Her blog’s readometer is about to turn over and hit the 1,000,000 mark!
An “accidental memoirist”
Over at Bibliobuffet, Daniel M. Jaffee has an interview with Samantha Dunn. Dunn began her career as a novelist (Failing Paris) and magazine writer, but after she was badly injured falling from a horse she found herself writing her first memoir, Not By Accident: Reconstructing a Careless Life. She’s since written another, Faith in Carlos Gomez: A Memoir of Salsa, Sex, and Salvation.
Of memoirs, she says,
I’ve come to realize that . . . one of the things that makes memoir writing unique . . . is the level of direct self-inquiry that is not demanded in other forms. That’s why I don’t call it ‘creative nonfiction’; to me that label goes to great reportage, in the school of Wolf or Capote.
She found her home, as a writer, in this genre.
Wagging the backlist
Jeff Jarvis, a couple of days ago, offered some ideas to publishers about how to make money from their long tail — i.e., their backlists. The basic idea is to offset the cost of storing all those books by charging a premium for them–while simultaneously offering a discount on electronic/PDF versions.
Must be in the air, because Booksquare has forayed into the same territory, while raising an option (in the comments) that Jarvis omitted: POD — specifically, the capability to produce one-off print copies of backlist titles.
Booksquare thinks that’s what’s coming — it’s just not quite there today.
POD technology isn’y geared toward mass production yet. It’s getting there. Until then, it’s not cost effective to print very small runs of books to meet demand . . . there might a reluctance to use this technology due to pricing as well — a POD book will likely be at a higher price point than the original version. As I think about it, pricing POD books in general might be something that publishers are just now starting to think about seriously.
Amazon’s acquisition of BookSurge will certainly change the dynamics of POD (and I think that Amazon is the dark horse in the book digitization race for this very reason), and as they develop their market there, you’ll likely be seeing more publishers embracing POD as a way to regain control of their backlist. Of course, as I noted in my article, you’re also going to see authors who realize they can simply go it alone. BookSurge’s product is produced much faster than other POD suppliers and is excellent quality (I have a sample on my desk).
Okay, if I were running a publishing company from my armchair, I’d be obsessed with POD. I’d be chewing on it 24/7.
I’d be looking for partners who might be able to do it more cheaply than I could.
I’d be thinking about offering my backlist at a loss if it meant I could establish relationships with prospective customers. Why not offer an author’s backlist titles as incentives to get people to purchase his/her latest book, for example? It wouldn’t even have to be by author — you could use your backlist to get people reading other authors, too, or to get them to explore other, related lines of books.
There’s no reason publishers couldn’t add public domain books to their POD offerings as well. Anything to get people collecting books and to expose them to other portions of a list.
I’d also be asking how price-sensitive people are when it comes to backlist books. Anyone who has shopped for an out-of-print book online knows their prices can soar pretty high. So, identify out-of-print books as just that. “Xxx by yyy is out of print. However, we can create a printed, bound copy from our electronic files if you’d like. Here’s the price . . .”
I’m just sayin . . .
RELATED: I’ve also posted about the long tail here and here, and also about “Resurrection Publishing.”
Should you promote an unpubbed novel?
Now there’s a question . . .
I think the answer is “depends.”
Depends on how you do it and what your expectations are.
I stuck my toe in, today, with a little teaser on my bio page. Here it is:
[I] am now querying agents for my latest completed book, WHEN LIBBY MET THE FAIRIES AND HER WHOLE LIFE WENT FEY. It’s about a biologist who’s trying to start an organic vegetable farm, only one evening as she’s crossing one of her fields a two-foot tall man steps out of the shadows and greets her by name.
It’s hard enough for Libby to believe that little folk exist, let alone that they’ll help her farm succeed. Then word of her sightings leaks onto the Internet and pretty soon her property is swarming with strangers who want to see the fairies, too . . .
There’s also a romance. I love books with romances :-)
I wouldn’t want to put anything more out right now. For example, there are some plot twists I hope will be fun for readers. I wouldn’t want to give them away. And how much of a hint is too much? I confess, that’s a question that makes me nervous.
There’s also the matter of my dignity. I am terribly excited about this book. I think it’s good. Hell, some days I think it’s very good. But I thought my last novel was very good, too, until I tried to find an agent for it. Come to find out, it wasn’t nearly the novel I believed it was.
Nothing like real world feedback to open one’s eyes ;-)
So I don’t want to overhype WHEN LIBBY even within the confines of my modest little blog, because even here it’s a long way down from that high horse saddle . . .
Sorry, but corporations can’t “blog”
Via Booksquare comes the news that Penguin has a blog.
Okay. Far be it from me to suggest this is an original thought, although it’s only now I’ve articulated it to myself — I know there’s a whole sub-blogosphere obsessing 24/7 about how to leverage blogs for corporate marcom programs, and no doubt this has already been proposed by someone, somewhere — but here it is, fwiw: it’s kind of embarrassing when a corporation launches a blog.
It’s like watching a person of a certain age ape teenage dress and behavior. You can smell what may be a whiff of fear; you sense you’re being asked to play along, almost as if for pity’s sake, in what is at best an act of uncomfortable self-deception; you know the apparent spontaneity is a sham and that the real motive is a desperate grab for whatever bennies (attention, sex) can be wrung from anyone naive or dull enough to be fooled.
Blogs are too much about personality, and with rare exceptions corporations have to suppress personality in the service of brand. Dave Thomas could have done a blog for Wendy’s, for example. But how many corporations really want their executives to be that closely associated with their public personae?
Not very many.
But oh, what a tempting place the blogosphere is. All that conversation. All those prospective customers . . .
So finally, after chewing its nails for a couple of years, a corporation figures maybe it can have the blog without the personality–it can launch a blog, but just won’t let it be naughty.
Sorry. That’s just co-opting the word “blog” as a cover for launching a different kind of corporate website. A pseudo-informal website.
I do think corporations have to pay attention to blogs. It’s like listening to visitors in your tradeshow booth, or reading letters to the editor in your industry’s trade pubs, or tracking stats in your customer call center.
And maybe someday corporate execs — the generation that is growing up, now, blogging — will be able to blog and have it come across as genuine.
But if some established Fortune 500 corporation were paying me the long dollar to advise them on blogging, I’d say save your money. Use it on other things. There are lots of ways for corporations to reach their customers over the net — chats, podcasts — that convey openness and informality without risking you’ll just look strained & foolish.
(Now, if Penguin’s blog turns out to be readable, it’ll be me that looks the fool. Won’t that be something? LOL)
Okay, so I actually took my clubs out onto the course, yesterday . . .
And utterly humiliated myself. Nine holes, and I think I was on the fairway ONCE the entire time. Unless the tees count. Do the tees count as “being on the fairway”???
I had gotten to the point on the driving range when I could hit fairly long, fairly straight shots, fairly consistently (I took a half hour lesson too, which helped) with my seven iron, at least.
But everything I thought I’d grooved in disappeared when I got out on the course.
*sob*
I hit trees. Several. I hit water (not that that was hard to do that — we got three inches of rain yesterday morning and the course was sopping wet). I scattered the geese grazing in the rough. I chipped over greens, and then chipped back over them the other way. On more than one hole.
I think I’ll stick to the driving range again for awhile . . .
[tags] golf [/tags]
Editors’ noses knowses
POD-DY Mouth sponsored a contest this week: she posted excerpts from 24 novels. Some were from commercially published books; some were from POD books.
The object of the contest was to figure out which was which.
I tried it and got half of them right. Nobody scored more than 80 percent.
But here’s what’s most telling, from her post-contest post:
The statistics are interesting, though–far more on point that I would’ve imagined. Here are the average scores broken down by group:
Average Score, Editors: 63% (19 exams)
Average Score, Agents: 60% (26 exams)
Average Score, Authors: 53% (72 exams)
Average Score, Other: 46% (550 exams +/-)So it turns out editors and agents have a keener eye than I’d guessed. I suppose it makes sense that unpublished works go from author to agent to editor. Looks like we’re not turning the publishing industry on its ear anytime soon.
Yeah. And if you want someone’s advice on whether your WIP is publishable, you’re better off trusting an agent’s rejection letter than a lay person’s high praise.
But we already knew that, didn’t we ;-)
(Btw, POD-DY Mouth doesn’t support permalinks, so if you’ve come across this post after 7/28/06, you’ll need to scroll down to the entry from the 27th to find the post from which I’ve quoted.)
From Renaissance Lit to Neuroscience
Read a review (no longer online, sorry) of The Creative Brain: The Science of Genius by Nancy C. Andreasen. She was a Renaissance Lit professor who went on to study neuroscience. How’s that for a sweet jump?
The book is about the neuroscience of creativity.
The reviewer, Nigel Leary, offers a caveat to the assertions in Andreasen’s book: while they are backed by studies, much research remains to be done. Nonetheless, it seems likely that creativity is marked by its own, unique neural processes, some sort of momentary disorganization — free association — that while “remarkably similar” to “psychotic states of mania, depression, or schizophrenia” yields not misery but scientific and artistic epiphanies.
“A Suitable Boy” by Vikram Seth
I have read Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” twice. The first time, however, was under the direction of an undergraduate Russian literature professor, so it might more accurately be characterized as having been taught “Anna Karenina” ;-)
College was a long time ago. I remember only one snippet of one lecture of that course, when the professor drew our attention to the scene early in the book that depicts the nature of Anna’s intimate relations with her husband — or rather, of his intimate relations with her:
Precisely at twelve o’clock, when Anna was still sitting at her writing table, finishing a letter to Dolly, she heard the sound of measured steps in slippers, and Alexey Alexandrovitch, freshly washed and combed, with a book under his arm, came in to her.
“It’s time, it’s time,” said he, with a meaning smile, and he went into their bedroom.
She’s already met Vronsky at this point, and Tolstoy uses this scene and that immediately preceding it to contrast Anna’s spontaneous and powerful physical attraction to her soon-to-be lover with her growing physical revulsion to her husband:
“And what right had he to look at him like that?” thought Anna, recalling Vronsky’s glance at Alexey Alexandrovitch.
Undressing, she went into the bedroom; but her face had none of the eagerness which, during her stay in Moscow, had fairly flashed from her eyes and her smile; on the contrary, now the fire seemed quenched in her, hidden somewhere far away.
It’s a heart-wrenching situation, to be sure; one can’t help agonizing for the woman, and although I can’t say for certain that my professor intended us to interpret the novel as a romantic tragedy (as per the tagline from the 1997 Warner movie: “In a world of power and privilege, one woman dared to obey her heart”) that’s how I, as a college student, did interpret it.
Then I reread it years later, and to my astonishment, discovered a completely different book.
With “Anna Karenina,” Tolstoy was not arguing that women must obey their hearts; he was showing that when people let their passions drive them, they may find themselves driven to self-destruction. Granted, social convention is the cause, to some extent, of Anna’s growing unhappiness, but the love affair itself becomes a source of torment at the end. Anna gets what she wants, and it solves nothing.
My discovery was pure pleasure, too. Not that there’s anything wrong with women daring to obey their hearts, but what a pleasure to realize that the book’s themes were more complicated than “defy social convention/get yourself punished.”
It was with similar pleasure that I finished “A Suitable Boy.” (Which I discovered, btw, via A Snarkling Reading List commenter.) Again you have, as a central figure, a woman under pressure to conform to restraining social convention (in this case, the custom of arranged marriage). Again, you have a writer who uses his heroine’s predicament as a lens through which to examine the choices of other individuals connected to her through a network of family and their associated social circles. “A Suitable Boy” is also as rich with details about 1950s India as Anna Karenina is with details about 19th century Russia, its path winding freely into contemporary politics and religious ceremonies, through both urban and rural settings.
But where Anna Karenina’s story ends tragically, Lata Mehra’s does not.
When I finished “Anna Karenina” the second time, I remember thinking that such a novel could not be written today. But Seth has written a novel that is very much in the same league, and which deserves the praise its earned. It’s a big book, but a book that merits, for the most part, its 1400-page length. I highly recommend it.
More long tail tales
While some journalists are busy lamenting the horrors of the Internet economy’s “long tail” effect on the arts, Lee Gomes, technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal, asked today if Anderson’s data really adds up.
The article is online here (subscription required).
Anderson responds here.
I find Anderson’s refutations of the column plausible. It will be interesting to see if Gomes takes up the subject again.
My dog in the fight, of course, is the fate of writers who have the chops to please a sizeable readership, but for whatever reason fail to hit a bestseller list. Solid midlisters have done okay, income-wise, in the past. Will that be true in the future?
Hopefully, someday, someone will tackle that issue without succumbing to the “end of the good ol’ days” hand-wringing that has characterized the attempts so far.
