That’s Juliet Annan in The Telegraph, as she shares her rationale for launching a new Penguin hardcover imprint.
Click on the link to read more of what she has to say about what’s needed for a book to succeed in the publishing biz today.
Category Archives: Books
To plog or not to plog
Found out about this site today, via Miss Snark. It’s called BiblioBuffet and as soon as I’ve finished this post, it’s going on my blogroll under daily reads.
The article that caught my attention is about plogs–a word Amazon has trademarked and seems to suggest is a contraction of “personal blog.” (Since “blog” itself is short for weblog, I personally wish they’d chosen “pwog.” It’s much more fun to say, and suggests pucker-lipped little baby amphibians, which is always a plus.) The BiblioBuffet article, otoh, refers to “plog” as a hybrid of plug and blog. It will be interesting to see if the grassroots meme overpowers Amazon’s corporate narrative.
Check the article to see what people–mainly readers–have to say about plogs. It’s not all of it good.
UPDATE: Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware is blogging about plogging.
Wrestling the angel
In a New Yorker review of two books about happiness, John Lancaster argues persuasively that for ancient man, happiness was a matter of luck. Life was “nasty, brutish, and short,” and individuals had very little control over whether they achieved what we, today, call happiness.
He quotes from “Happiness: A History,” by Darrin McMahon:
As McMahon points out, “In virtually every Indo-European language, the modern word for happiness is cognate with luck, fortune or fate.” In a sense, the oldest and most deeply rooted philosophical idea in the world and in our natures is “Shit happens.” Happ was the Middle English word for “chance, fortune, what happens in the world,” McMahon writes, “giving us such words as ‘happenstance,’ ‘haphazard,’ hapless,’ and ‘perhaps.'” This view of happiness is essentially tragic: it sees life as consisting of the things that happen to you; if more good things than bad happen, you are happy.
Then came the Enlightenment, and with it the notion that the world is a rational place, governed by laws that, if mastered, do give us a measure of control over our lives.
Manchester then plunges, as have we all ;-) into the modern world’s examination of happiness, with its increasingly sophisticated science, including neuroscience and positive psychiatry. He notes that some researchers have concluded that each individual has a happiness “set point” that is little influenced by external circumstances. From “The Happiness Hypothesis” by Jonathan Haidt:
“It’s better to win the lottery than to break your neck, but not by as much as you’d think. . . . Within a year, lottery winners and paraplegics have both (on average) returned most of the way to their baseline levels of happiness.”
Yet even David Lykken, the behavioral geneticist who came up with the set point idea (“trying to be happier is like trying to be taller”) went on to suggest things people can do to be happier.
Manchester does, too — read the article for the details, but being socially connected is important, as is spending your time in work you find absorbing.
The fact is, we’re all of us wrestling with the angel.
And Jacob was left alone. And a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched his hip socket, and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, “Let me go, for the day has broken.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” And he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” Then he said, “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.” Genesis 32:24-28
We’re wrestling with the angel, and demanding that he bless us; yet if you think about it, even the chance to enter the match is its own blessing, isn’t it?
Romance novels, a friendly-like look
The Telegraph has published an article on romance novels.
But the real mystery is, why aren’t we preoccupied with writing and reading novels about work, or the environment or children? Why is it always about pair bonding? “Lord, what fools these mortals be,” Puck remarked, observing human lovers in a certain wood outside Athens – but then, even Shakespeare’s fairies were subject to and humbled by the velleities of passion.
Yeah, it’s a kind and respectful article. And that’s a good thing ;-)
Bah to book overhype
I recently picked up a paperback because its cover sported a glowing blurb by an author whose work I enjoy.
The book was a resounding disappointment, and, no dummy, I, I made a mental note to never trust a blurb in quite the same way again.
I’m comforted to learn that I am not alone. Heck no, I’m part of a trend, according to Damian Horner on Bookseller.com, who says that readers have become cynical about the rave reviews and gushing quotes that accompany so many book launches today.
I suspect we will soon see publishers working much more closely with bloggers and reading groups. They will run ongoing focus group panels and maybe some will even follow the Miramax model and ruthlessly target awards and prizes.
They already are. In an interview with conservative blogger/radio pundit Hugh Hewitt, for instance, Robert Ferrigno talks about how the publisher of his new political thriller, Prayers for the Assassin, spent “six figures” on website and blog marketing. (The website lets fans enter, virtually, the futuristic world of the novel.) Ferrigno predicts that in five years, “publishers will not be advertising in print media, except in very rare cases.”
These tactics work by generating word-of-mouth, which has credibility because the Mouth generating the Word tends to be a peer–a reader, just like you are, who has no vested interest in praising something that’s no good.
The weakness of this tactic, however, is that an amateur’s recommendations can be worthless, as well. Fifteen minutes scanning the reviews on Amazon is all you need to convince yourself of that ;-)
Curried Wodehouse
Stephen McClarence, in the London Times: “In a country where most books in English sell fewer than 1,000 copies and 5,000 constitutes a bestseller,” Penguin Books India “sells up to 70,000 Wodehouses a year.”
(P.G. Wodehouse is one of my all-time favorite writers. So I can relate!)
No royalties necessary, a bit of biscuit is fine
Joe Woodward, at Poets and Writers, explores the narrated-by-critters genre, which (he notes) started with George Orwell’s Animal Farm and in the past few years has grown to include Timbuktu, by Paul Auster; Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, by Sigrid Nunez; and The Autobiography of Foudini M. Cat, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer.
Woodward then goes on to review this year’s newest additions, Timothy; or, Notes of an Abject Reptile, Verlyn Klinkenborg (February, Knopf) and Firmin: Adventures of a Metropolitan Lowlife, Sam Savage (next month, Coffee House Press).
The article doesn’t mention Paul Gallico’s The Silent Miaow. But that was, strictly speaking, non-fiction, insofar as it was a how-to manual for stray cats. So the oversight is understandable.
More on plots
Not to be confused with moron plots. We’ll leave that topic for another day.
This past weekend, I picked up a copy of Monkey Love, Brenda Scott Royce, Feb. 2006, Penguin, given the face-up treatment royale on the “new releases” table at my local bookstore chain.
So I’m reading it (because why not have four or five books going at once?) and as I’ve been thinking about plotting, I notice that in the first chapter (19 pages) no less than four major plotlines are introduced: a girlfriend’s unplanned pregnancy; another girlfriend’s professional shennanigans; the protagonist’s preparation for an upcoming stand-up comedy gig; and the protagonist’s first encounter with he-who-will-emerge-as-the-love-interest.
Advantages:
1. Fast pacing? You betcha. You can’t have that much going on in under 20 pages without having . . . a lot going on.
2. Major interest grabation. Take your pick, there’s so much happening here, you’re bound to want to know how at least some of it works out.
3. Comedic effect. A caught-in-the-headlights straight man is a comedy staple. Plot breaking out right and left is a useful device for propelling a hapless protagonist toward that lite, happy ending nirvana we’re all rooting for-o.*
Disadvantages:
1. There’s a thin line between “madcap” and frenetic.
2. Pacing isn’t pacing unless it’s modulated from time to time. When the balance tips too far toward “hard plot” and too far away from the protagonists interior life, things start to feel downright speedy after awhile.
So what’s the answer. Dunno. But if the pendulum has swung toward “plot ’til you’re punch-drunk” (and I’m by no means sure it has btw — I have exactly one data point upon which to base this) I hereby Predict it will Swing Back.
*The “o” is so that I won’t be using a preposition to end that sentence with-o
Do you want Google to digitize your book?
Here’s a Bookforum panel discussion on the implications of Google’s book scanning initiative. The participants are Nick Taylor, president of the Authors Guild; Allan R. Adler, AAP vice president for legal and governmental affairs; and Lawrence Lessig, Stanford Law School professor and public domain advocate.
I haven’t formed a clear opinion on this issue, save for one thing: I think Google should make it an opt-in process for copyright holders. IOW, don’t touch my book(s) until I tell you it’s okay to scan them. Needless to say, that would make the process much more cumbersome and expensive.
OTOH, Google is the one with the deep pockets. As one of the panelists says in this piece:
Everyone knows most authors don’t make a living as authors. They have some other job or jobs that allow them the luxury of writing. And to be denied a potential source of revenue, whether the purpose is altruistic or not, is both galling and disappointing.
The topic of making a living writing books — or, more precisely, how rare that is — was the topic of a couple of literary agent blog posts this week. So the question is, would Google’s book scanning scheme further reduce writers’ already meager returns?
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Outwitting Dogs
