Quality not Quantity

Since we seem to support this idea here at SotB - it's not about posting constantly or even consistently, but rather it's about posting important and relevant material, ya see? - I thought I would pull a quote I read recently and post it here. It's a quote that speaks to our deepest concerns in this ever-shifting publishing and reading landscape.

From Don Linn at Bait 'n' Beer:

We are, at bottom, a creative business. We are fighting for share of mind against hundreds of alternatives and if we do not put our best foot forward with regard to the titles we acquire, the care we give to the editorial process, and to the production quality of both our print and digital books, we won't (and don't deserve to) survive and prosper. When I see a poorly conceived, apparently unedited or copy-edited, badly designed book, that is produced (whether in hardcover, paperback or in a digital edition) in what is obviously the cheapest possible way, I fear for our future. Resources are limited, but if we can't produce consistent quality, then let's reduce quantities until we can. Nobody wants to buy a bad product.

For serious.

I also want to point out two recent comments I've heard regarding e-books and e-readers. First, someone told me that he travels a lot for work and relies on the iBooks app on his ipad to read digital books. But he has started buying "hard copies," as he said, as well, because often the plane pulls out from the gate but then taxis, and while everyone with "hard copies" is reading away, he can't read his e-book because passengers have been told to turn off mobile devices. Second, a coworker (though someone not in publishing) admitted that she followed my advice and read Jennifer Egan's fantastic book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit from the Goon Squad - but on her Kindle. Well there is a whole chapter done in Powerpoint, and it's a surprisingly touching and sweet chapter, and it simply did not work on the Kindle. This person feebly claimed, "I got the gist," but she clearly didn't. Such a shame. A whole chapter lost? That is just the kind of "bad product" Linn references above.

If this makes us seem like an irritating thorn poking into the side of the e-book world and nothing more, so be it. We are bloggers, after all. What else is the point??

Philip Roth wins Man Booker Prize

This just in, Philip Roth has won the 2011 Man Boo...zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Sorry, I fell asleep while reporting this news as it bored me to death while typing.

Here's the story.

Here is a video of Roth accepting the award on Youtube.

Seriously? That is the best the Man Booker people could do? Roth sucks.

That is all.

Oops, nope, that isn't. Carmen Callil is now my new favorite writer.

-CV

Editors on Trial

I was interested in two recent pieces that address the hard choices editors have to make. We are punished at times because some writers feel we are punishing them - for not writing about fuzzy bunnies and cute puppies and pretty flowers.

First, we have Raina Wallace over at The Rumpus writing about the "trend" of grief memoirs, beginning with the publication of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking in 2005. Wallace references a post over at The Millions on this topic by Bill Morris, but then refutes the idea that this is a trend. In fact, she feels editors are avoiding grief memoirs - including her own work (though it's actually a novel). At this point, to me, it became clear that this post was similar in tone to the many articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education about the difficulties of getting a faculty job - by unsuccessful candidates. This isn't to say the point is not valid, but just that the writer is working through rejection in making her or his point.

Wallace explains that, in her experience, book editors believe the public doesn't want too many grief memoirs. The sadness of them scares off the editors. She states,

I deduct this from the experience I’ve been having in trying to sell my novel, which tells the story of a young September 11th widow who discovers a secret involving her late husband and some of their closest friends. While the story is fiction, it is driven by emotional truth–namely, the emotional truth of grief and mourning–and this is the aspect of the novel that most editors have expressed concern with.

She goes on to say that one editor even warned that s/he "couldn’t see myself reading it over and over again throughout the editing process, or presenting it to my sales force without crying, to be honest. The emotional impact, in this case, worked against it for me—which I know must sound ridiculous, but although AFTER [my book] came close to overcoming my general reluctance to work on stories prominently featuring 9/11, I still just don’t feel quite emotionally ready to plunge in wholeheartedly and give this novel the publishing support it deserves.”

I can appreciate the author's frustration. In fact, I'm quite surprised by the brutal honesty of this editor - not against such honesty, just surprised to read it. Wallace then admits that she can understand the mentality, that she saw it in her personal life as friends grew uncomfortable if she spoke about her husband's death too much, even fairly soon after 9/11 where he died suddenly. She sees this as our country's collective avoidance of dealing with death honestly, and directly.

I'm glad that Wallace is able to see the editors not as some rude gatekeepers denying her the right to get her voice heard but instead as symptoms of a larger cultural issue. She's right to place the blame on American culture at large, and not on the shoulders of the editors who sent rejection letters that were honest, and hard, I'm sure, to write.

I remember having to reject someone with a Holocaust memoir. I felt terrible, even as a colleague explained that I'd see more of them, and we just couldn't publish them all. They had to really stand out. This is where self-publishing becomes useful. The story maybe should be told, but it's not necessarily going to sell the number of copies a publisher needs to justify it. Get annoyed at readers in general out there, but don't take it out on the editor or publisher.

In another article, this one by Michael Goldfarb writing at the BBC, the question is raised about why books and films are not reflecting the current economic crisis as such art did during the Great Depression. In fact, I would argue that Goldfarb is asking why more mainstream writers and filmmakers are not grappling with the reality of our times directly. (The Left seems quite rightly obsessed with the struggle.) I'm not sure this is quite as much of an image as he makes it out to be. Is it that novelists and other artists are not addressing the recession, or just that when they do, those books (or films) don't attract fans?

Goldfarb concludes at one point:

I think the primary reason is that Hollywood and the publishing industry have learned just one historical lesson from the Depression: people want entertainment in tough times.

Perhaps this is the case, but I don't know. Look at the National Book Award winner last year, Jaimy Gordon's Lord of Misrule, set at a rundown horse track in West Virginia. A finalist, Lionel Shriver's So Much for That, seems to hinge on the wife needing the man's health insurance (admittedly, I haven't read this one - forgive any misunderstanding). I also think of the characters in Bonnie Jo Campbell's book American Salvage, which was also a National Book Award finalist, and which peopled very much by working class and poor characters. The books are there, simply put.

The question becomes how much more can we take. It might not be that we should publish a ton of material on tragic stories, but only the best. The classics will go into the canon, perhaps, and in 60 years when people are looking at this time period, as Goldfarb looks back at the output of the Great Depression, the best will still be there, reflecting this period in all its heartbreak and frustration.

As editors, we can only try to find the best and not publish anything less, even if the topic is important and the issue at the heart of it - grief, a very real and all too common financial struggle - is true to life and important.

Endangerment, Extinction

As an editor, I'm of course concerned about the publishing industry caving in on itself, gutting its own support beams in its mad rush to digital products that cannot sustain labor that is thoughtful, wide-ranging, with workers trying to be prescient, trying to work with authors on deep and thorough investigations, both the creative, artistic kind and the scholarly kind, and sometimes both. Sure it worries me when I read most recently this news:

Physical book sales will decline at a compound annual rate of 5 percent. While e-book sales will rise during that same period, the increase won’t cover the revenue gap created by the decline in the physical book market. By 2014, the research note predicts, e-books will occupy some 13 percent of U.S. book publishing revenue, more than twice its current level.

That blows. But even before I read this, I read something else that very well may come to an end in this ever-changing publishing landscape, where print books are increasingly devalued.

Ever since 1983, when one of the earliest book cart drill teams formed in Virginia, teams have been sprouting up at libraries across the country, rehearsing synchronized routines and making occasional appearances at conferences, festivals, and parades.

Yeah, that's right. Librarians doing choreographed dance routines with book carts. Try doing THAT with your fancy e-books, Cory Doctorow!

What else will we lose before we put the brakes on this digitizing nightmare, I ask you?

But keeping the spirit of book cart-pushing performance alive has been no easy task. Recruitment and education are key. Deyermond concedes that the past two years have been tough. When there weren’t enough teams to field a real contest last year, she held a tutorial session instead.

That's Gerry Deyermond, whom you may know betters as "the book cart queen," sounding the alarm. This is how (print) books may go: not with a bang but a whimper, from a lonely librarian standing - or even slow-dancing - with an empty book cart.

Generational shift?

Sad news today out of New Haven, CT, where apparently the Labyrinth Bookstore may close, as soon as two weeks from now. (I initially read this news this morning in the daily installment of Shelf Awareness.) I mentioned this store almost three years ago here, when we stopped there on a mini-tour of bookstores in Connecticut. It reminded me very much of Harvard Book Store, unsurprisingly.

The article makes the problem sound generational in a more blatant way than I've seen elsewhere. The store's manager, Martha MacDonald, is quoted as saying, “Kids will [buy a book], move seven feet away, turn on their laptops and see that Amazon is selling it for $15 less — and then say, ‘I want to return this.’” Obviously, this is troublesome.

(You'll recall that Harvard Book Store fought such behavior in a kind of mock-PSA video, "Don't be an I-Phoney, posted here.)

There was more youthful indifference mentioned, as well:

Undergraduate students generally were unconcerned by the news that the bookstore may close. Of 14 students interviewed, seven said they did not buy any books from Labyrinth in the past year, and six more had bought five or fewer. Marisa Karchin ’14 said she bought 10 books from Labyrinth Books in the past year, but said the closing would only be a minor inconvenience, as she would have shopped online instead.

Could this be true, even amongst Yale students? So college students now only see bookstores as fulfilling their reading needs, not their wants? Are we really the old people telling kids today what they're missing, while they roll their eyes and put their ear buds back in?

I think I hear Christopher sobbing, or shredding phonebooks with his bare hands in frustration. Oh wait, who gets a phonebook anymore?!

:-(

Amazon Moves Forward with Strategy

It should come as no surprise to any of us - especially those of us who are *not* big fans of Amazon - that the (sometime) bookselling giant has just announced an even CHEAPER Kindle! Here's the cheap li'l harlot now, folks, marked down to the oh-so-reasonable $114. How do they do it?!

Oh, with ads in the form of screen savers. This means every time you settle down with your favorite e-book, you'll be greeted with ads, and again when you shut down, and maybe if you don't interact with the thing for awhile and it goes to "sleep." The ads will not be inserted into books - oh thank god, right? Because that would be horrible.

I hate this. I hate that it will make more people run out and get this thing, rendering them beholden to Amazon for future e-books. I hate that people will settle for being advertised to, just to save a few bucks. I hate that Amazon came up with this system to lock in more consumers, and it's going to work. And I hate that Amazon continues to hold an advantage over independent bookstores due to getting around state tax collectors.

And I think many of us scream in frustration when we hear from Ted Genoways, in a powerful and horrifying Virginia Quarterly Review article on the so-called paperless revolution, that "the New York Times recently calculated that the environmental impact of a single e-reader—factoring in the use of minerals, water, and fossil fuels along the manufacturing process—is roughly the same as fifty books."

Think twice before snatching up this cheap Kindle, just as I hope you do before purchasing anything at Wal-Mart or the Gap. We're paying a larger price than you realize, in a number of ways.

Of Hopes, Dreams, and Book Jackets

Before I get into this post let me get something out of the way. The whole book jacket issue thing makes me crazy. I have been on all sides of it as an editor, agent, and customer and my personal take on it is that it’s a big, fancy wank job. Has a book jacket helped in catching my eye? Yup. Have I bought a book based on the jacket design alone? I am pretty sure I have. Have I been let down by a book with the coolest jacket around? Hell, yeah. However, the whole business is just too fucking annoying when you are part of the process. Authors, agents, and advisers all think that the cover is the be-all, end-all of a book’s success and far too many authors, agents, and various and sundry advisers believe that they know best as to what the cover of a book should look like. To that end The Awl.com ran a piece on Monday about six writers discussing the book jacket design process and what it meant to each of them. I hated it. It just made me cringe. It took me back to my bad old days in Boston publishing.

"Writers by definition spend a lot of time on the inside of books, which is why what happens on the outside—namely, cover art and blurbs—can feel precarious and daunting. Often these elements are beyond an author’s control or expertise, which can be painful to admit, particularly when the "expertise" of graphic designers and marketers seems so subjective or at odds with an author’s “vision” for a book."

 The "author's vision" for a book is a phrase that makes me wanna stab my eyes out. If y'all out there knew how many times an author told me that the cover they were sent was "horrible" you'd never have time to read anything else ever again. “How,” I would ask them, “is it possible that every instinct they have telling them that the cover in question is horrible but that the press’s other books are selling and winning awards for design?” No answer. Or, better yet, another answer from the author in question that every person in publishing has heard a million times: "I showed the design to my family and friends and they all had the same poor reaction to it that I did. They, too, all hated it" OK, case closed. If your buddies say it’s horrible it really must be as one of your close friends is Chip Kidd, right? I digress.

To get some advice on navigating these issues, we asked a handful of writers—including Kate Christensen, Bennett Madison, Stefanie Pintoff, Mark Jude Poirier and Tom Scocca—who have been through the process these questions:

• How important are covers in terms of selling a book?
• Have your publishers asked you for your opinion or “input” on your covers, and to what extent do you think they listened? Did you ever meet with the designer? How important was “marketing” in making decisions about the cover of your book(s)?
• Did you ever receive a cover that made you unhappy and if so, what did you do about it? Did you ultimately end up with a cover that made you happier?
• How important are blurbs, particularly for a first-time author?
• How did you go about getting your blurbs? Did your agent or editor help, or did you rely more on personal connections?
• Have you ever offered someone else a blurb?

Alright, those are the questions to deal with…what are my reactions? 1) Important but not the end of the world if the cover sucks, right Geek Love? 2) Input? Usually publishers do what is best as they are the professionals and they almost always get it right. If we can’t agree on that, let’s at least agree that they are better at figuring out what works than your cousin Gus, OK? Meet the designer? What do you think this is Canada? Really, how would that help you? You already have a tangible example of what the designer thinks…it’s called the cover. Marketing? Let’s leave that sacred cow alone. I still believe to this day that the marketing decisions presses make include more closely guarded secrets than one would find in the North Korean supreme people’s assembly. One battle at a time, if you please. 3) Unhappy? Yes, I am sure every writer has been at some point but sometimes you have to trust someone else, yes? 4) Blurbs are important…and stupid. Discuss. 5) Usually the editor will do a lot of the searching for a blurb or two. If you are lucky you know a novelist with some public profile who will say something nice about your forthcoming book. Blurbs appear to be the most stressful aspect of the cover experience for all the authors in the piece. I agree with them. I hated asking for quotes for my writers. I found that many published and established writers were so ungenerous with their time that it made me feel like an old man. Some simply "had a policy" not to blurb. Others would just ignore the request. Look, a blurb from another writer none of us have ever heard of doesn't really help you. Sorry, the truth hurts. If you can walk through the mine field and get some great quotes, I ain't gonna lie, it really, really helps. For instance, tell me this guy didn't hit it out of the park when it came time to put some blurbs on the back of his original paperback release for Houghton Mifflin's Mariner line. For reals, right?!? However, blurbs aren’t always a good thing. Isn’t the following blurb the stupidest one you’ve ever read?

“This novel is so magnificent — in every conceivable aspect, and others previously unimagined — that it has occurred to me that the shadow of this book, and the joy I received in reading it, will fall over every other book I have ever read.” – Rick Bass on Cold Mountain

Seriously? I mean you have to be a grade-A asshole to send something like that in. Either Cold Mountain is the best book ever written in the history of humankind or Rick Bass has a bug up his ass about being asked to blurb a book he doesn't really like. In each case, you really don't want to put that on your book jacket even though Rick Bass is a famous writer and, on the surface, it appears that he has said something wonderful about you and your boring post-Civil War novel. I can offer new novelists no solace...trying to secure blurbs downright sucks. That's that. Anyway, back to the jacket discussion...

The authors in the Awl piece, which you really should go and read without the added acid I am throwing on things here, are split on their reactions to their book jackets. Kate Christensen said “The cover for the hardback of Trouble made me unhappy, but no one would budge on it, so there it stayed. My mother thought it was a picture of me; I thought it was flat-out weird. I still dislike it.” Bennett Madison was in deep loathing on his first jacket. “I absolutely hated the cover of my first book. I complained a little and they changed it enough to make me hate it so much more! So the moral of the story there is, no matter how bad it is it can always be made worse with hot-pink "I Dream of Jeannie" harem pants” I haven’t read his book so I don’t know what that last thing about Jeannie means but his point is well taken.

Mark Poirier had both a positive and negative experience with his two novel jackets. Poirier says, “I loved the cover they chose for Goats for which they had asked my input. I also loved the cover they chose for Unsung Heroes of American Industry. Again, I had some input. The cover they chose for Modern Ranch Living, however, sucked and continues to suck today.” Matthew Gallaway, Tom Scocca, and Stefanie Pintoff all had love at first sight with their covers. So it is a wash and--if anything--more of the authors were cool with their jackets than disliked them. But does a book jacket matter in the end? It does and it doesn’t. A cool jacket wrapped around a big pile of shit still makes for a bad read, right? All text covers of a type still used in French publishing houses can keep safe the best novel you’ve (n)ever read. So, why sweat it?

Finally, what’s my advice on this contentious issue? Trust in your airline pilot…your mutual fund manager…your lifeguard…your…you get the idea. I am not saying that presses don’t make mistakes but there has to be some kind of acceptance that the publishers and their designers are trying to create something in everyone’s best interest and no one is better at that than the designers at those houses. No, not always. Not exclusively, but it is what they do. I am sure that I could manage a professional baseball team better than many of the current managers but does that make it true? Nope. I have found that one’s life is better, less stressful, and generally more pleasant if one leaves things that one isn’t versed in to the professionals in the given field. Sure, I could suggest a typeface or a different color for a title but that hardly means that I am capable of discrediting a design because I don’t like “hot pink” or the look of “a bland and way-too-literal photograph of a curvy-road-ahead highway sign in the desert.” To his credit, Mark Poirier comes around to my way of thinking about it:

"I offered cover ideas to people at Simon and Schuster for The Worst Years of Your Life, an anthology I edited, and I’m grateful they went in another direction. The cover they chose features a diagram of a frog dissection that looks as if it were made on a '70s ditto machine. Created by Catherine Casalino, the cover went on to win design awards. While I approved the cover and approved the covers from Bloomsbury, it took me a while to believe that sometimes book-jacket designers, people who actually get paid to design book jackets, people who actually have a lot of experience designing book jackets, often know better than I. Because of my sour experience with Modern Ranch Living, I’m a little touchy, but I have come to let the experts do their jobs."

 Let the experts do their jobs. Good, sage advice…just breath, authors, and know that not only shouldn’t you judge a book by its cover but remember what your mother taught you: it’s what inside that counts. Of course, I've never had my baby covered in hot pink, tilt-shift photos, and terrible typefaces. Maybe I'd feel differently if I weren't just a boring blogger. It's an interesting point.