Johnny Appleseed preached Swedenborg????

Posted on by

That wasn’t in the Disney version! John Chapman (Appleseed’s real name)

kept Swedenborg’s “Heaven and Hell” with the Bible in his cookpot hat. Arriving at a house on one of his walkabouts, he would greet the inhabitants: “Will you have some fresh news right from Heaven?” The answer didn’t matter—he was already reaching for the cookpot. Chapman’s “religious intensity,” not his apple planting, was “the driving force of his life,” Mr. Means says.

Guess what else. The apples that grew from his trees weren’t the big luscious bake-into-a-pie sort you find in the supermarket today.

Nope. They were little sour things — that people grew to make hard cider.

LOL

Steinbeck’s story breaks into a Million Little Pieces

Posted on by

Pretty amazing bit of literary investigation, here. Bill Steigerwald set off to retrace the trip John Steinbeck recounted in Travels with Charley, and discovered that the trip was largely fictionalized.

My initial motives for digging into Travels With Charley were totally innocent. I simply wanted to go exactly where Steinbeck went in 1960, to see what he saw on the Steinbeck Highway, and then to write a book about the way America has and has not changed in the last 50 years.

But when Steigerwald started cross-referencing events Steinbeck recounts in the book against other evidence — letters, hotel records, etc. — he discovered so many discrepancies that, he concludes, “virtually nothing [Steinbeck] wrote in Charley about where he slept and whom he met on his dash across America can be trusted.”

Steigerwald’s piece isn’t an attack. He personally believes that Steinbeck didn’t set out to deceive anyone. He was, at the time, 58 years old, in poor health, and had promised to produce book for which “he had taken virtually no notes.”

Whoops.

Still, it’s interesting that for 50 years the book was trusted as a nonfiction account of what one man discovered when he crossed our continent, when in fact it’s fiction.

Good thing Steinbeck never appeared on Oprah ;-)

All hail the book machine

Posted on by

Those of you who know me personally know that for many years I’ve worked as a marketing communications professional supporting some pretty big, name brand companies, including one fondly known as an anchor company here in Rochester, NY. And as it happens, over the course of my career, I’ve had occasion to write about some of the more sophisticated printing devices these companies manufacture — machines that can produce one-off items from digital files.

Since I also follow the book publishing industry, I’ve been waiting for years for the day when book publishers would embrace the technology.

Good thing I wasn’t holding my breath.

Oh, I know, per-book cost goes way up — it’s a lot cheaper, per copy, to do a traditional print run of 10,000 or a million books than produce them in onesy twosies.

But in a world where just-in-time manufacturing principles are now the norm, it would seem a no-brainer to work these POD technologies into the production stream somehow. Think about it. You’d have a database of your content on the back end. Orders come in from distributors via a front-end web portal and are automatically sent to the printer — nobody would need to touch them (lowers your overhead right there). Suddenly the backlist is relevant again, it’s available to respond to demand. And as new media arises — ebooks, say — you just hook up a new output path, kind of like the Smashwords Meatgrinder.

I suppose the idea of transitioning to such a radically different production model was too wearying for publishers. Heck, they don’t even have their rights tracked in databases yet, apparently.

That said, I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that the entire industry will shift to a just-in-time model, albeit belatedly. But in the meantime, bookstores are installing POD systems, essentially taking over the production piece of the publishing business.

The above link is a story about The Expresso Book Machine, invented by Jason Epstein, 83, the guy who also came up with the concept of mass market paperbacks(!)

The Expresso Book Machine is basically a digital POD printer + book binder.

But get this. The article’s author, Ilya Marritz, first notes:

People in the book industry revere Jason Epstein, but they are increasingly skeptical his latest innovation will take off. The Espresso Book Machine is bulky, its menu of books limited mainly to backlist and public domain titles and users can’t operate the machine on their own – they need help from trained bookstore staff.

Guys, the reason titles are limited to backlist & public domain is that the publishing industry hasn’t realized, yet, that it needs to support POD with current titles. So it’s kind of two-faced for “people in the book industry” to be “skeptical.” Instead of being skeptical,  how about building an infrastructure to feed the POD stream?

Sigh.

Contrast with this a couple paragraphs later:

But the machine has proven to be a hit with customers. More than 1,000 books were printed on the machine in the first four weeks for prices starting at $8 apiece. Kurtz said the main attraction to the Espresso Book Machine is that it is a tool for self-publishing.

Not surprising that self-publishing has emerged as a strong use case. Indie writers “get it.”

But IMO, if this were marketed properly, with the proper front end, it would be a huge hit with consumers as well.

There is absolutely no reason on earth I shouldn’t be able to go online, order a book, the book gets printed at my local bookstore (or library. or supermarket) where I can pick it up — or maybe a courier brings it to my house later that day —

I should be able to do that by clicking on a link of a book review I read on a blog or online newspaper, or from my e-reader.

I should be able to do that from a kiosk in a bookstore.

Think about it. Bookstores would no longer have to be mammothly expensive warehouses (that’s all a big box store is, when you think about it — a warehouse with carpet and escalators). They could be salons, gathering spaces designed more like living rooms than commercial spaces.

Bookstore managers could stock based on real time data about what is selling or to support promotions they’re running. Poetry reading tonight? Print one or two copies of books by major poets and set them out for sale. Holiday coming up? Local paper run a review of a new title? Author in town for a signing? Ditto.

But most of your titles, you’d sell not by putting out physical copies but by generating opportunities for word-of-mouth sales and by running in-store promotions. I love golf, for instance. Think I wouldn’t notice if a local bookstore kicked off spring by hosting an event by a local teaching pro in conjunction with a sale on golf titles, make it a Masters tie-in?

The possibilities are endless, literally.

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz once said that he envisioned Starbucks as “the third place” — the not home/not work place you spend time because it’s comfortable and familiar and you feel welcome there.

There is absolutely no reason bookstores couldn’t also become “the third place,” but only if the business model supports it–which means you have to lower overhead. Smaller footprint, no more warehousing books based on publisher push instead of local market pull, and emphasize creating communities rather than moving product.

Could happen. Would like to see it, personally. I’d hang there.

of the 1 or 2 . . .

Posted on by

Of the 1 or 2 bad habits

that have crept back in since you moved

there is this:

that I take books to bed.

They accumulate

in the space that was once yours.

take up more and more room

as if I need anything more to disturb my sleep

E-Voice. Some Thoughts on Social Media.

Posted on by

I’ve always felt that the line between social media and traditional media was an artificial one, but it occurs to me now that my perspective is shaped by my being, when it really comes down to it, a writer first.

When your primary goal is to communicate, your audience is always there, in front of you. You’re always trying to tell a story that will connect with your readers.

What’s different, with social media, is that readers can talk back.

I recently added the TaylorMade Facebook page to my FB feed, and I was reading the comments this morning to a new post they’ve put up. It’s a short note about some new irons that are now available (Tour Preferred MB, MC, and CB irons), and one of the things that is immediately obvious is that some peoples’ comments are . . . shall we say, feisty.

How different from the days when a PR or marketing communications person would issue a press release without having to exit his or her comfortable mar-com bubble. If someone’s response to your company’s news was negative– “that’s ugly/too expensive/like someone else’s brand better”–you wouldn’t know. Sure, some inkling of those responses might trickle back to you over time, but it would be long after the release was issued, published, and essentially forgotten.

Now you know immediately.

And that’s a good thing, for a couple of reasons. First, it affords companies the opportunity to gather feedback. No, the comments on a Facebook page don’t reach the standards of bona fide market research, but there is data in there, if you know how to qualify it.

Equally important, the feedback ensures you put communication first.

Communication is not a one-way endeavor. It requires listening as well as talking. It’s reciprocal.

Which gets me to what I think of as “e-voice.”

The risk with traditional marketing communications has always been that the company’s voice sounds out-of-touch. You see it in pieces that are “corporate-y.” They speak with marketing department lingo instead of sounding like real people, by which I mean the folks who actually might buy the product or service. The language is stiff and formal, instead of being conversational. At its worst, the communications devolve into flat descriptions of features-benefits, devoid of any humanity whatsoever. It becomes noise–and people tune it out.

Carry that style into the realm of social media, and you set yourself up for mockery or worse. One local business here in Roch, in a particularly egregious example, has used its Twitter account to repeat the marketing tagline created for its radio and television ads. Sorry, but that is no way to win a social media audience.

E-voice is different. E-voice is genuine. It feels like it’s a real human being, not a marketing slogan bot. It is casual, conversational. And it is always aware of that reciprocity. Even when the person tweeting or facebooking or blogging doesn’t respond to commentors, e-voice always sounds as if it’s addressing actual people. It is always an invitation to converse, rather than a one-sided proclamation of some kind.

There was a time when companies, sensing all this, got a bit nervous. And some probably still are. But an e-voice doesn’t need to be out of control. It doesn’t need to diverge from the parameters set by a company’s brand and reputation.

In fact, e-voice is essentially a kind of fictional character, bound as surely as a fictional character by the constraints of personality, habits, values, even decorum.

You could think of e-voice as the 2D textual version of Old Spice Guy. It’s a creation, a manufactured entity, and yet because it has a personality it suggests a life of its own, and so resonates with its audience.

You almost need to start, with social media, by creating this character–this persona–behind the scenes. The rest just follows naturally, and the conversation begins.

Can novels take your breath away?

Posted on by

Dani Amore, writing on technorati.com [UPDATE: link no longer good…], weighs in on the “how to price an ebook” debate by attempting a comparison between songs and novels. This cracked me up:

A song that sells for 99 cents that just happens to be a masterpiece of beauty, timelessness and meaning and can change a person’s life, is much more valuable than a $2.99 novel that the minute it’s downloaded immediately causes your Kindle to smell like a rest stop toilet.

But it’s a little sad, too, because the fact is people don’t think of novels as beautiful, timeless, and life-changing. For good reason — they’re generally not.

But should they be?

Have you ever read a novel that took your breath away, that gripped you the way a song can? What was it, and how long ago?

And what would you pay to experience such a novel again?

7 reasons why you should NOT be in a writing group

Posted on by

Okay, so this post extolling the virtues of writing groups is about poetry, a literary pursuit for which the chance of monetary pay-off is so slim it’s basically off the table entirely. [UPDATE: link no longer good, sorry!]

But if you’re writing fiction, and your goal as a writer is to find a real audience for your work, sorry, but I think you have to be very cautious about joining a writing group.

Here’s why.

1. Blind leading the blind. If you want to learn how to become a success in anything, you need to find mentors,  models, and teachers who are already successful at that thing. A writing group — unless it’s well-stocked with published authors — can’t offer you anything but the opinions of people who are capable of educated guesses, at best. At worst, they may well be naive or even ignorant. You have to ask yourself: what sort of person do you want advising you on your work?

2. Your precious time. Participating in a writing group takes time. The meetings alone take time. Critiquing other peoples’ work takes time. And what could you be doing, if you weren’t spending all that time on your writing group? Um, writing, perhaps?

3. And your precious focus. One of the most important things you have to do, as a writer, is to pinpoint what you want to accomplish with your WIP. Any time anyone peers over your shoulder, points at a sentence/character/theme and says “well, what about this, though?” and you are obligated (because you’re polite!) to respond, then guess what. You’ve just been distracted. And when you’re distracted, you’re not honing in on what you’re trying do do, as a writer.

4. Committee syndrome. Related to #3, but important enough to merit it’s own line on the list. Committees create only one thing: consensus. Committees cannot create novels, or any other kind of art for that matter. The minute you start offering your writing up to some committee, you build a nice consensus on what’s “good” and what “works” etc. etc., but you are also consigning your WIP to mediocrity or worse.

5. False security. Say you manage to wow your writing group members with your latest example of scintillating prose. So what? To paraphrase Dean Wesley Smith, the only readers who matter are the ones who are going to pay you for your work. And here’s the thing: being praised for something we’ve written is a peak experience — it’s satisfying, it sates us as a culmination of sorts. The danger is that after that peak, we tend to let up. This is often subconscious, of course. “Oh,” says our sneaky little mind. “I’ve done it. I’m finished. I can rest for a bit now.” Well guess what — you’re not finished. Wowing your reading group means absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things. And every second you spend your time polishing that little trophy on your shelf is another second you’ve wasted when you should be pressing forward toward your real goals as a writer.

6. False insecurity. Okay, let’s look at the opposite scenarios. Say your writing group hates your latest example of scintillating prose. Does that mean you stink? Well first of all, maybe not. See #1 above. But even if the group is correct, and your stuff could use some work, what do you gain by knowing? Nothing, except if you count it as a “gain” when you let people suck you dry of all that pesky self-confidence. Look, it takes tremendous courage to become a writer. Don’t put yourself in a position where you’re spending your bravery reserves on the wrong things.

7. Creating and judging are mutually exclusive pursuits–and the creating bit is the one that is most important to writers. It’s “the zone.” I’m a golfer. And I can tell you that if I’m in a self-critical frame of mind, I cannot hit a pure golf shot. Well guess what, the same goes with writing. Yes, there’s a place for looking at your work critically. The risk is that participating in a writing group will cause you to add too much of that self-critical mode to the mix that makes up your writing life — in a sense, to your identity as a writer. Put another way, as a writer you have to learn to get in the zone, and that means controlling the self-critical periods of your writing cycles very, very carefully — because too much self-critical destroys creativity.

So does that mean writing groups over absolutely no benefits? Well, no. They may be a networking resource. They may be your outlook for socializing. You may, if you’re lucky, win a couple of future readers through writing group contacts.

But if you want to invest in yourself as a writer by getting feedback on your work? Look for workshops where you can learn from published, successful writers.

My 2 cents.

Fear of the banal is a good thing, actually

Posted on by

Okay, so I so get this post, and I’m glad there are writers out there who have the sense to be afraid of being banal. And here is why, and yes I’m harping again on the topic I alluded to a few posts ago: you can’t throw a rock without hitting somebody passing along tips about the “craft” of writing, and craft is all very well and good, but tell you what it’s not everything, not by a long shot. If you (the writer) pay close attention, when you write, you’ll notice that there is a point when the thing you are trying to write about has No Form, and than a moment when it has Form — that is the moment at which you are able to express it with words. And that moment, or event, or demarcation, not sure exactly, has something to do with perception, which in turn has something to do with consciousness. So you can’t necessarily equate Writing with Being, but you can’t separate the two, either — and Being can’t be taught — although we can, with time, chip away at the things that get between us and our connection with Being.

(This all sounds very abstract, but abstraction is another trap, as well. We also have to remember William Carlos William’s caution no idea but in things. The antidote to falling into the trap of becoming too abstract.)

But if we avoid that trap, hell yes banality is a nightmare, but not one we fend off via craft — it’s one we fend off by being authentic, and then communicating that authenticity in our writing.

When Hemingway said “write the truest sentence you know” I think this is what he meant. I didn’t understand that for the longest time, but I think, now, that is what he meant . . .

“I’m out of the advance business and I’m out of the inventory business”

Posted on by

Just watched a 6-minute interview with Jane Friedman, former CEO of Harper Collins. She’s now CEO of Open Road Media, a publishing company she co-founded to so she can play exclusively in the digital space.

Key things in her remarks that caught my attention:

She describes advances and inventory as the two things that caused her most stress when she was in traditional publishing. Little wonder: an advance is a gamble and inventory is a huge cost-burden.

She describes her new digital venture as entrepreneurial. From her lips, that’s code for “I believe there’s a lot of money to be made.” One source: author’s backlist titles. “Backlist was always something that completely interested me.”

She places a huge emphasis on her new company’s ability to market its authors. I find this interesting because as we know from reading writers like Dean Wesley Smith and J.A. Konrath, that writers no longer need “publishers” for . . . you know, “publishing.” So what’s left for “publishers” to do? That would be marketing.

She envisions ebooks as multimedia. “We are bookending the text with video.” “Enhanced biographies” embedded at the end of some ebooks include text, video, photos etc.

Dialogue tips for the mouths of babes

Posted on by

Okay, so the intent of this piece is not to help fictioneers but to lament a trend in spoken English.

It’s by Clark Whelton, who as a speech writer for NY City mayors Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani (!) screened interns over a number of years.

Around 1985, he noticed that college grads began to sound increasingly inarticulate.

I agree, this is lamentable. (And what does this say about the future market for fiction? Whoa, let’s not go there . . .)

But if we set aside our angst for a sec, we have some great tips here in how to write dialogue when the speaker is a teen/young adult.

There is, of course, the ubiquity of the word “like,” and the interrogative rise at the end of declarative sentences (personally, I wouldn’t end declaratives with question marks too often in my fiction; its the sort of thing that should be used sparingly; but if used sparingly is a great tool for conveying that speech pattern in a character).

Another that is pretty well known — to the point of being widely parodied — is “Playbacks, in which a speaker re-creates past events by narrating both sides of a conversation.” Example: “So I’m like, ‘Want to, like, see a movie?’ And he goes, ‘No way.’ And I go . . .”

Then there’s the verbal tic Whelton calls “Double-clutching.” The example he gives: “What I said was, I said . . .”

He also gives some examples from Catcher in the Rye:

All the way back in 1951, Holden Caulfield spoke proto-Vagueness (“I sort of landed on my side . . . my arm sort of hurt”), complete with double-clutching (“Finally, what I decided I’d do, I decided I’d . . .”) and demonstrative adjectives used as indefinite articles (“I felt sort of hungry so I went in this drugstore . . .”).

Pretty nice little tutorial there, don’t you think?

The trick will be to write this kind of dialogue without making your character sound like a nitwit, or worse yet annoying your readers. LOL

Related: The Decline of the Imperative.