension with practically every scene in the book, and at weaving together the strands of this unnerving story.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon. Spare prose creating an emotional response in the reader. I use this compact novel to illustrate how a first-person narrator can evoke great emotion in a reader (namely me) without being the slightest bit emotional himself. The writing is tightly controlled; the voice is pitch perfect.

Hiding Places by Daniel Asa Rose. Pinpointing the organizing principle of a memoir. One of the daunting challenges faced by this author was figuring out a way to thematically link the facts of his own Connecticut childhood with the larger story of his family's escape from the Holocaust. He succeeds brilliantly in finding a framework through which we can see the connections.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. Second-person narration. Hamid fully succeeds at the difficult task of writing an entire novel in the second person without being annoying. The plot strays just a bit at one point, but I'm so impressed with the second-person narration that I don't care.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski. Ambitious scope of story. Wroblewski is not afraid to tackle big themes in his beautifully written novel, and the world he creates is large and deep and rich enough to support his undertaking.

Of course there are plenty of great books that could be added to this list under these and other categories, but I'll stop there for now.

Reading Reality

An interesting article by Dana Goldstein at The Daily Beast providing a fresh take on why American kids lack sophisticated reading skills. According to a recent study of what grade-school students read, fiction dominates school reading lists, while serious non-fiction gets very short shrift (with a handful of exceptions, like The Diary of Anne Frank). Among other problems, this may short-change boys, who tend to be more interested in the word of fact than the world of fiction. More significant, it gives students of both genders less opportunity to develop the analytical skills they'll need to master tough non-fiction reading in college and adulthood.

I personally find this argument very appealing, having always been a lover of non-fiction (as reflected in the kinds of books I work on today). When I was a kid, my favorite reading was two series of non-fiction books published by Random House, the "All About" books, which dealt with topics from science ("All About Dinosaurs" and the like) and the "Landmark" series, which covered history and biography ("Abe Lincoln: Log Cabin to White House").

I gravitated that way, in part, because I shared a bit of the widespread attitude that "story books" were for little kids and girls. As a result of that attitude, if my literary diet had been limited to fiction, I would have done a lot less reading than I did. I've since outgrown my childhood prejudice against fiction, but I think educators (and parents) would want to be mindful of the phenomenon when designing programs to convert kids--especially boys--into readers.

Evaluating a Fiction Manuscript

Here are some basic criteria that editors use in evaluating fiction:

l) Voice: Does the author have a distinctive, unique voice that captures your attention, or is her writing bland, colorless. Do you want to spend the next several hours with this author? Note that Voice is not the same thing as Style. Think of a thriller writer who might not be a particularly felicitous prose stylist, but keeps you on the edge of your seat with his breathless, perhaps even melodramatic voice.

2) Pace: The test here is quite simple. After finishing one page, do you want to go on to the next page? In fact, are you compelled to do so? That is, is it a page-turner? A good thriller writer, of course, must have an unerring sense of pace. But the pace of literary writing, drawing you deeper and deeper into ideas and feelings, is also irresistible.

3) Character: While you might think plot should precede character, the fact is that the best plots emerge from characters in conflict. So the question here is whether you are compelled by the characters and are you involved in what is happening to them? Do they come alive on the page? Do they surprise you with their complexity?

4) Plot: Whether the plot comes out of the characters' development or not--a good thriller writer might have one-dimensional characters, but that doesn't matter if his story is riveting--we're looking for a story that keeps us reading because we want to know what happens next. And if what happens is surprising--not just arbitrary but convincing--that's all the better.

5) Style: As already mentioned, here we're talking about the quality of the writing. And while we all probably respond to a beautiful style, and it may impel us to keep reading, yet in the end if the author says nothing, reveals nothing, creates no strong effect on us with her story and characters, then we're left unsatisfied. What the reader asks of the author is: Astonish me!

6) Verisimilitude: By this I mean not so much accuracy or true-to-life details as convincing invention. If the author can convince you that something is true, it really doesn't matter whether it's true or not.

Finally, you must ask yourself--and this applies to both fiction and nonfiction--whether the author has accomplished what he set out to do. You could think of this as the combined effect of all the elements, but it's a crucial question to ask. You can't evaluate a manuscript on the basis of what you want it to be.

Tastelessness Is a Venerable American Tradition

If you think the world of literature is going to hell in a handbasket, check out this fun piece from the art website Today's Inspiration, which offers excerpts from a 1953 Fortune magazine article about the horrors of paperback publishing. (This is the third in a series; to see the previous stories, which are equally entertaining, scroll to the bottom and click on "Older Post.") You will be convinced that the world of literature has actually been going to hell in a handbasket for at least the last sixty years, which I find comforting in an odd sort of way.

Novel or Memoir?

Last weekend, I attended a writers' conference, where I was asked to evaluate the book ideas of about 20 attendees. I listened while the writers read the "pitches" for their works-in-progress. Most were novels, but there were quite a few memoirs. I found myself telling some of the novelists that they should consider turning their novels into memoirs and telling some of the memoirists that they should consider writing novels. Why?

I can't say that there are any really invariable rules about why a story should be told as fiction or non, but we've all learned some things from the James Frey and other literary scandals of the past few years. If a story is too good to be true, then it's wise to put the words, "A Novel" on the cover. If you call it a memoir, but you've embellished a lot, you're mislabeling a product, and no consumer wants to be misled.

Sometimes a life story can be just too rich -- filled with too many characters or incidents -- to fit neatly within the category of "memoir. " Those stories can benefit from the kind of imaginative editing and reshaping that goes into creating a novel.

Readers will always be hungry for stories about the lives of others, whether they are real or invented. Sometimes the trick is discovering just what kind of story you are telling.

NYC Teen Author Festival - Part 2

The festival is now over and it was a great success. (Kudos David Levithan, editor, author, and organizer extraordinaire!) As an author, an editor, and a reader myself, I found it valuable to attend for a whole host of reasons. I thoroughly enjoyed the reading I did at the library for about 60 high school students because of the astute, funny, and intriguing questions from the completely engaged kids. It also reminded me who I was writing for -- actual living, breathing teenagers. And it was reassuring too. When asked about how we deal with writing challenges, what we do first when we sit down to write, about our process at various stages, we all had completely different answers. That's right, folks. There's no one-size-fits-all approach to getting the manuscript written. You find what works for you -- no right, no wrong, just writing. Even the most seasoned writer needs to be reminded of this.

I also found the panels and other readings inspiring as well, as much for their content (really interesting info/discussions, great fiction) but also for the shared sense that reading and writing is to be celebrated. And what was also great -- all panels, signings, and readings were free and open to the public. Next time you hear about these kinds of events, I strongly urge that you attend! I know that I will.