Question of the year

I know I'm entering my period of holiday-induced crabbiness when blog posts like this annoy me.

Are you blogging to the wrong audience?

There are two reasons I want to post more often. One is to expand my readership beyond other writers. Social media queen Kristen Lamb has written some great posts on this topic. One titled Solid Platform, Wrong Audience is my favorite and has links to her previous posts. My memoir, which I completed earlier this week, is about the six years I spent working as a fashion model in Europe and Japan. My current WIP is a collection of humorous parenting essays. And my next project is something different altogether. As much as I love blogging about writing and social media, it's time for me to expand to also write about parenting and fashion and modeling and all the other topics I’m interested in, like rock climbing and geo-caching and Settlers of Catan. ...

Now, here's an exercise to determine whether you are blogging to the wrong audience: Profile your audience. Make a list of the different groups of people you imagine buying your book. Who are they? Are they teen girls? Middle-aged women? Men who like to read thrillers? How old are they? What do they do for a living? How do they spend their free time? What products do they buy? Make lists. Then, once you've got that down, think about what topics those people are interested in reading about. What concerns them? What are their thoughts preoccupied with? (Boys? Sex? Making money? Finding God? Decluttering their homes?) Make another list. And finally, ask yourself: Are you blogging about the topics on that last list? Why or why not?

When I saw this, my reaction was: Does Don DeLillo give a flying fuck what I blog about? And if not, why should I care what anyone else thinks? You think I'm trying to build some kind of "platform"? No, I'm talking to like five people here.

But I did really love that sentence:

My memoir, which I completed earlier this week, is about the six years I spent working as a fashion model in Europe and Japan.

For some reason that just cracks me up.

L.A. Times really excited about novel concepts of book serialization, packaging

Yesterday on Twitter I mocked the hype about a new novel by Mark Z. Danielewski, a novel which will be -- shocking new idea!! -- serialized in 27 "volumes." Today there's more information about it in this L.A. Times column.

From this article I want to draw a single quote, emphasis mine:

It's possible that [our publishing] schedule could be accelerated. We're constantly open to new ideas -- where will we be in 2014? Maybe digital releases every week, every few months a trade paperback or hardcover. The novel is designed to accommodate, anticipate various platforms.

I take it that he means this particular novel has been designed to "accommodate" (not to mention "anticipate" -- wow!) "various platforms" -- not that The Novel generically is. Although that's an interesting idea to investigate, maybe a good topic for a master's thesis -- that the novel is, by its nature, flexible enough to accommodate changing media.

But what struck me was this. This is not just a long book that the publisher decided, hey, let's go back to that whole serialization thing that worked so well in the 19th century. After all, it's working for the Paris Review to serialize Roberto Bolaño's "The Third Reich" into four parts -- that's garnered lots of attention (and did, in fact, motivate me to subscribe to the Paris review for the first time ever) -- not to mention the multi-book franchises of Harry Potter and other fantasy creations.

No, according to the author, he designed the books to a) be super-ass long, and b) "accommodate various platforms," like so:

Danielewski was paid a reported $1 million for the first 10 volumes; he's thinking of them as two 5-volume seasons, like a television series.

Uh huh. Now I know why it's the L.A. Times that is the one getting excited about it. Seriously, is this really anything that the awful teen-novel book-packaging industry (cf. "Sweet Valley High," etc. etc.) hasn't already pioneered?

Limo driver and performance artist 'found her voice' on 'This American Life'

This story about a memoirist seems to me representative of several odd strains in our culture.

Writer-performance artist Jeanne Darst wrote lots of stories about her dysfunctional family, which she "performed in one-woman shows she performed in her living room to help pay the rent," according to the story. Reading this, I thought, Oh right. This is the same world Miranda July lives in. You make yourself into a twee storyteller in the David Sedaris mode, and sure enough: "This American Life" is "where Darst began to find her voice as a memoirist." This led directly to a book contract.

Well, that's nice! You get to find your voice on the premiere radio show for memoir, really? Take a giant step, eh?

Just sour grapes on my part. I think it was that bit, which the journalist wrote, not something that came from her, suggesting "This American Life" is like a stepping stone rather than being what it is right now, which is a pinnacle. She's just someone doing exactly what 10,000 other writers are doing, only doing it better, and oh by the way, being an attractive slender woman who lives in L.A. You go!

Brits have no trouble with naughty book title

British newspapers have no trouble publishing the full title of "Go the Fuck to Sleep," the best-selling children's book by American author Adam Mansbach.

By contrast, here's the New York Times, which refuses to print the whole title:

Not much remains

As my friends know, for a few years last decade I had the honor of being represented by a real literary agent. However, my novel Make Nice failed to sell; then my agent quit the agency and the business, leaving me high and dry without an agent -- a state in which I still find myself. (I recount the tale at greater length here.) A little while after that, the agency's most famous client, David Foster Wallace, killed himself.

Now comes the news that the founder of the agency, whom I recall having met very briefly in my one and only visit to the office, has died.

I was so dumb when I was a client of the agency that I didn't even know Wallace was a client. And I had to read the founder's obit today to know about other well-known clients. I'm not sure what to do with this fact -- that the agency was better known than I realized at the time. It didn't do me much good in the end, though my agent was successful in getting my book looked at by major publishing houses. Maybe they recognized the name of the agency, maybe that's the reason they looked at it. Anyway, realizing all this years later just makes me feel stupid.

Support a small press

Salt -- not to be confused with the Angelia Jolie vehicle about to be released -- is a British literary publisher. Blogger Shigekuni posts:

Salt, the amazing British publisher of prose and poetry, is almost broke. Last year, they launched a campaign called Just one Book to save themselves, and they are doing it this year as well. It’s a plea to buy Just One Book published by Salt. You can buy it directly from them or from your retailer of choice. Spread the word.

I visited their website, which has a US store, and bought a book!

Things not to be

This literary agency has a helpful list of "Things To Be" and "Not to Be":

Things to Be:
- Confident
- Talented
- Marketable
- Objective
- Scrupulously Self-Critical
- Patient
- A Good Typist

Things Not To Be:

• Insecure - If you lack confidence in yourself, in your writing, or in your ability to become a full-time freelance writer, you'll never be able to stand up to the rigors and the brickbats that lay ahead.


• Marginally Talented - If you haven't yet developed into the kind of writer who works diligently at turning out only the best examples of whatever literary genre you're creating, you're not ready for agency representation.


• Conveniently Self-Forgiving - No one--from Ernest Hemingway to Homer and back again--ever wrote a single draft that "sang." Every writer worth the name knows when and how to rewrite, rewrite, and rewrite some more.

...

More at the link. I guess if you weren't sufficiently "Confident" this would scare you off, but I don't think it's bad advice. But I'm not sure there are that many people who combine the qualities of being confident while at the same time are "Scrupulously Self-Critical."

In this Galleycat interview, the agent goes on to request "fiction that is starkly unique and startlingly appealing," qualifying that requirement with "at least." It's good to set the bar high, but how many people who pass all these criteria would really be good? Can I think my work is "starkly unique" and at the same time be "scrupulously self-critical"? Man.

Today's fake: Author who admitted to plagiarism last month is caught again

From the increasingly invaluable MobyLives blog, which is the house blog of the Melville House publishing concern: author Gerald Posner, who wrote for Slate.com until he was caught plagiarizing, is once again the subject of plagiarism charges. Apparently he scanned in lots of sources for a book on Miami vice -- organized crime, that is, not the TV show -- and neglected to clearly mark in his files the material that was from other authors.

That's his explanation, in any case... He also says the stuff he was found to have lifted constitutes "a unique case," and will revise the book, and wasn't that just what Charles Pellegrino said a few weeks ago when questions first arose about "Last Train from Hiroshima"?

technorati: fakes, writers, plagiarism

Augusten Burroughs on tenacity

I had an agent for a few years, and she did a wonderful job getting my novel Make Nice in front of publishers. (Unfortunately none of them bought it, but that was my fault, not hers.) As most of my friends know, last year she quit the agent business, so I'm trying to find a new agent for my novel Mango Rain (which has had other titles in manuscript, including "Bangalored").

As I start the process of trying to find an agent again, these words from Augusten Burroughs are encouraging.

As a writer, you can't allow yourself the luxury of being discouraged and giving up when you are rejected, either by agents or publishers. You absolutely must plow forward. I believe that if you have real talent as a writer, a true gift, you will eventually be published. But it may not happen according to your schedule. And it may not happen with the first manuscript you create. Or the second. So you have to be, if not patient, at least endlessly tenacious.

Once I decided to write, to be published, I knew it would happen. I knew that if I wrote a new book every six months or every year, if I continued to read great books, eventually I would write something worthy of publication. I understood I might be in my forties or my fifties or even my sixties, but I felt confident that it would happen. The reason I was so confident is because I knew I wouldn't stop trying until it happened. And this is the secret. You don't need to be confident. You just need to be stubborn.

technorati: writing, rejection

What agents want: memorable 'stories or characters that gnaw at me weeks later'

Interesting exchange in an interview with an agent:

Q: What types of books are you looking for that you haven't found yet?

A: Despite the fact I read so much, I rarely find stories or characters that gnaw at me weeks later, and good literature should have that sort of staying power. Writing something memorable requires originality in voice, style and plot, but it also means tapping into the human consciousness and making readers feel something outside themselves. Cultivating that emotional investment simply requires a lot of talent, but real, relatable, and lovable characters are a good start.

That's about the size of it. But what alerted me to this interview was a statement the same agent made a few moments before:

2666 by Roberto Bolaño is a masterpiece -- but I wouldn't necessarily recommend emulating it. It's a novel that wouldn’t seem like it could work on paper -- I'd certainly have my doubts if it were pitched to me -- but it does because the writing is so strong. It is important to point out that even when dealing with higher concepts and more elusive goals, Bolaño's characters are still accessible, and that connection to the reader is the most important element.

technorati: literary agents, publishing, fiction

Amazonfail being put to bed for the moment

A day after learning, along with most of the rest of the English-speaking world, about Amazon de-listing LGBT and erotic books, I see that the rankings on my own books have been restored. Not that they're much to brag about -- they are numbers 704,277 and 1,436,221 at the moment -- but at least they're there.

Someday we'll know what it was all about. The technical explanation, that some guy in amazon.fr fucked with the code, makes sense -- but only if you ignore the explanations about "policy" changes that some inquisitive authors got. Man, what a clusterfuck this whole thing was.

technorati: amazonfail, books

Amazon pulls functionality for 'adult' books

Amazon.com arbitrarily de-listed hundreds -- possibly thousands -- of books for so-called adult content. They're still selling them, but no longer including the de-listed books in sales rankings. The de-listed books include award-winning gay-friendly books and general erotica. My own books are included, and they're definitely "gay friendly," but Stephen Elliott"s "My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up" is also affected, and it has practically no gay content.

Good coverage, comments on jezebel.com, Publishers Weekly.

Update: Associated Press is reporting that Amazon is now saying "There was a glitch in our systems and it's being fixed."

People on Twitter are putting up reaction using the #amazonfail tag.

technorati: amazonfail, amazon.com, books

$2 million for celebrity memoir, as male novelists grow limp

Glum observers of the publishing scene who want to reinforce their view that the industry is as broken as an over-extended mortgage lender need look no farther than the $2 million deal for Kathy Griffin's memoir. How many copies of a doorstop like that will Ballantine have to sell just to break even? And for what? (And no, the deal wasn't done by Molly Jong-Fast.)

At Salon, Laura Miller suggests that women are ready to dethrone men as the primary writers of American novels, saying "in my (admittedly limited and anecdotal) experience, literary men under 45 are as likely to idolize Joan Didion or Flannery O'Connor as Norman Mailer or John Updike." (I'm not under 45, but for the record, I do idolize Flannery O'Connor [but not Joan Didion].)

A related clue might be found in my interview with YiYun Li last month. When she wanted to think of an American novelist critical of American society, the first name that came to her mind was Toni Morrison.

Whatever the achievements of women novelists, it's definitely true that women buy more books than men, especially novels. This 2007 NPR story quotes British novelist Ian McEwan as saying "When women stop reading, the novel will be dead."

technorati: Kathy Griffin, publishing, novelists

'Lost' Kerouac novel to be published

Publishers Marketplace reports that Harpers has agreed to publish "The Sea is My Brother," a "lost" novel by Jack Kerouac, written in 1942 and based on his experiences in the Merchant Marine. According to the book "Desolate Angel" by Dennis McNally, Kerouac wrote the work while on the Dorchester, where he served in the galley.

A review in Jack Magazine of "Atop an Underwood," the 1999 compendium of Kerouac's early and unpublished writings says that "Underwood" contains "a substantial chunk of the third version of 'The Sea is My Brother'." The biography "Jack Kerouac" by Michael Dittman quotes Kerouac as describing "The Sea is My Brother" as being about "man's simple revolt from society as it is, with the inequalities, frustration, and self-inflicted agonies. Weley Martin loved the sea with a strange, lonely love; the sea is his brother and sentences. He goes down. The story also of another man, in contrast, who escapes society for the sea, but finds the sea a place of terrible loneliness."

Sounds like Kerouac was pretty horny and miserable aboard the Dorchester.

technorati: Jack Kerouac, publishing, book deals

More celebrity memoirs the solution to publishing's problems

She says she wants to flog "celebrity-driven" books, bringing in "'really smart' writers to help shape those public figures' lives into books." As for the literary part of being a literary agent:

I'm trying not to do too much literary stuff -- which is not to say I'm not taking smart things, but there's a certain type of pretentious novel that I just hate, that I'd spent most of my career trying to write away from... I want to represent books that will actually reach people.

Like celebrity memoirs. More at my Open Salon blog

technorati: books, writers, publishing

Eight years' work on her book paid off

On the SF Metroblog, I just posted an interview with novelist Nami Mun, whose work I was alerted to through the blog of another Korean-American writer, Alex Chee.

I hadn't heard of Mun, but she is a Pushcart Prize winner. According to the book deals log on Publishers Marketplace, Mun's book sold in a "significant" deal, which is between $250K and $500K, but she did work on it for eight years. Say she got $250K for the book, that's about $30,000 a year.

Her multi-city book tour has just started, and I hope it goes better than that other guy's.

technorati: writers, book deals, Nami Mun

Publishing and pain

A very good article in the Village Voice looks at the state of publishing from the perspective of a successful mid-list author. The hook for the story is how the guy, exhausted and disillusioned on a book tour from hell, managed to piss off some anonymous bloggers who proceeded to french-fry him online until he backed down. But the larger, more interesting issues addressed by the piece have to do with the desperate, almost flailing actions of book publicists, who don't understand the general uselessness of book tours for novelists, and the sad delusions of the novelists themselves, who think their book tour will be like a victory lap in front of informed crowds of fans and then find it amounts to appearing to empty rows of chairs in small towns where... but read for yourself:

Then comes the Friday night in Winnetka, Illinois, when you pull up to a street where the only light is coming from the bookstore, and you realize this won't be good. There's one customer inside, and the reading is canceled, but you talk him into buying a book anyway... There's the afternoon in a small, depressed Arkansas town when... the promised crowd and the television film crew have all been canceled, preempted by a big football game. Three middle-aged women walk in, escorting their senile grandmother, who they've brought back to town after an absence of 70 years to see what she remembers, which is nothing. The bookstore owner flips a thumb at you: "Why don't you do your little show for them?" And you do, dear reader, you do.

The piece captures the reality of what being a "successful" author -- one with good reviews and middling best-sellers to their name -- must really be like. For all those (like me) with unpublished novels who imagine (as I used to) that their lives will change when they're published, it's a good reality check.

Still, I know getting published means something. I have books on the shelves with my name on the spine. That doesn't mean I never have to work again, but it's something.

technorati: publishing

Xmas forecast

It's cold and rainy and intermittently sunny and blustery here at the House of Cats and Rhinos. We're gettin' up slow, having crossed the Bay Bridge after midnight on our way back from Xmas in Walnut Creek. Fortunately there was no backup at the toll plaza, since only about 4 lanes were open and most of the drivers took about a minute and a half each to grok the concepts of "toll" and "four dollars."

For Xmas, I think I'm going to give myself the present of self-publishing my Rat Pack novel. Why not let people read the damn thing. It'll take a while to get that into the pipeline, though, since the formatting has to be right or the resulting book will look like crap.

Looking forward to a week off, too. That's the scene here. Back to regularly scheduled programming soon.

Immature content only

On Friday I mentioned the CNet editor who self-published his novel and then wrote a long column about doing so. Now it seems (courtesy Galleycat) Apple won't allow his book to be sold as an e-book for the iPhone because of a single line in which "a teenage girl telling a detective that she overheard her friend asking a gentleman caller to '(love) me like you mean it,' just with a slightly more emphatic verb." The story goes on to speculate just how this phrase came to the attention of Apple, quoting a developer: "What would happen if I (a Romanian) would publish an e-book filled with Romanian obscenities? -- would Apple's staff need to learn Romanian... and read the entire ebook ... to make sure this doesn't happen?"

But the part of the story that caught my attention was lower down, in a section recounting Apple's struggle to keep iPhone apps SFW:

Apple's definition of "objectionable" has been questioned before. After initially balking, Apple finally relented to the extremely influential fart joke lobby last week and permitted applications such as Pull My Finger and iFart Mobile (ranked 3rd and 10th, respectively, among paid App Store applications at the moment) under what was described as a "Mature" section.

Really? Sounds like apps with names like that should be in an "Immature" section.

technorati: books, Apple, censorship

Two articles about the state of publishing

Two articles/blog postings caught my eye today.

Courtesy Galleycat, a long, almost obsessively comprehensive article by a CNet editor about self-publishing his novel. He compares services, makes strategy suggestions, and comes to the conclusion that you have to spend the money a real publisher would have spent on your book if you want it to be good at all. But at least it's published then.

Then in Huffington Post, someone writes about the publishing industry's seeming disinterest in publishing books male readers would want to read.

Since the novel I wrote for a local small press was designed specifically for the male market, but turned down by the publisher and dumped back in my lap for a small kill fee with the restriction that I can only self-publish it, these two articles coincide with my own writing career, such as it is at the moment.

That's right -- the novel I signed a contract for in 2007 and wrote in six months, more or less to order, was rejected, and I'll wind up self-publishing it. I'll be sure to publicize it here, once I go through many of the steps outlined by that self-publishing article (but without spending all that money on the book).

technorati: books, publishing, self-publishing, reading