A tour through a book’s P&L, by someone who’s done lots.
My favorite line from the comments:
Just like politics and sausage. Maybe it’s best not to know how it’s made.
Found via the always-entertaining Booksquare.
Tag Archives: writing
All a writer wants
“Good readers, and a bit of company in the evenings.”
Yes.
Quote by Chandrahas Choudhury, in the post he wrote to commemorate the one-year anniversary of his taking over The Middle Stage.
Do click and read the piece; he has some moving things to say about what blogging has done for him as a writer.
Advice to write by
From Diana Peterfreund, who modestly titles her post “10 Things I Know About My Writing” — in reality it’s a generous share for aspiring fiction writers.
My favorite: #7, “It’s a thousand times easier to write a new book than to sell a bad book.”
lol
“Intellectual kitch”
Denis Dutton, editor of Philosophy and Literature, has republished a Wall Street Journal piece about his annual Bad Writing Contest for academic prose.
The pretentiousness of the worst academic writing betrays it as a kind of intellectual kitsch, analogous to bad art that declares itself “profound” or “moving” not by displaying its own intrinsic value but by borrowing these values from elsewhere. Just as a cigar box is elevated by a Rembrandt painting, or a living room is dignified by sets of finely bound but unread books, so these kitsch theorists mimic the effects of rigor and profundity without actually doing serious intellectual work. Their jargon-laden prose always suggests but never delivers genuine insight.
He’s got some examples of contest entries, too, for your reading pleasure, ha ha ha.
And now: reader reviews are crooked (yawn)
A few weeks ago, on the occasion of my birthday, I decided to buy a bottle of champagne.
I didn’t want to spend a lot of money, but I didn’t want to buy something icky, either.
So I stood in front of the bank of sparkling wines offered by my favorite wine shop and considered my choices.
It happened that two other women were there, also shopping for champagne. They were apparently friends, and having a lively conversation, recalling different wineries they’d visited. After eavesdropping on them as they discussed four or five different bottles, I decided, on impulse, to consult with them.
I’d picked up a bottle of Konstantine Frank sparkling wine (which interested me because it’s an Upstate New York State vitner) and asked them if they were familiar with it, and whether it was any good.
They were gracious from the start, but also, at first, cautious. The reason soon became clear: they didn’t want to recommend something without knowing a bit about my taste. So wisely, they asked me which of the wines I did like. I pointed to the Veuve Clicquot, heh. “This, only I’d rather not spend quite that much.” And at that point, they relaxed. “Oh,” they said. Now they could help me. They knew my taste was close enough to theirs.
And they recommended a $20 Roederer Estate Brut sparkling wine.
I took it home, chilled it, opened it later that night, and was thrilled. It was delicious — at that price, perfect, in fact.
Which brings me to this 12,000-word article (excuse me, “paper”) at First Monday (tagline: “Peer-reviewed journal on the internet”).
The paper proposes to examine the scandalous behavior of on-line user reviews, with a focus on Amazon book reviews.
First, we have the reviews that are blatant plants. The article authors (Shay David and Trevor Pinch) remind us that
in 2004 both the New York Times (Harmon, 2004) and the Washington Post (Marcus, 2004) reported that a technical fault on the Canadian division of Amazon.com exposed the identities of several thousand of its anonymous reviewers, and alarming discoveries were made. It was established that a large number of authors had “gotten glowing testimonials from friends, husbands, wives, colleagues or paid professionals.” A few had even “reviewed” their own books, and, unsurprisingly, some had unfairly slurred the competition.
(The authors don’t realize how oh-so 2004 this particular scandal is. Today’s writers are urged, quite blatantly, by their handlers to call in every favor owed them since they left the cradle in exchange for glowing Amazon reviews.)
Next comes the point that many Amazon reviews are essentially spam. The text is copied from one review to another — outright plagiarism is involved in some cases — and often the review is merely a clever pretext for publicizing a website URL. (Rather like the spammers who pretend they love my blog as a pretext for adding their business site url to my comments. Yeah, that’ll work.)
Other reviews are falsely flattering: reviewers give books five stars in order to raise their own reviewer standing. Still others are obviously written more to satisfy a reviewer’s emotional needs than to provide information about a book. (Ya, no kidding.)
And then (worst of all! :-D) are the reviews that are simply crap.
What the paper’s authors don’t consider is whether anyone really takes online user reviews seriously.
I bet not. I bet most people — like me — read Amazon reviews (if at all) for the entertainment value, not to help them make purchase decisions.
It’s simple human nature. In most cases, we take advice from people whose judgement we decide we can trust — a common sense criteria that de facto excludes anonymous online reviews.
That’s not to say we have to know the person giving the advice, but we have to know something about them. Perhaps we’ve observed that they seem engaged and knowledgeable — like the two women I met in the wine shop. A well-written review in a print publication can fall into that category, even if the reviewer’s name is unfamiliar.
Maybe it’s someone with whom we simply identify — a blogger we read, or Oprah, or someone we know from work.
But taking advice from anonymous people on the ‘net?
Maybe some of us do that, once or twice. But I’m betting that people who do quickly learn how useless that advice can be.
And here’s the thing. Even if you do buy a book based on a bogus review, that’s the end of the chain, right there. You’re not going to recommend that book yourself.
So although the Internet can be a medium for word-of-mouth, it’s a foolish marketer who thinks a post on the Internet is equivalent to word-of-mouth.
The real chain is, and always has been, trust.
Or to put another way: the number of Amazon reviews is as much (maybe more) the result of a book’s popularity as the cause of it.
The “future of fiction”?
In the Boston Globe, Sven Birkerts reviews the online novel-to-date by Walter Kim that is being published by Slate.
Birkerts is not persuaded that the novel will live up to its promise of somehow delivering real-time art, i.e., to be a novel and at the same time to “respond to events as they happen.”
I believe that real time and the time of art, the consciousness that makes art, are contradictory concepts-“real-time art” is an oxymoron . . . The traditional aim of art, in response to deeply planted human needs, has from the first been fundamentally contemplative. The work offers a deliberate distancing from the chaos and turbulence of the immediate and allows the reader or viewer to process its tensions through the recognition of underlying patterns.
I suppose so. But that’s pretty, um, abstruse. lol.
He goes on a bit more in this vein, then writes:
And yet, if Kim can successfully deploy some of the energies and capabilities of this extraordinary technology, if he can intensify the participatory dynamic of reading-real-time interaction with real-time output-and win a readership, others will quickly follow.
This gets a bit closer to the crux of the matter. People don’t go to Borders or click on Amazon.com because they decide they need the “prophylactic” benefit of “artistic distance” to keep their sanity “in the face of the boggling complexity of living.”
They — we — buy books because they transport us and affirm what we know ourselves to be.
If writers figure out how to harness the Internet in a way that engages and excites people, and that enables readers to connect emotionally with an online fictional world, it will work.
It’s really pretty simple, in the end. Although not necessarily easy . . .
On Pseudonyms
In the Guardian, Jonathan Freedland, aka Sam Bourne, discusses why writers choose to publish under pen names.
Freedland’s is a special case, in some respects:
I confess it was not my idea. My agent came up with it when he sent out a proposal and a few sample chapters: he wanted publishers to react to the words on the page, rather than to any preconceptions they might have about me or the columns I write in the Guardian.
But he also notes an unanticipated benefit:
Even if the original motivation owes more to commerce than art, once chosen, a nom de plume can be liberating, taking a writer to places that might have remained unexplored.
It’s something I’ve considered, but have never quite brought myself to the point of committing to it.
How about you? Do you write under a pseudonym? Have you ever thought about it? Why (or why not) did you decide to do it?
When good enough — isn’t
Miss Snark fields a question from a writer whose novel has been rejected repeatedly as “not competitive.” The writing is good, the story interesting, and yet the novel doesn’t seem to have what it takes to make the cut.
Here’s a portion of Miss Snark’s response:
I see quite a few books as partials or fulls that are pretty darn good but there’s nothing there that makes me say “aha!” I have to be able to answer the questions “what makes this stand out from the crowd” “what is going to surprise me” when I send this to editors. Business as usual will not do that.
The bar for becoming a fiction writer is, on the one hand, ridiculously low. You like words, you like stories, you own a computer or at least a bit of charcoal and the back of a shovel, and you’re there.
So it’s disquieting to discover that what you’re writing may not be good enough to get published. (Of, if you get a little further, not good enough to sell out your print run. Or, a little further along yet, not good enough to make you a living.)
Miss Snark’s advice:
I suggest stepping back from the project for a bit. Work on something else for awhile. Then go back and really look at your characters and plot. You have to be able to look at your work with an objective eye. That’s the single biggest weakness in writers: they can’t see how their own work looks on the literary buffet.
But (and I’m making an oblique confession, here) maybe that’s not it. Maybe we can see. Maybe the problem is that we don’t want to see. Because seeing means we have to rewrite, and not just smoothing-up-those-awkward-sentences rewriting, but the sort of rewriting that involves dismantling plot or rethinking characters — the kind of rewriting that takes us almost back to the beginning, and that, with a novel we’ve lived with for so many months already that we’re frankly sick to death of it.
But maybe that’s what it takes.
In the Introduction to Writing the Breakout Novel, Donald Maass has this to say:
Great novels–ones in which lightening seems to strike on every page–result from their authors’ refusal to settle for ‘good.’ Great novelists . . . push themselves to find original turns of phrase, extra levels of feeling, unusual depths of character, plots that veer in unexpected directions . . . Is that magic?
Not at all. It is aiming high.
I have to believe “aiming high” is what gets you to the place Miss Snark references — to the novel that “stands out from the crowd,” that is more than “business as usual.”
The best advice
. . . comes from people who have been there, done that.
A few weeks ago, I put up a post about a discussion at Booksquare on whether writers would be better off producing books as work-for-hire (as opposed to the way it’s typically done today: writers receive an advance against royalties, and then later additional royalties should the advance earn out).
Now Tess Gerritsen weighs in with her experience. After publishing nine romantic suspense novels for Harlequin, she hit the NYT bestseller list with another book, Harvest. Reprints of her old titles, she writes,
started appearing in bookstores. Not just here in the U.S., but around the world. These were titles that I thought had long since finished earning out, and would never be seen again. And suddenly, they were selling again, and selling well, and now I’m being paid royalties that add up to many times the original advances I was first paid.
That’s money she never would have seen if she’d sold her early books as work-for-hire.
This is true for life, too
In an answer to one of her blog readers, literary agent Miss Snark gave out a piece of advice that applies as well to life as it does to navigating a writing career.
The reader was worried about the chances of being published after he/she gets an agent. Here’s Miss Snark’s advice:
Right now what you are doing is the equivalent of what 15th century mapmakers in Spain did…..they drew pictures of monsters at the edge of the map. Right now you’re in Spain preparing to set sail and you’re looking at the map seeing only the unknown. Just remember that where they drew monsters is present day Hawaii.
The unknown is just that — unknown. But we do tend to populate it with scary things, don’t we?
