Jodi Picoult's Issues

Whatever you think about "issues" fiction, here's an interesting interview with Jodi Picoult.

-- Miriam

No e-books for you

Kindle fever aside, some authors just don't want their books published electronically. Here's an interesting wrap-up of some of the more notable hold-outs.

-Jim

What makes publishing folk laugh

In this week's PW, publisher Jon Karp wrote a great piece about the 12 things publishing needs to work on. It's definitely worth reading, and though it's funny at times, much of the advice is right on.

Even funnier, Dan Menaker's response, which I found through the HarperStudio blog. Yes, dear readers, these are the sort of things that amuse us.

- Michael

Help!

So The New Yorker has posted a contest to identify some book covers from pretty small details. This week's is a lot harder than last week's, and we're a bit shorthanded around here today. Miriam and I are way too impatient to wait for the answers to be revealed, and we've only got 2 & 4 down. Head over there, check 'em out--if you think you know them, by all means enter to win--and then come back here and put us out of our misery!

-Lauren


UPDATE: You guys are awesome. We knew we could count on you!

Taking the plunge

The timing will probably seem odd, what with #AmazonFail and all, but I've taken the plunge and ordered a Kindle 2. I managed to not order one on the day of the announcement(impressive self-control on my part, really). I didn't order one right after I got to play with the samples that the Kindle team brought to our office. But, events in my life conspired to convince me that now is the time. It arrives on Friday, and I have a feeling I'll spend more on books this weekend than I have in the past 6 months. I'll let you know.

Speaking of #AmazonFail, I think I'm the only one who didn't see it as some vast conspiracy to rid the world of gay literature. Amazon likes making money, and it seemed to me that flagging all gay-related books as "adult" and unrankable was a quick way to lose money. Maybe I'm naive, but the whole situation seemed more like a "glitch" (though that's rather dismissive) than a purge.

Also, can we stop using "Fail?" It drives me nuts!

- Michael

Jessica Papin on "Nostalgia"

A few evenings ago I was talking with an editor who described, quite beautifully, the plot of a novel that he had recently acquired. In doing so, he used the word "reify," which is a wonderful word, but one that seldom shows up in flap copy--usual suspects being adjectives like "luminous," "compelling," "masterful," etc. I said as much, and he laughed good-naturedly, and said that as an assistant (at a venerable and highly serious house, mind you) a marketing director had nixed his use of the adjective "Swiftian" in a book description. I could relate. My first week of work as an editorial assistant, I marveled at the erudition of the editors around me who described the project under discussion, a proposal for a book on meditation, as "very much in the vein of Thomas More." Impressive. In the meeting minutes, which I was taking, I carefully noted the comparison title was the political tract Utopia by the sixteenth century English saint/statesman, which (fortuitously!) I had had to read in service of a survey course. And not, however, Care of the Soul, the New York Times bestseller published a year or so earlier by super-successful spirituality author Thomas Moore. This entry on the widely-circulated minutes earned me some funny looks from my colleagues, plus a gentle but firm recommendation from my boss that I should start updating my comp title frame of reference. Fast.

This was, in fact, not the only moment in which I suspected I might be ill-served by my alternate life as a graduate student in literature. When I had first interviewed for the position assisting an editor who managed the women’s fiction list, I had earnestly expounded on my favorite feminist writers; I cited a veritable Norton anthology of names, which grew longer and more frantic as I noted the editor’s increasingly bemused expression. When she explained that the kind of women’s fiction she was talking about was mostly romance and romantic suspense, I believe I may have mumbled something about reading Gone with the Wind, but probably retreated into stricken silence. How it was that she hired me, I’m not sure. In any case, working in women’s fiction was as good a starting point as any to discover that the business of acquiring books and the business of studying them, did not, apparently, have much to do with one another. As it became obvious that what I had thought would be a felicitous overlap in interdependent fields were in fact two divergent career paths, I took a semester off from the doctoral program, cast my lot with Thomas Moore, and never looked back. Until, that is, the other evening when the editor with whom I was talking used the word "reify."

Whenever I run across it, in a reaction either Proustian or Pavlovian, I am instantly transported back to the days when, as a distraction from wrestling with the works of theorists whose books appeared to be in English but were not, I kept a running list of words that seldom occur outside of graduate school. My favorite was "reify," but others included "problematic" when used as a noun, or "problemetize" (a verb); "vexed" (usually describing an idea), e.g."The narrative is a vexed one…" foreground" but only as a verb, as in "I’d like to foreground the problematic…"and "fraught" but only when unaccompanied by "with," as in "The text is fraught."

Proust had his madeleine cakes and I have my grad-school word list. I wonder if anyone else out there has such nostalgic associations with particular words–if so, I’d love to hear them.

Speaking of nostalgia, I just read Joanna Smith Rakoff’s wonderful debut novel, A Fortunate Age. The book, published by Scribner, is an updating of and homage to Mary McCathy’s The Group, set against the rise and resounding "pop" of the dot com bubble in New York–an era when 24-year-old new media millionaires were poster children for an economy freed from antiquated, mellow-harshing rules, and Williamsburg Brooklyn was the locus of a self-conscious hipsterism and attendant abuse of trucker hats. She captures a time and place I remember well with dead-on accuracy. I’m curious to know if folks reading this have their own nominees for books that capture the zeitgeist of a particular time and place.

Newsbooks

Teleread had an item yesterday about Digital Newsbooks, newspapers' multi-part series conveniently repackaged as ebooks for $4.95. It's an interesting idea, and I'm curious to see if they're able to make money. I know I've gone back and read these sorts of series after they ended, and if they were convenient and easy to access, I know I might be willing to pay a fee for them. Newspapers are eager for new ways to make money, and if this allows them to continue or increase their investigative journalism, I'm all for it. And, a successful newsbook could be a signal that a longer, book-length treatment would have an audience. I'll be keeping my eye on this.

-Michael

Author photos

Let’s be honest: People isn’t the only magazine more likely to review someone’s book if they think the author is attractive.



Do you have to be “attractive” for someone to buy your book? No. Will you get more media attention for your book if you’re traditionally good looking? Possible.



My take is this: if you’re attractive, it can help your chances. If you’re unattractive, it can’t hurt. I’ve never picked up a book and thought, “Yikes! Not gonna read a book by that!” I honestly don’t think author photos make anyone buy or not buy a book in the bookstore. At most, it’s the very last thing that tips a buyer into the “yes” or “no” column.



So for all you gorgeous souls out there, there’s one more reason to thank genetics. The rest of us will carry on depending on our supreme intellect and prodigious talent.

-Jim

The Tournament of Books selects a winner

I let you know when it started, and I'm here to let you know that it ended. The Tournament of Books over at The Morning News has selected its winner, and for the second time in its five years, they picked a novel I loved--one of the only books I've re-read in recent years (well...re-read for pleasure) and that has only increased in my estimation as more time has passed.

But as the tournament itself and the comments on it have shown--what's great about a contest like this isn't the naming of an ultimate winner, it's getting passionate readers engaged about the books they love. There was a fascinating dialogue throughout both for and against books I loved and hated. And what's more fun than that?

--Jim

Mark Rudd on Mark Rudd: The Proust questionnaire

Mark Rudd is the author of the memoir UNDERGROUND: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen, out now. Here he confronts the Proust questionnaire.

--What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
The isolation and fear of the racist; the despair of the murderer or soldier; the egotism and weariness of the politician on the campaign trail; the prisoner in his cell.

--What is your idea of earthly happiness?
It has something to do with chicharrones.

--Who are your favorite heroes of fiction?
Alexander Portnoy; Raskolnikov; the White Whale

--Who are your favorite characters in history?
V.I. Lenin, Ella Baker, George Burns and Gracie Allen

--Your favorite painter?
Breughel, Goya.

--Your favorite musician?
Vladimir Horowitz playing Stars and Stripes Forever in Moscow; Jimi Hendrix playing blues.

--Who would you have liked to be?
Richard Pryor

Twitterlog?

Countryman Press is running an interesting experiment. They've posted their catalog on Twitter before releasing it in any other form, one book a tweet. Without links, I don't think it's that useful, but it's certainly garnered them a bunch of attention. With e-catalogs seemingly the future of things, an integration with other social media would make sense.

- Michael

Publishing Flashback

From MobyLives via Galleycat comes this link to a 1987 New York Times article on the future of publishing in an age of conglomeration. Fascinating look back at how we got where we are--for better or worse--particularly for someone like me whose only ties to publishing in 1987 came from bedtime stories and the classroom library.


-Lauren

Why I Love My Job by Jane Dystel

Actually for the last over twenty years, my “job” hasn’t been a job at all. Before I became an agent, I was an editorial assistant, a managing editor, an editor and then a publisher. All of those positions were jobs – work, sometimes enjoyable, sometimes not.

Then in 1986, I bit the bullet so to speak, took a huge pay cut and a huger risk and joined a small but successful agency where I learned the ropes from a master. I was once again able to work with creative people who were putting together book proposals and writing novels. I learned how to negotiate contracts from the seller’s side and how to map out a strategy for a writer’s career; I was able to attend writers conferences and find new talent that way. And I met an entirely new group of people – writers and editors, most of them wonderful, honest, and full of creative and exciting ideas.

Now, I have been living life as an agent in my own company for a long time and loving (almost) every minute of it.

Sure there are the heartbreaks: losing an unhappy author, after we have put in years of hard work on their behalf because s/he blames us for his/her lack of success; failing to sell a book you love; watching publishers make wrongheaded decisions that affect your clients and colleagues… But those instances, fortunately for us, are few and far between.

I love meeting with our staff in the morning and trying to help them deal with their frustrations and issues; I also love celebrating their successes. I love discussing various negotiating strategies with our senior management. I love reading an article that I think might become a book, contacting the writer and seeing that idea develop that I can then sell to a publisher. I love the serendipity of sending out a proposal and though I am usually fairly sure of whether it will sell, often I am surprised at the way it sells, to whom and for how much. That surprise is great fun – (almost) all the time.

I love meeting with editors and finding out what they are interested in and going out and developing ideas for them. I love meeting new writers – ones already published but new to me like our dear David Morrell – or first timers whose careers we are helping to launch – like Chris Campion or Dwayne Betts.

And finally, I absolutely love seeing that final book and the thrill of the author as he or she holds it in his or her hand. Just the other night, Mark Rudd whom I have known and worked with since the mid ‘80s celebrated the publication of UNDERGROUND and I was able to see his joy and feel the thrill of being a part of this achievement.

Even in this very challenging publishing climate I am not dissuaded from feeling positive most days. We are helping the creators and no matter what form their work is published in, we will continue to be part of that process.

Yes, I love my “job.” Being an agent is one of the most fulfilling things I have ever done (next to being a wife and a mother, of course).

Story Collections v. Novels

Taylor Antrim's piece for the Daily Beast tells us short story collections are big this year, defying conventional wisdom cited by naysaying agents and publishers when trying to persuade an author to write a novel instead. Thing is, story collections will continue to be published and some will do quite well. But the commercial successes are few and far between and still a dicey proposition for authors trying to get their foot in the door and the agents and publishers who want to help them.

-- Miriam

Chris Campion meet Proust

The latest person to answer our mini-Proust questionnaire is author Chris Campion whose memoir ESCAPE FROM BELLEVUE came out this week.

· What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
Being faithless.

· What is your idea of earthly happiness?
As the lead singer of a band I’d have to say leading a room full of people in a mirthful group sing-a-long. There is no earthly currency quite like the smiles on their drunken faces. It’s pure joy.

· Who are your favorite heroes of fiction?
Ignatius J. Reilly, Holden Caulfield, Tom Joad, Dean Moriarty.

· Who are your favorite characters in history?
Jesus Christ, Thomas Paine, Abraham Lincoln, St. Francis of Assisi

· Your favorite painter?
My Mom. Patricia Campion.

· Your favorite musician?
Robert Pollard (lead singer of Guided By Voices)

· Who would you have liked to be?
Joe Namath