1) Write. There is no substitute. Write what you most passionately want to write, not blogs, posts, tweets or all the disposable bubblewrap in which modern life is cushioned. But start small: write a good sentence, then a good paragraph, and don't be dreaming about writing the great American novel or what you'll wear at the awards ceremony because that's not what writing's about or how you get there from here. The road is made entirely out of words. Write a lot.
Links of the week December 12 2016 (50)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
19 December 2016
2) Remember that writing is not typing. Thinking, researching, contemplating, outlining, composing in your head and in sketches, maybe some typing, with revisions as you go, and then more revisions, deletions, emendations, additions, reflections, setting aside and returning afresh, because a good writer is always a good editor of his or her own work. Typing is this little transaction in the middle of two vast thoughtful processes. There is such thing as too much revision - I've seen things that were amazing in the 17th version get flattened out in the 23rd - but nothing is born perfect.
I do not think it is a coincidence that the novel as a form reaches maturity at the same point as the bourgeoisie as a class are ascendant. Although the novel has its forerunners and predecessors - Boccaccio, Rabelais, Cervantes, de la Fayette - it gets into its stride with affluent, middle-class white men: Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Smollett.
Will Self has recently written about the shift from page to screen, word to image, and while agreeing with much of what he writes about the nature of narrative, I'd like to propose a more optimistic vision. The novel is hamstrung by its 18th-century origins and the TV box set sets fiction free. There are certain things about the novel we take for granted. The protagonists have intact selves. They have cogent agency - they choose to do this (marry Mr Darcy, say) or not do that (marry the Rev St John Rivers, say). They have memories that they trust - and can trust - and desires they comprehend.
E-book devices like the Kindle and Nook have already changed the industry of publishing in their relatively short lives. Much as the iPod did with music, now authors can self-publish right from their laptops and readers can carry with them every book they own in something about the size and weight of a paperback.
But while the e-book readers might seem good, uh, on paper, you might consider continuing to read print books for the foreseeable future. Science has given us several reasons why the health and wellness benefits of reading printed material outweigh the convenience and affordability of their digital brethren.
By now, we've come across all sorts of articles and nosy interlopers reminding us that staring at the screens of our tablets and phones is hurting our ability to fall asleep and stay asleep. Well, if you're using a multipurpose device (like an iPad) as opposed to a purpose-specific e-reader like a Kindle with e-ink, it doesn't matter if you're reading US Weekly's home page or War and Peace - you're exposing yourself to the same blue light that's messing with melatonin, circadian cycles, and the like, which all lead to you feeling tired when you wake up.
That said, the act of reading still serves as a great remedy for occasional insomnia or restlessness. Just make sure it's a print book you're diving into, otherwise you could be making matters worse.
Pamela Paul, the editor of The New York Times Book Review, hopped on reddit yesterday afternoon to answer questions about the Book Review and the recently published list of their editors' picks for the 10 best books of the year. In addition to recommending a number of great books and writers (Nora Ephron, Christopher Hitchens, George Orwell, George Eliot, and more), dubbing Colson Whitehead one of the greatest novelists of our time, and suggesting that, of the Times‘s Top 10, a Trump supporter might most enjoy The North Water, Paul shed a little light on how things work at the Book Review (a question that some of us have been asking ourselves lately!). Below, find a few things you may or may not have known about how books are assigned, reviewed, and considered for the year-end lists of the paper of record.
"Here at the Book Review, the editors select which books we want reviewed, and then we find reviewers to write about them. We review all genres, though our tastes reflect the tastes of our editors and those of readers of The New York Times. The staff critics for The Times choose which books they want to review themselves."
December 15, 2016 - For years, I knew Octavia E. Butler, the famed African American science fiction and fantasy writer, by her first name only. That was the way she introduced herself when I first met her back in the fall of 1999. Butler had just purchased the house across the street from my parents' and joined the ranks of our rather conventional suburban community in Lake Forest Park, WA, located just north of Seattle. A spate of rumors had attended her arrival on the block: "Octavia" wrote novels (about aliens!); "Octavia" had one of those "genius" grants; "Octavia" lived alone and was a reclusive artist type. An interview with Butler appeared in the Shoreline-Lake Forest Park Enterprise, our humble (and long-since defunct) local weekly, explaining that our new neighbor was, indeed, the author of a dozen novels and a MacArthur Fellowship recipient.
Nonetheless, I imagine that the move to our neighborhood constituted a dramatic change for Butler. She couldn't help but stick out among the mostly white, unvaryingly middle-class residents of Lake Forest Park, the majority of whom tended to structure their lives around the very things that she lacked - namely, cars and children. But Butler, it is clear, was no stranger to the experience of being a stranger. "I'm black. I'm solitary. I've always been an outsider," is the way she put it in a 1998 Los Angeles Times interview.
These are clarion calls for booksellers to rally around and encourage the consumer to make the conscious decision to buy books from bricks-and-mortar bookstores rather than Amazon. A couple years ago, the American Booksellers Association hired a non-partisan firm to research the economic impact of Amazon. The results were astounding, and got even more so when the study was updated to include 2015: Amazon's stranglehold on our economy has caused a net loss of over 200,000 jobs, a sales tax loss of over $700 million, a property tax loss of more than $500 million, and a net national revenue loss of $1.2 billion. Yes, BILLION. Each day, Amazon gets closer to becoming a monopoly and a monopsony, vertically integrating in a way that dominates all levels of our retail economy in nearly every consumer market.
We're booksellers because we love books, and nobody gets into the book business looking to make buckets of cash. We love language and stories, and enjoy an exciting, uplifting, and reaffirming companionship with our colleagues. Many of us, if faced with the prospect of meaningless office jobs, would probably rather gouge out our eyes with rusty spoons.
But no one should have to sacrifice a living wage for their dream job. We find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of being believers in social and economic justice while struggling to pay our employees a salary they can survive on. We urge our customers to Shop Local but make hardly enough money to do so ourselves. It is an unintentional hypocrisy, one that has gone largely ignored and unaddressed.
Joe Pan, better known to the small press world as Brooklyn Arts Press, rarely enters his books into consideration for the big literary awards-one book, once a year, tops. For a one-man publisher with a yearly operating budget of under $20,000, the risk, he said, is rarely worth the rare reward. "When I make a decision to submit a book to a prize like this, it [costs] around $125," Pan said, referring to the submission fee for the National Book Awards, to which he submitted an uncharacteristic two books this year. "Some of our books cost $800 to produce," he added. "So it's the difference between using a quarter of the funds delegated to another book to send a book out for a prize, or just holding onto that money and using it for the next book."
"I have a friend who's a successful writer who told me, ‘All cream rises to the top,'" Pan said. "Well, no it doesn't, because I'm surrounded by cream.... There's a huge new wave of small publishers our size that have been working under $20,000 a year to produce what I think of as the poetry of the future.
"We get to take risks that big publishing houses don't," he added. "If something is crazy wild and experimental, I don't have to sell 5,000 copies of it to validate its existence."
12 December 2016
Martin Amis is a novelist with an innate talent to cause outrage. He angered Muslims (among others) by telling them post 9/11 that they ought to "suffer until they get their house in order". He offended senior citizens (among others) in Britain by suggesting that euthanasia booths be installed along the streets for the silver tsunami to avail of a "medal and a martini" before terminating their lives. He annoyed his friend Julian Barnes (among others) by ditching his wife Pat Kavanagh as agent and switching to Andrew Wylie.
Zadie Smith said to me years ago, "Everything we think of as literary culture will be gone in a generation and a half." She said, "It will last your time, but it won't last mine." I don't think it will ever disappear, but it will shrink. It will go back to what it was when I started out, which is a minority interest sphere, which some people happen to be very interested in. What happened as I see it is that the newspapers got bigger and bigger, and they were casting about for people to write about, and they ran out of people until they found themselves writing about writers - the people they hate most, certainly in England. And then suddenly, writers were much more famous than they used to be. When I started out, you wrote your novel, you sent it in, it was published, it got reviewed. But none of the other stuff. No interviews, no tours, no readings, no panels, no photographs, no TV, no radio, all that came with this higher profile, higher visibility. I think it will go back to something like what it was.
Paul McVeigh and Kirsty Logan are authors you may have heard of. Both of their debuts were published by Salt, an independent publisher. Paul McVeigh's The Good Son was shortlisted for a bunch of awards, and won the Polari first book prize this year. Kirsty Logan's The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales won three awards - including the Polari in 2015- and Logan had her next book published with Harvill Secker, a division of Penguin Random House. The same trajectory is likely for Paul McVeigh. It's a familiar story.
Independent publishers have existed since the 19th century; it wasn't until the 20th and the 21st that we saw the industry dominated by a few corporations. "The Big Four" publishers - Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, Hachette and HarperCollins - have grown big by buying up small publishers. Hogarth, for example, was founded by Leonard and Virginia Woolf in 1917; now it is an imprint at the Crown Publishing Group, which is in turn a part of Penguin Random House - which itself used to be Penguin and Random House before their merger in 2013. Phew.
When I sat down to write The Marriage Lie, I wanted to create a story that was equal parts suspense - a husband killed in a plane crash, and the wife's subsequent search for the truth about him and her marriage - and emotion that arises as a consequence of the action. These are the types of books I like to read, stories where the action drives the emotion and the emotion drives the action. In The Marriage Lie, the two are so intertwined that one can't exist without the other.
I'm often asked why I chose to write such a dark story about marriage when my own is so stable. My husband and I have been married for 24 years, all of them happily, and though Iris's husband is very different from mine, I did build some of my own self into Iris's character. I mined my memories for those thrilling early-marriage moments when the relationship was still fresh and exciting, and I transferred those heady feelings to Iris. I know what it's like to love someone, to believe with everything inside that they are good and true and that they love you back. Iris believes this of her husband, as well, even when she's faced with the truth. As much as she hates what he's done, she still loves him, and she grieves the life they lost.
I'D ALWAYS thought of myself as a poet, and that was that. I'd gone to graduate school in poetry. I'd had fellowships in poetry. I don't mean to say these things qualified me to be a poet, but that was the label I'd given myself. Fiction had never come up. One day, like many other days, I sat down to write a poem. I worked for a few hours in an armchair with a pile of blankets on my lap; this was winter in upstate New York. I got up to go to the bathroom, and when I came back my then-boyfriend was in my chair, my blankets and laptop on his lap. "Who wrote this?" he asked. I told him I just had. He said, "You did? I think this is fiction." I was annoyed: he'd been sneaky. I hadn't asked him to read it. And I didn't much care if it was fiction or poetry. I just knew I'd written it - this was what had happened during my writing time that day.
The screenwriting came much later, again coming from a need for money. In our second year of marriage, my wife was pregnant with our first son and we were broke. A woman I'd known from the writing classes at Ole Miss, where I'd taught, introduced my short stories to Robert Altman, who said one story in particular would make a great movie. When I heard that, I went to the library, checked out some books on screenwriting, checked out what scripts that had that matched whatever movies they had to rent, and taught myself screenwriting. I'd watch the film and read the script at the same time. Like chess, it was easy to learn and difficult to master.
I still find screenwriting the hardest genre in which to work, you're writing for so many different eyes looking for so many different things - executives, producers, actors, directors, all aspects of production - while still trying to maintain a compelling narrative. I hate writing in general, and I hate screenwriting in particular, but it's probably the most fun to have "done," in the way that the true satisfaction of any writing comes in having finished the goddamnned thing.
Whether you're completely new to the publishing process or an old pro, it can be helpful to have a to-do list to guide your self-publishing project to completion, to ensure you don't miss any important steps, and also to help you plan well enough to hit your target pub date.
I've created both a downloadable PDF handout and an interactive worksheet that you can customize for your book project.
Below I detail the distinct stages of the editorial, production, and sales/distribution process. My goal is to help you understand some of the assumptions I've made about the publishing process (which follows a traditional model), as well as where you can save time and expense.
The Editorial and Production Process
This process can be broken down into roughly three stages:
Editing
Design
Proofing
1. Editing My checklist begins at the point where you have a reasonably final manuscript that does not require higher level editing or significant revision. While much depends on what level of editing your manuscript has already undergone, for most authors, I recommend seeking a formal copyedit: you send the manuscript to a professional freelance copyeditor, who will focus on style, grammar, and consistency issues%u2014and might possibly do light fact-checking if needed (very useful for nonfiction). A typical copyedit for an 80,000-word manuscript takes two weeks, but good copyeditors usually need to be booked a month (or more) in advance. Authors should give themselves at least a week, if not two, to review and make changes after the copyedit is returned.
A single book created the "bodice ripper" as a concept and cultural phenomenon: 1972's The Flame and the Flower. Written by Midwestern homemaker Kathleen Woodiwiss and published by Avon, the novel is widely considered to be the first sexually explicit romance novel, released just as the second wave of the feminist movement was cresting. As Roe v. Wade came before the Supreme Court, and Congress sent the ERA to state legislatures for ratification, the old sexual mores were unraveling faster and faster. Deep Throat made its world theatrical debut the same year.
Women enthusiastically snapped up Woodiwiss's sprawling epic and the flood of books that followed, driving them up the newly created New York Times paperback bestsellers list.
The runaway popularity and the ensuing public fascination with these books-which appeared seemingly out of nowhere and were suddenly ubiquitous-explain why "bodice ripper" is one of the terms still tossed around by the uninitiated, despite the fact that many who work in the romance industry view that as an offensive way to describe these books. The term-the allegation, really-still dogs the romance novel decades later, collapsing a genre uniquely responsive to the changing fortunes of American women into a collection of stereotypes involving Fabio, bright blue eyeshadow, and retrograde sexual dynamics. In fact, these books were the first sexually frank popular literature for women, which surfaced from the cultural chaos of the ‘70s and thrives to this day, albeit in a much modernized form. It was the "Avon Ladies"-as they were known in the business-who first sexually liberated the romance novel.
A friend recently said to me, "Poetry is the non-profit of literature." The public admiration for this particular artistic practice is as long-standing as the difficulty in securing practical support to back it up. Isn't it incongruous to live in a culture in which one of the greatest compliments given to a work that isn't poetry is that it is poetic, while little to no space is given to actual poetry?
I am laying down a sequence of thoughts I've had for a long time in order to open a conversation about alternative ways in which we can support poets. One reason People Who Aren't Poets should care about the state of Poets is that there is in fact (to contradict myself) poetry in things that aren't poetry, and it might very well bring you a moment of delight, which might in turn make everything ok for a spell; poetry is a kind of noticing, which can also function (like humor does) as an escape route from one potential meaning to another possibly more enjoyable meaning. And such a definition indicates that poetry can find its way into unexpected places.
Of course many of us know that poetry is important and that's part of the reason why the term continues to hold a place in the public imagination. (It's why people share poems at weddings and funerals and in light of the terror of the recent election.) There are many awards designated to support burgeoning poets (their first book, their time, their potential) and many fewer in the arena of afterwards to sustain those individuals once they have reached their presumed desire to be actual-and, no less, living!-poets with actual books. Too often the industry seems to wave a couple of carrots before a field with no future. What follows a poet's supposed period of emergence? What happens when a poet continues? I wonder what it would look like if poetry's albeit limited resources were more evenly distributed across a life, because what's the point of rushing initiation if there's so little room to stay?
When Oxford University Press decided, in 1998, to sell off its poetry backlist, begun in the 1960s, and to close its doors to new collections of contemporary poetry, a vigil outside the press's offices was called by the Poetry Society and the MSF trade union branch. A louder and more direct response came from Alan Howarth, then junior minister in the department of culture, media, and sport. Howarth labelled the financial grounds of the decision ‘barbaric' and argued that the dropping of the poetry list equated to an ‘erosion of standards'. ‘Has OUP not noticed,' Howarth asked, ‘that in this day and age we have moved on from the heresy that everything should be susceptible to market forces, that everything should be for sale?' It is hard to imagine such a statement coming from a government minister today.
In 2014, poetry accounted for 0.6% of the book market; that figure looks set to fall further. The biggest selling poets are dead - in 2014 7 of the top 10 bestselling poetry titles were all by dead poets; only Carol Ann Duffy, Pam Ayers, and Simon Armitage figure as living poets selling books.
These figures raise an important question about the role of poetry today. What's it for? Poetry has a ceremonial place within state spectacles, the pseudo-national psyche, births, weddings, funerals, not to mention the education system; the poetry that sells belongs to the establishment, to tradition. And yet at the same time, it's probably also fair to say that poetry has never really been more than a peripheral cultural pursuit. It happens, but not much necessarily depends on it.