Survival of the Book

Quality not Quantity

2011-06-28T08:52:00.002-05:00

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

2011-05-18T10:24:00.000-05:00

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

2011-05-13T12:53:00.002-05:00

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

2011-05-03T07:25:00.005-05:00

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?

2011-04-29T14:40:00.003-05:00

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

2011-04-12T12:56:00.002-05:00

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

2011-04-06T14:54:00.001-05:00

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.

Op-ed versus blog post

2011-04-03T21:39:00.003-05:00

When I post something on here, no one screens it for me. This is sometimes painfully obvious, as when I include a glaring error, from a misspelled word to something just plain wrong. But Christopher and I purposely use this space to mouth off about whatever annoys, amuses, pleases, or frustrates us. We try to balance it so we're not always ranting. I hope all of you out there appreciate that balance.

This morning, I read something in the paper that just plain pissed me off. (And yes, I still read a newspaper.) My local paper is the Boston Globe. You'd think this would be a good thing. Sometimes it is; other times, it's a damn shame. When news went out recently that they were laying off two great writers from their books/Ideas section - Amanda Heller and Katherine Powers - I was not a proud subscriber. Melville House director and general smart guy Dennis Johnson rightly called the Globe out on this move on MobyLives, stating correctly:

Under the helm of long-term book editor James Concannon, and now his replacement Nicole Lamy, it’s long been a bizarre boycott in a town that has more colleges per square inch — about 100 within the city limits alone — that is full of writing programs (at Harvard, MIT, BU, BC, Emerson, UMass and Northwestern, to name a few), is the home to numerous award-winning literary journals (such as Ploughtshares, Post Road, Agni, and others), and is generally, as my grandfather used to say, lousy with writers. It’s clear the audience is there, and a huge part of the newspaper’s demographic, but the Globe has clearly decided to ignore that part of its readership.

I mean, I'm planning on going to two great literary events in this fair city just this week: on Tuesday, Harvard's hosting an incredible event about Frank O'Hara, which will include O'Hara's sister Maureen, novelist Ron Padgett, and the John Ashberry. Then on Thursday, Irish writer Colm Toibin is speaking at Emerson College, first doing a q&a with novelist Christopher Castellani at 4 and then doing a reading at 6, on behalf of literary journal Ploughshares where he is guest editor. Pretty f'ing hot, right?

But the Globe is bored with it, I suppose. They can devote plenty of ink and pixel to the Red Sox but as little as possible to literary goings-on.

But wait! There was something just today in the op-ed page - not even in Ideas or in the official Books section - on books. Fantastic. It was an article about how books are dead. Yes, this is what annoyed me this morning, and this is why this post is going from joy - Toibin! O'Hara! yea! - to frustration.

The op-ed, charmingly entitled "The Last Chapter," is from Globe gadfly Tom Keane, who has been a reporter and an all around capitalist his whole life, it seems. And he uses as his jumping off point the fact that a large Borders is closing right in the Back Bay, a central neighborhood here in Boston. Now Keane takes this information and provides hardly any context. Instead, it conveniently serves as evidence of bookstores' collective demise, at least in Boston. Apparently Keane hasn't followed the annoyingly complicated reactions happening around the country as Borders locations close, as chronicled impressively by Shelf Awareness in the last couple of months. Nor has he heard my call for an indie in my own South End neighborhood in Boston, or my suggestions for groupthink on how to open a good non-profit bookstore. (One post with both here.) There are options.

He in fact announces simply, "The book is dead." Unfortunately, some of us keep getting out the paddles, I suppose, forcing the poor, sickly book to hold on another month longer. To those of us who like printed books, he offers a series of dismissive comments that I won't repeat. They're cheap shots, like jocks mocking the nerds with arrogance and swagger, with a sense of the inevitable. "It's done," he's saying, "so get with it and buy an e-reader."

Many people are saying this and we don't go after all of them, but this guy is saying it in the Globe. In fact, he writes for the op-ed page regularly. That's where I fit this into the Globe's larger disinterest in the literary world of Boston. How is this guy qualified to write this? And did he do any more research beyond noting that this specific Borders location is closing, and then getting sales figures on books from the American Association of Publishers, for ONE MONTH! (And it's January, the month after the holidays, no less.)

And I come back to my opening remark regarding this blog. We can shoot our mouths off all we want. We are not supported by any larger body here. But Keane is printed up (shocking!) and sent out over internet tubes with the Globe's branding all around him. Why are they letting this cheap shot become part of any conversation in their pages, online or off? This is just an ad for e-readers, nothing more.

And I'm again struck by the sense that some want to create this self-fulfilling prophecy to get us over the hurdle. It's okay now, it's okay, put your book down... there ya go... and here's a Kindle! Yes! Take it, hold it, it's okay... it's okay... click on something... And boom, now you're stuck with it. Now you must buy and read with it, and let Amazon track your purchases, and your files, and your highlighting. Anyone reading a printed book is a loser. It's a done deal.

Let Keane make this case as loud as he pleases, of course, but hey Globe? Ask your writers to do some work, and try to avoid these editorials designed only to alienate the few of us left who both read books and still read your paper.

Um, paging Dr. Freud!!!

2011-03-28T21:21:00.000-05:00

It goes like this: a blogger gives a book a poor review and the author sees said bad review and posts a comment about the review in defense of her book. That's that, right? All over. Wrong. So wonderfully wrong. Next, instead of taking her lumps, all HELL BREAKS LOOSE with the author, Jacqueline Howett, throwing a temper tantrum, posting comment after comment after comment after comment and, in effect, challenging the blogger to a pissing contest. Absolutely fabulous. No, that's not right, it's perfect. It. Is. Perfect. Go watch the catfight happen right now...

Awesome.

This is the cover.

That is all.

The Fallacy of "the System"

2011-03-27T20:32:00.003-05:00

With great trepidation, I went to see Tod Machover's Death and the Powers: The Robot's Opera, a production of the American Repertory Theater playing at the Cutler Majestic here in Boston. I may be a nerd, but I'm not really a geek. For example, the video art on display by Stan VanderBeek at MIT's List Visual Arts Center left me cold. I could see that it was inventive, but the chirping and blinking overwhelmed me and it all felt void of emotion. Call me middle brow, but I want at least a touch of sentimentalism in my art, it seems, or some kind of feeling. (That same day, I went up to see Tufts University's gallery show, Seductive Subversions: Women Pop Artists, 1958-1968, which was amazing. I was happily introduced to a number of great artists, including the hilarious May Wilson, but I digress...)

I went into this opera expecting a similar chilly production, with cleverness outweighing emotional resonance. Perhaps it helped that poet Robert Pinsky did the libretto. The music was beautiful and the performances - especially the two female leads, Emily Albrink and Sara Heaton, who truly stole the show - were simple, and powerful, and felt very honest. The technology at work - which you can hear more about here - was incredible, but again, if that were laid on heavy without care and consideration to these other parts, it would have failed, at least by my standards. But what made me think of this blog were the themes. A bit on the story.

The opera is about a wealthy man who is dying. He decides to put himself into his own belongings, downloading himself into "the System," represented by lit walls that become characters. His family - his wife and his daughter (from another mother) - must determine whether he is still alive, when he is part of the system and not in human, or "organic" as they say, form.

Of course, like any good opera or artwork in general, the play brought up many questions and led to many connections in my mind, but one issue that rose to the surface was how much we represent ourselves in digital form, whether on blogs, or Twitter, or Facebook, or IMs and emails, or text messages. In some ways, we are putting ourselves into "the System" to push past the limitations of our bodies to be in multiple places at once. I emailed a friend and her boyfriend recently, knowing she was in Taiwan, traveling. I got a text message from her, and I asked if she was back. She wasn't, but the news I gave her upset her so she texted. (It shouldn't have upset, but that's another story entirely.) The point is, she had to be in Taiwan seeing family without missing the daily dramas that unfold back home.

But as many have noted, communication and reltionships suffer with this need for constant connection. In an article in today's Boston Globe, reporter Beth Teitel writes about teens getting worn out from all night texting. (Admittedly, it's a bit of a media-hysteria piece. And btw, why the F did the Globe file it this way, "

HOME /

COMMUNITY /

MOMS IN BOSTON AND BEYOND

"? Lame, Globe, really lame.) Now let me herd this story back to the point of this blog: if you need to be in many places at once and cannot be alone - one teen says “When you don’t have your phone, you feel incomplete’ - then how can you possibly READ A BOOK?!

And yes, I know that reading articles online, or blog posts like this one (for you 8 people reading), or ebooks on dedicated devices, is all still reading, but it is reading differently. When I read an article online at work, using Google Chrome as my browser, I find myself taking breaks in the text to look at the other tabs, to see if I have a new email. I may get interrupted by an IM on gmail or facebook. For anything I want to retain, I have to print the article out and read it on paper, without these distractions - and even then, my phone is close by to deliver text messages, 99.8% of which do not require any immediate response. My attention is pulled in various directions. This makes concentration difficult.

At the end of Death and the Powers, which sadly is no longer running in Boston as it was a truly exquisite production, the daughter Miranda must decide whether to go and spend eternity with her father as part of "the System" or whether to remain organic, and face death eventually. The libretto raises these fascinating questions of what we sacrifice if we have complete efficiency - with no death, do you appreciate life? With unlimited memory, how do you choose what to think of if no memory is lost? Without struggle, what to appreciate? Without suffering, how do you appreciate relief?

I'm not trying to be simplistic (sometimes I can't help it). But if my books are just files on my computer, do I appreciate themas much? Do I look at the ones I've read and feel satisfied, maybe even smug, and proud? Do I look at the ones I have yet to read, as I'm doing right now (The Talented Miss Highsmith by Joan Schenkar, Triomf by Marlene Van Kiekerk, Fidelity by Grace Paley, etc) and feel thrilled with anticipation of what I'll find?

Because blinking files on a desktop or on a handheld device don't hold that allure. And to me, as of now, the convenience of that system, versus the supposed inefficiency of printed book, is not worth it. Because when I'm reading that book, without any access to the internet, without any blinking names or alerts to messages, I get into an alternate, interior world. The physicality of that book, disconnected from a buzzing network of needy voices trying to give an opinion, or sing a song, or be clever, is protection. It's very limitations are also its strengths, and in the interest of convenience - like the wealthy man in the opera - we are throwing out those limitations without thinking through what's to come, and what may be lost.

Shocking Blogger Revelation

2011-03-21T10:15:00.002-05:00

I hate to say it, but it seems... Christopher and I are Pluggers (tm).

Disturbing look at dead library

2011-03-20T17:55:00.005-05:00

I was rather shocked to watch the video and see the photos posted over at deTROITfuUNK, of the now deceased Mark Twain Library. The images are a powerful look at what could happen in other communities if we allow the government to cut funding and close branches of public libraries. I'm not saying they must stay as is, but they need our support - as communities, and from the government.

I tried to get a bit of a back story and discovered that a "Mark Twain annex" opened at a church in 1998. I wondered if they just never fixed the original building. I know nothing about Detroit so I was not familiar with the situation there.

In the comments section, someone named Eastside Al gives the real story, apparently, which makes the tragedy of these images all the more frustrating:

I’m horrified by these pictures of what was the library of my childhood. I spent many happy hours sitting and reading in the children’s room here while my mother tended to other business in the grown-up books section or at the nearby Sears store.
I’m also furiously angry. The reason why there are so many books left here and so much furniture is that this library was only supposed to be temporarily closed. The people in the neighborhood just wanted the roof and the heat repaired swiftly, but the DPL insisted that they should do a major renovation and that we’d all have a beautiful like-new library when they were done in about a year. If anyone here remembers the late ’90s “empowerment zone” years, the money seemed to be there to do it then.
Well, a year dragged out to 2 then 3, and little progress was made. There were apparently “contractor problems” Some of the books were moved to the “annex” library in a nearby church hall, after people in the area complained and complained. And then asbestos was “discovered” (what, they didn’t know it was going to be there in a 70 year old building?) which was used as an excuse to discontinue all work. We were all promised that this stoppage would be temporary too, while they worked out a plan to deal with the asbestos. Yeah, right.
Then the building sat… and sat… and sat… and the library people and the city stopped answering our calls, and acted like they’d never heard of the building when we did get ahold of them. The interior got progressively more damaged by the original problem that had never been fixed – a leaking roof – and then, of course, the scrappers and ‘explorers’ came, and it ended up in the state you see today.
This city can make me so sick sometimes.

The blogger later notes, in the comments:

And for the historical record, the building bears his name in direct commemoration of the man – by that I mean he was given the honor in person. His daughter Clara Clemons (she was married to the director of the DSO) lived in Boston Edison, and Mark Twain was therefore a person who was associated with Detroit during that time period. I believe the building itself deserves historic protection due to its history, as well as being a Wirt Rowland design.

Here in Boston, Mayor Menino once again threatened library closures in January, after failing to get any closed last year. The same is happening in Los Angeles and surely other cities.

I've said it before - we should take a lesson from the Brits, whose libraries are under general threat, and organize a strong resistance.

An opportunity for bloggers

2011-03-14T12:46:00.002-05:00

I recently heard from a friend of mine, Felicia Pride, who has become a one-woman force in publishing as founder of Backlist, about this opportunity, which I'm passing along. (I feel comfortable doing so as it's supported by public television station WETA out of DC.)

(PS: Remember to support public broadcasting!)

***************

Are you a bibliophile who loves the smell of print, but can’t deny a growing affair with your Kindle? Do you love to converse about your favorite books and their connection to the broader world? Perhaps you think reading is more than fundamental—it is a cornerstone of society.

If you want to grace the masses with your witty and smart writings about books, technology, and culture, we’d like to connect with you.

inReads will be a new online home and social community for those of us who love books and can’t get enough talking about them, but also recognize the myriad of ways that reading is changing—young, cool, and plugged in nerds who listen to NPR, read the New York Times daily, have diverse, yet refined literary tastes, but also engage with the highs and lows of pop culture.

inReads is a production of WETA, the Washington DC public television, media and radio entity, and the producer of such notable works as the films of Ken Burns, In Performance at the White House and Washington Week with Gwen Ifill and National Journal.

We’re looking for writers, bloggers, book/product reviewers, and content producers who want a platform to riff on all things books, technology and culture in a thought-provoking and entertaining way. Our content won’t take itself too seriously. Serious is for the other guys.

We want content of all types—from text to video to audio—and we like when they’re paired together. We’re slated to launch in March.

Interested? Send us a few links to your work online and include some pitches for stories via email: inreadseditors@gmail.com. We look forward to the possibilities.

Authors, liberate yourselves

2011-03-12T10:46:00.002-05:00

As I've written here before, I'm increasingly frustrated by this black/white divide between big publishing and self-publishing. Authors have more options than this. Self-publishing companies, out to make big bucks off the backs of authors who feel they'd be better off just doing it themselves rather than waiting around for some uppity editor to tap them on the shoulder for a dance, are ratcheting up the rhetoric with every new ad, article, and post they manage to get out there. As with most things put out there as black & white, there are valuable issues lost in the gray in between. (This is not the case with all issues, of course, such as the Wisconsin nightmare wherein a lunatic governor, Scott Walker, is showing blatant disregard for workers by doing all he can to kill collective bargaining, but as a proud union member, I digress...)

I was reminded of this frustrating dichotomy with the slideshow/ad producted by Smashwords, the self-publisher, as featured at the Scholarly Kitchen. In this slideshow, which I'm not going to reproduce on this page, the good folks at Smashwords compare the author revolution, as they see it, to the revolution in Egypt. Yes, folks, *this* is heightened rhetoric. They see authors as needing to break down the gates that keep them out of being published by self-publishing. They have a list of ways in which self-publishing - with Smashwords perhaps? - is liberating.

The points they make about the problems with "big publishing" are valid, but their conclusion, I would argue, is not always so. In fact, their manner of phrasing the problems and their use of these problems is... well, problematic. One reason you should self-publish your work as an e-book? Bricks and mortar stores are disappearing. Uncool, Smashwords. They're not disappearing, and in fact some of us hope to see a resurgence as Borders pulls back, leaving some communities in need of a bookstore. They also see "oppression of creative freedom," which they then paraphrase as "you suck and don't deserve to publish until publishers tell you otherwise." This is where a red flag went up for me, as Smashwords is obviously playing on the insecurity of writers and their frustration at rejection letters. I get that frustration, but this is cheap and easy exploitation.

They then talk about the joys of self-publishing, which can be reduced to you're in control and you'll get more money.

What I have long complained about in regards to this rhetoric is the lack of collective benefit. (Note the tangent above, re: unions and collective bargaining...) They are saying to authors, hey, you're sitting at home like an a-hole collecting rejection letters. Eff that, right? There is a world of money and creativity and a market waiting to be tapped! Do it for YOU! Let the publishers keep publishing Snooki - ha ha, right?!

But what about independent, non-profit presses? What about presses that publish to a mission and support creative voices, alongside one another? What about finding a group - or even making your own group by starting your own press - that thinks along similar lines, such as The Nervous Breakdown did/is doing. Or find a leader who is committed to publishing and whose aesthetic fits yours - you'd be damn lucky if that person were Richard Nash, for example (an SotB favorite).

Self-publishing works for many people and that's fine, but I hope many of the desperate, vulnerable, over-worked and non-paid writers out there looking to publish their work think through all this advertising being thrown at them by self-publishers. I know models are changing, but we need to beware of changes that become potentially exploitative, especially when there are opportunities to make a positive difference.

Always better to cooperate?

2011-03-10T09:23:00.003-05:00

I was intrigued last week when I read in Shelf Awareness that Buffalo Street Books in Ithaca, NY, is going co-op. Explains the "present owner," Gary Weissbrot,

Four days after sending out my farewell closing letter, Bob Proehl put out a well considered and passionate proposal asking our community if they would consider creating a community-owned cooperative bookstore, and if so, to make a non-binding monetary pledge.
It’s now two weeks later and the proposed financial target has been reached!

In fact, they raised $50,000 more than they requested. Exciting stuff. I suppose this is in some ways similar to the model at the Brazos Bookstore in Houston, TX, which I've talked about before.

This also made me think of efforts in the Boston area to start up a bookstore, first in Davis Square up in Somerville (I talked about it here but there must be an update??). I'm hoping something similar develops in my own neighborhood of the South End, after the South End News published this op-ed by Billy Palumbo about the need for a bookstore here - a point with which I heartily agree.

Do these campaigns work? As Borders stores close nationwide, some communities are crying out for bookstores. Can we come up with a new model, something between a library (non-profit) and a bookstore (things for sale, revenue-generating) that is sustainable and answers these calls?

FTW!

2011-03-07T22:04:00.000-05:00

Oh, Borders, you crazy!!!

Opportunity calls!

2011-03-07T11:09:00.002-05:00

I have long held that Melville House is one of the coolest independent publishers out there, led by the a great director, Dennis Johnson. They have proven to be innovative, open-minded, progressive, intelligent, and mouthy - all qualities I admire in publishing.

Now comes word that they're hiring! According to this job description, they need an editor as awesome as they are. We have many cool readers here - are you the person they're looking for?

I've been pawing their Art of the Novella series for some time now - they look so uniform and modern and great. I'm a sucker for a consistent design like these, and the kind of counter-intuitive step of printing novellas at a time when everyone says go digital, go digital, go digital. Harvard Book Store has a great display of a bunch of them in their window (or did - don't know if it's still up) and inside. And now it seems you can buy a gift bag of them right from the Melville House site.

So fine, you bought the gift bag. Good. Now, is your resume ready to go?

World Book Night?!?

2011-03-04T14:12:00.002-05:00

Tomorrow, March 5th, is World Book Night. Why the hell didn't we think of this?

From the Guardian UK:

World Book Night 2011
The first ever World Book Night is being held on Saturday, with events across the UK being held and at least 1million free books being given away.

Here are the books being given away. Here is a ton more about the Trafalgar Square event.

Still, there are always ~~assholes~~ people who have a problem with EVERYTHING. Seriously.

Vanessa Robertson, who owns the Edinburgh Bookshop in Bruntsfield, Edinburgh, has claimed that, far from spreading the joy of reading, World Book Night will simply flood the market with free books and devalue the work of authors in the eyes of the public.

In a highly critical blog posted on the website State of Independents Robertson says many booksellers are "horrified" by the "misguided and misjudged" venture.

"One million books flooding a struggling book trade; one million copies of books which make up a good part of many bookshops' sales (David Nicholl's One Day; Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; Case Histories by Kate Atkinson; Fingersmith by Sarah Waters to name a few); one million books being given away, further reinforcing the notion that we're all there to provide a public service and that authors, publishers and booksellers don't deserve or need to make a living," she wrote.

Others echoed her view. One independent bookseller, who would only speak anonymously for fear of being labelled "curmudgeonly", said: "We're champions of the book and independent reading and people enriching their lives and bringing people to appreciate the value of books. I don't see how giving stuff away will help." He queried whether World Book Night would bring in new readers, saying: "I suspect it will be nice bookish people giving the books to other nice bookish people."

World Book Night has been accused by a number of authors and independent booksellers of damaging the struggling book trade, but Atwood – whose novel The Blind Assassin is among those being given away – responded by saying: "Other booksellers are enthusiastically participating, as it spreads the word on books and makes them available to people who would otherwise not have them or be able to afford them. Also: I gave a book by Kate Atkinson away recently and the person I gave it to liked it so much that she bought all the others."

Curmudgeonly? Nah. One book per person isn't going to crash the book trade in the entire UK and if it does then they were fucked already. Sorry, but that's the truth.

Andrew Bentley-Steed, who manages Robertson's Edinburgh bookshop... suggested that a better event would be a "Fair Trade Book Fortnight" at which all retailers agreed to charge the full cover price for their books to support authors.

Um, I know what we could call that: Tuesday. No, wait, Thursday. No, no, no, I've got it: Saturday. For the most part, I buy my books at a great independent bookstore in Cambridge and I always pay full price. Always. So how is "Fair Trade Book Fortnight" an event? The answer is it isn't. Wah, wah. However the charmingly named Nic Bottomley has the right attitude:

Nic Bottomley, owner of Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights in Bath, called World Book Night "a great idea" likely to inspire people who received a free book to buy others to give away in turn. "I don't buy the argument that the market will be flooded," he said. "Giving away a million free books sounds like a lot, but in the context of the 250m we sell across the trade each year, it's absolutely nothing. I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation and it works out at just three or four books for each independent bookshop. I don't think there's any independent that wouldn't give away that number if it encourages book-lovers."

Phew! Haters just think of all the readers you might actually gain if you give an individual a book that changes their world and instills a lifetime love of reading . Anyway, I love this idea and for a nation like ours, which doesn't really read as much as we should, I think it would be totally cool to have something like this in the US but, of course, it would have to be more than 1,000,000 books since our population is a little larger than the United Kingdom. A little.

So, what books would you like to give and/or get? I would love to give copies of Farmer Duck by Martin Waddell. It is the best, clearest, most simple Marxist fable kids book of all time. We might as well start 'em early, eh, regressive right? "Moo, bah, cluck, and that was that."

Wonder what some of your favorite authors would like to give or receive? Glad you asked...the Guardian asked several dozen current writers what their choice would be. Check their suggestions out here.

Have a good weekend.

R.I.P. Rev. Peter Gomes

2011-03-01T11:15:00.000-05:00

Another terrible blow to the intellectual life of our nation. Farewell, Rev. Gomes. He was a kind man of deep sympathy and a passionate intellectual rising from public school to Harvard. He was also my minister. What a loss.

From the Harvard Gazette:

The Rev. Professor Peter J. Gomes, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church at Harvard University, died on Feb. 28 from complications arising from a stroke. He was 68 years old.

Gomes, an American Baptist minister, served in the Memorial Church since 1970. He was a member of both the Divinity School faculty and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard. Gomes authored many books, including the best-sellers “The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart” and “Sermons: Biblical Wisdom for Daily Living,” as well as numerous articles and papers.

Widely regarded as one of America’s leading preachers, Gomes participated in the inaugurations of Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He was named Clergy of the Year by the organization Religion in American Life in 1998; in 1979 Time magazine called him “one of the seven most distinguished preachers in America.” He received 39 honorary degrees and was an Honorary Fellow of Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge.

“We are deeply saddened by this loss,” said Harvard President Drew Faust. “Peter Gomes was an original. For 40 years, he has served Harvard as a teacher in the fullest sense — a scholar, a mentor, one of the great preachers of our generation, and a living symbol of courage and conviction. Through his wisdom and appreciation of the richness of the human spirit Reverend Gomes has left an indelible mark on the institution he served with unmatched devotion and creativity. He will be sorely missed.”

“No one epitomizes all that is good about Harvard more than Peter J. Gomes,” said Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard’s Alphonse Fletcher University Professor. The pair met in 1991 when Gomes was part of a recruiting committee that helped to bring Gates to the University. Gates quipped it was “love at first sight,” and said Gomes had been a loyal friend and adviser for 20 years.

“He was one of the nation’s truly great preachers and one of Harvard’s truly great scholars,” said Gates, who directs Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research. Gates also praised Gomes for his expertise on the history both of Christianity and of Harvard University and for his “keen storytelling capacity.”

“Peter has been a powerful presence in the University for more than four decades,” said William Graham, dean of Harvard Divinity School, who first met Gomes at Harvard in 1966.

Graham recalled hearing Gomes offer parting words to graduating College seniors during Commencement. Those speeches “are masterpieces, both humorous and moving valedictions. That was something very special for undergraduates,” said Graham, John Lord O’Brian Professor of Divinity and Murray A. Albertson Professor of Middle Eastern Studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Gomes preached and lectured across North America and the British Isles. In 2010, he gave The Princeton Lectures on Youth, Church, and Culture. Harvard University in 2010 elected him Honorary President of the Alpha-Iota Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. In 2009, he gave The Lowell Lectures of Massachusetts.

In 2007, he was named a member of the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem, the oldest order of chivalry in Britain.

In 2005, he presented a series of sermons in St. Edmundsbury Cathedral, England; in 2004 he gave the convocation address at Harvard Divinity School; and in 2003 he delivered the Lyttelton Addresses at Eton College, England. In 2000, he delivered the University Sermon before the University of Cambridge and the Millennial Sermon in Canterbury Cathedral. In 1998, he presented the Lyman Beecher Lectures at Yale Divinity School.

He also preached at the inauguration of Deval L. Patrick as governor of Massachusetts.

Born in Boston in 1942 to Peter L. and Orissa White Gomes, Gomes was educated in the Plymouth, Mass., public schools. He graduated from Bates College with an A.B. degree in 1965, and he received the S.T.B. degree from Harvard Divinity School in 1968. That year, he was ordained to the Christian ministry by the First Baptist Church of Plymouth.

From 1968 to 1970, Gomes was an instructor in history and director of the Freshman Experimental Program at Tuskegee Institute, Ala. There he also served as a church organist and choirmaster. He came to the Memorial Church as assistant minister in 1970. He became acting minister in 1972, and in 1974 was named the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Minister in the Memorial Church. In this capacity, he acted as the University’s leading religious officer and spiritual adviser.

Gomes’ teaching and research interests included the history of the ancient Christian church, the Bible, homiletics, worship, and the history of the black American experience. He served as acting director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard from 1989 to 1991.

The former president of the Signet Society, Harvard’s oldest literary group, Gomes published eleven volumes of sermons as well as numerous articles and papers. In 1996, he published “The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart,” which became a best-seller. Gomes described it to the Boston Globe as a book about the Bible “for the average intelligent lay audience, not for seminarians or Divinity School colleagues.” In it, Gomes analyzes the historical efforts to misuse the Bible to marginalize Jews, blacks, women, and gays.

A self-described cultural conservative, Gomes stunned the Harvard community and reluctantly made national news when he came out as a homosexual in 1991 in response to gay bashing on campus. “I don’t like being the main exhibit, but this was an unusual set of circumstances, in that I felt I had a particular resource that nobody else there possessed,” he told The New Yorker in 1996.

“I’m always seen as a black man and now I’m seen as a black gay man. If you throw the other factors in there that make me peculiar and interesting — the Yankee part, the Republican part, the Harvard type — all that stuff confuses people who have to have a single stereotypical lens in order to assure themselves they have a grasp on reality,” he said in an interview with the Boston Herald in 1996.

Gomes served as a trustee of the Roxbury Latin School. He was also a member of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, and the Advisory Board of the Winterthur Museum, and a sometime fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, London. He had been a trustee of Wellesley College, the Public Broadcasting Service, and Bates College. He is past president and trustee of The Pilgrim Society, Plymouth, Mass.

What to do while under house arrest?

2011-02-23T10:25:00.000-05:00

Okay, this is kinda fun.

A big, steaming pile of intellectually dishonest horseshit...now a major motion picture!

2011-02-14T10:35:00.001-05:00

First the lead in from Matt Taibbi:

While, outside of America, Russian-born [Ayn] Rand is probably best known for being the unfunniest person western civilization has seen since maybe Goebbels or Jack the Ripper (63 out of 100 colobus monkeys recently forced to read Atlas Shrugged in a laboratory setting died of boredom-induced aneurysms), in America Rand is upheld as an intellectual giant of limitless wisdom. Here in the States, her ideas are roundly worshipped even by people who've never read her books oreven heard of her. The rightwing "Tea Party" movement is just one example of an entire demographic that has been inspired to mass protest by Rand without even knowing it.

Now the bad news: Atlas Shrugged has been turned into a movie.

See for yourself:

Again, Matt Taibbi:

In the Randian ethos, called objectivism, the only real morality is self-interest, and society is divided into groups who are efficiently self-interested (ie, the rich) and the "parasites" and "moochers" who wish to take their earnings through taxes, which are an unjust use of force in Randian politics. Rand believed government had virtually no natural role in society. She conceded that police were necessary, but was such a fervent believer in laissez-faire capitalism she refused to accept any need for economic regulation – which is a fancy way of saying we only need law enforcement for unsophisticated criminals.

I weep for the future and culture of America.

Awesome.

2011-02-11T16:47:00.000-05:00

"People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children's book," Amis said, in a sideways excursion from a chat about John Self, the antihero of his 1984 novel Money. "I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable."

- Martin Amis on writing a children's book.

2011-02-10T15:54:00.002-05:00

"Aren't books worth kind of a lot? Won't you be sad when they are gone?"

2011-02-01T16:46:00.001-05:00

Sent to us from a vigilante propagandist.

"Oh, look! Fresh iceberg ice for my drink!"

2011-02-01T12:19:00.000-05:00

An admission: I am a blog loser. I try to post on a regular basis but life gets in the way. (Don't we all say that except for, like, Bookslut?) Plus, I am as pessimistic these days about books and publishing as I have ever been...and that is saying something since my first job ever (literally the day high school ended for me I was offered a bookstore job) I have believed in the strength of this industry to plow through any of its various and sundry barriers. Today? Not so much. This morning I was checking my work email and I came across this quotation from Mary Williams, events manager, Skylight Books, Los Angeles, Calif., in the store's February e-newsletter:

"There's a lot of talk in the media about books being a dying format and bookstores being a dying business. If the people who said that saw the energy, inventiveness, and determination of the 500 booksellers from around the country at Winter Institute, they wouldn't be so quick to dismiss either books or the people who bring them into their communities. It's an exciting time in the book business and things are certainly in flux, but your independently owned bookstores, far from being relics of the past, are ready to meet the challenges of the future and continue to provide a service that is unique and valuable."

Yes, it is true that there are still thousands of independent stores and many of them are making a go of it but I am starting to wonder is it too late? No, not for the stores but for what masquerades as the "reading public" in the U.S. An "exciting time?" That isn't the phrase I'd use. It is eye-opening that Ms. Williams has this sense while attending an ABA sponsored event. It is a bit like going to a baseball game and saying to yourself "Wow! This country is really into baseball...what a great time to be a fan of the sport!" Yes, the attendees and sponsors of the Winter Institute are really gung-ho about the future of bookselling and independent bookstores. Is that news? I am pretty sure that those attending the national ham radio convention would give one the impression that the state of ham radio is really strong, no? Who the hell "ham radios" or whatever anymore? The real proof is in the wider culture and I am afraid that, for the first time in my life, I am beginning to feel that we are all part of the buggy whip business. Sad, I know, but there it is. I've written it and I can't very well take it back. I am sure that this post will get picked up and sent into the blogosphere where smarter people than I will have clever responses, comments, and loads and loads of statistics on why I am full of shit but deep down, I am thinking even they know what the reality is and the reality is bleak. How else to explain the blockbuster mentality in publishing these days? Why the hell does Justin Bieber have an autobiography? There is a line from Matt Taibbi about Goldman Sachs but has some applicability here (especially when you think of books like Patterson, Grisham, and the new "Snooky" books) about the way in which publishing has become blockbuster oriented. Publishing these days is like "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."

Do books matter anymore? Is the success of Skylight Books in L.A. an antidote to the loss of Kroch's and Brentano's in Chicago, Gotham Book Mart in New York, Goliard Bookshop in Amherst, Cody's Books in Berkeley, Printers Inc. Bookstore in Palo Alto, A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books in San Francisco, Midnight Special in Santa Monica, Dutton’s Brentwood Books in Los Angeles, Oscar Wilde Books and Coliseum Books in New York? I guess. I know there is little rhyme or reason as to why a store in one place makes it and store in another doesn't but those cities above aren't exactly shabby, right? I mean, if the oldest (and maybe the most famous) gay bookstore can't make it in New York then we're all fucked...and not in the good way. My point is that I hope the independent world can survive and there does seem to be some evidence that they will but I am not so sure. (I am looking at you, Borders - king, daddy, papa of the indies. What the hell happened to you? Don't you realize that your demise leaves us to the whims of Jeff Bezos and Len Riggio?) Does the population that under girds all cultural activities seem to be losing its interest in books? Perhaps we aren't a reading/literary culture at all? Perhaps we are, in fact, a visual/popular culture where "straight teeth in your mouth are more important than the words that come out of it." Bleh. I am all over the place here but maybe you can feel my frustration? I don't see how books are going to continue to have any fascination for future generations. I want it to be true, I work hard to make sure that it will be true, but that may not enough to make it so.

Are books are dying? AAP sales figures from 2009 (the most recent yearly stats available) are mixed. Some indicators are up, others are down. Popular culture is in the ascendancy. Let's look at the NYTimes best seller list for a second, shall we? Is there a single book on any of those lists that is there because it found an audience that didn't hear about it on Glen Beck, Oprah, or NPR? Sure, the usual suspects are still on the list:

Tom Clancy (Seriously? Still?)
John Grisham (Who?)
Dean Koontz (Isn't he dead?)
James Patterson
W.E.B. Griffin
and, of course, Stieg Larsson.

I suppose there is a case to be made for Room by Emma Donaghue. That is a surprise actually, though it was one of the NYT's best books of 2010 so it isn't like it snuck up on us. I guess I can't have it all. I can't complain that people don't read any books other than what they are force-fed and then have an example in front of me and say "oh, that one doesn't matter." What all this ranting is making me think is that I am having a crisis of confidence. We never seem to get enough comments here to make a debate but that sure would help me as I am flailing around. What do you think, readers? Help a lifelong book devotee (I have worked in 5 bookstores in my 40+ years, 3 publishers, 1 agency, and a library) come to some conclusions about the state of books here in the US. What articles do you read? Which authors will help me through this long period of darkness? Where does the solace come from? E-books? Well, the six of you who stop by regularly know I am not really an e-book guy.

I'm drowning. Can anyone help?

A British Invasion We Need

2011-01-27T13:46:00.002-05:00

The Brits are talking libraries big time, as protests continue over the looming threats to their public library system. (I love the protest wherein community members checked out all the books! Brilliant.) They have planned for a Save Our Libraries Day of Action on February 5th, and I'm still wondering if anyone in the US is planning to join them. I know we have had many threats to our libraries here in Boston, which continue. Do the folks who led the fight to keep all branches open want to show solidarity on Feb 5th with their British counterparts, perhaps? This SaveLibraries seems to be a catch-all for news on both sides of the Atlantic.

One powerful piece of oratory has emerged from this discussion in the UK: Philip Pullman's impassioned speech about the value of libraries. It's gone viral in a big way, as Benedicte Page writing in the Guardian recounts, and there's a reason. It's an incredible testament to the importance of libraries, but above the usual (and still valuable) personal stories about this great writer's various interactions with public libraries, it also cuts to the heart of the matter: libraries are disrespected for not generating revenue, for not actively participating in the capitalist game.

He first introduces this point after discussing the British government's ludicrous and conservative plan to turn the libraries over to volunteers instead of paid, qualified librarians, and how volunteers will then have to compete to get some cash from some pot of money the government sets aside that is vastly less than what they now provide for librarians. It's all deeply insulting on many layers, which Pullman explains, but then he steps back and criticizes

this whole competition, and where it comes from:

It’s imported the worst excesses of market fundamentalism into the one arena that used to be safe from them, the one part of our public and social life that used to be free of the commercial pressure to win or to lose, to survive or to die, which is the very essence of the religion of the market. Like all fundamentalists who get their clammy hands on the levers of political power, the market fanatics are going to kill off every humane, life-enhancing, generous, imaginative and decent corner of our public life. I think that little by little we’re waking up to the truth about the market fanatics and their creed. We’re coming to see that old Karl Marx had his finger on the heart of the matter when he pointed out that the market in the end will destroy everything we know, everything we thought was safe and solid. It is the most powerful solvent known to history. “Everything solid melts into air,” he said. “All that is holy is profaned.”
Market fundamentalism, this madness that’s infected the human race, is like a greedy ghost that haunts the boardrooms and council chambers and committee rooms from which the world is run these days.

Of course he's absolutely right. The government doesn't trust goodwill. It assumes the worst about humans, that it needs to give us a competition for pure hard cash as motivation. This mentality is blind to books and their value - Pullman's point.

And then folks, he takes the publishers to task. Oh be still my heart. This man has got my number:

In the world I know about, the world of books and publishing and bookselling, it used to be the case that a publisher would read a book and like it and publish it. They’d back their judgement on the quality of the book and their feeling about whether the author had more books in him or in her, and sometimes the book would sell lots of copies and sometimes it wouldn’t, but that didn’t much matter because they knew it took three or four books before an author really found his or her voice and got the attention of the public. And there were several successful publishers who knew that some of their authors would never sell a lot of copies, but they kept publishing them because they liked their work. It was a human occupation run by human beings. It was about books, and people were in publishing or bookselling because they believed that books were the expression of the human spirit, vessels of delight or of consolation or enlightenment.
Not any more, because the greedy ghost of market madness has got into the controlling heights of publishing. Publishers are run by money people now, not book people. The greedy ghost whispers into their ears: Why are you publishing that man? He doesn’t sell enough. Stop publishing him. Look at this list of last year’s books: over half of them weren’t bestsellers. This year you must only publish bestsellers. Why are you publishing this woman? She’ll only appeal to a small minority. Minorities are no good to us. We want to double the return we get on each book we publish.
So decisions are made for the wrong reasons. The human joy and pleasure goes out of it; books are published not because they’re good books but because they’re just like the books that are in the bestseller lists now, because the only measure is profit.

Right?! And the fact is, this is all true not just at the most commercial presses, but also at many non-profit presses, whether attached to non-profit organizations or universities. It's the mentality that has given way to a huge business in self-publishing, which in turn has left readers skeptical of books.

I have long said that we are asking too much of books. We put them next to other commodities that sell and say why can't they do more? There are so many readers, why can't we reach them all and make a bundle of money? We exploit them by testing markets with them - Ted Striphas explains this strategy, most recently used by Amazon who found their customers using books before moving on to tvs, toilet paper, toys, and more. We get too far from the importance of what is in books themselves.

So we look to presses and stores and libraries and we demand returns, quantifiable returns. But they're not always quantifiable. Pullman may be getting nostalgic and sentimental but I refuse to fault him for that. We can sit around and mock readers who talk about loving the smell of a book and the feel of the page, in response to diehard Kindlers, but there is meaning there. The fact that places like Amazon can keep a close count of what people are reading and even how they are reading each book they purchase - when they stop, what they highlight - is not a plus, to me, but a minus. (It's also deeply creepy and invasive.) You're pounding the fun out of reading and books by demanding to know every bit of data about this market.

With talk of Editors being replaced by Robots and Cyborgs, Pullman is right, and his call is increasingly important.

Bookstore Obit #244583

2011-01-12T15:23:00.002-05:00

On this snowy New England day, perhaps you, dear reader, have not read that opinionated old coot Richard Posner's latest blog entry, in which he poses the headline question, "Can Bookstores Survive?" His answer seems to be, in a nutshell, "good news: no!"

I appreciate Posner laying out the pros and cons of bricks-and-mortar stores versus online stores, though I suspect his reasoning is flawed. He says, basically:

Brick pro: "The only offsetting advantages of the bookstore are the opportunity it provides for browsing and the fact that the customer can see and handle the book before buying it." Notice the diminishing use of "only" here.

Online pro: There are five of these-

1) artificial-intelligence programs that can recommend other books for readers

2) bigger inventory available

3) "ease of search"

4) reader reviews available

5) the ability of customers to look inside a book before ordering it, which Posner admits is "much as if he were leafing through a printed book in a bookstore." Indeed.

Once again, I'm struck by the need for efficiency. Posner talks about the social savings, basically the time wasted traveling to bookstores to get a book that may or may not be there. But I'm not a machine; I don't need everything to work out. Haven't we all realized that it is when things don't work out, in fact, that we often find what we need, even if we weren't looking for it? I hate to sound flaky or like some damn fool by arguing for flawed systems, but I also think it's so male and so kind of pathetic to demand that everything in this world be based entirely around efficiency.

Posner goes on to break down where money is being saved and how it will impact the publishing industry, and he ultimately finds that publishers and authors should not be hurt in the move from bricks-and-mortar stores to online venues for books sales. In fact, they may increase. The only way for bookstores to survive this increasingly efficient world is if "unless the services are valued by a greater margin than seems realistic to expect." This is what I call "mean Dad" talk - cold, unemotional, and unapologetic. I suppose I can't blame the messenger.

What disturbed me here, however, was Posner's conclusion, in which he sees this change as a good one. Sorry independent bookstores, he seems to be saying, but the online sales venues will make for "genuine economic progress, just as department stores and supermarkets represent progress though they cause the demise of countless small retailers." I wrote - in PEN, on PAPER, not on the screen - "yikes" at this line, as I had visions of Wal-marts dancing in my head.

Guess we have to increase those margins, reader.

Why aren't we all reading poetry again?

2010-12-31T17:13:00.002-05:00

It is not a resolution, as it's been building over the last year, and I'm now confident it will continue. I'm really loving poetry right now. Not in a read-a-bit/write-some-garbage kind of way, but in a why-did-I-ever-stop-reading-this-and-who-do-I-read-next kind of way. There's much to discover.

To help me with this, I received a fantastic Christmas gift: my partner gave me his own version of a poetry starter kit, with a number of books of trustworthy contemporary poets to kick off the new year. I thought I'd list them all here with links, as we've listed great poetry books on SotB before. It's always worth spreading the word!

In no particular order:

New Selected Poems of Stevie Smith (New Directions)

Martin Espada's A Mayan Astronomer in Hell's Kitchen (Norton)

Maureen N. McLane's Same Life (FSG)

Denise Levertov's Making Peace (New Directions)

Audre Lorde's Coal (Norton)

Robert Hass's Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005 (Ecco/HarperCollins)

Philip Levine's Breath (Knopf)

Pablo Neruda's Odes to Common Things (Bulfinch)

Federico Garcia Lorca's Ode to Walt Whitman & Other Poems (City Lights)

Grace Paley's Fidelity (FSG)

As I start to read through this incredible collection of poetry books, I can look to Jeff Gordinier's advice. You'll recall that he's been in touch with us here at SotB before. In fact, he's the one that provided a list of contemporary poetry books referenced earlier in this post. Well he has a relatively new post over at the Poetry Foundation blog giving us all permission to flip through poetry books. It's liberating. Thanks, Jeff!

And happy new year!

Sweet, Sweet Relief to Us All

2010-12-29T21:56:00.004-05:00

With today's LA Times interview with Russ Grandinetti, VP for content or some crap from Amazon, by Alex Pham, I feel like I had a mini epiphany. I think it was when Grandinetti said one of many lines that Amazon trots out regularly, like well-trained politicians, this one about Amazon's vision to make "every book ever written, in any language, in print or out of print, all available within 60 seconds. And we want to make the customer experience great." For the first time (I think), I found myself thinking, "oh.... oh, okay. Fine. Make "books" available in seconds. Do that, if you must, and just let the rest of us get on with our lives without having to hear about your friggin' vision." And then I thought, perhaps naively, that maybe we are seeing the splintering of markets, and those readers that want to read electronically, within seconds of thinking of a title or author, and [heart] Amazon more than ever can buy their li'l protected devices and use them to buy their li'l e-books and just exist, like a cult. And when I need a new book, I can go to the Boston Public Library or the Harvard Bookstore or the Brattle Book Shop or Aaron's bookshelf and get a new book to read, and not have to hear about / think about / even know about the latest Amazon stats. Because I'm kind of done.

But what pleases me about this idea is thinking about how often I've thought this, and others have said it, about Amazon but also about B&N and Borders. It does feel like these oversized, impractical dinosaurs are shuffling away. They are turning their big fat backs on printed books, which has pissed many of us off, but now... well maybe we can leave them behind, and stick to the tried and trusted independent stores and libraries. This isn't necessarily to say all e-books are bad (though Christopher might say they are), but it is to say that I'm ready to log off my computer and spend more quality time with Joe Lesueur's Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara and not look at a screen. I'm kind of like this guy (William Petrocelli, owner of Book Passage in northern Cali). So me and that guy and some of you can all quietly relax at home and let Amazon fatcats like Grandinetti spout quotes from whatever recent Amazon press release has been pooped out of corporate headquarters, and guess what? We don't have to listen!

But we can and should watch Patti Smith on Newshour here, because she will charm you. That's a promise. Just watch it real quick, go on, and then you can read. For serious, it's worth a bit more screen time.

How did I miss Ms Amber Sparks

2010-12-26T20:25:00.002-05:00

Her name sounds a bit like a drag queen, in which case I am that guy in the front row of her show applauding a bit too much.

Amber Sparks has a great post over at Big Other from earlier this month, about the lack of working class representation in literature (which I found via Daniel Pritchard's The Wooden Spoon, in which Pritchard follows the consideration through to poetry). I really appreciate seeing her raising the question of class, or the lack of consideration of class, in contemporary fiction, and the connection she makes between that gap and the economics of publishing and writing (to quote at length):

So what do these absences in our writing signify? What does our lack of class-consciousness say about us now? Did McCarthyism initially stamp out the desire to write about class issues? Or maybe it’s because we’re a nation and a culture deeply rooted in individualism. Concern about class tends to suggest collectivism, something that has proved to be anathema to Americans raised in the cowboy mythology. We prefer our heroes singular, not plural.
Or perhaps literature has become the province, largely, of the comfortably-off. I suspect this is closer to the truth. Writers might choose to starve to devote time to their art, but they themselves seem largely to come from the middle and upper classes of American society. The same may be especially true of those working in publishing and academia, people who had to have money to pay for school or to take unpaid internships in expensive cities like New York. These folks may not be interested in—or more likely may be made uncomfortable by—class issues, since they would necessarily resist any notion of their own privilege.

And now I am DYING to know where she got that great Kenneth Fearing quote. Ms. Amber, if you're out there...???

For the record, it is this concern with contemporary literature that made me greatly appreciate when I finally discovered Daniel Woodrell, whose own writing on class is being increasingly recognized after the amazing film version of his novel, Winter's Bone. The opening of his novel Tomato Red is a great take on class in modern America.

I suspect there are many interesting intersecting issues going on, some of which are touched on by Sparks, as noted. The reality is, it's hard to talk about difficult topics in a way that people who are not directly impacted by those topics want to read about. Editors assume working class people ain't buying books, but middle class and wealthy folks (hello, Oprah fans!) are. That's the demographic. And it's assumed that people want to see themselves reflected in their fiction. The book is a product to sell, and many houses want to reach the most consumers. There's a certain pessimism involved in that thinking.

I'll have to follow Sparks' link to Roxanne Gay's piece on this topic, as well. Glad this conversation is happening!

Cor-yyyy!

2010-12-20T22:09:00.002-05:00

I have written about Cory Doctorow before - I mean, anyone who writes about publishing / media / anything even vaguely related to the internet has written about the man. He's whipsmart and very visible and has done a lot of great work. In the latest article from him that's getting attention, in last Friday's Guardian, he is discussing the problem of abundance online, using his own new experience as a publisher to make his point. I find it troubling.

I actually agree with his larger "problem" of the internet offering too much, as practical considerations that limited one's consumption of media - namely, availability - disappear. But then he gets into the kind of case study: he had enough short stories to put together into a book, but he decided to forgo the traditional publisher route and publish the collection himself, using readily available tools. I can pinpoint just where the red flags go up in my reading:

I'd reached the point where I had enough short fiction for another reprint collection. I'd done two before with small, reputable New York houses, and they had sold well. But, having looked around at the tools for publishing – print-on-demand presses like Lulu.com, automated ebook workflow tools like SiSu, and tools for publicising work like Twitter and blogs – I decided I could readily produce a collection myself with comparable reach and even more income.

What bothers me is his blase way of referring to his past experience, and his flattening of these publishing options. I know I'm overly defensive here, but all of those publishers put work into publishing his collections. From a quick glance, it looks like he's published with Tor Books (part of Macmillan), Running Press (part of Perseus), and someplace called Tachyon Publications, which looks to be an independent sci-fi publisher out of San Francisco.

A lot of great writers - including Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and Kurt Vonnegut - have gone with small independent publishers for collections, knowing it would boost the bottom line for said publishers and help those publishers stick around to nurture new voices. (Forgive the all-white-male list - they jumped to mind.) They had a collective mentality, which is what I maintain is needed in publishing, and is something this mentality being put forth by Doctorow lacks.

In fact, Doctorow brags about making more money by self-publishing:

I'm not sorry I decided to become a publisher. For one thing, it's been incredibly lucrative thus far: I've made more in two days' worth of the experiment than I made off both of my previous short story collections' entire commercial lives.

I know we can't fault writers much for making money, because there is so little to be made in this profession. This still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. It's just too simple. Why is it, one must ask, that "formerly expensive action can now be had merely for the time it takes to seize on the opportunity"? It's the reaction I'm increasingly having to excited reports of cheap consumer goods. There are sacrifices being made elsewhere for you to get that t-shirt for $4.99.

Likewise, crafts are being diminished so that publishing can be made available so readily. It's unclear to me how other people involved in this project - most notably, the "artist friends" Doctorow is using to design various covers - are being compensated, or the "voice-actor pals." It's all a big fun game with buddies "in three countries." But traditionally, those have been employees, with health insurance and stable jobs, who work for publishing companies that pay them to do that labor. I don't mean to get all Norma Rae here, but when we skip over financial compensation and employment stability and have a "let's just let people be artists" attitude, I always worry that we're screwing the working class and poor creative types who cannot take such risks, while the wealthy creative types can wait around for these jobs to fall into their laps, from friends, and not worry about the compensation.

I feel I have been the skunk at the proverbial garden party a few times around here, and that's too bad. I love fun as much as the next editor! But I sometimes worry that just as we were starting to build in ways of getting more voices heard from both sides of publishing - writers and employees - we are now blowing up the whole operation, and leaving the parts right back in the hands of the privileged few who can enjoy publishing, the career, as publishing, the hobby.

Bad News from Boston

2010-12-20T11:50:00.002-05:00

I consider myself part of the problem I'm considering today. The need to widen the scope in our conversations, to include multiple perspectives, can certainly be work, but it's work worth doing. It's easy to gravitate toward people like you and that's something we'll always do, so we all need to remember to lift our head a bit higher and look beyond the familiar to expand our thinking.

In publishing, this is especially important. There is a long history of good ol' boys publishing good 'ol boys, keeping the opportunity to publish away from so many other voices. Many see the digital revolution as a way to balance things out, but I'm not entirely convinced. I don't want these digital options to be like the pox-filled blankets offered to Native Americans by Europeans - "what modern convenience!" followed by "I feel funny..." Will digital tools offer a range of voices access to readers, or give the illusion of an access that is still being denied?

It's unclear, but what is clear is that the hits the publishing industry is taking are hitting minority voices disproportionately, as is always the way. Many of us listened with concern as bookstores committed to progressive politics such as Women and Children First in Chicago, called out for help in the midst of the recession. Now we are seeing this struggle played out at Food for Thought in Amherst, MA, which lists the challenges it's facing:

We've been hit hard by many of the same factors contributing to the nationwide decline of independent bookstores, including: big box stores, Amazon, the rise of e-books, and, more recently, a severe drop in textbooks sales.

In this context, I should not have been surprised to hear that Jamaicaway Books & Gifts here in Boston is closing its doors. Even sadder, I heard this news while at a holiday party in nearby Roslindale, where a woman of color, born and raised in Boston, went to the store for the first time upon hearing it was closing and was blown away by its many books on diversity. "My husband's Latino, and so my two kids are bi-racial, and I'm looking at all these books about US! Why didn't I come here all the time before?!" And I thought, why didn't we all? It's a typical response to the story of a independent bookstore closing.

As the recession continues and we feel its impact in publishing, let's remember that the voices that have fought hard to be part of the conversation despite years of neglect - our voices of color, our GLBT voices, our voices from working class and poor communities, etc... - are facing a very real risk of getting shut down. Regardless of your race, class, or sexual orientation, you benefit from all voices being heard.

Best of luck to Rosalyn Elder and everyone at Jamaicaway Books & Gifts, who will go forward online. Here's to a fantastic final holiday season at your store!

The Need for Loyalty in a Saturated Consumer World

2010-12-02T21:33:00.004-05:00

I read this story from Eugenia Williamson in the Boston Phoenix with an eyebrow cocked. It opens with news that indie bookstores are hot property in Boston right now, and goes on to explain how the big chains - B&N and Borders - are suffering from not jumping into the digital market fast enough and are now "closing outlets." I'm all for wishing these big bullies away and celebrating the sustainability of the indie bookstore, but I'm not sure I agree we are out of the woods just yet. Here's hoping! (I appreciate the commenter that mentions how unfortunate it is she didn't go a bit further out of town - something I'm guilty of myself! - to check out Back Pages Books in Waltham.)

What I do love about the article though, beyond this lede, is the way Williamson talks to both booksellers and literary agents, getting both sides of the story and presenting a wider picture of publishing, from what's selling to publishers through to what's selling to readers. It's all the same process, after all, but we have a tendency to talk about them separately, which runs the risk of making the whole industry more complicated than it really is. It was interesting to hear agents talk about what genres may get lost in the move to e-readers - reference are gone, genre fiction is next supposedly - and which are doing better than ever - business books, cookbooks, etc.... This doesn't address the fears about how we are going to allow for new experimental voices, especially in literary fiction, if readers get used to paying no more than $9.99 for a new book.

I spent today in lovely Plymouth, New Hampshire, where I visited two bookstores, one new books and one used: the Plymouth Book Exchange and the Readery. In typical New England fashion, it's completely counter-intuitive which is which. In fact, the Book Exchange is new books while Readery is used. Because Plymouth is a somewhat small college town, these bookstores were the main ones, as far as I know. The person I know who lives there said she goes to a Borders when she visits friends in New York. As we looked around these stores, it was like going back in time. (I'm sorry to say that as I know it sounds so condescending.) The new bookstore, which clearly did most of its business in textbooks for Plymouth State, has an odd mix of books - self-help, random fiction titles, some genre fiction mass markets. They were not marked down at all - they cost the price on the book. I was reminded of the B. Dalton in the mall where I grew up, which I have written about here before. Meanwhile, at the used bookstore, there was ample genre fiction. In fact, there was a big sign about what authors' books they'd take - mostly romance writers - with a note (I believe) that said nothing pre-1990. Someone came in and asked the woman about their policy and she also mentioned that they won't buy hardcover fiction, interestingly. They did have a general fiction that had some decent literary titles - Michelle Cliff, for example - but it was quite limited.

We come back to the problem of a limited market. Omnesha Roychoudhuri's new article in the Boston Review is getting a lot of attention, as she takes on Amazon and its business practices, and the potential impact its having on literature and reading. (Hooray for the BR getting all the attention!) This is where I recently was reminded of this concern many have that new novelists will have no market if readers expect only cheap books. Roychoudhuri quotes literary agent David Gernert as saying, “If readers come to believe that the value of a new book is $10, publishing as we know it is over. If you can buy Stephen King’s new novel or John Grisham’s Ford County, for $10, why would you buy a brilliant first novel for $25?” A fair point. The article nicely sums up, though sometimes in a slightly sloppy fashion, a lot of the problems with Amazon's style of cornering the market and then abusing the producers. (Ted Striphas nicely lays this out in a larger context in his book, The Late Age of Print, which I'd highly recommend.) But one of Roychoudhuri's detractors in a comment below states,

A lot of indie bookstores went down (or are going down) because they are too elitist, too focused on handselling what they consider to be "great literature" instead of great reads. If I get on Amazon and want to buy a beach read, I don't get sneered at by some indie bookstore clerk with an eyebrow ring and a condescending attitude. Amazon makes suggestions, but no judgments. I have been in way too many indie bookstores where the staff was unwelcoming, unfriendly, ill-informed and frankly unpleasant. No wonder people prefer to buy online.

I am guessing I wouldn't agree with this person's politics, but the point remains. What if your local indie bookseller is not handselling the books you want to read? What if, as in the case in Plymouth, they have too limited a selection for you? And what about the so-called brown bag factor - the benefits to buying online / digitally, so no one knows what you've bought? Roychoudhuri discusses Amazon's creepy auto-recommend feature, which is based on complicated system that favors certain titles and publishers. But this reader is saying s/he wants an impersonal recommendation.

The counter to that argument, I suppose, is that it's not as "private" as you think. Just because ordering a book on Amazon will not make your neighbor's 16 year old daughter working behind the counter at Molly's Books raise her eyebrows doesn't mean no one is keeping tabs on your purchases. Amazon's computers are watching, and even moreso with Kindle purchases. It may be more abstract, but buying online means your purchases are in fact being monitored more than ever.

Honestly, I think back to the cashier I referenced in my last post, at the Brazos Bookstore in Houston. The reality is that we all shop in different places, and customer loyalty doesn't have to mean absolute monogamy. There are places I will always avoid - I'm staring at big fat you, Walmart - and places I'll always favor - indie bookstores. I hope my favoring those stores will help them thrive, and I'll keep hoping that until I'm with Eugenia Williamson, glowing in the warmth of a healthy indie bookstore world, even right here in Boston (and the larger Boston metro area).

The best writer you've never read.

2010-12-01T11:15:00.000-05:00

A quick post before the whole stinking thing comes to a complete halt. Congratulations to Percival Everett for winning the 2010 Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award for I am Not Sidney Poitier. Ok, no, it isn't the most well known award in the universe but it does shine a light on the best novelist you've never read. Percival Everett is a master stylist with a deep and profound ability to write fiction in any style. He has done a western, a postmodern gobbledy-goo novel, a satire, short stories, poetry, as well as a great baseball novel among many, many other things. Hell, instead of just getting the same old shit at the bookstore, spend some of your hard earned money on a writer who, I promise, will become one of your all time favorites. Plus, for those of you looking for writer with super indie cred, he has pretty much shied away from major publishing house choosing to publish with houses like Graywolf and Beacon. That's something, right? Do it. Or at least go get one of his novels from the library you cheap bastards...then buy something once you fall in love.

"If Percival Everett isn't already a household name, it's because people are more interested in politics than truth."-Madison Smartt Bell

Congratulations, Percival...you deserve this award and more!

Works:

Suder (1983)
Walk Me to the Distance (1985)
Cutting Lisa (1986)
The Weather and Women Treat Me Fair: Stories (1987)
For Her Dark Skin (1990)
Zulus (1990)
The One That Got Away (1992)
God's Country: A Novel (1994)
Big Picture: Stories (1996)
Watershed (1996)
Frenzy (1997)
Glyph: A Novel (1999)
Erasure: A Novel (2001)
Grand Canyon, Inc. (2001)
American Desert: A Novel (2004)
Damned If I Do: Stories (2004)
A History of the African-American people (proposed) by Strom Thurmond, as told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid (with James Kincaid) (2004)
Wounded: A Novel (2005)
The Water Cure (2007)
I am Not Sidney Poitier: A Novel (2009)

Holiday spirit

2010-11-26T11:02:00.004-05:00

First, our deepest apologies here at SotB. We have been horrible and have not updated this blog in far too long. I hope you all will remember that we do have day jobs, and those jobs got very demanding in the last month.

But now the holiday season is upon us and that means, of course, a time to reflect. Today is Black Friday, and it feels like a particularly tense one as retailers hope to make some good money despite a seemingly endless recession. I'm pleased to see that American Express is supporting local business through their "Small Business Saturday" campaign, though I don't quite understand what they're doing. Still, any reminder to buy local is a good one, even as I drove by Best Buy and other big ugly box stores last night to ogle the damn fools camped out outside.

For us book lovin' and publishin' types, there are a few things to note. Publishers and booksellers have jumped into the stack of pleas to shoppers for this Friday. Borders actually had a circular in Thursday's Boston Globe, and I got a Groupon today for discounts on Simon & Schuster books when one buys directly from the website. Both of these ads surprised me, and then I wondered why. I suppose I have some weird sense that booksellers and publishers - especially the latter - should be above such advertising. Leave it to department and discount stores! I was also surprised to see an e-book reader advertised in the CVS circular. I can't imagine that's a good product, on sale in a drugstore for $99 (AFTER rebate, admittedly).

In these ads, it seems to me, we have made tangible the place of books in our modern culture. The printed book may be disappearing from stores, off shelves, and out of bags heading to the airport - I had many friends ask me, as I prepared for a trip down to Texas, whether I had a Kindle or Ipad so I didn't have to carry books with me, God forbid - but when one includes e-books unproblematically into the equation, there are more books than ever, and perhaps more readers. We clearly are once again in an age, similar to the appearance of the mass market paperback, when books are filtering into places where they have not been or have been less visible, such as Sunday newspaper circulars, drugstores, and emailed coupons. This means sellers are reaching out to a wider readership, just as sales reps started selling spinners for paperbacks to the convenience stores in train stations in the '20s.

I want to have hope, or at least have less concern by putting this trend into historical context, but I still don't know what it might mean for independent booksellers. I was in Houston on Monday where I went by Brazos Bookstore, a fantastic independent that I have visited before. (Sadly, I had to get to the airport and miss going to Murder by the Book down the street, which looks so cool.) As I was purchasing Jay Parini's Why Poetry Matters, my sister and I chatted with the cashier. (I was looking for poetry books - Gerald Stern, Elizabeth Gerstler, W. H. Auden - but they didn't happen to have the ones I wanted, so I picked up this book which I didn't know I wanted but have enjoyed - you know how this works.) (I should note that The Strand in NYC didn't have any books by these poets last week either - !!!) My sister pointed out that she'd love to support the store and others like it more but couldn't afford to, and "it's hard with Half-Price Books around." The cashier graciously admitted that she buys books there, too, and online sometimes, such as first editions through ABEbooks.com. She rightly identified that as consumers we can spread our bucks around, but we should include indies when we do that. (No one mentioned that online bookseller who should not be spoken.)

At the counter, I picked up a pamphlet for the Friends of Brazos Bookstore program, which is a great way to support your local independent even as you, in a weak moment, shop elsewhere. You join the program at whatever level suits you best - I don't have the pamphlet in front of me but there are tiers, down to a very reasonable $50 perhaps - and you get discounts based on your level. You also hear about all the great events there.

As we head into the overheated holiday gift-buying season, of course you should support your local independent stores. I know I for one feel very gratified by gifts of memberships or donations, and you might be surprised to find others do, too. Ask! But if you know your loved one wants something special, something more tangible, look at your Sunday circulars - themselves some consider a relic, though they seem more numerous this year than in the past - and find the book-related ad you never thought you'd find, and see if any books are advertised that might just work. Then drop the circular and head to your local and pick it up.

More holiday-themed posts to come, I'm sure!

E-books vs P-books Battle on city street

2010-11-03T09:59:00.002-05:00

Ironically, we ourselves have moved from words to video, just as we hope books won't. I know, right?! But these "movies" are all the rage, so I wanted to use this tool to make a snarky, ridiculous, absurd entry into the e-book debates. I could have made one that is more like a conversation between me and Christopher on this topic... hmm... perhaps for the future.

For now, enjoy.

What is it?

2010-11-02T13:57:00.003-05:00

It's a Book.

Harvard's "Why Books?" Conference, Pt I

2010-10-31T20:23:00.003-05:00

We have some new followers at our Twitter account thanks to Christopher's expert - by which I mean "snarky" - live-tweeting from Harvard's "Why Books?" conference itself on Friday. I sat next to him for most of it and we shared nods and notes (not all of which are blog-appropriate) and eye-rolls. It was an interesting day, as was the one afternoon panel I attended the day before. Let me start with the Thursday afternoon panel.

I attended a panel on Thursday titled, "Challenges and Opportunities in the Emerging E-book Age." Alexander Parker did a fantastic job setting up this panel as the kind of host and first speaker, introducing a lot of basic terms that were then referenced later by the other speakers. He explained how we are seeing the "doubters versus the touters" in this world of e-books, struggling with "the shock of the new." He explained that perhaps we are in an "e-Incublar period," starting in 2006 with more sophisticated e-readers, which are now hitting the market too fast and furious for even him to follow. He offered some hope for people like me, perhaps like Christopher, by saying this technology adapts to what we want and need, once that shock of the new wears off. Here he referred to radio, which were once a central entertainment object in a home but which have now settled as kind of background noise, still used commonly but not as prominently. At the same time, Parker did bring up issues still being explored that have not settled down - rights management, for example (agents being careful in giving options to film studios, only allowing dramatic but not digital, which suggests new things may fall under "digital" as technology develops), the "out of sight, out of mind" danger as book collections become virtual rather than physical, the endangered parts of books, including indices, works cited, and appendices, and what that might mean for the Table of Contents, which may in fact become more descriptive as they become more important for navigating a book.

Liza Daly of Threepress Consulting brought up a somewhat troubling issue: text changes when put into a venue in which text flows, and is "reflowable," rather than being page-based. The reader now has control of the text, and can re-format to allow for bigger text, different orientation, etc... This has been a major concern, for obvious reasons, for poets. I was rather surprised to hear Daly dismiss these concerns from authors and publishers in general by suggesting that readers aren't bothered by these challenges, by poetry lines being broken up when 4 lines are used as an epigraph. As publishers, I don't want our goal to be producing books - e or p - that the readers can tolerate, can still read despite inconsistency or sloppiness. Daly later mentioned the potential for projects on handheld devices to create narratives that take into account where the reader is and what the reader is doing - a mystery is now set in West Somerville, in her example, and the narrative unfolds as the device moves. This to me sounds like the ultimate in narcissistic reading. It's one thing to want to see something you recognize in a narrative, but to demand your own experience turned into fiction as you have that experience? Someone pointed out to me later that this is similar to the recent Arcade Fire video that went viral, for "The Wilderness Downtown," in which you put in the address of your childhood home and it uses Google images of that home in the video itself. (I admit it, it kind of blew me away, but put into this context, I found it in retrospect icky.)

Similarly, she brought up a chart that showed how ebooks were most commonly purchased at around 9pm at night. She explained this data by having us imagine that we're in bed and we finish our book, but we're not quite ready to go to sleep. We then order up a new book for our Kindle or what have you, and it instantly is on the device and ready to go. She touted this convenience, which is so superior to having to wait and get to a bookstore later. Maybe I'm sounding like some kind of New England puritan here, but this convenience is kind of... well, as Christopher might say, dumb. I mean, most of us have plenty of books lying around waiting to be read, so I can't imagine finishing a book at 9pm and having to order a new one for immediate deliver. But hey, she made a point of saying how most books read on these devices are very trade fiction - romance, thrillers, etc... This is exciting reading, page-turners. We've all been caught up in those kinds of books now and again, and sometimes you need that sequel. But this is one of those times when I feel like those in favor of these emerging technologies are telling me I want something that I'm not convinced I want - the ability to buy a book instantly at 9pm. She was saying "this is about you," and that sends some red flags up. Anytime people push such convenience, I feel like a targeted market.

Emily Arkin of Harvard University Press talked about, amongst many other things, the potential for additional curatorial roles out there, as more books become available digitally and even created with the digital more purposely in mind. There is only going to be more of a "glut of information" coming at us, so who is going to help readers decide what to read? Arkin feels the imprimatur on a book will become more important - something those of us in publishing hope is true.

This hope was somewhat dashed when an audience member asked about self-publishing, but as the panelists started to answer, she said, "Look at the time - you can just tell me what website to go to to self-publish." This goes back to my larger concern that the industry is being shaped by folks desperately trying to capitalize on what readers want, with the most base taking the lead at times. Should we make decisions based on who can make the most money by catering to reader narcissism, or should we find smart folks curating a smart list and taking risks going forward with a collective mentality, in terms of employees and in terms of writers? My preference is the latter, obviously.

I don't have time to go over the full day on Friday just now, but I'll return to it soon. Until then, you have Christopher's tweets to give you a sense of the day.

An anecdote about a book.

2010-10-26T10:51:00.000-05:00

Howdy. Usually when I take to these airwaves (whatevs) I do so to scold, make fun, or generally make an ass of myself by being outraged about this or that stupid happening in book publishing (I'm looking at you Justin Beaver). Not this time. Everyone knows I am anti-Kindle. I think the device is just plain, old, dumb but my previous posts on the matter have often been more of the "I love the smell of books and a Kindle doesn't smell like a book" variety instead of addressing the actual reasons why I think the Kindle (or any of its brothers or sisters) is dopey. Seriously, not this time.

Yesterday evening while walking around Harvard Square I happened to pass the front windows of the Harvard Book Store. I wasn't going to go in because every time I do I end up spending money I really shouldn't on yet another book (for instance, I own 4 different editions of 1984, ugh). While scanning the "New in Hardcover" display I spotted this book:

An Atlas of Remote Islands: Fifty Islands I Have Never Set Foot on and Never Will by Judith Schalansky, winner of the "Most Beautiful Book in Germany" Prize (who knew?). The title alone had me interested but it was more than that. 1) I love atlases. (Don't ask.) 2) I love islands (duh, who doesn't?) 3) I truly treasure reference books (I got nothin' on that one, I'm just a nerd). I stood outside in the rain thinking about whether or not I was going to go in a take a closer look knowing full well that my inherent weakness for book purchases could and would come into play. However, I felt I was safe because I happen to hate hardcovers (as we have documented here). I walked over to the New Hardcovers table and opened up what has to be coolest book released this year. The book is what it says it is on the cover. It is an atlas of remote islands accompanied by a small one-page piece of writing on the history/culture/mythology of the island in question. I was totally consumed right in the middle of the store. Judith Schalansky writes:

“The absurdity of reality is lost on the large land masses, but here on the islands, it is writ large. An island offers a stage: everything that happens on it is practically forced to turn into a story, into a chamber piece in the middle of nowhere, into the stuff of literature. What is unique about these tales is that fact and fiction can no longer be separated: fact is fictionalized and fiction is turned into fact....For me Atlases are the most poetic books of all, the body of the earth shown on a map.”

Ok, that is a little squishy but the point is that this book-which I explicitly told myself I wasn't going to buy-was in a bag and out the door with me a mere 10 minutes after first finding out about its existence. This post really isn't supposed to be about how great the book is but it is important that you see at least one of the maps in the book to get a sense of how beguiling the Atlas is. So, here is the page for the island of Diego Garcia, located in the Indian Ocean approximately 500 miles east of the Maldives.

See?!? Plus the text on the verso side of the page is...is...is...well, there really aren't words for it. Sometimes Ms. Schalansky writes of history, other times it is mythology, a few times she transcribes entries from a long lost journal belonging to a lighthouse keeper, soldier, or occupant of the island. You never know what you are going to get island to island. Totally amazing. But that isn't what I came here to tell you about. I have been typing this piece for 15 minutes; I can write about the book for 15 more. I'm not proud, or tired. But, I really did come here to write about the Kindle and why it should just go away.

I can't really counter all the claims made about the Kindle by the true believers. It really is handy. It can hold ten million books and fifty million magazines (I think). It is portable and very easy to use. So convenient. Yes, yes, yes, yes, everything they say about the Kindle is true and great. I think there is even a religious movement dedicated to the Kindle. However, what the Kindle cannot do, and why I will never own one even if it allows me to hold all the books of the Library of Congress in my pocket for the cost of a penny is that it doesn't allow for discovery...for an epiphany. For the first time in a very long time I was absolutely seduced by a book I hadn't heard anything about until I happened to be walking by the store on a rainy evening. Being able to go into the Harvard Book Store and touch the book, browse its pages,as well as become engrossed in its words will never happen with a Kindle. A Kindle is a storage device. Usually when I go into bookstore I am just looking around. I don't really care if I find something or not but I am always of a mind to get something if I can. Last night, a book caught me off guard and believe me when I tell you that I wasn't in the "spending $28 on a 100 page hardcover" mood. Once I got the book in my hand, however, I just had to. Everyone I have shown the book to in the last 12-15 hours has also been completely in its thrall. So there, after all my public denunciations of the Kindle, my final rejection of it comes from an anecdote not a point by point dismantling. The Kindle will never give me an spot in time, that fleeting moment when everything else is shut out around you...it just isn't capable of that in the way that an unknown book by an unknown author about a subject I , myself, didn't know I was so interested in, on the shelf of the local bookstore I love did. Perhaps that isn't the Kindle's mission but if not, that's sad since that is ultimately the whole point of a discovering a book you didn't know you'd love - lighting the fire of an idea in your mind while wandering the streets in search of a beer.

Boston Book Festival report

2010-10-17T11:40:00.003-05:00

It's a beautiful fall weekend here in New England, and yesterday saw the exciting, much-publicized Boston Book Festival, now in its second year. I went to one event and then wandered around with some friends to the booths, and it was all in all an impressive showcase of talent and publisher marketing and even bookselling.

I was pleased to see some cool independent publishers present - Small Beer Press, for example, and David Godine Inc, and the relatively new and quite commercial Union Park Press, which does Boston books for Boston folks. I also really enjoyed the book stalls from Symposium Books and the Brattle Bookshop. Lastly, I was interested in this Better World Books, which seems to be a for-profit but socially responsible alternative to Amazon. (Any alternative to Amazon seems pretty damn good by my watch.) They seem to do a lot of work for literacy and they sell these t-shirts, which they had on display and which were charming in their simplicity:

The festival was bustling, unfortunately with many people who were pushy and demanding and ill-equipped to be around other humans, but such is part of the deal in a popular urban festival, especially in Boston. (Sorry, but folks are just a bit more polite in other parts of the country and world - those of us who live here know that!) The exhibitors, however, were friendly, at both these independents and at booths for corporate publishers, such as Harper Perennial. Everyone had a good spirit about them, and the crowd was eating it up. I should call out the young woman at the New York Review Books' stall in particular, who knew her list so well and was just plain charming.

But I have to get around to my frustration. Sorry.

I am working on a book of local interest right now, which just came out. Local independent the Brookline Booksmith had a booth last year at the Festival - which I remember because the weather was horrible, and as I approached the tent, the woman working there warned me not to come in, because the rain and wind were threatening to bring the whole tent down. So this year, I knew that the store had ordered 12 copies of this book in question. I called them up to ask if they'd be bringing the book to the Festival. I was put through to the woman organizing the books for the Festival, who told me that no, they were not bringing any general titles. In fact, they were only allowed to sell books to support one of the multiple venues for the Festival. They said maybe someone else will be selling general titles.

This was Thursday. That night, my partner and I wandered into the mammoth Barnes & Noble in the Prudential - a store where I once worked, which is one of the top-selling stores in the country. In the last couple of weeks, this very large superstore has been transformed per the new B&N model, which I discussed here. It's now happening, for reals. At the front, just to the left, of this huge store, the books have been removed. Completely removed, in a space that once had about 5 or 6 short rows with travel books and cookbooks, I believe. The shelves gone, the store has now put stands to push the Nook, making the store resemble, as I said before, a Best Buy. Charming. We walked to the back of the store, to the decent sized fiction section so my partner could look for Karen Tei Yamashita's I Hotel, a novel that was just named a finalist for the National Book Award (as we told you). As he we stood in the last row, with the Y's, I looked across the aisle, and the psychology/self-help section, as well as the Education and exam guide section, has been wholly removed, and in its place? Vaguely educational toys, probably taking up a space where at least 4 maybe 5 rows of books had been. This is the Toys 'r' Us section.

We had seen the novel there just a couple of days before, multiple copies even, so we went to the information desk. The woman struggled a bit, and took us to two different locations. (We noticed there was not even an endcap of National Book Award finalists - !!! Isn't this a bookstore!??!) Unsuccessful, the worker pointed out that "they" had taken a bunch of books out of the store to sell at the Festival, and maybe they took all five copies the computer was saying the store had in stock.

Sure enough, B&N had a huge booth at the Festival, in a central location. They were clearly the official general, new book booksellers instead of local independent the Brookline Booksmith. Very bad news. We found I Hotel there and I asked the worker, whom I recognized as someone I once worked alongside at that B&N, if there were discounts for the books on sale. She said no, then she revised her statement to say that there was no discount for the customer, but a portion of the proceeds would go toward some literacy campaign. Convenient - I hope someone holds B&N accountable for that.

I know that was a long tangent, but I'm frustrated that the Festival organizers went corporate on the bookselling. It was particularly bad timing given that B&N is in the process of backing off from selling books, more than ever. They have turned to gadgets. They were more interested in getting the Nook displays set up than getting news about a major award put out front, with books that were named finalists on display so smart readers could say, "oh, we should read this now, some great novelists said these were the best of the year." B&N didn't care. They probably didn't even let their workers know about this, in case anyone asked.

I'm angry as a reader. I'm sick of not having a bookstore that cares. (Brookline Booksmith is great, but not in my neighborhood, and the same goes for the incredible Harvard Bookstore.) And I'm annoyed that the Book Festival, which was fantastic in many, many ways and will surely enjoy years of continued success, didn't "think local" and celebrate a couple of that top-notch independents still left in the general metro area. I understand the need for corporate sponsors and I applaud the Festival organizers' ability to keep all of these events free. That is huge. Perhaps my frustration stems to how closely they almost made it perfect, and also my current particular frustration, as noted, with the cruel corporate carelessness of B&N.

The Story of a Success

2010-10-14T19:00:00.002-05:00

I went to a reading this afternoon by Paul Harding, famed novelist of the (surprise) Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Tinkers, published by the tiny, independent, non-profit Bellevue Literary Press. I will say first that Harding was great as a reader. He read a terrific passage that was entertaining, with impressive writing, wit, and enough hints at the larger story that it made all of us interested in reading more. He was also excellent in the Q&A, which both he and the moderator made clear was an important component of his talk, something he enjoyed very much. One could see why - he was candid and funny.

The first question asked of the author was how he came to get this thing published, and where he is going next. He explained that he finished an MFA at the famed Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa, working with British novelist Barry Unsworth. A few years later, Barry called him out, saying he should have something ready to share at this point. Harding took out his "pile of prose" that he had been assembling for years. He printed out everything, then got a pair of scissors and a stapler, and started cutting and spreading things out and stapling things together. It was amazing to hear him describe even briefly this very physical process. He then re-assembled the salvageable parts and realized that he had a little literary novel.

He talked about how he sent this novel out, presumably in a more cleaned-up fashion, to "about a dozen plus" agents and editors, and got rejections, "with varying levels of class," from all of them. He then put things away and kept plugging away at his day job, teaching freshman comp and some continuing education courses, and raising 2 boys. A couple of years later, he was talking about it to a poet, who put him in touch with someone who worked at "a small literary press in NYC," but that person rejected the manuscript, too.

That person, however, put him in touch with Erika Goldman, publisher and editorial director of Bellevue. Goldman obviously fell for the novel, and they had a 2 - 3 hour phone call about it. But Harding said the first half hour involved Goldman telling him what the novel was. She then explained that she wanted to make sure that she read what he wrote. He jokingly acted out his reaction to this, saying "I love you, where do I sign?!" It seemed to me a useful, smart part of the editorial procedure - I scribbled a note to remember to do that.

Harding said the book came out as a paperback original with a 3,500 copy print run, and "virtually no marketing or publicity." (Earlier, he had joked about first hearing about Bellevue, describing it as the literary arm of the NYU medical school, with an office in Bellevue itself that was akin to a custodian's closet pretty much.) Some outstanding booksellers got behind this li'l book, though, first on the west coast and then back here on the east coast, and it started to move. He said it showed him that there are still readers out there looking for books, and there are still great booksellers who can help those readers find the right books. This echoes what Motoko Rich reported in the NYTimes last April:

But he is quick to praise those who helped “Tinkers” become a darling of the independent bookstore circuit, including Erika Goldman, the editorial director of Bellevue, whom Mr. Harding described as a “deeply empathetic reader”; Lise Solomon, a sales representative in Northern California for Consortium, the book’s distributor, who passionately advocated for the novel with booksellers; and the booksellers and critics who embraced the book early on.

(In fact, much of this info can be found there, truth be told, but I swear I heard it live just today!)

Harding then said that he now has a 2 book deal with Random House, and laughed about how he's gone from one extreme to the other. You may recall that our own Christopher complained about this move in a comment on this post from last spring. I'm not sure what to think. I mean, I give the guy credit for calling out the folks that helped him get to the Pulitzer, and I'm not sure that he should stay with Bellevue. I'm not sure Bellevue is ready for him to stay there, and they have done very well with this book, which remains on bestseller lists. They are and will always benefit, especially given the paperback original (no paperback rights to sell elsewhere!).

I guess I appreciate it when big writers contribute books to small presses, something Howard Zinn often did for a number of smaller, often non-profit, ever-independent publishers. But a guy like Harding? He's not living that large. Maybe we're asking too much when we want him to sacrifice a living wage and the freedom to work just on writing for the benefit of independent publishing. Bellevue is not going to come up with a $100,000 advance, most likely, for his next book, but his next book may be 2 - 3 years in the making, and the advance would have to cover that whole time in order for him not to work. $100k over that time - and mind you, that's not a salary so it does not come with any benefits, including healthcare - is not a huge amount. I know there's other income possibilities - subrights, royalties from the first book - but anyone in the business knows it takes a lot to add up to anything substantial.

I differ from Christopher, clearly. I feel there should be an out clause for writers at this point in their careers. They have to be opportunistic, and I guess I see a lot of enemies of good books and good publishing out there - Amazon Shorts, capitalizing on shrinking attention spans thanks in part to their ridiculous gadget, for example. Writers at this stage in their careers are not the worst offenders. Let them make enough to get ahead, and then make sure they remember.

When Harding's next book comes out from Random House, I hope he still talks about those booksellers and independent bookstores like he did today, and I hope he still mentions the fact that Bellevue Literary Press believed in him and made his dream come true. Until then, I'm not ready to throw tomatoes at him.

Um, how does one get something so wrong?

2010-10-13T11:41:00.000-05:00

From one of the great voices of the internet (and a personal hero of mine), Richard Metzger comes this stinging rebuke to Lee Seigel's piece in the New York TImes Book Review comparing the Beat Generation with the current Tea Party.

From Richard:

“I think I’m going to puke.”

Blowhard asshole Lee Siegel continues to thrash around in the low end of the journalistic cesspool with this utterly idiotic essay in the New York Times comparing the Beat Generation to the Tea Party movement.
The counterculture of the late 1950s and early 1960s appears to be everywhere these days. A major exhibition of Allen Ginsberg’s photography just closed at the National Gallery in Washington. A superb book, by the historian Sean Wilentz, about Ginsberg’s dear friend and sometime influence Bob Dylan recently made the best-seller list. “Howl,” a film about Ginsberg and the Beats, opened last month. And everywhere around us, the streets and airwaves hum with attacks on government authority, celebrations of radical individualism, inflammatory rhetoric, political theatrics.
In other words, the spirit of Beat dissent is alive (though some might say not well) in the character of Tea Party protest. Like the Beats, the Tea Partiers are driven by that maddeningly contradictory principle, subject to countless interpretations, at the heart of all American protest movements: individual freedom. The shared DNA of American dissent might be one answer to the question of why the Tea Partiers, so extreme and even anachronistic in their opposition to any type of government, exert such an astounding appeal.
Comparing the sexy, druggy, life embracing, progressive culture of the beats to the fascistic, xenophobic, racist, fearful and life-negating Tea Party is absolutely absurd. It’s like comparing fucking to a case of serious blue balls.
The following comment by Siegel not only posits an idiotic argument, it’s morally disgusting:
the Tea Partiers’ unnerving habit of bringing guns to town-hall meetings would have repelled the Beats. But William S. Burroughs fetishized guns, accidentally killing his wife while trying to shoot a glass off her head. Violence, implicit or explicit, comes with the “beaten” state of mind. So does theatricality, since playing roles — and manipulating symbols — is often the first resort of people who do not feel acknowledged for being who they really are.
What the fuck does Burroughs’ wife’s death have to with “manipulating symbols” or some kind of identity crisis?

Read the entire steaming pile of bullshit here.

The 2010 National Book Award Finalists Announced

2010-10-13T11:19:00.000-05:00

(plus the names of the judges to blame if they don't pick your favorite book from each list) - CV

FINALISTS ANNOUNCED FOR 2010 NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS

Fiction

Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America (Alfred A. Knopf)

Jaimy Gordon, Lord of Misrule (McPherson & Co.)

Nicole Krauss, Great House (W.W. Norton & Co.)

Lionel Shriver, So Much for That (Harper)

Karen Tei Yamashita, I Hotel (Coffee House Press)

Nonfiction

Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
(Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group)

John W. Dower, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9-11, Iraq

(W.W. Norton & Co.)

Patti Smith, Just Kids (Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)

Justin Spring, Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Megan K. Stack, Every Man in This Village Is a Liar: An Education in War (Doubleday)

Poetry

Kathleen Graber, The Eternal City (Princeton University Press)

Terrance Hayes, Lighthead (Viking Penguin)

James Richardson, By the Numbers (Copper Canyon Press)

C.D. Wright, One with Others (Copper Canyon Press)

Monica Youn, Ignatz (Four Way Books)

Young People's Literature

Paolo Bacigalupi, Ship Breaker (Little, Brown & Co.)

Kathryn Erskine, Mockingbird (Philomel Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group)

Laura McNeal, Dark Water (Alfred A. Knopf)

Walter Dean Myers, Lockdown (Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)

Rita Williams-Garcia, One Crazy Summer (Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers)

The Judges for the 2010 National Book Awards:

Fiction

Joanna Scott (Chair), Andrei Codrescu, Samuel R. Delany, Sabina Murray, Carolyn See

Nonfiction

Marjorie Garber (Chair), Blake Bailey, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Seth Lerer, Sallie Tisdale

Poetry

Cornelius Eady (Chair), Rae Armantrout, Linda Gregerson, Jeffrey McDaniel, Brenda Shaughnessy

Young People's Literature

Tor Seidler (Chair), Laban Carrick Hill, Kelly Link, Hope Anita Smith, Sara Zarr

November is National Novel Writing Month

2010-10-13T11:12:00.000-05:00

I am not really sure why anyone would want to create artificial barriers to writing a novel-Ok, I do. I am looking at you Oulipo Group-but if you are interested in making your writing life even harder then November 1st marks the first day of National Novel Writing Month. The simple goal of the event is to write a 50,000 word novel by the end of the month. You can find all the details at their website NaNoWriMo.org (I know, I know). However, if you are too lazy to click on over to their site, below are the 10 salient things you need to know about writing your novel. (I should add at this point that if you are too lazy to click through to their website I am not 100% how you will have the discipline to write everyday for a month and finish with a 50K monster but that's just me being an a-hole.)

1) Sign up for the event by clicking the "Sign Up Now" link at the top of the site. It's right there above "National."
2) Check your email and read the ginormous email our noveling robots send you. It will have "Love" in the subject line, and may be hiding in your Junk folder.
3) Log into your account and use the links on the My NaNoWriMo page to set your timezone, affiliate with a region, and tell us a little bit about yourself.
4) Begin procrastinating by reading through all the great advice and funny stories in the forums. Post some stories and questions of your own. Get excited. Get nervous. Try to rope someone else into doing this with you. Eat lots of chocolate and stockpile noveling rewards.
5) On November 1, begin writing your novel. Your goal is to write a 50,000-word novel by midnight, local time, on November 30th. You write on your own computer, using whatever software you prefer.
6) This is not as scary as it sounds.
7) Starting November 1, you can update your word count in that box at the top of the site, and post excerpts of your work for others to read. Watch your word-count accumulate and story take shape. Feel a little giddy.
8) Write with other NaNoWriMo participants in your area. Write by yourself. Write. Write. Write.
9) If you write 50,000 words of fiction by midnight, local time, November 30th, you can upload your novel for official verification, and be added to our hallowed Winner’s Page and receive a handsome winner’s certificate and web badge. We'll post step-by-step instructions on how to scramble and upload your novel starting in mid-November.
10) Win or lose, you rock for even trying.
That's all there is to it! Occasionally, participants write in to ask about the rules of the event. We don't have many! But because we've found that creativity is often heightened by constraints (and communities bolstered by shared goals) we have evolved a handful of rules over the years. The rules state that, to be an official NaNoWriMo winner, you must…
Write a 50,000-word (or longer!) novel, between November 1 and November 30.
Start from scratch. None of your own previously written prose can be included in your NaNoWriMo draft (though outlines, character sketches, and research are all fine, as are citations from other people's works).
Write a novel. We define a novel as a lengthy work of fiction. If you consider the book you're writing a novel, we consider it a novel too!
Be the sole author of your novel. Apart from those citations mentioned two bullet-points up.
Write more than one word repeated 50,000 times.
Upload your novel for word-count validation to our site between November 25 and November 30.

So that's all there is to it.

Well, what are you waiting for? Get on over to the National Novel Writing Month website and get going.

I have seen it, and I'm unimpressed

2010-10-12T21:11:00.002-05:00

This weekend, I spent some time at my sister's house, having her six year old son show me how he uses their iPad, as my parents looked on, only slightly more confused than me. We all figured out the basics and within no time, were scanning up and down and flipping through applications, but at the end of it, I had no problem leaving this new toy behind. Two points come to the surface after this experience.

First, I should quote my father here: "You can see why books are in trouble," he pointed out as my nephew "made cupcakes" with an app. "Reading doesn't have the immediate gratification that these apps do, and they're not as involved with it." He makes a good point. How do you go from picking up an iPad and engaging with it - you pick the ingredients, you "pet" the cat and make him purr - to picking up a printed book and sitting quietly, reading it? But my mother countered that everyone said the same thing about televisions, or with calculators that were going to make us unable to do math (um... oops!). And the fact is that my nephew is reading, and is interested in reading, even with the iPad. I should also note, however, that he knew how to ask to download an app and knew when we weren't allowed because it wasn't free - dexterous in the marketplace already.

Second, my sister had downloaded some Dr. Seuss books that her son has read, though she has also caught him getting the iPad to read to him, which she doesn't allow. Of course, he figured out how to do it before she even knew it was a possibility. My sister is a big reader, though, reading the kinds of books one doesn't feel the need to keep - your Nora Roberts et al. But clearly she is not at the stage that she wants to sit around with a screen and read. This isn't anything to do with her love of physical books, as she was ready to go "e" by the the start of the summer. She would go into Borders and buy 3 for 2, and then suddenly have tons of books that she had read sitting around in her house, not cool enough to put on display but not cheap enough to recycle or sell. But now here we are, three months after she was given this thing, and she has not yet purchased a single e-book for herself. I was surprised to hear that. I kind of thought of her as the main demographic right now.

I have become accustomed to reading the occasional article on my blackberry, and obviously I consume quite a bit of media online, on my laptop. But I still want to commit to things longer, and in fact, I have spent a few evenings now at the kitchen table longer than intended, reading more of the Boston Globe, or the local papers like the Boston Courant, Bay Windows, or the South End News, my micro-local, and I have read some really important news in these papers (albeit with typos, incorrect jumps, etc). It's similar to getting sucked into a book, fiction or non-fiction. It's more than just that flash that passes by and ends up being forgettable - like much of the news we all pass to each other, or worse, the Youtube clips. It's important to me because I have something in common with the other readers. We have a common interest, and the editors know that, and edit with us all in mind. That's a community feeling that I appreciate, and I don't need to see those other readers - online, in comments sections - to feel it.

I want to end by saying, like so many, that I was saddened to see the news of Carla Cohen's passing. Cohen seemed to be quite a tough broad who co-founded Politics & Prose, a vitally important independent bookstore in Washington, DC, in 1984. We here at SotB join many others in the publishing world in recognizing this loss.

(how great is this photo of the co-founders, Cohen (left) and Barbara Meade?! Taken by Darrel Ellis, The Washington Post, in 1989.)

We are sentimental souls around here

2010-10-06T12:04:00.001-05:00

From Seattle Public Library's blog, the world's sweetest letter:

The Way to Spend an Evening

2010-10-05T14:50:00.004-05:00

I don't want to get all Wendall Berry on you. I like plenty of modern things. I also am not necessarily always cranky. But I do like to spend an evening now and again with some old school cranks. I like the physicality, the challenge, the reactions. I'm getting ahead of myself - let me explain.

My partner bought an album through Amazon and earned some credit toward their streaming movie feature. Clearly Amazon is trying to push everyone to all things digital, so you download a whole album and hey, why don't you watch a streaming film?! You'll be hooked. Since this would not cost any money, we said fine. We go to watch a film, however, and the sync is slightly off, with mouths moving just a bit of whack to the sound. Clearly there is quality sacrificed for convenience. Why should people watch movies this way?

We couldn't take it and stopped the movie halfway through, moving over to the Netflix "watch instant" feature... which was down, as a whole network. At this point, we just pulled out books to read.

But my point is the frustration. I couldn't call anyone - who does one call at Amazon or Netflix? I have no idea. I'm sitting in the privacy of my own home, with useless technology failing me, mocking my request for such luxurious convenience. I was isolated and all I could do was throw up my hands and turn off the damn tv entirely - doesn't that sound familiar? Such technical errors leave me with a profound frustration, a feeling of lonely desperation and powerlessness.

Compare that story with a radically different experience of error, which occurred at Bingo night at a Catholic high school in a town just outside of Boston on a Thursday evening.

There are many amazing things about Bingo, something I had not experienced as an adult until this magical evening. If you, too, have not experienced this, it's a bit of a culture shock. I was warned, and I was still taken aback, but some deep part of me fell in love. I can sum up the experience with a few quick anecdotes:

1) A middle-aged man on the steps of the school saw us approaching and said, "You gents here for bingo?" When we answered in the affirmative, he said, "You bettah hope you don't win - those old ladies will kill you! You take ya life into your own hands, gentlemen."

2) When the announcer said he wouldn't call the door prize until the next smoke break - when, of course, many of the gals would be out smoking - a 60 year old (or so) gal next to my friend actually screamed out to him, despite him being across an auditorium, "you retahded asshole!"

3) The older lady across from me, who with her friend helped me with all the many surprisingly complicated games - you have no idea - won $150, at which point she rubbed the cash on my friend's arm for luck. She was otherwise unmoved. She said she once won $1100 here, over the course of the month, and I asked her outright, "Did you ever get excited, at any of those wins?" "No," she answered, and I nodded, entirely believing her. She later rooted for me as I was 2 numbers away from winning $750. Sadly, it didn't help.

Now that you have the tone, let me explain the error. At the start of the night, the announcer stood up on a chair to announce that bingo would begin momentarily. Then he fell of the chair. This was the error. There were gasps; those who could, jumped up; others, including the gals across from me, shook their head and muttered how he was going to kill himself one of these days. Some folks looked confused and others explained what happened. People smiled at each other and shook their heads as he got to his feet, unharmed. The game was up and running in no time.

I know this is simplistic, but it was nice to have this error happening in a shared space, and that that space was replicating a cultural practice that hasn't changed too much in a long time. They still use daubers and printed out boards of all kinds (leading me to wonder, who manufactures these things!) and put the numbers called on a big screen with basic light bulbs. I should admit, though, that things have progressed since I was a kid: when someone called BINGO!, the person checking had only to read the card ID number from the middle of the winning board, which was then checked in a computer (maybe) and verified immediately. They did not have to go through each square to make sure the right number was called.

In this context, we all shared in the error, and we all got over the error. Maybe we grumbled, maybe we saw it as evidence of a larger problem, maybe we hardly noticed, maybe we had so little sympathy for the guy that later we'd call him a "retahded asshole" when he threatened not to read the door prize number at the appointed time. But we were in a room together, and we didn't need much to have a pretty damn fun evening. I don't think I could replicate that in a chatroom. We didn't need to each have a computer terminal or laptop or handheld device. We just needed a stack of boards and daubers, and for some of us, the occasional pudgy hand coming over to tag a square I missed (for this, I repeatedly thanked - but also chastised - my neighbor).

Books are isolating in a sense, but then not. When I'm editing, I tell the author that she or he is the guide for the reader. You two are in this together, with you leading the way, so be nice, be clear, know where you're going. (I'm reading Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn now and feel like I know this narrator incredibly well. I hardly feel alone as I read the book.) But then if that reader is using a Kindle and the batteries die - not a shocking thing to have happen with any electronic device - she can't read that book, take that journey. I guess I feel like right now, with reading, that's too much reliance on technology, and not because I dislike technology so much, but just because, as we have said so many times here at SotB, it just feels unnecessary.

It's like that quote featured on Shelf Awareness recently, where a woman noted that as her plane landed, she didn't have to "turn off" her book. At bingo, I didn't have to find a plug because my board was starting to fade. My only technical challenge was keeping the lid off the dauber - my neighbor explained that I was wasting time replacing that lid between each number call. Another good tip.

Similarly, I was chatting with a colleague who is unabashedly pro-book, in all it's expensive, wasteful paperness. He goes out and buys fat, esoteric hardcovers with no discount. He's crazy! And someone told him how e-books can have things embedded in them - videos, music, etc... He said he calmly explained back that if he's reading a book on the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the author references Martin Luther King's famous "I have a dream" speech, his brain will recall images he has seen of this event. His brain will make those connections. He doesn't need a video implanted in the e-book to show him the speech. In fact, he said he can read very quickly, but he doesn't, because he likes having his brain make those connections, scanning through his wide breadth of book knowledge to connect this image in a book on Churchill to that other book he read on Krakow, etc etc... It made me think of how everyone pulls out an iphone now as soon as anything even slightly obscure comes up. Our brains are atrophying.

In my role as editor, I want to be creative in thinking what makes a good book in 2010, but I also want to preserve what a book can and should do, and not try too hard to make it do everything for everyone. Things fail when you try to be all things to all people, but I fear that's where the purveyors of new book technology are going. So we sacrifice quality - the screen isn't great in the sun, not every book you want is there, oh I rarely read the whole book on this thing but I'll read a few chapters - for the supposed convenience, because we're told its convenient.

But what is that convenience? You can order a book that you read about online right then and have it right then. You didn't have to talk to a human at a bookstore, walk down the street to that bookstore. You didn't have to leave your home or office. You just pushed some buttons and there it is. The narrator, your guide, holds her hand out and you two are ready to go.

So what happens when something goes wrong, when that narrator falls off the chair, metaphorically, but doesn't get back up? Batteries are dead, system is down, Amazon has taken back the files and you have no one to complain to.

If you want to complain to me, too bad: I'll be a bingo with my new friends.

If John McPhee says so, who are we to argue?

2010-09-21T08:58:00.002-05:00

From this morning's Shelf Awareness:

"I’m really concerned about it. And nobody knows where it's going-particularly in terms of the relationship of the Internet to the print media. But writing isn't going to go away. There's a big shake-up-the thing that comes to mind is that it's like in a basketball game or a lacrosse game when the ball changes possession and the whole situation is unstable. But there's a lot of opportunities in the unstable zone. We're in that kind of zone with the Internet. But it's just unimaginable to me that writing itself would die out. OK, so where is it going to go? It's a fluid force: it'll come up through cracks, it'll go around corners, it'll pour down from the ceiling. And I would have counseled anybody ten, twenty, and thirty years ago the same thing I'm saying right now, which is, as a young writer, you should think about writing a book. I don't think books are going to go away."

-John McPhee, in a Paris Review interview earlier this year.

Rethinking Done Right

2010-09-19T11:14:00.002-05:00

I know I just posted on something said over at Booksquare, and here I am writing about another post there, but I've gone back to this post multiple times in the past few days, which makes it seem worthwhile to talk about here. Right? Right.

The new post in question is from Sept. 14th, and in it, Kassia Krozser imagines new roles in the modern day publishing house. Now here at SotB, I know we get a bit prickly with changing things up too radically, but we try to clarify what kinds of changes freak us out. Speaking for myself rather than Mr. Christopher, I'd say that things that heighten corporate competition in a way that threatens new voices and makes vulnerable valid if currently under-recognized voices worry me. I also cry foul when the media goes apeshit about a product in a way that seems suspicious, too cozy with the maker/seller of said product. In our modern age, I think it behooves us not to read any and all media with a very critical eye.

I'm getting around to a point, I think.

Krozser, as far as I can tell, is not selling us anything here, but is instead explaining some possibilities in a level-headed way, and in a way that's very accessible (as compared to some who either go off on theory or go off on metadata in a way that makes an old-school editor like me a bit numb). She's going through and exploring how work within job titles will change. I'm going to stick with how she imagines the changing roles within editorial, since that's the department in which I happily exist. To quote:

However, acquisitions editors will change how they think about — and there’s no way around this word — projects. There will be booky-books. There will be multimedia extravaganzas. The type of project will drive the final product. Just as authors and agents are starting to think big picture when it comes to works they are shopping, so, more and more, will editors. Is it text, is it a web-based community, is it an application, is it a living, interactive experience? One or more of those?

I know, I know. Deep breaths, y'all, it'll be okay.

The fact of the matter is that I, like some of the commenters, have unconsciously or sub-consciously already started thinking in this way, as an editor. I admit it. The way she's described it has made me feel better about this reality. As I advise authors - those I am publishing and those I'm not - I find myself raising this issue more and more. I don't see this as leading to the death of books, but it will lead to the slimming down of what we all publish, in a way. I hate the idea of reading what could be a straight-forward novel and having that novel interrupted with a video or an mp3 file or something. If that had happened while I made my way through The Man with the Golden Arm - "Algren may have been envisioning a bar like the one featured in this clip!" - I would have hated it. But when I hear about certain books and I hear authors urging - or wanting to urge - their publishers to include this or that, I do see opportunity, for added material online and/or embedded somehow in an e-file that includes that text and the extras.

But how much can we possibly do? She goes on later to suggest,

Someone needs to be in charge of all aspects of the book — whatever form it takes — from beginning to end. This is particularly true if the book is slotted as a transmedia project. Nobody — nobody! — is better positioned to execute the vision than the acquiring editor. It’s a different kind of job. It’s a visionary kind of job.

Now I appreciate this point. There are always times when an editor stops and wonders if he is the only person in-house who has read a manuscript, or even a chapter of a project. We often do know the material best, having worked closely with the author on finalizing it. And I love the idea of building on the "visionary" aspect of being an acquisitions editor. At the same time, I might want to farm out some of this work....

Editorial staff will be on the front lines of coding manuscripts; they’ve already started this. Yes, I did say coding. There will be tools to make this job easier. They will be awesome tools. They will work the way they’re supposed to work the first time. Because this is the future and things work in the future.

Right? Some basic coding maybe but it seems to me, this can fit into production. Now we're just squabbling.

My point is that this is all great, but we must keep in mind what readers want, and the question becomes how we figure this out. We shouldn't base it on media - see my point above - and random polls don't seem particularly scientific. I suppose all of my reading about past editors and publishers comes into play here, and what's left is that we need folks to be visionary not just with individual projects, but with whole publishing plans. Hell, we can try to be those people here at SotB, but I'll warn you, our vision will involve fairness for all parties to a painful degree, support for new literary endeavors with a sense of history and skill rather than mere cleverness, and a commitment to big ideas wherever they appear, including outside of NYC and outside of the US.

Oof. I best get to visioning.

Before I leave you, however, two more quick points:

1) Thanks to Christopher's lead, we are now on Twitter. Check us out here. Follow us, and we can follow you, and we'll all tweet each other stupid.

2) As I mention in that first tweet, Craig Fehrman has a great article in today's Boston Globe about author libraries that's well worth a read. (Btw, it seems they are hiring a staff person for the Ideas section of the Globe, where this article appears. I can't find the listing but it's out there, so interested parties should apply! It'd make for a pretty awesome job for a smart journalist.)

Two links

2010-09-15T09:39:00.002-05:00

On this wonderfully cool fall day, I want to offer you two good links, one of which may bring a smile and the other, a bit more thoughtful.

First with fun: LOOK at this library information desk made from books!

Can you believe it?! So friggin' fun. It's at the Delft University of Technology, in the Netherlands. Leave it to the Europeans, eh? Well done, folks.

And another link, this to a kind of bitter sweet article of sorts from author Steve Almond, who has had many great moments of writing (as when he publicly resigned from Boston College when Condeeza Rice was chosen as a commencement speaker - how bad ass is that?!) Anyway, Almond in this link is writing about the tragedy at the Virginia Quarterly Review, wherein managing editor Kevin Morrissey committed suicide, after which allegations arose regarding editor Ted Genoways' supposed hostility as a supervisor. It's all a mess, and Almond nicely captures the sadness of it all, but in a somewhat useful way, as he uses it as an opportunity to think through the relationship between editors and writers.

Almond mentions his own unpleasant interactions with Genoways when the editor was considering his writing, though of course he does not use this as an opportunity to, as he says, treat "Morrissey’s death as some kind of lurid whodunit." In going over all that is sad about the situation - and there's is a lot of sadness - Almond adds,

And yes, it’s also sad that certain editors, endowed with so much power by a growing army of insecure writers, don’t exercise that power more responsibly.

Fair point. Almond references an article Genoways quite famously published in the Atlantic, which I wrote about here, and points out the hostility in that article to many writers, including those who would/should be submitting to VQR. This adds to his consideration of frustration, from the author's side (his own) and from the editor or agent's side, based on letters he has received from a few, including Genoways. Almond tries to be fair, stating,

That’s what most editors and agents dream about – that one story or novel or memoir they can’t dismiss. And we all want to write it. We all want to summon within ourselves such a voice, such courage, such attention to pain and beauty. But most of us fail. Our days rank as failures. And so we send out work that – as Genoways did me the great favor of pointing out – doesn’t honor our talent. And who do we blame? We blame the editors and agents, who are often merely stand-ins for the parents and siblings who thwarted us long ago.

I appreciate the point. I try very hard to be sensitive to writers, including the authors I'm publishing, those I am having to reject, and friends or colleagues who do me the honor of letting me read their writing and provide feedback. (I'm thinking of this as someone recently sent me a short story that really surprised me, with strong and varied language and great characterization, and I didn't even know she was a writer. I don't know that anyone did!) And having read this article now, I will only keep trying, and also try for more. Almond offers a useful mission for all of us, though he directs it primarily at his fellow writers:

Our job, then, is two-fold: to focus on our own failings as writers. But also to speak more forcefully as advocates for literature. Books are a powerful antidote for loneliness, for the moral purposelessness of the leisure class. It’s our job to convince the 95 percent of people who don’t read books, who instead medicate themselves in front of screens, that literary art isn’t some esoteric tradition, but a direct path to meaning, to an understanding of the terror that lives beneath our consumptive ennui. It’s hard to make this case, though, if all we do is squabble with each other and lament our obscurity.

On Way to Reader's Manifesto

2010-09-12T15:28:00.002-05:00

If you haven't done so already, I would recommend you head over to the Booksquare blog to read Kassia Krozser's post about the "question of value" in books. Krozser nails a lot of problems in publishing these days. She calls into question the gatekeeping role of publishers who get so hung up on an author who sells well that they publish anything that person sells, even if it's utter shite, resulting in a loss of faith from the reader. The reader is left wondering whom to trust. Krozser goes on to make a point we have certainly made here at SotB:

The truth is, as readers, we have no idea how good a book is when we purchase it, nor can we guess at the quality of what we get, generally, until we read the entire work. Yes, there are publishers (hello, Unbridled Books) who have a tight, focused list that reflects a consistent point-of-view while publishing a diverse list. I love it when I can trust a publisher. I feel the same away about Harlequin. It’s a compliment to both publishers. Readers may not love every book published by these houses, but they know there is a certain focus they can trust. Very few large publishers offer this kinda, sorta guarantee.

I know we're not going to return magically to a world where a publisher's name, at least a big corporate publisher's name, means a whole helluva lot. But I'm always pleased when folks point out how independents are often still defined enough that, if you find one that aligns with your taste, you can really learn to trust them.

So Krozser asks the hard questions about what publishers are adding in value to books:

Rather than accusing retailers and cheap consumers — and we are cheap, particularly in this economy — of devaluing content, how are publishers enhancing the consumer perception of the value of books?
Are they rejecting crappy books from established authors? Are they offering advances based on reality, the marketplace, rather than fantasy? Are they pricing books base on that same reality? Are they listening to what readers say?

Whoa. These are good and fair but very tough questions for publishers, but questions that must be asked. An an Editor, I appreciate someone basically asking, Are editors able to do their jobs and create lists that are recognizable? She also pushes for more transparency, which I've had mixed feelings about but I'm kind of coming around to. More on that in another post.

I appreciate Kroszer adding to this discussion and I'm very pleased to see many comments beneath the post. We need to keep thinking through these issues as we move to a digital world where more and more content is free, but is also of incredibly mixed value. But you may not know the value, good or bad, until you've already invested in the book.

Who do we trust these days?

How to clear your weekend reading list in 4 minutes.

2010-09-10T13:23:00.001-05:00

Trying to catch up on the classics during the weekend? Why bother? Just watch this instead. 50 spoilers in 4 minutes. You're welcome.

Break Free from the Chains!

2010-09-09T21:28:00.003-05:00

I was giddy like a schoolgirl when I read this article in the Guardian (UK) by Julia Finch about the bookstore chain Blackwell turning into an employee-owned firm. I know, right?! There is a model in place in the UK, as a major department store, John Lewis, has already made this move, and found success with it. In fact, as Finch states,

The John Lewis partnership has proved more resilient than many of its rivals in the recession and research by the Cass business school says there is evidence that staff-owned firms performed far better than shareholder-owned firms.

Put that in your capitalist pipe and smoke it.

The model will work this way, 81 year old chain owner Toby Blackwell explains:

He and two long-standing associates will retain control of Blackwell's A shares – the voting shares, which have no dividends attached. They will be placed in a trust. The B shares, or wealth shares, will go into another, employee, trust.
"No one will own shares," said Blackwell. "There will be an annual bonus, paid out of profits, and the chairman will get the same percentage [payout] as the part-time lady on the till in a store."

I'm not going to pretend like I fully understand this arrangement, though I'd like to think I could if I had it explained to me slowly. But the more important question becomes, for us here at SotB, could such a scheme ever work with our whiny chain bookstores?

I wondered this aloud, as it were, over at Ted Striphas' blog, and he responded. Pop over and see for yourself.

I know it won't happen. Borders and Barnes & Noble are much larger than Blackwell, which has only 37 permanent shops and 40 that open temporarily near college campuses. Compare that with 700+ B&Ns. And having worked at both Borders and B&N, I can tell you that any independence you sense is just an illusion. Each shop is controlled from above and every story manager has pretty tight orders.

But the article states that employee-owned businesses have happier employees... Now that would be a sea-change. I know there are always stories about people who love their local chain store and have great experiences with staff, but I also know - and have seen - some truly miserable people working at these chain stores. And I know as a cashier at B&N, it was hard to always be happy when I knew that, at the end of my shift, I would have to count out my drawer and then stand at a dry erase board, writing down the exact difference between my actual count and the receipt (manager: "in the first space, put '-25 cents'"), the amount of returns I processed (was it somehow my fault they returned merch?!), and the number of B&N memberships I sold (manager: "In the last place, put... ZERO.") It was degrading and insulting, for me and often for the manager.

But hey, I don't want to be all fa-la-la, employee-owned means never having an unhappy employee again. I know that's simplistic, but I also know this is an interesting turn-of-events at a chain bookstore that is getting little to no play here in places where the futures and fortunes of B&N and Borders are discussed ad nauseum.

Are we, as Striphas suggested in response to my comment, just afraid of anything that sounds the least bit socialist in this country? If so... egads, man.

The Book Club Strikes Again

2010-09-08T13:15:00.002-05:00

Last year, I posted about my experience with McSweeney's Book Release club, which was not altogether horrible but not my idea of perfection. You might recall my fit as the All Known Metal Bands book arrived at my door. But I still like the idea.

Well The Rumpus, the hipster literary site, a kind of scrappy version of the Daily Beast, has launched their own monthly book club this summer (as reported by PW here). What is different is that they will choose books from various publishers, indie and otherwise, and will ship the books out to members a month before pub. Well played, Rumpus. They are charging $25 a month, which includes shipping I believe, or $250 for a year.

Author Stephen Elliot started Rumpus and it should be no surprise that he's being innovative, given that for his own book last year, published by great indie Milkweed, Elliot sent out galleys to folks who signed up, asking that they then send them onto the next person on the list. I participated in this plan and actually found it very smart, and though I didn't love love love the book, I respected it - and the author - a great deal and liked the process. I like the way this Elliot guy thinks.

I also respect how he's not overhyping this idea, but just putting it out there in a laidback way. Probably the San Francisco in him talking, but in this case, I'm going to let it slide. He says in the PW article,

Elliott also picks books from authors he thinks have an affinity with The Rumpus. "We're doing Tao Lin's new novel, Richard Yates, coming from Melville House in September. We're really interested in Tao as a writer on the margins of the mainstream literary world, really fond of some of his other books, and we've discussed him a lot on The Rumpus. We haven't read the book yet, but we're looking forward to it, and think it's a book that people who read The Rumpus are also interested in. I really hope it's good," said Elliott.

Stepping back further, I also appreciate the curatorial quality to this whole set-up. So many books are published, so the folks at Rumpus, with a sense of what their readers like, will help you out, picking books from Melville, Milkweed, McSweeneys - but also, perhaps sadly, Penguin and Little, Brown - and give you a community of fellow readers for that book.

Lastly, I love that they have also started a poetry book club. Now with that move, Rumpus, I may be smitten.

I am watching with some trepidation as they start their own book publishing imprint, Paper Internets, with an anthology of writing by women. Good luck, Rumpus!

Beyond Books

2010-08-31T09:09:00.004-05:00

It's no surprise that the big bookstore chains are leaving books behind. This has been a strategy for years. Amazon has been most upfront about it, but Borders and B&N are following the same trajectory. They come in, they discount books and give coupons so they can undersell the local independent, and then, when they've cornered the book market, they sell you stationery.

In an article by Matt Townsend at Bloomberg, the newest detail in this strategy is laid bare - pardon the pun.

Borders will now begin selling Build-a-Bear items. Yes, you read that correctly. So when you run to the bookstore to pick up that new novel everyone is talking about, you might just forget about it upon entering Borders and instead end up with a vente mochiato and Jimster, a specially stuffed bear wearing a gingham dress. On the ride back, you might realize your error but hey, did you really need that book anyhow? You can just wait for the movie version.

Sorry to sound bitter, reader, but living in a city where we have two amazing independent bookstores - Brookline Booksmith and the Harvard Bookstore - both a train ride away, but downtown we have two Borders and a massive Barnes & Noble, I'm very irritated to once again find this trend so visible.

One anecdote on this topic: a Facebook friend who works in NYC publishing posted about the bad B&N earnings recently posted, wondering how we could save "our industry." Read: crappy B&N earnings = people aren't reading. What's that now? Let's just say... simplistic.

I commented that B&N is turning into a mix of Toys 'r' Us and Best Buy anyhow, as I indicated in my last post. Someone else commented back, "STOP BETTING ON THE HORSE THAT'S ALREADY WON. the game has changed. there is fecundity in change." Note that this started with the B&N earnings report. I'm not trying to resist change, and therefore fecundity, but instead asking us all to question these assumptions. B&N earnings are more complicated than a single independent bookstore. There are executive bonuses, extreme expansion, all kinds of factors impacting their bottom line. If Amazon and B&N and Borders invest in e-readers and e-reading, does it then follow that all readers want to read in the electronic format? No. That's corporate forecasting, and I'm not going to have my reading choices dictated by it, nor am I going to assume that to be the only way forward.

These chain bookstores can morph into something much less book-related, but excuse me and people like me if we don't then follow the market without remembering what we like and what we don't like. I'm not saying I'll never read an e-book, but I am saying that I do not foresee getting a bear stuffed for my beloved at a Borders anytime soon.

Convince Yourself of the Lie Already!

2010-08-24T12:18:00.004-05:00

I have gone on and on, ad nauseum, about the fact that in a press release, Jeff Bezos of Amazon did not, did NOT say that the online store had sold more e-books than printed books. He did not. I am sick of this error being misquoted everywhere as lazy journalists make the case that what you want, reader, is an e-book. You want it more than you even know.

As I said here, this error was noted in an article from Slate, but now, in a major new article making the rounds, it appears again!

Andrew Rice's New York Magazine article on Barnes & Noble offers an interesting and fairly in-dept look at what exactly is happening right now in the major offices, and amongst major shareholders of the bookselling giant. But Rice states outright:

Amazon launched the Kindle in November 2007, and Barnes & Noble has been trying to play catch-up ever since. It introduced the Nook last October. After a bumpy rollout, it has begun to make inroads with book buyers, and the company says the Nook is now its best-selling product. Still, Barnes & Noble is running far behind Amazon, which claims a 70 to 80 percent market share. Earlier this summer, Amazon announced that it now sells more e-books than physical books.

Can anyone see the problem? I've put it in bold so it really pops.

Amazon is not selling more e-books than physical books, just more e-books than hardcover books. This is a much different fact!

It's particularly irritating to see this error appear when journalists are discussing the supposedly inevitable move from books to gadgets, as Rice is doing here in the case of B&N. At B&N, similar to what has happened at Amazon (as recounted in part in Ted Striphas' fascinating book, The Late Age of Print), the powers-that-be are being replaced by non-book people - men who have made their fortunes in grocery stores and the Home Shopping Network - who clearly have plans to expand the bookstore's offerings. Says the new CEO of B&N, William Lynch, as quoted in this article,

“We’re morphing into a retail and technology company. We’re purveyors of content, and I don’t think anybody at this company would say we sell physical books. We do sell that, but that’s not how we define ourselves.”

Get it?

There are still those of us who read our books as books and are not in the market for e-readers and who like going into stores with books - many books, not just a few titles in the corner behind the greeting cards and book ends. As B&N turns into Best Buy, why don't we turn to independent bookstores? I don't hear owners of those misquoting bullshit statistics from that blowhard, Bezos.

And I will try to continue calling out these journalists for this repeated error, refusing to be convinced that I must read electronic books or die. Like many good readers, I can't really stand group-think, or bad research producing inaccurate information.

PS Please find the press release in question from Amazon here. Note the second bullet point under "Highlights." Thank you.

Happy Anniversary to Us, and New Home!

2010-08-20T15:49:00.002-05:00

As I head out the office door on this sunny Friday for what I am hoping is a pleasant (rather than painfully hot) bike ride home, I'd like to make two points:

1) Earlier this week, we had our four year anniversary here at SotB! My first post went up on August 17th, 2006. Oh how far we've come... humor me.

2) This should require no work on your part, dear reader, but please notice we have lost that annoying "blogspot" business and can now be found at simply www.booksurvival.com. Exciting, right? We got rid of the training wheels!

Happy weekend reading!

Experiment Fail in University Press World

2010-08-20T10:36:00.004-05:00

We don't often wander into the university press world here at SotB, but this story is worth publicizing. Rice University has decided to suspend operations of its experimental press, which was entirely digital. Scott Jaschik has the story and does a nice job providing context over at Inside Higher Ed.

I won't go into all the ins and outs as this really is part of such a bigger debate, which Jaschik summarizes in the last part of his article, but it is worth pulling this quote, from Eugene Levy - no, not *that* Eugene Levy, but the professor who just completed his time as Provost at the University:

The results leave him wondering about the ability of small publishing operations, he said. While the hope was to save money by not printing books, he said that there "are base costs that are irreducible" for a publisher "and printing is only one of them."

Curious, eh? In the UP world, this means considering moving administrative functions into the library - like I said, a whole world of debate in and of itself. For now, I just want to point this out to show how many small presses not attached to universities don't have this option. Folks of varying kinds - readers, even writers - say to publishers that they shouldn't be so uptight with selection, with pricing, because the digital future means no costs. That's just not the case.

The closing of Rice University Press follows more bad news from earlier this week: Scranton University Press, RIP. I hardly knew ye...

Sorry to be a downer. Maybe Christopher can come along and post a video of a kid picking his nose while reading Curious George or something. I'm sure he can cheer us up on this sunny summer Friday!

Writers, writers, and writers

2010-08-17T20:58:00.004-05:00

We're in a bit of a panic, right readers?

Last week, I was sitting in lovely Provincetown, having quite a gay evening in every sense with ridiculous appetizers being served along with a special cocktail for the evening - see photo - and a novelist who was also joining us mentioned the Anis Shivani article from the Huffington Post about the 15 most overrated contemporary American writers. A friend of mine, it turns out, had already emailed me this post by Alison Flood at the Guardian about the piece. Clearly everyone was talking about this literary Molotov cocktail, clumsily pitched at middlebrow readers across the country. The novelist that first mentioned this article noted that Shivani is a poet, which explained it to her. He had an ax to grind. As Flood notes, "I also think it's a little unfair to describe any poet as overrated – poetry sells so very little that I feel we should rejoice in any rating it gets at all."

I will only make one point about Shivani's piece, and I'm pleased that many others have said it as well, though I'm not surprised since it's so friggin' obvious. The part on Junot Diaz is just so racist. Anyone that has read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - a heartbreaking novel that moves from pop culture to Haitian/Dominican history, from Spanish to English, from teen tragedy to proper literary melodrama.... Shivani boils it down to a voice that "describes everything with the same faux energy, the ear-shattering ghetto volume, as though there were no difference between murder and puking." We clearly need to call foul. Okay, that's all the time worth spending on this lame attempt to get attention, though we must give him credit (thanks to HuffPost) for getting it.

And so I was pleased to see Publishers Weekly writing up the most underrated writers, which is a much more exciting and less nasty list. I'll just list the cream of the crop here, though be sure to click through to see all sixty - sixty! - writers:

Here are the top 15 Underrated Writers According to PWxyz (in alphabetical order)

Donald Antrim
Jo Ann Beard
Anthony Doerr
Deborah Eisenberg
Stephen Elliott
Steve Erickson
Brian Evenson
Percival Everett
Mary Gaitskill
Tessa Hadley
Kelly Link
Sam Lipsyte
Lydia Millet
Christine Schutt
Matthew Sharpe

We've got a lot of reading to do, folks.

This battle of the lists is obviously a result of the gluttony of reading material available. I mean, who can sort through it all? We're all excited that "publishing" is becoming more available to more people, in its many (print / electronic) forms. But what to do with it all? So literary folks start generating these lists and prizes, anything to separate the supposed wheat from the chaff. But I suspect larger things will need to change, and I'm still intrigued by the concept mentioned by some, that there is a role for some enterprising soul - and yes, I'd love love love to be that soul - to find a way to take on the role of sorter, in such a way that is effective. One must be trusted, and honest, and skilled at pairing readers with writers in a variety of creative ways, and technology must be involved in a way that doesn't make the reader feel a million miles away. It's a kind of horizontal editor role - one edits across a genre, not by one publisher but by one type.

In the short term, we also have the staff picks at your favorite independent bookstore. I know Harvard Bookstore and Brookline Booksmith here in the Boston metro area both have fantastic staff picks.

Any of these on the short list strike your fancy? I already love Millet and have liked Percival Everett. Who should I go to after those two? Maybe I should go get a book by one of those "overrated" poets.

In truth, I have finished one book and am, in fact, in a bit of a panic, with no cocktail (such as the photo, above) to be found. Help?

Our 1st NSFW post! This is too hilarious not to pass around...

2010-08-17T13:50:00.002-05:00

"Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury" by Rachel Bloom. No, he's not the first writer who comes to mind for me either but the heart wants what the heart wants, no?

Seriously, though, this isn't for work unless you are like Brian and work all alone in a basement space next to the boiler room in a large, impersonal, nondescript university office building then it's probably ok. I'm not judging...

Oh, since it is Ray's 90th birthday on 8/22/10 you might as well read this.

"Something wicked this way comes..."

Look who's watching the fort this week!

2010-08-08T20:40:00.004-05:00

While Brian is away on the Cape this week, I will be pulling the strings behind the curtain. I shall have a few more substantive posts coming later but for now I wanted to make sure that everyone saw the Carnegie Corporation of New York/New York Times I LOVE MY LIBRARIAN 2010 Award. Are there any cooler people on earth than librarians? Ok, well, yes, Brian and I are pretty freaking awesome but, please there is no need for an award, we do this for you...

There are nearly 123,000 libraries nationwide, and librarians touch the lives of the people they serve every day. The award encourages library users like you to recognize the accomplishments of exceptional public, school, college, community college, or university librarians. We want to hear how you think your librarian is improving the lives of the people in your school, campus or community.

Up to ten winners will be selected this year and receive a $5,000 cash award, a plaque and $500 travel stipend to attend an awards reception in New York hosted by The New York Times. In addition, a plaque will be given to each award winner’s library.

The award is administered by the American Library Association with support from Carnegie Corporation of New York and The New York Times.

It is important to note that in order to nominate a librarian from a public library, school library, college, community college, or university librarian you must *MUST* use their automatic form on the web page above. Think of all the times a librarian has helped you with a paper for class or found you a book you really love or were just there to lend you a pencil...they are the coolest. They deserve recognition and this is a delightful way to honor a group of professionals who, in my opinion, are the heart and soul of the library system not just here in the United States but in every library in the world.

Nominations will be open from August 2 to September 20.

Do it. Now!

UPDATE on the Justin Bieber book.

2010-08-06T13:29:00.002-05:00

Now that my anger has subsided after writing this post, I am happy to report that there are a series of book jackets under consideration for the new Justin Bieber-ahem-autobiography. Which do you like? I am partial to #2, myself.

Justin Bieber book jackets

Resources for Indies

2010-08-06T13:03:00.003-05:00

Just a quick note before vacation - vacation! - to show some appreciation for Jill Priluck's article on Slate about small, independent presses adapting to our digital world. Priluck explains how these small presses, including Featherproof Books which apparently publishes just two books a year, are nimble in dealing with the changing publishing landscape. She also talks about Small Beer Press, which is now based (in the hands of the Gavin Grant and Kelly Link) in Boston, it seems. Welcome to our fair city! I had no idea.

[Edited to add this sidenote: it's interesting to note that the editor at Small Beer is Jebediah Berry, who himself is a novelist (The Manual of Detection) represented by agent Esmond Harmsworth (Boston-based) and had his first novel published by Penguin. Nice to see someone who has made it big but remains committed to this small press in terms of his labor.]

Priluck makes the point, though, that these small presses are adept at knowing their readers, but this does not typically result in making money beyond what it takes to run the place. There is not a lot of growth or expansion, even when these places are able to take advantage of digital advances. Even without shareholders making unrealistic profit demands, it still would help these folks to grow rather than just survive. Perhaps someone needs to come along to string these independents together and make the work available digitally in a way that's more fair financially to the presses and their authors (as compared to, say, Amazon). Perhaps such a network is already in place.

Actually, Priluck talks about an iPad app from Electric Literature, which they are thinking of licensing to other independent presses. What was kind of bad-ass about this idea was that Electric would charge a one-time licensing fee without royalties, allowing customers to recoup the expense easily rather than having it hold back their revenue forever more. Nice one, Electric!

One other point about Amazon that I found interesting in this article. Priluck has an asterisk early on in the article:

Publishing is a business plagued with manyafflictions—except a lack of media attention.Reports that the Wylie Agency—among others—is launching an online imprint, that Amazon's e-book sales outpaced hardcover* sales, and that its digital sales will surpass paperback ones in the next nine to 12 months underscore a new reality: the age of the publisher-turned-digital-curator.

So what is the footnote here? Glad you asked:

Correction, Aug. 5, 2010: An earlier version of this article stated that Amazon e-books had outsold print books over a particular period; they outsold hardcover books only.

Interesting error. This further makes the case that the media in general is eager to report big statistics showing how digital products are taking over the world, because it's such news. Fine, Amazon exaggerates because there is more money for them - clearly - in e-books rather than printed books, but I hope more journalists are careful when writing on these issues. I think it's entirely fair to ask journalists not to embellish how much of the market digital books take up.

Anyway, glad to see Slate mentioning some good small presses. And now, I wait my final couple of hours at work before heading out to vacation. Happy reading, suckers!

Getting to Balance

2010-08-04T19:41:00.004-05:00

Americans have a tendency to take everything too far. We have this drive that's entirely market-driven. Where is the market? What does it want? What does it need? What will it support - but not support, what will it overuse? How can I master the market and become a billionaire? This crazed thinking has been building and building in post-war America, and when it hit a hiccup with the recession of the 1970s and 1980s, it came back bigger and stronger and badder than ever, with Reagan at the helm. We're of course still coming out of the ugly daze of the Bush years, when once again, free enterprise and competition reigned supreme. (And let's not kid ourselves, President Neo-Liberal Clinton didn't impede the progress much - hello, NAFTA.)

And now look at us, and by "us" I mean the publishing community. We're in a real effin' slump, it sometimes seems. We watched the massacre at HarperCollins last year, with layoffs across the board. We've seen beloved community bookstores close. Remember when one major publisher just stopped acquiring new books? The last couple of years have seen job losses and store losses, and many a pissed off author has picked up her ball and announced she was going home - home to publish her books herself. Stephen King did it at the turn of the current century, and John Edgar Wideman did it in the last few months, both taking the initiative to screw their usual publishers and publish their newest works themselves. On top of all that, the two biggest bricks and mortar bookstores are on shaky ground. Borders was on the brink of collapse in 2008 until they managed to restructure some debt, and now news comes out that the board of directors at Barnes & Noble might put the chain up for sale.

I would love to make a big announcement here, have the big answer to solve these huge problems, but of course I can't. And my reaction is rather anti-climatic to type out. It seems to me that the answer is moderation, something foreign to most Americans.

We're clearly in the midst of a very painful transition, and one that's going to mean people lose their jobs and lose their publishers and lose their local (chain) bookstore. But the people we need to blame are not the ones locking those doors to the now-empty stores or shuttering that imprint at a major house. These corporate bodies got too big, too fast. They're unmanageable, and they are asking too much of books.

I'm reading Jason Epstein's Book Business, a book published by Norton in 2001, based on three lectures he gave in October 1999 at the New York Public Library. Epstein worked his way up at Random House after starting there in 1958, when it was (as he describes it) a charming, quirky publisher located in the Villard mansion in Manhattan. It even had parking! And authors could crash right in, with some even spending wayward nights on the couch in his office. It then gets bought and sold and bought again, and imprints are spawned, and massive changes take place. This was a major growth period in publishing when bestsellers sold by the millions and media corporations saw books as more products to pitch, to sell in new locations, to incorporate into other media - synergy!

Now I'm only 40 pages into this book, but Epstein points out something of interest here: as he discusses the ways in which new technology will dramatically alter the industry - and yes, he's quite prescient in this section - he states,

Trade book publishing has always depended on the generosity of patrons and the undercompensated devotion of employees and owners. It has never rewarded investors looking for normal returns, which is why the entertainment conglomerates - CBS, ABC, RCA, MCA-Universal - that acquired such distinguished houses as Henry Holt, G. P. Putnam, and Random House, including Alfred A. Knopf, in the 1970s and 1980s, deluded by the false promise of synergy, eventually found them a burden on their balance sheets and disgorged them. The million-copy sales of a few name-brand best-selling authors led these conglomerates to believe incorrectly that general book publishing is a mass-market business, like selling soap or razor blades or movies. Between 1986 and 1996 the share of all books sold represented by the thirty top best-sellers nearly doubled as retail concentration increased. But within roughly the same period, sixty-three of the one hundred best-selling titles were written by a mere six writers, Tom Clancy, John Grisham, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Michael Crichton, and Danielle Steel - a much greater concentration than int he past and a mixed blessing to publishers, who sacrifice much of their normal profit, and often incur losses, to keep powerful authors like these.

I know that was a lot - the man uses long sentences. But I couldn't stop. This was just such an eye-opener for me - not shocking, I know, but made such sense.

Let me just quickly untangle and connect here. Epstein's larger point beyond this quote is that these authors can easily pack up and start selling their own books directly to their fan base, which is just what they've done now using the latest technologies (see Wideman, above). We also see the backlist, once the stalwart of publisher's accounts, getting scooped by folks like Andrew Wiley and Jane Friedman who are digitizing backlist books and getting them to readers, sans publishers. The big publishers are losing their big ticket players.

In another section, Epstein mentions how this leaves publishers scrambling for quick sales, acquiring crap books - as Christopher pointed out, the latest being the chronicles of Bieber - to get immediate sales because who knows where we'll be in five years? The publishers need the money now. In collusion with them, the big box stores need the money now and are turning books around with remarkable speed - if a book doesn't sell at B&N or Borders in a matter of 4 - 6 weeks, it may very well head back to the publisher's warehouse. They got rent to pay and shareholders to please, so there's not pussyfooting around, people.

My point is, this is so much to ask of a book. People that love books aren't sharks. People who like reading books are by their nature kind of slow movers, and maybe that's not so bad. In fact, if more shit hits the fan, the world will most likely need people who are patient and thoughtful and attentive to figure out how to fix some major problems. But we can be crap consumers. We like libraries, and used bookstores, and we hold onto books we love for far too long. You can't get us to buy a stupid gift card to give out on someone's birthday, because instead we pick out a book we love that makes us think of the birthday boy. We probably don't have much money anyhow - we work in things like publishing, we teach, we write, maybe we work in a cubical 9 - 5 but daydream during work about what we're going to read on the train heading home. That won't get us a big promotion and big raise, now will it?

But these big industries and these rich shareholders are staring at us and saying they want more from us. Well too bad. So leave us be. And for those of us who got jobs at Random House and B&N and Holt thinking, well, it's not ideal but I get to read here and be involved so I can overlook the evil... we'll have to use the skills elsewhere, because the writing's on the wall. The dinosaurs are falling, they're crippled. They may not recover. That big fat publisher could be one 12 year old pop star away from landing on his face and not getting up again.

But maybe it's time we evolved and created smaller, more manageable venues - publishers and bookstores, independent and run thoughtfully, conscientiously, with respect for authors and editors and readers. This may be the only way for books to survive.

Back to Epstein for more insight...

I think I just threw up in my mouth a little bieber!

2010-08-02T09:45:00.003-05:00

That's that. Publishing has finally collapsed under its internal contradictions-profits v. art-and now we have to see how the dust settles going forward. Tomorrow I am going to post the best rejection I have ever received but for today I must, must, must comment on this "breaking news" from HaplessCollins.

A PR blast:

HarperCollins Acquires Justin Bieber's Official Illustrated Memoir

NEW YORK and LONDON, Aug. 2 HarperCollins announced today the acquisition of the official illustrated memoir from multi-platinum selling superstar Justin Bieber. JUSTIN BIEBER: FIRST STEP 2 FOREVER: MY STORY will reveal Justin's amazing journey to superstardom. This beautifully designed hardcover book contains exclusive, never-before-seen photos -- a must-have for fans afflicted with Bieber-fever. The book will be published this October in both the United States ($21.99) and in the UK (16.99 pounds Sterling). "Every day I wake up and count my blessings. My fans have played such a large part in all of this and they help me live my dreams every day. I'm excited to share just a little bit more of my world with them through this book," says Justin Bieber. "Between the behind-the-scenes pictures and the story I think this is going to be something they can all enjoy. This is just another way for me to say thank you to my fans." Born in Stratford, Ontario, Justin Bieber is a multi-talented pop/soul singer and self-taught musician on drums, guitar, piano, and trumpet. As an amateur he posted renditions of his favorite hip-hop and R&B songs on YouTube.com, to the tune of 50 million views. Now, Bieber's video for "Baby" is the most-watched music video in YouTube history with more than 250 million views. Justin Bieber is the first solo artist in history to send four songs from a debut album into the Billboard Hot 100's Top 40 prior to the album's release. He is also the youngest male solo artist in the history of the Billboard 200 to chart a #1 album since 13-year-old Stevie Wonder did so in the summer of 1963. These accolades have resulted in total record sales to date exceeding 5 million. In 2007, his manager Scooter Braun introduced Justin to the music industry in Atlanta. Scooter Braun formed the RBMG joint-venture label with Usher and signed the 13-year-old Bieber to his first professional deal. RBMG in turn signed a deal with Antonio 'L.A.' Reid, Chairman of the Island Def Jam Music Group. Now, Braun and Creative Artists Agency have sold the rights to JUSTIN BIEBER: FIRST STEP 2 FOREVER: MY STORY to Anna Valentine, Harper Non-Fiction Senior Commissioning Editor (UK), and Emily Brenner, Vice President and Publisher of HarperFestival (US). "Justin's adoring and devoted fan base that started on YouTube now follows him to packed concert halls around the world," says Susan Katz, President and Publisher of HarperCollins Children's Books. "He is a force in the music industry and we are incredibly excited to be publishing this photographic memoir of his amazing journey." Valentine added, "This is a real coup for us and we are very excited about adding Justin to our autumn program. Justin is the hottest star of the moment and this book will be the perfect gift for his millions of fans worldwide."

(PRNewsFoto/HarperCollins, Pamela Littky)

Um, ok, where to begin. "A real coup?" I don't think that means what you think it does, Ms. Valentine. First, and most importantly he is 16. Who gives a shit what has happened in his 16 years? Second, who remembers Hanson? (M-m-m-bop) I know someone who doesn't: Justin Bieber. Can we just see how his "career" plays out before we start comparing him to Stevie Wonder? Third, instead of seeing this-Justin Bieber is the first solo artist in history to send four songs from a debut album into the Billboard Hot 100's Top 40 prior to the album's release-as something impressive is it possible that maybe, just maybe this is one of the saddest commentaries on the state of the recording industry ever written? I think it is an indictment of the way in which iTunes is ravaging the idea of the album but that is a story for another day. Really, it is just so sad. So, what would this "coup" look like in book form? Glad you asked! I happened to find a table of contents on the internets.

Chapter one: Burb. Milk time! I shit myself and mommy changed my diaper. (I'm a late starter.)
Chapter two: Drooled on myself and began my slow change toward being a tyrant. Time for rubber pants!
Chapter three: What is three?
Chapter four: Look who's talking!!!
Chapter five: The big J goes to kindergarten. Or gets a tutor...whatever...who needs to know what or where Germany is?
Chapter six: I feel funny "down there."
Chapter seven: The golden throated one starts to work the pipes.
Chapter eight: How do you like my hair? I told my mom not to cut it, jerk.
Chapter nine: Hey-oh, junior high school.
Chapter ten: Do I sound like Stevie Wonder (a.k.a. the other thirteen year old singer to hit the charts)?
Chapter eleven: Puberty!
Chapter twelve: Wow! This teen idol thing is hard...how's my hair?
Chapter thirteen: Zits!
Chapter fourteen: What is this "Germany" you keep asking me about?
Chapter fifteen: Hey, why is Tom Brady biting my style? Where is my motherf****n' black fur and leather jacket?
Chapter sixteen: C'mon ladies, I'm almost eighteen!

Ugh...just when I though publishing couldn't get any shallower the business manages to drain a little more water out of the tub. Listen, I am not saying that Justin Bieber is a bad guy-how the hell would I know-but I think we can all agree that right now there isn't anything in his life that anyone needs to know about. This book, the worst idea in the long, sad, sorry history of bad ideas is just plain stupid. It shows that the book business loves to stick Harper Lee in your face and claim that we are safeguarding the culture but really it is just a way block your eyesight while they reach around and try and grab your wallet.

Where is that Strychnine I bought for emergencies?

Fight it, fight it!

2010-07-31T12:37:00.001-05:00

You should be sitting somewhere with a nice (printed) book, but then THIS comes along - Bookshelf Porn - and suddenly... suddenly...

Fight it!

So has the ipad changed the game?

2010-07-29T12:16:00.003-05:00

I have been doing quite a bit of abstract thinking that may or may not form itself into a post. It involves capitalism, and the television show "Hoarders," and our culture of consumption, and Fahrenheit 451 (which I'm only now reading for the first time - I know, I know), and the future of books. There are many strands floating around that may or may not coalesce.

For now, I was interested to see today's article by Julie Bosman in the NY Times on e-books made for use on the iPad. Bosman covers new products, though publishers have not universally settled on a new term for such products:

In the spring Hachette Book Group called its version, by David Baldacci, an “enriched” book. Penguin Group released an “amplified” version of a novel by Ken Follett last week. And on Thursday Simon & Schuster will come out with one of its own, an “enhanced” e-book version of “Nixonland” by Rick Perlstein.

Now I have to confess that my sister now has an iPad. Her husband bought her one for their anniversary, calling me first to discuss. I did not steer him away from it and even talked about some of the positive features. I guess some part of me wanted someone close to me to buy it, play with it, and report back. She opened the gift last weekend and we talked about it on Monday. I told her how I sat next to a man on a plane from Houston to Boston who sat quietly flipping "pages" for the entire flight, his attention rapt. Near the end of the flight, he flipped the thing over and worked on some PowerPoint presentation. I also mentioned the article I linked to in my last post. I also emailed her information about the Dr. Seuss products available for the iPad - adapted from the books, for my six year old nephew. (It turns out he doesn't like Dr. Seuss, which may be insane, offensive, or awesome - I haven't decided.)

I chatted with her today and she said she's enjoying the iPad, but her experience does give one insight into its uses by someone who is not typically considered an early adopter of anything. They went through a ton of Youtube clips, some of which she said were hilarious but others of which confused her, in that they were painfully boring and tedious and yet highly rated and commented upon. Such is the world of the new, unedited media, hm? Thanks, crowd-sourcing!

But we also talked about this article, which I had just read, and about publishers embedding videos into e-books, and we agreed that those were two different parts of one's brain that would be competing. "Either I'm watching a video or I'm reading a book. I don't want both." She suggested maybe our brains are just trained that way because we have read so many books, and maybe younger people would find videos in books a lot more appealing.

In reading this piece, I see that Bosman mentions how,

Grand Central Publishing, part of Hachette, released an “enriched” e-book version of Mr. Baldacci’s latest novel, “Deliver Us From Evil,” in April to coincide with the hardcover release. The e-book producers borrowed from the film industry and included “research photos taken by the author, deleted scenes from the manuscript, an alternate ending and other special features,” Hachette announced in March.

When I read that, I thought about how I do look to see if a dvd has "extras" when I'm thinking of buying it, even though I rarely sit and watch director's cuts, or commentary (except on John Waters' movies, which are always good). Are we now going to raise the bar with books, and demand that an author writing a narrative isn't enough? "Oh, her novel doesn't have a trailer, and 'writing-of' segment, a series of photos so I know what to imagine for various scenes? Forget it!"

I don't know, though. I admitted to my sister that I do go online to see author websites sometimes, and I have been known to read a Q&A with the author at the back of a Harper Perennial paperback. It does make one wonder if this is the way the publishing industry is going to change, by adding capacity by seeking out employees who can think up and create these extras. That would still be a creative enterprise in service to the author's work.

But this is all iPad related. We've all heard about companies coming forward to do this kind of work but they've been given a bigger market as the iPad has rolled out. As Bosman quotes in teh article,

Brad Inman, chief executive of Vook, said his company is working with 25 publishers to create multimedia books. “The iPad brought this to life,” he said. “Everyone knows now that they’ve got to put their toe in this water.”

So... where does this leave other readers, most especially the biggest and loudest of them all, the Kindle? Well, Bezos is now announcing a cheaper version, a "mass market" type of deal. As Geoffrey Fowler reports in the WSJ,

The new Kindle features a screen with increased gray-scale contrast, a battery that lasts for a month, and a slightly smaller size. It will come in two flavors: one with Wi-Fi and 3G Internet connections selling for $189, the other with Wi-Fi only for $139. The latter will be among the cheapest wireless-equipped e-readers on the market, at least for now.

Hm. Too little, too late? And everything Bezos says sounds sleazy. His quote here, "People will buy them for their kids. People won't share Kindles any more." It's like he's not sophisticated enough to code language so it's not quite so desperate.

But then, in explaining why the Kindle doesn't have the bells and whistles of a table like the iPad.... oh I hate to say this... Bezos makes my same point!

"For the vast majority of books, adding video and animation is not going to be helpful. It is distracting rather than enhancing. You are not going to improve Hemingway by adding video snippets," he said.

Oh God that smarts.

As Christopher and I have both said, at some point, I just think these guys are trying to tell me I want, or even need something that I really don't. You know what? When I watch a good movie, I don't need extras. And when I want to read a book, I don't need something electronic. I just need to grab something made largely of paper and open it, and sometimes stuff it in my bag or under my arm, and take it on a train or plane or on a walk. (My sister pointed out, "I'm not sticking this thing in my beach bag, that's for sure.") These stories fill the "pages" of our newspapers, but at some point, is it a bunch of noise about nothing?

I mean that on a happy note, but in case you're not happy yet:

Thanks to Adele Enerson at Mila'sDaydreams for this ridiculously cute "bookworm."

[PS I would be grateful if anyone in North Carolina, in particular Wilmington, can tell me why this post on the Kindle debates from last May keeps getting hits from your region. Any clues? Thanks!]

Quick Recommended Reading

2010-07-25T11:22:00.002-05:00

Just wanted to point folks to Scott Kirsner's piece in the Ideas section of the Boston Globe today, with the headline, "Kicking Back with a good e-reader." Kirsner, who covers technology for the Globe as a columnist, takes B&N's Kobe, a Kindle, and an iPad on a weeklong vacation to try out each one, and makes some interesting finds. While I take issue with any journalist parroting back Amazon's press release regarding the number of e-books they've sold compared to hardcovers - self-serving stats to be sure - I do appreciate the overall level-head-ness of this piece. There were multiple times when, as I read it, I almost spilled my coffee and/or started sputtering various curse words, but generally, as I kept reading, I was calmed. One such example: when Kirsner says that, in keeping with this experiment, he was going to stay out of any bookstores, doing all his book purchasing online to have the full digital experience. But then he comes around as his son forces him into the Where the Sidewalk Ends bookstore in Chatham, on the Cape, and he also talks up the Harvard Bookstore back in Cambridge. Phew.

I appreciate his ultimate conclusion, but in fairness to him, I have to make you all read it to get there. Enjoy!

More Poetry Recommendations

2010-07-21T13:50:00.005-05:00

A few months ago, we posted a "contemporary poetry starter kit" as provided by Jeff Gordinier, which seemed to attract a fair number of readers. Nice for us, great for contemporary poetry! So recently, when a friend on Facebook put up the following status:

Hey poetry folks: Looking for a heap of new books to burrow through. Any recent favorites?

I thought I'd share the recommendations mentioned. I was very pleased to see someone whom admittedly I don't really know asking for new poetry titles. At one point, he specified, "Specifically, folks, I'm looking for brand new books of poetry by living, breathing, and most likely socially awkward writers. BOOYA." Keep that point in mind in looking at this list, though every rec may not meet that qualification. I put some covers in when I could, some of which (including Myles' and Kunin's) are fantastic.

Here 'tis:

My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer

Mindfield: New & Selected Poems by Gregory Corso

Two Minutes of Light by Nancy Pearson

Sleeping It Off in Rapid City: Poems, New and Selected by August Kleinzahler (this one the original poster knew, and loved apparently)

The Irrationalist by Suzanne Buffam (review here)

The Wasteland and Other Poems by John Beer

Geoffrey Nutter's Christopher Sunset

Rachel Levitsky - any of her books, but especially Neighbor, pub'd by Ugly Duckling Presse (Q&A here - did Ugly Duckling disappear? website not working, which is sad as it's described as a non-profit art & publishing collective, but site seems to no longer exist - ??) (it does exist, and link works! see comments)

The McSweeney's Book of Poets Picking Poets

Amy Gerstler's Dearest Creatures

Eileen Myles' Sorry Tree (orig poster said this was his favorite books of her's)

The Sore Throat and Other Poems by Aaron Kunin

Elisa Gabbert - no title mentioned, but try the most recent, The French Exit

I personally am curious about Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, the Myles, and The Sore Throat. You?

Would you pay to use your public library?

2010-07-19T09:51:00.012-05:00

This past Sunday, the Guardian, an newspaper online that you really should be checking in with every day or so, ran a short feature on the refurbishment of the legendary London Library. (How has it never occurred to me that there is a big library open and ready for exploration in central London?) Anyway, the article explains that the London Library has had to raise its annual fees and has asked its members to bear more of the share of the cost in the upkeep of the physical space which, as you might guess, hasn't gone over too well. It made me wonder: would Americans pay to use their local library? If so it could be a model moving forward for publishers, writers, and the hemorrhaging book business in that it could provide a solid and reliable stable of consumers for books and cultural products like magazines, videos, etc. It also could be a way to generate some revenue for our extensive library system so they wouldn't be so reliant on local and municipal funding. For £395 (or approximately $600), patrons get access to over a million books plus nearly every periodical released since 1841. I know that it isn't in our DNA to pay for the privilege of going to and using the library but maybe we need to rethink that model? If patrons and citizens joined in the cost of keeping their library open with both taxes and a yearly membership fee, perhaps we could keep most libraries and their branches from closing (or almost closing...I'm looking at you BPL). I realize this isn't a popular idea but maybe one who's time has come?

The finest place to find yourself in the whole of the capital is in the book stacks of the London Library, best of all on the metal staircase that runs between the topography, history and science and miscellaneous sections. A million books are within your reach: almost everything interesting ever written in English, and several other languages besides. The wonder of the place is that most of this great collection is on open access, and, unlike academic libraries, available to take home. You don't just use the London Library, you explore it. The clanking, slatted cast-iron floors; the long narrow passages; a layout that sends even old hands into literature by mistake when they were seeking biography; the warm, deep scent of carefully bound books; the fact that you can, if you want, read every copy of the Times ever published, on paper: all this is available in return for the membership fee, and can never be replicated by an online search using Google. There is nothing pompous about the place, though it is a private club and has a roll call of famous literary members running back to Thomas Carlyle, who helped found it in 1841.

Think of how chronically understaffed, underfunded, and overworked your local library seems when you go in. Have you ever heard a librarian say "I can't believe it. I have all this money to buy books that the question isn't which ones should I get but can I find enough titles to spend the budget this year?" A yearly membership at your local library could go a significant way toward alleviating all the ills that plague the American free library system. I know that this, by definition, smacks of elitism because there will be people who can't pay a fee at all, hence the natural advantage of a free system. But the system has become untenable and in every community across the nation the sands are starting to be washed away from the foundation of the system. Admit it, your local library isn't open as much as you remember it was when you were younger. With a little tweaking and some compromise (the true American gift) there would be ways for anyone who couldn't afford the fee to have it waived. How about 2 hours per month of volunteer time in the library for anyone who can't pay the fee? Every library I have ever set foot in could use some help shelving, alphabetizing, and straightening the shelves. A fee (and volunteer structure for those not able to pay) could go a long way in returning libraries to their rightful place as the cultural heart of a community.

Over many generations the London Library has been amassing books and periodicals covering every aspect of the humanities to give readers, writers and researchers the riches of a national reference library for use in their own homes or workplaces. The Library's founding principles remain a blueprint for providing the most direct and liberal access to knowledge.

It is a central tenet of the Library that, as books are never entirely superseded, and therefore never redundant, the collections should not be weeded of material merely because it is old, idiosyncratic or unfashionable: except in the case of exact duplication, almost nothing has ever been discarded from the Library's shelves.

Over 95% of the collections, which now number some one million volumes, is stored on some 15 miles of open-access shelves which may be freely browsed, and over 97% is available for loan. With books dating from the 16th century to the latest publications in print and electronic form, the Library has sought to be contemporary in every age.

Wait, what?!? "Almost nothing has ever been discarded from the library's shelves." That is awesome and the annual fee goes to directly support the acquisitions and maintenance of a collection which never shrinks. Think about that. Furthermore, assuming you join the London Library, you get to read here:

In any case, it isn't going to happen here but it might just be the panacea that would cure the entire library system in the United States. For now, I understand the value of the free public library system but sometime in the not too distant future there will be a reason to start instituting a yearly membership fee to guarantee the survival of these institutions. The notion of government support-from local to national-is under siege and it is not out of the realm of possibility that one day libraries won't be supported by the municipalities in which they are located. When that happens they will either shrivel up and die or find a new way to survive. If the library system dies, we're totally fucked.

The London Library

More Shots at Amazon

2010-07-15T11:52:00.004-05:00

Colin Robinson of the maverick new publisher OR Books does a nice job on GRITtv explaining how far Amazon's (bad) tentacles go into the publishing business:

Scary but important stuff. I really appreciate what these OR Books folks are up to, and look forward to seeing more.

PS - For those who prefer to read rather than watch, here is a fantastic article with the same point by Robinson, in the Nation. In addition, today's installment of the always-reliable Shelf Awareness includes a round-up of article's around Amazon's bullying tactics.

Texas-style

2010-07-14T16:14:00.003-05:00

I'm not posting from Texas, where I was not born but where I spent many years. (To be Texan, one can't just be born there, but must have family roots.) But I am posting upon returning back to the Northeast from a trip down to Texas, to Austin specifically. It was a good time - but hot... so effin' hot... why do you have to get so HOT, Tejas?

Anyhow, I'm happy to report that we did manage a trip to BookPeople while in town and it is as amazing now as when I lived in Austin over ten years ago. I have to commend this fantastic store for one thing in particular (though they do so much right): staff recs. Holy crap. There are great staff recommendations all over that massive store. You Austinites are lucky for a lot of reasons - bats, food, music - but never forget you have one of the best indies in the country right in your fair - very hot - city.

I also read Daniel Woodrell's novel Winter's Bone en route to Tx, in anticipation of seeing the movie this week (I hope). The charming novelist/poet Scott Heim recommended Woodrell to me and I immediately went out and got Tomato Red from the library, only to wonder why I hadn't read this guy. I then bought Winter's Bone and it was pretty amazing, folks. (Try to get the non-movie tie-in version, as the cover of the original paperback (right) is charming. In fact, they had it up at BookPeople as a staff rec!)

But there's more TX connection here!

It seems Tomato Red had somehow gone out of print. Fear not, good readers. An indie out of the Lone Star State has come to our rescue. Busted Flush Press out of Houston is reprinting the novel, and I highly recommend you grab a copy when they are ready. (The Press's blog said it was at the printer on June 30th.) It seems the Press was started up by David Thompson, assistant manager for Murder by the Book, an indie mystery book shop in Houston, to reprint crime classics, but they now also do anthologies and even original novels. Their selection looks mighty good - Woodrell got me looking, now others have me interested. This is a press to watch, folks. Thompson et al must be good if they are bringing some Woodrell back.

Politics aside, Texas ain't all that bad. Some great things come from there!

Economics for Publishing 101

2010-07-08T09:34:00.003-05:00

I mislead with this headline. I'm not providing such a lesson, but rather require it. Please advise on good sources.

The reality is, everyone has their own opinion on how publishing can move forward in a way that is financially secure. 90% of it is probably bunk, or at least iffy conjecture. I certainly don't have an answer but find a certain logic, and/or perhaps comfort, in simplifying.

This article by John Standerfer in the Huffington Post (a high school classmate of mine!) raises the issue that corporations have become so efficient in modern-day America that they don't need as many employees. As we all wait to come out of the Great Recession, we have to stop staring at employment numbers and hoping the unemployment drops magically. He brings up this uncomfortable example:

According to their most recent annual reports, Amazon generated $24.5 billion in sales with 24,300 employees while Barnes & Noble had $5.8 billion in sales with 40,000 employees. Amazon is generating over $1 mm in sales per employee while Barnes & Noble is generating less than $150,000. Put simply, for every million dollars in revenue Amazon takes from Barnes & Noble, Amazon hires one person and Barnes & Noble lays off seven.

Yikes. No, I'm not entirely sure what this means, but it can't be good.

There are quite a few comments below this article debating its validity, as ever in our modern internet-based media, and some good points are raised. Manufacturing has shrunk so dramatically in this country, but it didn't just vaporize: it moved to developing countries, where corporations could find much cheaper labor and more lax regulation. This is a bit beyond the example provided here however, regarding Amazon and B&N.

(I kind of love this point by "worldsfairdesign" (whose avatar may be Herbert Marcuse?), which is just so cranky and, as someone happily not ensconced in corporate America, seems so true:

Bottom-line is that the vast majority of the American middle class hasn't produced much of anything of value for about 30 or 40 years. Don't tell me consulting for a marketing firm that handles PR for an entertainment company is valuable. It doesn't warrant making five figures any more than being a CEO warrants making six.

Apologies for the tangent.)

So what does this mean for publishing? I don't really know, but I do know this comes back to the point many have made about the value of humans in the whole publishing and bookselling world. There is something people appreciate about the anonymity of Amazon, and no one can question the convenience, and the endless incentives (free shipping, anyone?!). But it comes at a price. It isn't entirely increased efficiency - though Amazon has mastered that, as covered by Ted Striphas in his book, The Late Age of Print - but also the wonders of the internet, which cuts down the need for store space - and store staff. Yes people like the physical space of a bookstore, so often replicated in movies and tv shows, but are they willing to pay for it?

I know I've gone on and on about labor before, but it does worry me. And something not addressed here is the massive amount of accumulated wealth in this country - the rich have become much, much richer - and yes, I'm looking at you, Mr. Jeff "$4.3 billion worth" Bezos. It's time to DISTRIBUTE that WEALTH, billionaires! It's hard to look at that amount of wealth alongside struggling independent bookstores and important independent presses that are getting by on nothing, with employees making pennies (trust me, I speak from experience) and having to cut corners while fatcats question their bottom lines, telling them they should dry up and die if they can't find a market. That's not even to mention public libraries facing horrible cuts, to employees, to hours, to branches. I know this is simplistic but on some level, so is the problem: $4.3 billion here and bookstore or library closing there (or here or there), it doesn't take a math genius to find imbalance.

Well now I'm angry. At least I have BookPeople ("A Community Bound by Books" - great slogan) to look forward to for the coming weekend in Austin, TX. I'm also happy to hear of any used bookstore recommendations there.

One for the Road!

2010-07-02T13:03:00.002-05:00

As we (Americans, anyway) all get ready to hit the beaches and parks and backyards to celebrate July 4th, I wanted to quickly post about something fun that caught my eye.

Stephen J. Gertz over at BookTryst posted here about Bibliopulp from the Heldfond Book Gallery in San Franciso. (Great site design, too.) These are faux pulp covers geared around book collecting, for the hipster geek in all of us. $25 for one of these bad boys!

My two favorites are this one:

and this one:

Happy July 4th!

Another Bookstore Model

2010-07-01T08:53:00.002-05:00

In today's Shelf Awareness, there is mention of a new non-profit bookstore. The viability of this idea has come up on this site before. In lovely downtown Spartanburg, SC, it's happening, folks.

The Hub City Bookshop has now opened its doors, filling its 2,000 square foot space with new and used books. It's quite an operation, from the ways it's described in this article from the local paper (Trevor Anderson reporting). It is in the 82-year old Masonic Temple Building, which also includes a 275-seat auditorium that the store can use for events and will soon include the Little River Roasting Co. and a Cakeheads Bakery, making it quite a hub, indeed. It is associated with Hub City Writers Project, which sounds a bit like Boston's own Grub Street, with classes for new writers taught by published writers, events, and other community-oriented projects.

But back to the bookstore - from the article:

“As far as we know, nowhere else in the country is there anything like this,” said Betsy Teter, executive director of the Hub City Writers Project. “We think this could be a model for a new trend in the way to keep independent booksellers alive.”

I'll be curious to see how this works out, and I certainly wish the Hub City Bookshop the best! Now folks, I've been down to Spartanburg, and I can tell you... well, I'm just real real pleased to see a bookstore going in down there, because I didn't find a whole lot to love in the town. But hey, I was just there for a conference, for a few days... a few sweltering June days.

I wonder if there is anything else quite like this around...?

Galleycat Frustrations

2010-06-30T13:07:00.003-05:00

I have aired my complaints about Mediabistro's Galleycat blog before. I guess it's always easy to go after the biggest players in the game, who post so much that they're bound to put up stuff that isn't agreeable to everyone, but this one-two punch really rubbed me the wrong way today.

First, at 12:03pm, Jason Boog posts this story on Fox News Chicago trash talking libraries, questioning why we even need them when we have "the internet and e-books." Boog nicely calls foul.

But then, at 1:23pm, Mark Byrne posts this story about the wonders of the non-profit Open Library, where folks from around the country - or the world? - can check out e-books. Fine, fine. Byrne points out how this could challenge Google's monopoly on e-books and, though he doesn't say as much, this reminds many of us of debates wherein librarians were irritated that we all let Google - a private company - scan everything, meaning they now have it all and can offer it back to us in whatever form they, as a private company, want. Anyway, Byrne ends with a point that annoys me, as he celebrates this Open Library initiative:

Much as we love brick-and-mortar libraries, we can't help but imagine how much money we'll save on late fees when our eBooks automatically return themselves.

Hey, look, it's a joke. I get it. It's a nerdy joke, so I should love it. Right? Well, not so fast. Because Byrne is playing right into the mentality of "e" standing for "easier," and that's just not necessarily the case. I have no problem with Open Library but I think with all of these digital initiatives, which we are seeing of course at publishing houses as well, we need to be careful not to set up a black or white paradigm. Jokes about the expend-ability of the old "brick-and-mortar libraries" are not that amusing in the context of massive lay-offs of librarians and shuttering of smaller branch libraries - something I know we here in Massachusetts are seeing all around us.

And can't someone at Galleycat watch posts as they go up, so we don't have one celebrating and defending libraries followed by another that jokes about the convenience of a massive online library, in place of the bricks-and-mortar?

(I was actually at the Boston Public Library just today, and was reminded once again of how that courtyard is one of Boston's best kept secrets, but you didn't hear that from me.)

Busted!

2010-06-23T20:25:00.002-05:00

I know this is old news by today's standards, but I am pretty impressed with Nathan Ihara's article in L.A. Weekly titled, "Tyranny of the New: Why the future of books might be old books." This is a simple article, but one of those that I read and wonder if Ihara tunneled into my brain to get his idea.

And his idea, his point, is that publishers are always pushing new pubs as the best books ever, so good they'll blow anything you've read right out of the water. But Ihara doesn't buy it, and he calls them out by saying, "all the middlemen along the way — the publishers, publicists, critics and book sellers — know the truth: The book they are hyping probably is not the book you ought to read, not even the book you would most enjoy reading. That book lies hidden in the back of the bookstore, or perhaps not even there. It is 10-, 20-, 35-years-old. However good it is, no one talks about it anymore. You might not have heard its title or its author's name." BAM.

Ihara goes on to explain why this happens, that we all want to feel we're moving forward and the endless march of exciting new fiction and revelatory new non-fiction is evidence that yes, there are yet new things to explore and discover. But then he does his magic trick, throwing together the sound argument he has just made - luring us bookie technophobes in with that line about the bookstore, that dog! - by bringing up the opportunity offered by the digital future:

The potential for the iPad to contemporize and repackage novels is endlessly exciting. Novels could get the full "Criterion Collection" experience and come with a wealth of supplementary information: a comprehensive history of a novel's covers, links to online book communities, reviews, biographies, photgraphs, authors interview, short stories, etc. Zeitgeist would come included.

Now wait - when did Apple get to this party?! And how dare you give Jobs et al good ideas for what they can do with books! (I should note that I was getting on a plane last weekend and as I walked through first class - ahem - I saw no fewer than THREE ipads.)

Yes, I do think Ihara is offering something fun and intriguing here, but I also must salute him for offering resources now available for those of us who prefer to find our reading material not in the review sections in newspapers - though those are important and I do *not* want to see any more cut - and not in the "just published" section of Amazon, but more idiosyncratically, with no regard for how recent but instead how fitting for our own quirky literary sensibility. Ihara mentions The Second Pass, which offers "spirited reviews of older books," and The Neglected Book Page, which "contains essential gleamings from our literary amnesia." I'll add both sites to our sidebar, which needs cleaning up anyhow.

I won't even get into the mind-blowing that was the Association of American University Presses meeting in Salt Lake City last weekend. Too much, too soon. Too many ideas, too many experiments, too many talking heads - almost all of whom are worth listening to, but at the expense of my sanity. I'm still sorting through it all. For now, I just want to take a moment to slap Nathan Ihara on the back and thank him for this article, before I dive into my massive pile of old books purchased at a library sale recently and find some gem.... most likely published before I was born.

To old books!

(Thanks to Shelf Awareness for including a link to the article way back on Monday, when it came out!)

Rhetoric vs. Reality

2010-06-14T13:35:00.003-05:00

I felt justified in my thinking when I read these "six takes from academics" on the e-book reading experience, from The Chronicle Review. Not all six takes are against electronic reading devices, but mind you, I'm not entirely against them, either. But some of these folks offer observations that fit with some things I've been thinking, or raise issues that have concerned me, as well.

My sister recently called to ask me what I thought of e-books, and about this new Kobe eReader coming out at Borders in particular. She had gift certificates to use there, adding up to a good sum, and this thing was going to be much cheaper than the Kindle. She explained that she's been buying tons of books lately, and not books she felt the need to display - ie, paperback fiction, perhaps even at the level of Nora Roberts (not that there's anything wrong with that). I said I could see her point, and that I've assumed that these devices could be useful for folks like her, who read a lot of throwaway fiction. (This is not to say the writing is bad in such novels necessarily, but just that the editions readers like her purchase are not made for display, ie they're mass market. And the term "throwaway" is not literal - library donations, selling to Goodwill, and more are all likely.) She liked the idea of being able to increase the font size, so when she cannot use her glasses, such as when she's having her hair dyed (I know, I know), she can compensate for her poor vision with the device. She is not looking to mark up these books at all.

But then the conversation went somewhere that I found troubling. She pointed out that people she knows often borrow books from each other. My other sister wanted her to bring the third book from some trilogy when they meet for vacation, and a friend recently asked to borrow another book of her's. She did not mind, however, that she couldn't share books on these e-readers, generally speaking. (You can do limited lending on B&N's the Nook, I believe). Here she was part of this reading community, and yet she was still thinking more of personal convenience rather than community needs (ie, lending). My frustration was balanced by talking to my mother, who had pointed out to my sister, she reported, that she herself would never bother with such a device as she reads three books a week, and does not want to pay for them, in e-form or p-form. She goes to the library, and this system works very well for her. Ain't mothers so often right? This is a classic case of not overthinking a system that works.

So after this rare family discussion on something so near and dear to my (professional/blogging) heart, I then read these "six takes," and first up, a provost and professor of classics from Georgetown has all kinds of interesting observations on the technology not quite being there yet. He articulates his points so well. Two in particular:

1) He lists some books he's bought for his Kindle, and confesses: "I've read chunks of all of them on the Kindle at odd moments, but not a lot of any of them yet."

2) of the Kindle store: "...still feels like the old B. Dalton, with best sellers, schlock, and not much selection. It has no Nabokov, and only three Sebald volumes, for example."

He feels the devices mean well, but they have not caught up to match the sophistication with which he reads, and even the way those of us who are not professors read.

The rest of the takes are mixed, but on the whole, the message is that the technology just hasn't gotten there yet, despite the assurances of all the sellers. Some take issue with the selection of e-books available, as noted above, while others express disappointment that publishers have not found a way to use the technology more creatively. As these are all academics, they almost all express frustration with not being able to interact with books in the way they are accustomed, even just putting in simple notes. Could this just be a learning curve?

I suppose what I liked about this article was that you didn't see some underlying message of technology = superiority. It did not seem infused with some corporate interest. These takes are honest grapplings with this technology, with assessments that are negative and positive.

But most of all, I loved that all the folks take their books and their reading so seriously. Perhaps it's time to do something similar with other types of readers?

Another Shop on the Block

2010-06-10T10:14:00.002-05:00

I just wanted to send word out for those who didn't hear that another great bookstore is going up for sale, though this time not in Boston or in Western Mass. It's the quite legendary Politics & Prose in Washington, DC, as reported in the Washington Post. It's not due to the economy, per se, but more a matter of the two owners, Carla Cohen and Barbara Meade, deciding to pass the baton. In fact, they explain that they turn a profit - this is hardly a sinking ship.

Start the bidding!

Afterlife of books

2010-06-09T12:06:00.003-05:00

Two somewhat disparate things are on my mind today, though I may be able to link them up. We'll see how that works out.

First is this post over at Writer 2.0 by writer extraordinaire Pagan Kennedy, who explains that authors can get the rights to their books reverted back to them if the book in question has been out of print for at least 6 months. (Christopher wrote about Kennedy's launching of Writer 2.0 briefly here.) As Kennedy rightly points out, this is standard small print in publishing contracts.

I really appreciate this practical information for authors. Kennedy takes you through the steps - when you know it's been out of print for at least 6 months, write to the publisher and formally request the reversion of rights, and then it's all yours. There are, however, some bumps. First of all, books can go out of stock but not be out of print, meaning the book is not available if someone wants it, but the publisher is happy to take back orders and not declare it "o/p," out of print, quite yet.

Kennedy says, "Eventually, if publishers are smart, they will begin to change the rules and hold onto book rights forever. But for now, the system works to the author’s advantage." But... many publishers are getting wise, and are seeing the potential for the so-called "long tail." They can keep the book "o/s," out of stock, but make it available as a print on demand. This is a tough one. In one sense, it's great because it keeps the book available for new readers, and print on demand has improved in production quality, generally speaking, a great deal. (The interiors are much less smudgy in appearance and even the covers reproduce pretty well.) On the other hand, though, this means the publisher may be reluctant to revert rights, preferring to make that little bit of cash off each sale of the POD (print on demand) version and paying the royalty to the author.

The author could pull in more money with the rights reverted if she were to go, as Kennedy advises, to a place like Smashwords or Scribd. The author can manage things in an easier way. But the book will no longer have the imprimatur of the publisher's name on it. Is that a problem? If you have a catalog of books, like Kennedy, you may feel confident in your own name as a brand, but others might want that publisher branding visible. If you're published by an activist press - South End Press, for example - or an established literary, independent press - let's say Graywolf Press - and you don't have other books to sell alongside your own, you might rather stay with these institutions so your book remains for sale next to big names in your genre or political position.

The second thing on my mind these days is something that is not a new phenomenon necessarily, but it's been made more efficient by technology. Ya see, a friend of mine has recently become obsessed with library book sales, which he watches out for at this site, which lists them all. I can appreciate a good library book sale so I have joined him at a few, or gone after he mentioned them even if he couldn't. I hit Somerville, Needham, South End, and Dedham sales. What I have seen at these sales is troubling.

Yes, most of the folks are people from the communities, mostly women, mostly older, who are probably patrons of the library, some of whom may have even donated books for the sale itself. There are also families stocking up on cheap books for the kids. Then there are academics and readers of varying ages - I'll put myself in this category - who are looking for interesting fiction and quirky and/or scholarly non-fiction.

But then there are the scanners.

People go to these LIBRARY sales - offered as a way to help the meager budgets at these community public libraries - and scan all the books with handheld scanners to see if any of them are worth money. They then stock up on those books - first editions, rare copies - and buy them for nothing, only to resell them. To or in a used bookstore? Online? At Amazon? I have no idea, but I do know this unbelievably sleazy. A quick google search finds a discussion of this going back to 2006, with some folks talking about doing it in the late 1990s. I guess I'm just now seeing it so visibly.

One man in Needham was particularly irritating. He was in his 30s, I'd guess, with the classic shlubby look of a man living in his parent's basement, making pennies on Ebay and feeling like a real mogul. My friends and I sat in the corner of the sale room to go over our findings, to see what we were going to keep and what to put back. (Mind you, hardcovers were mostly $2, paper $1, mass markets $.50.) We looked at this massive pile near where we chose to sit and found a couple more. This guy then comes over and points out that those are HIS books - there must have been about 150 - 200 in this corner. He asked we put back anything we pulled, including a hardcover of Helter Skelter my friend had, which this guy recognized as one of HIS. He then returned to scanning every single book in the sale. My friend commented that this was "uncool," all this scanning, and he didn't even look up, just answering "whatever" as he returned to this task. We happily went back and stole Helter Skelter and multiple paperbacks from his pile, most of which we had no need for, but hey, it was worth the $4 or whatever it was (and we let the woman taking cash keep the change, for the library).

Now he could do the right thing here, which would be offering this service to the library ahead of their sale. He could scan the collection and help the library sell the valuable books separate from the rest, making some extra money. But he didn't care. He was being such a nasty little capitalist and banking off used books on offer from a community library. We were all enraged.

I guess there is a connection that goes back to all my rambling in the past, that we need to think collectively to get through tough times - both on a larger economic level, as the unemployment rate remains disastrously high, and in publishing, with books. This is not to stop e-books (necessarily) but to say as we move to the digital realm that we cannot lose perspective, and use technology in a way that's so exploitative of weaker parties. We should also be careful in labeling the good guys and the bad guys. Publishers that keep books "in print" by keeping them available may be doing the right thing in some cases, using POD technology to keep a stable of books that belong together for sale alongside one another. And we could use book scanning technology to be charitable instead of trying to make enough money to buy a new Playstation 3 - which would be even more fun to play on the big tv in the living room but my MOM says she has to watch her shows. (That was another dig at the Dedham scanner - I'm telling you, he was a total ass.)

Most of us in publishing, whether editors or authors or booksellers, are not going to make much money, so can't we share what little there is out there more fairly?

The Story Behind the Names in Our Digital Future

2010-06-04T13:06:00.003-05:00

Let me start this post by saying I'm a bad blogger. I'm such a bad blogger. It's been weeks since my last post. (And yes, for those of you that can spot evidence of a Catholic upbringing...) As I have said before, if I could get this day job / salary / healthcare situation taken care of - ie, get salary and healthcare without the non-blogging day job - then I would be at your beck and call, reader.

But back to the point of this blog...

I followed a link today from Book Ninja to get to a Wall Street Journal article that is not, as of right now, restricted, that fits the usual formula for omg-self/digital-publishing-will-overthrow-the-establishment articles that happens more and more frequently.

In this case, this article by Geoffrey Fowler and Jeffrey Trachtenberg uses the lede these articles always use: author rejected by mainstream publishing houses self-publishes and reaps major rewards - big sales, movie option, glory. The author here is Karen McQuestion, with her first novel, A Scattered Life. I suppose this is available heuristics - the media always finds these isolated incidences and puts them out there, to please... whom? The authors? Well sure, but that's not enough reason to publish these stories. To annoy publishers? Well there's no good reason for the WSJ to slam Random House et al. What about the folks providing the self-publishing tools? Ah, now we're getting somewhere.

See, providing the tools for authors to publish their own work is big business, and e-books provide even lower risk for these places. They can move you from manuscript-on-Word-on-your-laptop to published "book" - digital edition - in very little time, and they can set the rates, with the "publishing" process remaining something of a mystery to the writer who is thinking of Karen McQuestion and her ilk. Will that be me now?!

If anyone doubts the viability of this business, here's an excerpt from the article that shows how many big kids are jumping into the pool:

Apple last week announced a digital self-publishing program for its iPad giving 70% of revenue to authors, similar to Amazon's formula. Last month, Barnes & Noble also announced a service called PubIt!, allowing authors to post and sell e-books online.
Last fall, Jane Friedman, former chief executive of News Corp.'s HarperCollins Publishers, started Open Road Integrated Media LLC, which focuses on e-books, including authors who are willing to be published digitally before going into print. Traditional publishers such as Nashville, Tenn.-based Thomas Nelson Inc., a religious publisher, have struck alliances with Author Solutions Inc. for print and online self-publishing.
And a flurry of tech-focused startups now offers self-publishing services, including Smashwords, FastPencil Inc. and Lulu Enterprises Inc. Website Scribd.com says it publishes 290,000 independent books annually on its site, which authors sell at a price they set themselves.

Hot damn - Christopher, why ain't we in on this action?! (He may be spitting up his huevos rancheros in Albuquerque right now. My apologies to his hosts.)

While I'm all for writers finding the right venues for their work, I also find strength in solidarity. Yes I know, more leftist ranting, but seriously - this is capitalism in its purest form. These companies are giving writers the false sense of empowerment. They are helping you help yourself. They are helping you reach your readers, and now that everyone is going digital, it's easier than ever. Don't worry about those fatcat publishers - we're giving you THEIR tools! We'll show them! We'll stick it to th- wait, did you say the last four digits of your Amex was 3355 or 3356?

Anyone who reads this blog - and god knows I don't want to see hands up, let me live under the delusion that more read it than I know - should be doubting me, if you think I'm saying to screw these self-publishers and go to mainstream, corporate NY publishers. I ain't, I swear. In fact, there may very well be self-publishers I'd recommend - I'd have to do some research. What I am saying is that we should be reading articles such as this one with a healthy level of skepticism.

One point: the writers of this article say, "E-book sales could reach as high as 20% to 25% of the total book market by 2012, according to Mike Shatzkin, a publishing consultant, up from an estimated 5% to 10% today." Um, Shatzkin is in on the game, folks. I'm not saying he's a bad person, but I am questioning the way in which he is plopped into this article uncritically.

But hey, there's no getting around that a place like Amazon can offer features to authors not available at publishing houses. Sure, you won't really get edited, but get this action:

Amazon executives say they signed Ms. McQuestion to the Encore imprint after noticing the positive user-generated reviews of her books. Thanks to its vast database, Amazon not only knows what people buy but also how they consume e-books—such as which passages readers most often highlight

As a reader, I cannot hate this idea any more than I do right at this moment. I hate the crowd-sourcing concept, which I blame for such cultural highlights at Jersey Shore, and I hate using technology to spy on consumers. It makes me want to run screaming from Amazon.

I know it's hard. You're a writer, you are frustrated by rejection. That rejection is so much about the lack of control - who is rejecting me and on what criteria? It's maddening, I know. As an Editor, I've struggled with rejection letters.

Self-publishing may be the way to go for some, but collective production with a point appeals to me so much more. I appreciate the model offered by The Nervous Breakdown, which publishes short pieces and hosts readings and parties, and has now announced that it will start publishing books through Hukilau - which admittedly, I know nothing about. But if you're going to get into the self-publishing game, this is the model I prefer. They have a community, they have standards, they have shared interests, and now they'll publish each other, for each other, and for others to learn more about and possibly join this community. I don't believe they are overtly political, but they are a community - and that I respect.

I must also say how impressed I am that bestselling author Brad Listi created this community after finding success. Now there's an author I can applaud - use him for your lede!

Have a great Memorial Day Weekend.

2010-05-28T12:14:00.002-05:00

For your viewing pleasure, check out this cool list of the 50 most iconic (or "ionic" as Mayor Menino would say) book covers.

Enjoy!

More from me after the long weekend. Don't get bitten by a shark, ok?