Think on it

Not much time but I wanted to post two links, with a bit of commentary.

First is the fantastic Citizen Reader offering something to cut through the syrupy and stupid sweetness offered by magazine year-end top ten lists. Yes, CR has instead posted The Worst Books of 2008 - with nice summations following each title. Scott McClellan's a weenie, Thomas Friedman's a jackhole, and that person creating so called "buzz"? "I'm thinking he and I don't share the same taste in books." Well done!

Second is this rather irritating but often right-on op-ed from author Lawrence Osborne (*not* actor Laurence Fishburne), in which publishers are given the what-for. Osborne makes some good points. For one, he lists the problems editors are reporting, with his own critique of their reports:

Industry insiders provide a depressing catalog: a failure to acquire the kind of franchise authors now topping the bestseller lists, a lack of editorial insight and supervision (resulting in longer, sloppier books that bore readers stupid), extravagant author advances, agents all too happy to sacrifice the long-term interest of authors for short-term profit, incompetent management at the top and a lack of books that have commercial impact.

Then he offers some nice feedback, often in blunt form:

But just as newspapers are dooming themselves by cutting the very thing they alone can provide--in-depth, on the spot reporting--so publishing houses are dooming themselves by trying to run in somebody's else's rat race and cutting the very thing we turn to them for: writing itself.

Amen! The problem is in fact commercial publishers who are not even going after "the next big thing," but instead are chasing "the big thing to follow the last big thing."

He ends by suggesting publishers reach the post-college, literate folks like, oh, the author's son.

My son and his friends, who are in their early twenties, read Houllebecq and Bolaño and Sebald and Coetzee without any problem at all. Those writers speak easily to their anxieties and concerns. And yet none of these writers would have found American publishers if they hadn't first succeeded in their countries of origin.

We the readers, the people, are not dumbed down media serfs obsessed with celebrities, dosh and movie rights. You are.

This man has the leisurely tones and metaphors of a posh English dandy lazily blabbering in a hotel tea room, but his points are true. I fear they may not reach the needed audience, however - especially seeing as this was published by Forbes!

Publishing slowly moves forward

If we're going to be trapped in some recession or depression, we best make the most of it, right? So we need to institute some changes to publishing that will make it a more efficient industry.

Shelf Awareness is linking to a Wall Street Journal article (sorry, think it's subscription-based) by the ever-reliable Jeffrey Trachtenberg on news that Borders will buy books from HarperStudio on a non-returnable basis. This is unusual, for folks not in the know:

Under the terms of the deal, the nation's second-largest bookstore chain by revenue will get a deeper discount on initial orders of books published by the new imprint of News Corp.'s HarperCollins Publishers -- 58% to 63% off the cover price, instead of the usual 48%. In exchange, Borders won't return any unsold books to HarperStudio, instead probably discounting them in the store.

Borders needs the discount and probably assumes it can use the inventory, if it doesn't go under, and HarperStudio can send off the books without having to worry about them coming back. The return system in publishing is archaic, so this is progress.

"Returns have never made sense in our business, and with the recent economic downturn, publishers and booksellers are more open than before to experimenting with models that might decrease waste and increase profit," said Robert Miller, president and publisher of HarperStudio. When he started the imprint earlier this year, Mr. Miller said he intended to shake up traditional book-publishing economics.

Shelf Awareness added their own two cents with the link, noting: "If selling nonreturnable spreads and everyone isn't too exhausted by the effort, perhaps the industry will then re-examine another of its 'quirks': the manufacturer's suggested retail price printed on the book."

PS I wanted to add a worrisome update, also posted in Shelf Awareness, regarding a place I've mentioned before: the Bookstore Restaurant in Wellfleet, MA. I have not been here still, but I want to go now more than ever after reading this story in Cape Cod Today about its struggles - not over the ever shrinking economy, but because of their inability to update their septic system. If it's not one thing, it's other! The place still looks amazing.

Going forward or looking back?

As the publishing industry squirms in the pressure cooker created by an ever weakening economy, blogs and other media outlets are scrambling with how to portray this unique world of editors and publishers.

I was less impressed with Ethan Hill's article on Barney Rosset than I wanted to be, in Newsweek. Actually, I should say that if I came across the article in Newsweek, I would have just been impressed that they were devoting so much space to someone in publishing, but coming across it as a link posted by The Casual Optimist, I was less impressed. For those who don't know and don't have the time to click through, Rosset purchased Grove Press for $3,000 in the early 1950s, when it was nothing to speak of and he wasn't much either, and turned it into the leading home for avant-garde and popular literature, fighting seemingless endless obscenity laws with writing from Bertolt Brecht, William S. Burroughs, Samuel Beckett, and many other white guys (sorry!). I appreciate the article's objectivity - Rosset's no hero in some ways, but he's fascinating and important - but even with the article's length, it still seems to be skimming on the top of this topic, not delving into it in an intriguing or particularly useful way. It's worth a read as this kind of history in publishing is often quite fascinating, but it may leave that bad taste in your mouth that said history often does - rich white guys being rich white guys, isn't this one rich white guy great because he "took such a chance."

And then looking forward, we have all these open forums for discussing what will become of modern book publishing. The Penguin blog (yes, that Penguin) is looking forward by "inviting authors, typographers, cover designers, printers, technologists, retailers, literary agents, publishers and geeks to come along and consider if and how technology can transform and perhaps improve on The Book." Don't know how much "buy-in" will happen there. I mean, they have a vested interested in hosting such a discussion that makes the use of their blog or somewhere else on their website a less-than-desirable venue for a frank discussion. And in a truly mainstream but strikingly pedestrian manner, over at the Huffington Post, Hugh McGuire asks about "hybrid readers" - those of us who like printed books but are open to e-books and other digital creations. I don't think the name works, quite frankly, and I am shocked by how basic this article is given McGuire's other work (namely, LibriVox AND the Book Oven Blog). I blame the Huffington Post, which is publishing too fast and loose, having contributors churn out light content written up on the fly.

So the best plan is to look back as we go forward, but where to look and then where to go?

Brother Can You Spare a Dime?

There is a whole lot of crash-and-burn talk going on with writers these days. I was just talking to one author I edited who is a freelancer, and he was talking about places - magazines, websites - wanting more for less. And the big problem is, it's not even a matter of the publishers holding back necessarily! In many cases, no one is making money. So if you go chasin' it, you might end up staring down a big empty hole.

So what to do? Call Obama!

Two new articles have come out about whether President-elect Obama should revive a Federal Writers' Project like the one that we had in the 1930s following the Great Depression. Are we ready for a literary bail-out? (So asks Jennifer Schuessler at the NY Times' Papercuts blog.)

Paul Greenberg's piece will appear in this Sunday's NYTimes, arguing not to resuscitate the old FWP model, but to instead model the AAA - Agricultural Adjustment Administration, which worked to lower the production of produce. Why? Well...

Overcapacity has been something generally acknowledged across the writing industry for at least 10 years. In a 2002 essay in The New York Times, the onetime best-selling novelist and story writer Ann Beattie mourned the situation of the modern writer, living in a world where people are more interested in “being a writer” than in writing itself. “There are too many of us, and M.F.A. programs graduate more every year, causing publishers to suffer snow-blindness, which has resulted in everyone getting lost,” she lamented. That Ann Beattie must now compete on Amazon with a self-published author named Ann Rothrock Beattie is proof of how enormous the blizzard has become.

I'm always amazed at the number of people who claim to be or want to be writers, versus the smaller number of people who really and truly read books.

Greenberg's piece is somewhat tongue-in-cheek but still of interest to those of us who worry about just how much garbage clogs your modern corporate bookstore.

Greenberg ends with a biting quote from Graham Greene:

“Are you prepared for the years of effort, ‘the long defeat of doing nothing well’? As the years pass writing will not become any easier, the daily effort will grow harder to endure, those ‘powers of observation’ will become enfeebled; you will be judged, when you reach your 40s, by performance and not by promise.”

Yowser, huh?

The other article considering this idea is by Mark I. Pinsky over at The New Republic. A bit more straight-forward, this article includes a nice brief history of FWP and does at least imagine, if not call for, a resuscitation of the federal program.

This time, the FWP could begin by documenting the ground-level impact of the Great Recession; chronicling the transition to a green economy; or capturing the experiences of the thousands of immigrants who are changing the American complexion. Like the original FWP, the new version would focus in particular on those segments of society largely ignored by commercial and even public media. At the same time, the multimedia fruits of this research would be open-sourced to all media, as well as to academics.

Interesting concept to consider. However, try to sell this idea to anyone who gets a whiff of the blog Daily Routines, which chronicles "how writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days." Some show discipline, sure - Toni Morrison writing before dawn, when her children would start to wake, or J.M. Coetzee writing seven days a week - and then you have the others who are a bit more... eccentric? Says Truman Capote:

I am a completely horizontal author. I can't think unless I'm lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I've got to be puffing and sipping. As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis.

Can you imagine the conservative reaction to that man getting a federal subsidy? Not so much, but I'm certainly glad his writing made it into the world.

Back to the drawing table perhaps...

More Discussions on the Future of Publishing

Given "Black Wednesday" in publishing, how should we go forward in the book world? This conversation is occurring around water coolers, online, in papers, etc..., and most of it has been said before.

But I was intrigued by the ideas offered up by David Nygren over at The Urban Elitist, in a post titled "The Future of Publishing (Maybe)." How humble. (I will admit I have not followed his blog, so I don't really know his usual p.o.v.) His vision of what publishing will become is actually quite promising, without being extreme or nihilistic.

I appreciate his point about the end of corporate publishing dominance - appreciate in that I'm pleased by this forecast, but also that I agree with its logic. He posits that theory while still allowing for gatekeepers - but these gatekeepers, egotistical or not, will not necessarily be driven by profit, or by shareholders looking only at the bottom line:

I expect the rise of “super readers,” such as Oprah has become (though not on that scale). Each super reader will have his or her own following. Many of them will be mini-tyrants, but at least the power will have moved from the profit-centered board room to those who truly care about and appreciate the content. As we have currently, various reading groups, online review journals and bloggers will also drive readers to content that might otherwise have been ignored.

This is exciting to me, and offers more promise for writers than counting on editors at corporate publishers who have marketing people and shareholders breathing down their necks, shouting to find the next big thing.

I also agree with his not-so-shocking concept of independent publishers needing to build a community, to know their niche. The concern there is always profit, or even staying afloat (forget making money), but Nygren explains that production costs and even marketing will be lower and the royalty arrangements we now have will change, so cash will flow differently. There also won't be the same warehouse costs.

I do worry that this new arrangement means less labor, as in fewer people employed by the publishing industry. Everyone can get published but no one can get hired. With print culture moving online, and being more accessible for less money, are we just discarding manual labor in the world of books and magazines and newspapers? Will there be unskilled labor jobs created? Like the discussions around environmental changes, with green collar jobs now becoming a real expression with meaning, I wonder if we need to discuss this aspect in the culture of writing and disseminating information.

Sorry I can't post as much, this week and running up to the holidays. Christopher has an idea for the top books of 2008... only I don't read many new books. If mine can be old books read in 2008, I may be better off?

Publishing News Flash II - Random House re-org

Publishers Weekly is reporting some changes at Random House, which is being seriously reorganized. See the letter from Markus Dohle, RH Chairman, here. Welcome! to the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group!

This document is interesting to read just to get a sense of how many imprints exist under RH, which has gobbled up a number of publishers over the years. But have no fear! Dohle says: "I want to stress the fact that all the imprints of Random House will retain their distinct editorial identities. These imprints and all of you who support them are the creative core of our business and essential to our success." Ah, what a relief...

Lines like this - "Because of the current economic crisis, our industry is facing some of the most difficult times in publishing history" - are scary indeed, though. And best of luck to two departing bigwigs - Irwyn Applebaum and Steve Rubin, freshly out of work with the re-org.

I hear PW and Publishers Lunch email alerts are filling inboxes all over the publishing world. Corporate publishing employees must feel under siege!

Publishing News Flash - More Houghton Trouble!

It seems Houghton's publisher has gone and resigned! This just in from the New York Times' ever-reliable Motoko Rich:

In a sign of further setbacks at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which represents authors like Philip Roth, Jonathan Safran Foer and Günter Grass, the publisher of the company’s adult trade division has resigned.

The publisher, Becky Saletan, who took the job in January, will leave the company Dec. 10.
Last week, the publisher temporarily stopped acquiring new books as its parent company, Education Media and Publishing Group, an Irish private equity concern, said it was not allocating as much capital to the consumer book business.

Josef Blumenfeld, a spokesman for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, confirmed that Ms. Saletan had resigned. Ms. Saletan did not return calls or an e-mail message, and Jeremy Dickens, president of Education Media, did not return calls. The news of Ms. Saletan’s resignation was first reported by The Associated Press.

Literary agents who knew Ms. Saletan were upset by the news of her departure. “I think that Becky is a woman of extraordinary integrity and had quickly become a terrific publisher,” said David Black, whose clients published by Houghton include the cookbook author Dorie Greenspan and the sports columnist Ian O’Connor. “It’s a significant loss.”

Ms. Saletan became publisher earlier this year after the merger of Houghton Mifflin and Harcourt, edging out Janet Silver, who had been at Houghton Mifflin for 24 years.
Houghton Mifflin, based in Boston, was acquired in 2006 by Riverdeep, an Irish software company backed by what is now Education Media. The next year the company bought Harcourt, an educational publisher.

In an interview last week, Mr. Dickens of Education Media said Houghton had about $7 billion in debt and that other publishers had expressed interest in it.

Obama and Publishing

Lori L. Tharps over at the Root offers an article about President-elect Obama's impact on publishing, specifically for black writers. (Via her blog, she directs readers interested in the topic of "Black people in the publishing industry" to the blog WriteBlack, run by Anika, which I hadn't read before. Looks like a fun spot worth visiting.)

Tharps doesn't make any definitive point in the article but nicely opens up this conversation, which is about publishing and of course more, in terms of a national conversation. How do we all discuss race with a black president coming into office? Publishing gets pulled out from other media because it's slower, and Tharps (and many others, myself included) feels it's also slower to publish by and for black people:

In the past month, those of us who make our living from the written word have started to ponder the possibilities. We are imagining the different ways the incoming president might inspire the overwhelmingly white publishing industry to get a clue about our stories... In the world B.O. (before Obama), publishers seemed to operate under the impression that black authors appealed only to black readers. Even worse, that those black readers were interested only in books that involved a lot of sex and ghetto baby-mama drama. For the past decade, support for authors of color with literary ambitions, or even those who just wanted to tell a different kind of story, has been dismal.

Fair play. She gets into the ghettoization of black writing and how publishers only seem comfortable with black authors writing "street" or "gangsta" lit, but what she doesn't address is the problem with corporate booksellers and how they truly segregate black writing separate from other writing, even black fiction versus "literature." That's definitely a part of the equation. When does a writer get to the point where she's next to Toni Morrison rather than Lisa Lennox?

I do appreciate the point Malaika Adero of Atria Books makes: "Sometimes there's this notion that publishers introduce the hot new thing," she says, "but we don't lead, we follow." I don't know if this has to be the case, but I do know, especially in this point in time with the economy shrinking and publishers less willing to take risks, it's gonna be the case for awhile.

But here's another possibility: maybe when the dust settles on this recession, as our economy reorganizes itself, with banks and sellers restructuring credit and consumers shopping in more educated ways - locally, sustainably - maybe there will be an opportunity for a publisher or publishers to go out with a new direction and challenge the kind of thinking that says every new project brought to the editorial board as an acquisition has to have 2 or 3 or 200 precedents, that every new book has to fit the XXXX meets XXXX model. If national, independent publishers are not desperate to make enough to stay open, maybe they will be able to lead - like Soft Skull has done with fiction in recent times. And maybe this can bode well for black writers wanting to break out of the segregated publishing AND bookselling world.

I return to a phrase I find myself saying or thinking a lot these days: Here's hoping!

And another update to publishing's turmoil

Or is it turmoil?

Yesterday's NY Times article by Motoko Rich suggests there is not turmoil necessarily, but there is chaos. Rich juxtaposes the acquisition freeze at Houghton with news from Hachette Book Group: "Hachette is giving bonuses equal to one week’s salary to every employee in the company, in addition to the regular bonuses for which staff members are eligible." Congrats to those employees, living large in a time of such financial instability. (This calls to mind hearing about HarperCollins, I believe, in the UK, who were having a bad year while I worked for an agent there in 2000. They supposedly gave their employees a copy of a book for their holiday bonus - not any copy of any book, but one copy of the same book, left on each employee's chair.)

Ah, but in fact this is all evidence of instability, and as ever, it all seems terribly unsustainable. Hachette has some valuable product - books by Baldacci and James Patterson and of course, it-author Stephanie "bloodsucking" Meyer. But Houghton is no slouch, folks. In their backlist, they have such familiar brand names as Curious George, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Philip Roth. Okay, it's not altogether consistent, but it's all successful. So why are they in such dire straits?

Well they diversified, and they have had some serious struggles with owners, most of whom have been European... not that there's anything wrong with that. My point is not xenophobia, my point is that these literary backlists are not served by those with bottom-line, profit-driven interests. I am not convinced I want to cozy up here, but Rich ends the article by quoting agent Peter McGuigan of Foundry Literary & Media:

“I think there’s a tendency to overreact in general, whether it’s firing people or canceling submissions because we have a dip in the economy or paying $6 million for Tina Fey because she does a good impersonation of somebody we’re not
even going to know who she is in a year.”

If you're just trying to sell your first novel, I don't expect you to have the assuredness to think of these issues, to consider who will care for your book if it becomes a classic, to think about who will best manage your backlist when you eventually have one. But publishers have this responsibility. You can't leave editors to extol the virtues of their historic literary press and then sell the whole operation off to the highest bidder, regardless of where that bidder made their sheckles (see Alec Baldwin's character in 30 Rock discussing cross-promotion with GE and NBC).

I am sad for Houghton, who is now off the shelf but still open to offers for company purchase, and I'm thinking Hachette employees should proceed with caution. As someone that made little money in publishing and was always resentful of the industry's reliance on independently wealthy employees, I'm not convinced this meal ticket will pay out forever more. And as for those Hachette authors... enjoy it while it lasts!

A Radical Reaction to Recession Concerns

My apologies for the boring heading. It's rainy and the morning and a short week for work... let's face it, no one wants to be in an office. But I'm just throwing in a bit of commentary on the news Christopher posted yesterday.

There's a general feeling in publishing, as in any industry, that these are tough times and if you're working, if you have a job in publishing, you're fortunate, and you hope that fortune lasts as long as possible. I spoke to an agent last week, who is also a friend, and I asked her whether her agency, a strong and productive one, was changing strategy at all to deal with the current economic crisis. She said publishers still needed books, they still had lists to fill, and they were still hoping for "the big one," so submissions were going out the same as ever. She said advances may have been down somewhat, but if they could sell an editor on a strong project, the editor could find the money for it.

But then we hear that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has suspended acquisitions for its trade and reference division "until further notice." Claiming that "they" - editors? - are going to focus on what they have already acquired, a spokesperson for the publisher explained “In this case, it’s a symbol of doing things smarter; it’s not an indicator of the end of literature. We have turned off the spigot, but we have a very robust pipeline.”

Agents are not angry, obviously, but deeply confused and concerned. Most are saying, like my aforementioned colleague, that it makes no sense as publishers need to have projects in the works, and plenty of them. I worked with a director who always explained the value in having too many manuscripts under contract: regardless of the delivery date, you can get them all in and then decide when to publish them, picking and choosing strategically. If an author had to wait 18 months to see their book in print, the editor could simply explain the value of waiting and timing it just right. This course of action creates the risk of never publishing a somewhat weak title, of course, but most hope no such titles end up in-house.

So it's hard to know how Houghton can get out of this freeze. How can they move forward? And it's disheartening to hear of such an action at the same time as all the bad news on the corporate bookselling side: shares of Borders Group dropped below $1 for the first time last Friday, down 19% by closing, notes WSJ and Shelf Awareness, and Steve Riggio at B&N has been complaining about the "significant drop off in customer traffic and consumer spending." We can take heart in this campaign and others like it to give Books as Gifts (from the good folks who brought us Book Bloggers Appreciation Week!).

I'll buy what I can from local booksellers - most likely the Harvard Book Store - whose former owner, famed bookseller Frank Kramer, was profiled here - though I'll try to get to the Brookline Booksmith as well. (RE: the Harvard Crimson article on Kramer... I believe this line contains an error: "He sits on the board of both the Harvard Square Business Association and Beacon Crafts, a local but world-renowned publisher. " I think the writer meant Beacon Press, on whose board he does sit.) As for those in Houghton... good luck? I worry for you, friends.

PS A nice round-up of not-so-nice news from the great blog Moby Lives, under the tragically appropriate headline, "Whew! For a minute there I thought we were fucked!"

Rewards for Stupidity

Some of us like to pretend that books offer a more intelligent form of media, existing on a higher plane than dvds or cds or online news, above the sensationalism of some blogs that run on gossip fumes. If nothing else, the long production time should minimize the book publishing industry's ability to benefit from tawdry subjects in a big way.

And then you see news like this, from an article by Tony Allen-Mills as reported in the Sunday Times (UK): "Literary agents are queueing up to sign her to a book deal that could earn her up to $7m. " Who, you ask? Sarah Palin, of course! The article suggests some think she could "emerge as the saviour of the American publishing industry." Now *that's* hype, I believe.

I mean honestly.

With publishers as nervous as everyone else about next year’s economic prospects, Palin’s popularity has become a boon. “Nobody is waiting for George W Bush’s memoirs,” one New York agent noted.

Well fair enough, but any book by Palin would have to be ghost-written within an inch of its life. I don't think she is necessarily stupid, but I refuse to believe she is intelligent or thoughtful. She's all presentation, clearly, and quite frankly, she has a bad attitude. Any book by her would be a defensive tirade against the media, most likely. There are endless things to criticize about American media, but she would most likely skate by each useful critique and instead land punches that offer soundbites at best.

But lest we overlook one brave woman's opinion...

Camille Paglia, the radical feminist, declared that she had “heartily enjoyed [Palin’s] arrival on the national stage”. She had been subjected to “an atrocious and sometimes delusional level of defamation”, Paglia added. “I can see how smart she is and, quite frankly, I think the people who don’t see it are the stupid ones.”

I sometimes enjoy the provocations of Paglia, but I think she's off here. Palin was subjected to serious defamation, but I do not think she's smart. If anything, she's a heck of an actor.

So do us a favor, Palin, and just skip the book idea. Make an inspirational dvd or something, but leave books out of it!

As I type that, though, I'm aware of the money that could go to independent booksellers if such junk was published, which gives me pause. Also, maybe she'll hang herself by her own rope - metaphorically speaking. Hell - put those thoughts together and you have my hearty support - gulp - for a book by one Ms. Sarah Palin.

Books are as low as any form of media, folks. It just saddens me to envision such a stupid book with a cover of her and her glasses trying to look smart sitting on a used bookshelf 3 years after pub, with 5 other copies, all marked down to $1. In the longterm, does this devalue all books?

To answer, here's a comment on the article posted by E. Joyce Moore of Indianapolis:

This will rank right up there with Monica Lewinski's, and the future Joe the Plumber books. No wonder the publishing industry is in trouble. Millions of dollars for books to be returned from the bookstores unsold. You could have had at least ten really good writers/books for the same investment.

Point!

Sweet and bitter all at once

The story by Richard Perez-Pena in the NY Times was downright overwhelming. The article, published today, was about Dan Mirvish and Eitan Gorlin, two men who created a hoax that reached the top tiers of our pathetic media system, apparently built on a house of cards.

Many of us read about Sarah Palin thinking Africa was a country rather than a continent. It was a cheap joke, an easy tidbit of information for all us liberals to smugly point to as evidence of her grand stupidity. Irony of ironies, it was reported by Carl Cameron, a Fox News Channel correspondent. Oops! Though it was actually MSNBC that came forward to retract the story.

The truth is that these two gues, Mirvish and Gorlin, went all Yes Men-style and made up a blogger named Martin Eisenstadt who was a McCain advisor and fellow at the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy. The man, like the institute, does not exist.

What made me think of my li'l blog here was this part of Perez-Pena's article:

They say the blame lies not with them but with shoddiness in the traditional news media and especially the blogosphere.

“With the 24-hour news cycle they rush into anything they can find,” said Mr. Mirvish, 40.

Mr. Gorlin, 39, argued that Eisenstadt was no more of a joke than half the bloggers or political commentators on the Internet or television.

This is always the hard part. Is it the people who did its fault or the people who let them do it? We all went through this with JT Leroy, not to mention bad tv movies about washed up celebrities, the ones who just wanted to keep the crowds happy.

These guys have to take some blame, yes, but the story provides a useful example of the dangers our fast-paced media must address. Everyone is in a rush to break the story and with the internet being what it is, you can get the story out there very quickly, right to readers.

And who are the readers? We were all gorging on media leading up to and just following the election, and many of us still are. I used to scan, but now I zip right through headlines, going forward and back with speed heretofore unreached. Why? Because I can. And because there seems to be endless news to read!

But like many publishing/bookish types, I appreciate the solace of a good book, with a finished ending just waiting for me to reach it. It's not changeable, it's not anxious, it's not going to be taken down or altered. And I'm not reading in a bubble - I often go online for supplementary material: to see the author's website, or see images as I did recently, as I wanted visuals to go with the story told in And the Band Played On. But this story is a good reminder to take what I read online with a grain of salt.

This also affirms my belief in the need for strong gatekeepers, and if those gatekeepers delay a process somewhat, it can be a valuable delay that strengthens the credibility of the material you're reading.

So just chill already.

I can hardly believe it

To think that we are soon to have a president who reads poetry... It is the dawn of a new day!

It was Derek Walcott's Collected Poems, 1948-1984, it turns out. Nice choice! I know we were all supposed to be impressed that he was reading Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World during the campaign, but it's nice to see him balancing the issue book with something more artful.

So maybe there can be a run on Walcott's poetry books now, just in time for the holidays. If you think your favorite Obama fan is interested, be sure to follow IndieBound's advice and buy at an indie!

(In the photo, it appears he's reading Team of Rivals, the Doris Kearns Goodwin book about Lincoln and his peeps. Snoooooorrrrree... Gimme Walcott anyday.)

More fun on the web

I know this has been blogged about on publishing / reader blogs, but I still want to spread the word as I find this website by the New Zealand Book Council pretty hilarious. Here you can read to your heart's content at work, all the while appearing as if you're going over a powerpoint presentation. It's simply bizarre.

I don't see that as much more than a novelty, of course. I mean, one cannot truly appreciate the works of Emily Dickinson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Oscar Wilde in this format, with stock images alongside verse, with useless charts littering the page. If anything, it's more interesting as an artistic statement about the hollowness of modern business presentations.

This project brings to mind David Byrne's Powerpoint presentation, Envisioning Emotional Epistemoligical Information. My partner's a big fan of Byrne's - as am I now - and so this is in our home, and it's odd. I enjoyed seeing this project, but you know how you sometimes don't know how to move, or what to do with your hands, when you're at a museum? It was similar. One doesn't know how to react to watching an artistic powerpoint. Where to look, how to sit, what to say. I suppose it is a sublime experience in some ways, or absurd.

Who am I kidding - we all still have one thing on our mind. I still cannot believe we are finally getting rid of that joke known as George Bush and bringing into office someone who seems to be intelligent, thoughtful, humble, open-minded, reasonable, and prepared. I know Obama will have his faults but I'm still, like so many, incredibly hopeful. And with the world on the evening of Nov. 4th, I breathed a sigh of relief!

Categorize this!

There's a nice, very short interview with author Mary Roach over at Paper Cuts, the NYTimes' book blog. She tells an amusing story about contacting Borders after seeing her first book, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, shelved in Medical Reference.

I call up Borders headquarters in Minneapolis and I ask to speak to Guy Who Decides Where Books Get Shelved. Of course, there is no guy. The receptionist asks for the title of my book, she checks a list, and she puts me through to Guy Who Deals with Medical Reference. What I don’t know at the time is that this man has taken a liking to my book. He spends his days with “Healing Your Sinuses” and “Dr. Jensen’s Guide to Better Bowel Care.” “Stiff” is high art to him... I fill his voicemail box with a whingeing ignoramus request to be moved to, what, Sewing Craft? Gardening? A few hours later my publicist e-mails me. There is panic in the land. Damage control is underway. “Mary,” it concludes, “please don’t ever call Borders headquarters again.”

As far as I know, “Stiff” is still shelved in Medical Reference. I told this story to a Borders employee a while back. “That’s not so bad,” she said. “We put ‘The Perfect Storm’ in Commercial Fishing.”

Having worked at a location myself, this sounds about right for Borders. Even worse, I'm sure her new book, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, is getting put right up in Erotica. Many of these employees do not and some might not be able to read. That's what happens when you hire teenagers at $7 an hour. Now I know this is not true for all Borders floor staff, or the staff of chain stores in general, but sometimes... (This caused a flare-up recently at Shelf Awareness, so I should just let it go.)

Are you the Gatekeeper?

There was a good if short post on Critical Mass - "the blog of the national book critics circle board of directors" - about the NBCC/PEN discussion Beyond Margins: A Critical Perspective, wherein authors and editors dicussed "the question of gatekeepers in the publishing, book reviewing and awards communities." The publisher involved in the event was the terrific Brooklyn-based independent Akashic Books, with appearances by two of their authors, Chris Abani and Amiri Baraka. They all discussed marginalized writing, with two resources those of us committed to such voices should keep in mind: blogs and academic departments, such as ethnic studies, LGBT studies, etc... It's worth a read.

Joseph Marshall III had interesting comments to make regarding the efforts of native writers:

"Anyone who's native deals with various attitudes," he said, including "narrow-minded condescension" and "benign curiosity." "Gatekeepers who work for publishers are no different," he added. "Once we get past the gatekeepers, we have things to say."

The post is a good reminder that some of the most important, prescient, and ultimately valuable writing comes from unexpected or overlooked places with their ears to the ground. Sometimes "the next big thing" isn't manufactured to be just that by a big corporate house, but instead bubbles up and demands attention. So... what's next?

Stop the whining!

Thanks to BookNinja for today's link.

Book Editor David L. Ulin of the L.A. Times has a good article on his reaction to reading yet another article on "the crisis in book publishing." Ulin makes the point that many are making about the economy in general: the coming (or current) recession will be/is painful, but maybe it will have some good effects in slowing things down, curbing over-consumption and getting people to live within their means. Rather than just rolling over and dropping dead, maybe, Ulin says, something else in publishing will occur:

What's more likely, I think, is that publishers will scale back some of their higher-end advances, especially in regard to certain risky properties: books blown out of magazine stories, over-hyped first novels, multi-platform "synergies." At least, I hope that's what happens, because one of the worst trends in publishing -- in culture in general -- over the last decade or so has been its air of desperate frenzy, which far more than falling numbers tells you that an industry is in decline.

Here's hoping, Ulin!

It's true that this "publishing is DYING!" call has gone out numerous times before. Everyone who works in publishing is told they missed the really *good* times. It's an industry surviving on an end-is-near mentality, where a success is greeted as a delay of the inevitable. And so everyone is out chasing the next big thing, thinking that's all they can count on to make it through another day.

Ulin talks about the problem facing a new novelist, say, who has her first book published to low sales numbers. Then what happens? "According to one agent I know, you almost have to hide your numbers, moving from publishing house to publishing house to stay ahead of the curve." That's partially true, but now with Bookscan so widely available, those numbers are nearly impossible to hide, so the next publishing house, despite agent attempts to maintain the illusion, knows the score.

But Ulin holds out hope:

This, of course, may be the silver lining to our current economic contraction: No more will publishers or writers have time or money for ephemera. During the Great Depression, even popular literature got serious: The 1930s saw the birth of noir. As the money dries up, so too, one hopes, does the gadabout nature of literary culture, the breathless gossip, all the endless hue and cry.

Can we keep some of the "breathless gossip" please?

Actually, I'll back this, and I see modest independent houses leading the way - heads up, Soft Skull! You in, Chelsea Green? These are the places that hopefully have not overextended themselves, that have built strong lists with readers who know them and their authors, and these are the folks that can maintain a steady hand and keep publishing quality material that folks who need a break from the bad news around them may turn to.

Keep up the optimism, Ulin. As you know, in publishing, it's in short supply.

Street lit

I'm a bit late on this story by Anne Barnard in the NY Times today, as other bloggers and such (including Shelf Awareness - thanks!) have linked it. It's even one of the most emailed stories. But hey, I had other work to do.

The story is about literature "variously known as urban fiction, street lit or gangsta lit." Street lit is my favorite term, though I'd like to see it expanded to include different subjects. In this case, the article is focusing on mass market (mostly) novels, soap opera styled, written by and for folks in impoverished, urban black communities.

I've long been fascinating and appreciative of the economy around books for and by this demographic. African American literature, fiction and non-fiction, is often woefully underrepresented in big box bookstores, for many reasons. So you have this vibrant economy of self-published authors and street vendors getting books to readers, who often blow through them. In this article, reader Shonda Miller "devours a book a day, enforces a daily hour of reading time for her entire family and scours street stands and the Internet for new titles." Very nice. Barnard adds, "She also acts as an unofficial guide and field scout for the Queens Library as it builds its collection of a fast-growing genre, written mainly by black authors about black characters."

I'm also increasingly fascinated by the role of the library, which is clearly ever-changing. The debates come down to whom it is serving, and the awkward, unwieldy answer is the public. But there must be a healthy sense of the mission, to both serve the public and work toward enlightening the public. I think it's important for a library to have street lit but also have more difficult lit, so readers who want to go for something more challenging at some point can do so. The head librarian at Far Rockaway library in Queens is quoted in the article, responding to all the folks heading straight to the urban fiction section:

The head librarian, Sharon Anderson, who said she grew up on Donald Goines and was now obsessed with spy novels, says that sometimes she recommends something harder: “If you want sex, dirt and murder, read Shakespeare! We have the CliffsNotes!”

Makes sense to me. You got readers into the library, now let's see what they'll find. Maybe that's idealistic, and it's clearly subjective as I love exploring the library, just wandering around through sections and taking home books I never knew before walking in. And I may not so much as crack them before I return them, but who cares?

It's exciting to hear a librarian say that she will go out to a street vendor and buy copies of a book she hears is popular, a self-published title not available in her usual catalogs, to keep library users satisfied, even users who are not there to delve into deeply intellectual matters. Libraries need to know the public, to know how to keep them informed on everything from their history to their tax forms.

Now keeping the homeless warm at the BPL? That's a whole different post, I imagine... (but look at that hot new redesigned bpl website!)

When Authors / Publishers Succeed

As I come down from a very nice if incredibly brief visit to nyc - 1 night - seeing my friend Damian Barr, a fantastic British writer and one-to-watch, I wanted something to keep my spirits up. I looked to my google reader and the blogs tracked therein.

This story by Sue Fox at the UK Times may not be entirely uplifting, as our heroine Doris Lessing is surely struggling with some typical ailments of aging, but I still appreciated the Nobel Prize winning author's point:

I give away mountains of books to Africa and Oxfam and anyone else who comes here. I get The New Yorker, which is always inviting readers to read more books. I buy armfuls from the local bookseller in West Hampstead. I phone up and somebody collects them for me.

It’s lovely to have money to give away — that’s the bonus of winning the Nobel. I support Oxfam, Shelter and Centrepoint. I’ve also got a fondness for a local cat-and-dog home and an organisation to help writers. I was much too proud to write begging letters when I was broke. Miraculously, two people I’d never met said they’d heard I was hard up and enclosed some money. They were communists and told me that when I had enough I should pass on the money to somebody else who needed it. I’ve been doing it ever since.

It's nice to see a writer who is financially comfortable, and because of that, is generous. I would expect nothing less from what I know of her, but it was still nice to read. (And thanks to BookNinja for the link.)

And publishing folks are all coming down themselves, from the Frankfurt Book Fair. It sounds like it's busy but not the best and brightest fair in recent memory - fair enough, given the current state of the global economy. This report from Motoko Rich at the NY Times follows Mizzi van der Pluijm, presumably because of her outstanding name. Well done! She is the Dutch publisher at Contact Publishers, and using her as a focal point is a nice way into reporting on the fair. But this paragraph stood out, not necessarily about the fair but about the love of publishing specifically:

Ms. van der Pluijm knew she wanted to become a publisher when she was 16 and read a biography of Nancy Cunard, the cruise-line heiress who first published Samuel Beckett. “To be paid for reading all interesting stuff, and meeting very interesting people,” Ms. van der Pluijm said, “that is a wonderful job.”

To uplift, I should also reference this story by Simon Romero at the NYTimes about Luis Soriano, a Columbian who brings scores of books to poor rural folk by way of donkey. It's already one of the most emailed articles today. Given my love of bookmobiles, I was of course drawn to the story of this man's "Biblioburro."

More original content soon. My brain is still in a cab heading downtown it seems...

BREAKING NEWS: NBA Finalists Announced

As if you haven't heard...


FICTION
Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (Riverhead)
Rachel Kushner, Telex from Cuba (Scribner)
Peter Matthiessen, Shadow Country (Modern Library)
Marilynne Robinson, Home (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Salvatore Scibona, The End (Graywolf Press)

Fiction judges: Gail Godwin (chair), Rebecca Goldstein, Elinor Lipman, Reginald McKnight, Jess Walter.

NONFICTION
Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Alfred A. Knopf)
Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton & Company)
Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals (Doubleday)
Jim Sheeler, Final Salute: A Story of Unfinished Lives (Penguin)
Joan Wickersham, The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order (Harcourt)

Nonfiction judges: Marie Arana (chair), Farah Jasmine Griffin, Russell Jacoby, Megan Marshall, Kevin Starr.


POETRY
Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Mark Doty, Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems (HarperCollins)
Reginald Gibbons, Creatures of a Day (Louisiana State University Press)
Richard Howard, Without Saying (Turtle Point Press)
Patricia Smith, Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press)

Poetry Judges: Robert Pinsky (chair), Mary Jo Bang, Kimiko Hahn, Tony Hoagland, Marilyn Nelson.


YOUNG PEOPLE'S LITERATURE

Laurie Halse Anderson, Chains (Simon & Schuster)
Kathi Appelt, The Underneath (Atheneum)
Judy Blundell, What I Saw and How I Lied (Scholastic)
E. Lockhart, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks (Hyperion)
Tim Tharp, The Spectacular Now (Alfred A. Knopf)

Young People’s Literature Judges: Daniel Handler (chair), Holly Black, Angela Johnson, Carolyn Mackler, Cynthia Voigt.


It's always nice to see some smaller presses on there. Good luck, Graywolf!

And yet another model, but this one means FREE BOOKS!

To start, let me explain how my route here. I started with this post at the Written Nerd, which took me to this post at Books on the Nightstand.

So where did this all lead me? To the website of the Concord Free Press, based right here in Massachusetts, which is offering a whole new publishing model. Ya see, these kind folks are going to publish 2 books a year, with print runs of about 1,000 copies, and give them all away for free. In getting a book, though, you are promising to "make a voluntary donation to a local charity or someone in need in their community." They ask that you then log your donation at the website, with the number on your copy of the book, so they can track where the money is going.

Obviously, this is a non-profit organization, but I was of course still confused as to how they could sustain this model. This page partially answers that question by explaining that the design is free, due to the kind folks at Alphabetica Design, and the actual printing is discounted by the kind folks at Recycled Paper Printing. And then they get support from their board and whoever feels so inclined to throw them some change. Their advisory board includes writers Russell Banks, Stephan McCauley, and others.

I'm pretty fascinated by this model, and I've already requested a copy of Stona Fitch's Give and Take. (The perceptive among you might have noticed she's also the Editor-in-Chief of the press...) I'll donate somewhere and report it. I do worry, of course, about how this kind of model impacts writers and publishers who need to make money, not to mention bookstores. I love giving away my books and taking from others, I can't get enough of the library, and books prices can be out of control (Christopher was recently reporting the shocking list price of Nixonland - $37.50!). But there is something to be said for people willingly putting down money for a book, investing in it with their hard-earned cash. It makes the transaction more of a commitment for them. If they just have a book handed to them, even if they give $50 to Doctors Without Borders, they still may not feel that obligation to read the free book in their hand. They may have given the money to the org anyhow.

And if you're a fiction writer and you're hoping to do it at least a bit closer to full-time, you may not appreciate this throwaway line on the publisher's website: "Do writers get paid? Writers rarely get paid, ask one. In our case, we can definitely guarantee that they won’t get paid—can a traditional publisher promise that?" I don't know if this is the right answer to the question of how to get funding for innovative writers, not just commercial writers who know how to deliver a really sellable product. I appreciate the fact that it's a limited print run, but the idea that a bigger publisher could put out the book after Concord Free Press is tough as some publishers will not want a book that is out there in one edition already, especially when readers are being encouraged to actively share their copy of that one book.

I'll read, though, and I'll keep watching this space. If nothing else, I give a big kudos to their logo. It's fantastic! And I look forward to trying out Give and Take. You?

Publishing into a Recession

First off, I'd like to ask that the Great Depression NOT be invoked anymore, at least for a few weeks. I just can't.

Next, I'd like to send you readers away, with some interesting links. First, courtesy of BookNinja, is this article from the UK Guardian, on how British publishers are handling the financial crisis. They note that guides explaining how to save money - making things, growing things, etc.. - are on the rise, with more to come. But they also note that in other times of similar crises, trashier fare did quite well - romances, biographies of the rich and famous, etc...: "Back in the recession of the early 80s, cash-strapped readers were lapping up Jackie Collins sex, rock'n'roll and shopping saga Lovers and Gamblers." Something to keep in mind.

The next link is to a blog entry that has received tons of comments, and for good reason. I didn't even know this blog before I was pointed to it by The Written Nerd.

The blog is called Editorial Ass and the entry in question is here. In it, a "recovering editorial assistant" explains sales figures for literary fiction in a way that I would deem totally fair. People get very nervous talking numbers. I always wanted to be honest with my authors about sales figures but I also had to be sensitive. They wanted the truth, but how much truth could they handle?

On her blog, this "Moonrat" decides through an admittedly unscientific process that 7,000 copies is the magic number. That or above and you've done nicely for yourself. And I agree. She then breaks down less than that and correctly explains what the publisher's reaction might be. It's not entirely bad until we hit 1,500 or less, and then you're stuck.

The comments are well worth reviewing as readers ask good questions and Moonrat offers more strong answers, including a lengthy one where she explains how the credit crisis may impact publishers. She explains how literary fiction is kind of luxury publishing, something many editors want to do but can only do with more reliable non-fiction books on the list. Literary fiction is a big risk. But then she goes on to explain the pressure publishers get from the sales force who want to see more paperbacks, as they sell quicker in stores. I've seen this pressure firsthand. It puts the publisher in a pickle because the margin on paperbacks really blows, especially if a book is a paperback original. The publisher has to sell many more copies to earn back the advance. For the author, it also means a lower royalty rate usually, and of course less money in general as each book costs less than it would in hardcover.

What I also find interesting is that Moonrat is not distinguishing between an independent and a large corporate press, because in this non-scientific way, it's not just about financials but about morale and one's sense of the market. A book is most likely celebrated more at a small independent when it sells 7,000+, but especially for literary fiction, it's still great news at a much bigger house with bursting coffers.

I hope writers reading about this stuff don't get too hung up on this number - just as I hoped my authors wouldn't - because it cannot be one's focus. It'll throw you off your game. But for the rest of us, it's a really useful contribution to online discussions of publishing. Thanks, Moonrat! I'll be going back soon to check out this entry on creating a platform. Great stuff.

News You Can't Use

Well raise your hand if you're shocked by this news. In this day and age, of course Tina Fey is writing a book. Don't get me wrong, I'm as amused by her as anyone, but why does every joanie-come-lately feel the need to put pen to paper? But what am I saying, if the price tag reached $6 million as the New York Post reported, why wouldn't she?

And I can see a fun book coming from Fey, based on her writing over at 30 Rock, which is a fantastic show... mostly. And I suppose it's good to see publishing as quick-moving as other media - her agent, Richard Abate at Endeavor, apparently employed a "no meeting, no proposal pitch." Outstanding! Did he just show youtube clips?

While watching the excruciating VP debate last week, a fellow viewer at a friend's house took issue not just with McCain's choice of Palin, but also with Palin's acceptance of the VP role. This young woman - a PhD in political science, it might be worth mentioning - is tired of the entitlement Americans have, shown by Palin who didn't question her own ability to be in this incredibly powerful position. Instead of saying, "Am I qualified?" she thought "Why the heck shouldn't I?!" Is Fey showing the same ignorance here? Did her agent say let's do this, even though she apparently could not even make time to meet with publishers, much less put together a proposal? He said strike while the iron's hot, and she said why not.

But then we have the publisher, Little, Brown. This is not some small outfit that may go under from this deal, I realize. Still, book publishing is sloooooooow. By the time Fey's book comes out, god willing, Palin will be a distant memory, perhaps reporting on quirky stories from Fox News in the same way Jeanne Moos does for CNN, but with a more moose-huntin' flavor. She'll find the oddest, funniest Joe Six-Packs and Hockey Moms around and report on their goings-on under the oppressive Obama regime. "How are you all survivin'?" she'll ask with a wink. This won't be SNL fodder, enjoyed only by the fringe still left watching this backwards channel, and Fey won't necessarily be the most watched comedienne on tv. The book may have to stand on its own, needing to earn out $6 million. This seems like a shaky business model to me.

And in other publishing news, Soft Skull has published the complete collection of David Rees' Get Your War On, and the author has been busy self-promoting online. I admit it, his ridiculous blog cracks me.

I'll also just admit, though I fit the demographic a bit too well, that I'm ready for Sarah Vowell's new book, The Wordy Shipmates, about the Puritans. Now there's a writer who can deliver a book. Just sayin', Tina Fey.

Your Side of Deceit

I was in the bookstore today looking over the new arrivals - it was the Harvard Co-op, which of course is a B&N college store - and I noticed GirlBoyGirl by Savannah Knoop. The subtitle offers the reveal: "How I Became J. T. Leroy." Yes folks, it's out: the true story of the person who played the part of the mysterious, genderqueer it-author a few years ago - the actor, not the writer - who was found to be a fraud. Now that the fracas has all died down, what of the person behind the sunglasses? Hmmm....

I picked it up to confirm it was what it was, but I must be honest in saying I can't imagine actually reading it. I mean, at this point, who cares? And then I was a bit disappointed to see the logo on the spine. The book is being published by Seven Stories Press, an independent publisher famously run by Dan Simon, a press I have long respected. (I thought the Open Media pamphlet series was very cool, if somewhat impractical.) Then I looked at the acknowledgments page and saw mention of Amy Scholder, who is the current editor in chief of the press. I know Scholder's name because she was the US Editor at Verso, and after she left, I (unsuccessfully) interviewed for that position. She has certainly worked on some very cool books - I'm intrigued by the use of her name in association with David Wojnarowicz's The Waterfront Journals - and she knows how to get attention, start fires, and force discussions of the first amendment and art, which I'm all for. It looks like Verso may have been set to publish Scholder's anthology, Dr. Rice in the House, but they lost her and it to Seven Stories (or gave both, it's not clear). Perhaps they felt it was straying too far from their rather rigid (and dry) approach to politics, which has a more European, old-school feel to it.

So Scholder is more pop and art (worked with Karen Finley et al), and she was clearly the editor of this GirlBoyGirl business. But it hardly seems all that substantive, and in fact seems instead like part of an ongoing genre of confessional - and boring - books. Now a press like Seven Stories needs to have some money makers to keep publishing more risky, less popular books - their fiction, especially first time novelists, are a huge risk. But I'm much more impressed with big sellers like Kurt Vonnegut's A Man Without a Country, a model of how an indie press needs to publish, getting a huge name and getting him to do this with you rather than a giant commercial press, and showing booksellers and readers that you can publish something this popular in a way that looks top-rate and is readily available. Derrick Jensen's forthcoming graphic novel on global warming, As the World Burns, also looks great, and very accessible, with definite commercial appeal. So why'd they stoop to this JT Leroy hot mess?

In terms of genre and not indie publishing, holding this new book in my hand also brought to mind Can You Every Forgive Me?, Lee Israel's relatively new book about her years forging author signatures on literary classics. It was celebrated in the Sunday Book Review, much to the frustration of many, and I was curious about the book. Reading a review on a blog later turned me against it. But is this kind of confessional book, by someone we have every right to hate or at least be angry with, interesting in that car-accident kind of way?

It seems the genre, long a mainstay of commercial publishing, got a serious boost from the whole scandal involving James Frey's A Million Little Pieces. I remember my sister getting the book after the truth came out, because she was "just so curious." And that's it, right? We're so curious as to why you'd dress up like this fake author, or sign Noel Coward's signature and sell it, that we actually go out and buy these books, thereby supporting the very people we can't stand!

But morals aside, really, aren't these confessions just articles? Do they really need to be whole books? And this is what worries me: editors are pushing these as books based on an idea and not the content, so they have authors, some of whom may not be particularly skilled at crafting a book-length narrative on most given subjects, expand their story to make it a product they can sell. And they run with it. This is what I felt reading Robert Leleux's The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy, which was over and done with in 3 days (thanks, Boston Public Library - here's an early return!). The author wasn't a bad writer, but he had a schtick - gay kid in TX with fabulous mom - and he went on and on for about 200 pages. Book's done!

And we hear about the pressure from publishers to find authors, to find books that are not going to take long to write. I don't know. I suppose most really commercial books are l-i-t-e - it's the nature of this kind of book. But is that seeping into other areas, even into genres we expect to be weightier? And is it lowering standards for even our best independent presses?

I should say that Terri Jentz's book, reviewed here recently, was an example of a book that seemed to have come from a painstaking writing and editing process - in a good way. It may have been very long, but it was also very well done, with polish, and nuance, and consistent style, and intelligence. Let's hope publishers keep producing these books even while they slam lighter fare into their catalogs to get in quick cash.

Banned Book Week!

How could I not post about this exciting week! "Free People Read Freely" is the tagline for Banned Book Week. Check out the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, too - they're fantastic.

Shelf Awareness did a great round-up of news stories on Banned Book Week, which I will just copy and paste:

Banned Books Week in the News

"'Dangerous' books are a big reason to keep reading," noted the Winston-Salem, N.C., Journal

In the Asbury Park, N.J., Press, librarian Marian R. Bauman wrote, "Books are not evil and do not harm anyone."

A Fort Myers, Fla., News-Press editorial advised, "Read, do not ban, books."

"SoCal rediscovers banned books" was the headline in the Los Angeles Times over the weekend, followed Monday by "Banned Books Week--does it matter?" and David Ulin's "Banned Books Week a thorny issue."

BiblioBuffet, the online literary salon, features several pieces about Banned Books Week, including one by SIBA's Nicki Leone, also managing editor and contributor of A Reading Life; a letter from Lauren Roberts, editor-in-chief; a column by author Lev Raphael; and a contribution from literary critic Henry L. Carrigan, Jr.

Inevitably, the Sarah Palin controversy has been invoked in many articles, including this from the Christian Science Monitor: "Given the recent public scuffle over Sarah Palin’s conversations while mayor with a Wasilla librarian about the possibility of banning books, there probably couldn't be a better moment for the American Library Association's Banned Books Week."

"Oh, those evil books," cautioned the Albany, N.Y., Times Union.

"Banning books is not a way to run a country," according to the Contra Costa Times. "Transparency and censorship issues are nonpartisan."

The American Thinker offered an opposing viewpoint: "Apparently 99% of Books Have Been 'Banned'!"

So what banned book will you read?!

Strange Piece of Paradise 4-sentence Review

I finally made it through all 700+ pages of Terri Jentz's Strange Piece of Paradise, a big odd book wherein the author recounts her experience being attacked at a campsite while traveling across country, far from home, as a 19 year old by an axe-wielding nutjob in small town Oregon who was never caught. She revisits the crime and the area 15 years later and begins her own investigation, interviewing law enforcement, friends, and more, while also ruminating on the experience that she's reclaiming and gauging reactions from people who, bizarrely, still think about this incident often, sometimes everyday. This is kind of western goth, with respectfully drawn characters from an outsider perspective with a strange, eerie tie to this place. Maybe all this Johnny Cash has made me overly sympathetic to criminals, but I was uncomfortable with some of her work going after someone she's convinced did it, but ultimately, the story is worthy, and at times beautifully quiet, and speaks in a small way to the very large issues of masculinity, violence, and the expected silence of victims.

Slow return

My apologies for letting the blog go dark, as theatre folks say. I was down in the wonderful Austin, Texas for a family wedding. Have you been? Why not? GO! Trust me, it's a beautiful place.

Anyhow, I don't have time to catch up on much publishing news just now, but I did want to pull a great quote that the good folks at Shelf Awareness alerted readers to in today's email.

In covering the New England Independent Booksellers Association trade show, Melanie Lauwers at the Cape Cod Times opened with this great lede:

Apparently, there's an old saying that in a tough economy, booze and books continue to sell. The former, because people don't stop drinking no matter what, and the latter because books represent a purchase of lasting value, plus you can find anything in the world within the covers of a book — including a new career if you need one.

Very nice - and optimistic. So I offer that up, with a promise to write more very soon. So grab a book and a drink, and don't worry so much about this bail-out.

For whom the bell tolls....

So I have now had a chance to read Boris Kachka's much-discussed New York magazine article on "The End" of publishing as we know it. I want to say upfront that we should not forget the magazine in which this article appeared. Of course it includes a fair bit of gossip - including that disturbing image of Jane Friedman's retirement/not-so-fast party in which everyone wore masks of her face. It's the nature of this particular magazine, right? And because of it, I now know that Sarah Palin spent $2500 bones on a Valentino jacket (zut alors, hockey mom!). It's New York, not the New Yorker... which couches its gossip in more bourgeois stylings.

But I digress. So this publishing article is long and includes gossip and, as the folks at HarperStudio pointed out on their blog, it doesn't have much interesting new information. Anyone who has followed the discussions going on in modern publishing for the last 5 or 10 years will read a mere re-cap rather than a forward-thinking piece. In fact, the blog's conclusion in the above-linked post is a bit more valuable than any conclusion I found in the article. Says the folks at HarperStudio:

To quote Kurt Vonnegut, “so it goes.” And goes, and goes, until the once-profitable middle is the worst possible place to be. And we’re left with an industry that can only do two things: gamble bigger and bigger on the next big thing and milk the backlist for all the new formats it might be worth. If this trend continues, we’ll all be the poorer for it, because the middle should be a place where we can take interesting chances without risking the farm, not a place we go to put our careers—and our corporate parents—on the line.

It sounds a bit like one of the presidential candidates crying out for the elusive middle class - which defines no one and everyone all at once - but in fact, these folks are making a good point.

It's useful also to counter the old celebration of publishing's heyday in mid-20th century America with wise(r) words from Soft Skull's Richard Nash. Says Kachka of the good ol' publishing boys:

They took poor writers drinking, put them up in their homes, and defended them in court. They made handshake deals, spent their personal wealth in lean years, and built backlists out of modernist classics. Discovering Faulkner was like buying Picassos in 1910.

All well and good, and of course we can all pick out favorite books from this era, but as Nash says in reference to a review of the new books, The Time of Their Lives: The Golden Age of Great American Book Publishers, Their Editors and Authors by Al Silverman,

I'm completely astonished that an era that consisted of white men publishing white men could possibly be described as golden. Frankly, we should be ashamed of ourselves to go along with this hypocritical drivel.

Amen!

This article does have some useful information about how all these ol' boys formed houses that got gobbled up by bigger corporations, and a brief history of our bizarre advance and royalty system. (The latter is a structure that cannot hold our modern competitive and short-term thinking ways, hence the experiment that is HarperStudio.) It also shows the desperation of editors under the gun, told to hit targets by bosses culled from marketing departments rather than from editorial departments - or worse, not even from publishing houses! I also liked this point in the article:

This would mean far more than just the few book “trailers” you see online. “They’re all the rage right now,” says Bloomsbury’s Peter Miller, “but I would love to see an example of one video that really did generate a lot of sales. There’s a sense of desperation.”

Those trailers have long mystified me. Why would anyone watch them?

I was intrigued by this paragraph, but of course, I also feel used because Kachka is baiting me as the reader:

One indie publisher has been pitching an imprint around town that would go beyond what Miller’s doing—expanding into print-on-demand, online subscriptions, maybe even a “salon” for loyal readers. He envisions a transitional period of print-on-demand, then an era in which most books will be produced electronically for next to nothing, while high-priced, creatively designed hardcovers become “the limited-edition vinyl of the future.” “I think they know it’s right,” the publisher says of the executives he’s wooing, “but they don’t want to disrupt the internal equilibrium. I’m like the guy all the girls want to be friends with but won’t hop into bed with.”

Any hints on who this publisher is? Someone with a pretty serious ego, the way Kachka paints him, but also with some potentially crucial ideas. I thought of McSweenys, given my subscription there to the Book Release Club, only to see it mentioned in the next paragraph. (I better be getting that Out of Exile book with narratives from Sudanese people displaced, to make up for that hideous heavy metal book!)

We do need to think through how to get targeted lists to interested readers in a way that creates profit, at least enough profit to keep publishing. Bob Miller has a plan that makes sense but might, perhaps, as Kachka suggests, require too much sacrifice for a writer who needs money upfront to write a book. Too many publishers are trying hard to find writers who don't need the money, which will result in a big void of voices. But where will the money come from, if not very commercial blockbuster books? Foundations perhaps? I'd like to see that, but how does one navigate that world without having the author's/editorial vision being too beholden to the sources of money?

Lastly, though, let me say what I found truly distasteful in this article: the final section about books that have not earned out massive advances, which includes future books to watch to see if they flop. Seriously lame. To me, publishers who spend money badly are fair game, but authors trying to get by should not be targeted in this adolescent, bullying way. Maybe I'm being delicate here, and I'm not looking to run out and buy a book about "a small-town library cat" admittedly, but I still would recommend backing off, especially with a novelist. That's blood, sweat and tears in there.

So much to read!

And I'm not just talking about in my tbr pile, people.

I blame BookNinja, who put up many links to end-of-publishing articles today. I just can't get to them all right now, but I want to make them available to anyone who passes through here so you can get started as well. I hope to throw up comments to these as soon as possible.

Ironically, I scanned this article by John Walsh from the UK Independent, and I appreciated what he was doing but feel he may be trying to be a bit extreme. At one point, he explains how Victorian literature is full of slow narratives, because readers slowly devoured books: "readers would settle in for long evenings letting Barchester Towers or Our Mutual Friend wash over them. This was the period when, say, William Gladstone could tell friends, with every expectation of empathy, that he had stayed up all night to read The Woman in White." While I appreciate that this isn't entirely normal, I do have friends who will stay up too late reading a novel, showing up at work the next day exhausted. And in fact, look how many children and adults spent whole weekends or evenings reading Harry Potter books. I see his point, I just don't like this dichotomy being too strict.

What I really like in this article is the second half, when different bookish folks are interviewed about our changing reading habits. Agent Clare Alexander makes a point I've seen firsthand: agents spend much of their time bickering with publishers over digital rights based on fears of what's to come. I also appreciate Richard Ovenden the librarian's point:

"Our reading rooms are still as busy as ever: the most high-quality digitisation does not replace the power of seeing the original artefact. However, people are now more aware of what we've got: a recent report identified a generation that felt that if something wasn't online it didn't exist. So if you digitise things, it does exist to that generation."

That puts things into perspective a bit. Jeremy Ettinghausen, publisher at Penguin, follows Ovenden and mentions "Spinebreakers," Penguin's website for teenagers. (The name makes me a tad uncomfortable, perhaps in its violence.) His piece makes clear the point that publishers, like many media companies, are trying to engage people online as a way to capture them as consumers. "In the past it's been hard to talk to teens – so we gave them a platform where they could talk to each other about books." This is where the internet has this creepy quality, kind of like a church that gives teenagers a place to hang out and then quietly proselytizes. It's too cold to play basketball so they go inside, but when they come out... they're Methodists!! WTF?!??!

I don't entirely buy Andrew Cowan's discussion of his MFA students: "Ahead of this interview, I talked to them about digitisation and not one of them had heard of Twitter, and they were all hostile to the idea of e-books." That's weird. His next point I believe - and appreciate: "They're not immersed in digital fiction, either – some have been published online, but feel it's second-best; they're concerned about the lack of editorial control on the Net and only pursue it because there is a dearth of [print] outlets for short stories."

So I guess I did cover that article, but I cannot get to this lengthy article from New York magazine by Boris Kachka, which opens with a visit to Bob Miller and his exciting new project, HarperStudio. I know I rail against corporate publishing much of the time here, but I'm really intrigued by this HarperStudio and will keep an eye on it. I appreciate the concept, and Miller is obviously an incredibly smart guy. On their blog, in this post, they jump off the New York article to get into publishing issues. The blog seems quite well done.

So I'll try to get my head around that long article and write on it soon.

Then there is this UK Telegraph article by Alex Clark, editor at Granta, about editors. I did read this because it's relatively short, so I can comment on it now. It's sweet. Clark writes about the value of editors, jumping off from the sad news of Robert Giroux's recent death. Summing up the editor's role, he says:

But there is something special about the peculiar skill of editing - which requires the patience to pore over a succession of drafts and redrafts until no further improvement seems possible, plus the tact integral to encouraging and containing writers (rumoured, occasionally, to be highly strung creatures) and, finally, the self-effacement to bring to fruition someone else's work without much public recognition.

Yeah, I'll admit it: I miss editing. I did well at this role, and wouldn't mind a chance to do it again in some capacity. For now, I'll keep trucking along with this blog to stay in the publishing loop.

Clark talks about the value of editors to writers, even as we usher in this digitial age - going back to the point Cowan makes about young writers still being skeptical of getting published online due to the lack of editorial control on online content. Writers who spend time on their craft, as compared to those who throw everything they write right up online and demand readers, will continue to appreciate the rigorous feedback they get from a good editor.

Thanks to BookNinja for these links!