My friend says you can't do that

Now and then a faculty member will come to one of the summer scholarly book publishing groups with a nervous message for me. It often goes something like this: "I told my friend what you told me about querying university press editors while you're working on a book, and she said you can't do that, because if they ask for the whole manuscript and the book isn't finished, they'll be pissed."

I hope these faculty members forgive me when I laugh before I answer. Hmmm, you can't do that? Or "they" will feel a particular way? Like Dick Van Dyke said in the old 1960s TV show, I want to ask "Who's this they?"

In reality, querying editors while you are working on a scholarly book can be a powerful way to gauge interest early without committing to one press, and also of getting helpful feedback. I originally got the idea from speaking to university press editors themselves. Two key lines will help you as you do this. I like to say "This is an inquiry only, not yet a full submission," and "I anticipate completing the manuscript by x date," so that nobody accidentally imagines that it is sitting on your desk ready to go.

By the way, scholars, the trade press world snickers when they hear that we have been taught to completely write our books before submitting them. That's a little like designing a suit without knowing what show it is going to be in. Most university press editors are more proud of their publishing lists than they are of their own children, and even though your work is uniquely you, it also has to work on one of those lists. It will be shown as part of a set, not as a one-off.

Also, the editors I have met tend to be intelligent, collaborative, and brimming with good ideas about what might make books work and why. They've been through this a time or two, so why not give some of them the opportunity to communicate early? You just might end up with a deal before you finish your book, and wouldn't that be a comforting way to spend the last months of your writing?


Stack o' books above is the work of Czech artist Matej Krén, whose terrific work using books as a medium can be gawked at here.

Scholars on crime

Crime is always an interesting topic. Crime in the summertime is nearly irresistible. Amid the fleet of scholarly books underway right now, crime studies are the pirate vessels...

Dr. William F. McDonald has a new book, Immigration, Crime and Justice, part of Emerald Book's Sociology of Law and Deviance series. Whoo-hoo! Here's a description: "Driving the white-hot arguments over immigration are myths, fears and political correctness. As the US Congress prepares to take another shot at comprehensive immigration reform, you will want to know the many unexpected and vexing facts about this complex topic. William F. McDonald’s Immigration, Crime and Justice tells the whole story: immigration reduces crime; immigrants are victimized in numerous ways; local police disagree as to what role they should play; laws and policies intended to better manage the immigration phenomenon have unintended negative consequences; open borders policy is seen as the answer by some.

The only readers for whom this book is not relevant are those who have no ancestors who were immigrants in the past."

Given that all of my ancestors on one side came from the Italian town of Calabritto, in the hills near Naples, I can relate.

Image from Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, upcoming in July.

Brian Tracy on How to Write a Book

Every now and then I need a fresh hit of Brian Tracy. He's an old-school motivational speaker, and I've learned so much from his materials. We have somewhat different perspectives (he's far more ambition-oriented, and I am currently gleaning much from the more contemplative, "little way" path), but if you feel that you need to get moving, Brian Tracy can do it. Here's a link to his audio on how he has written books that have sold over 50 million copies.

Back from the AAUP

AAUP can stand for two things in academic circles: the American Association of University Professors, and the Association of American University Presses. I have been invited to speak at both over the years, which makes it doubly confusing. But it was university presses that had my undivided attention this weekend as I joined three bookish colleagues on a panel, "From Book Labs to Publishing Liaisons: University-Based Programs for Authors.”

My buddies were moderator Amy Benson Brown, Director of the Manuscript Development Program at Emory University, whose genius was behind the panel in the first place; Rebecca Sestili, the Author-Publisher Liaison from the University of Michigan; and Steven Feldman, Book Publications Officer, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. We bonded the night before over a Chinese dinner in Philadelphia, and then Saturday morning we enjoyed a lively event with about 35 attendees (pretty much a full room).

The biggest things we learned from one another are that many faculty publishing concerns are universal:

* Weird writing issues that crop up when the job is on the line? Check.
* Faculty nervous around most university press editors? Check.
* Confusion over publishing requirements, industry standards and more? Double-check.

It was a great weekend, and I plan to attend the full conference in Salt Lake City next year, along with the rest of the panel.

A week at Collegium Colloquy

The blog has been quiet while I spent a week in Collegeville, Minnesota at Collegium Colloquy, created by Dr. Tom Landy as a way for faculty and staff from Catholic universities to discuss faith and intellectual life. One need not be Catholic to attend, and in fact he always encourages more participation from non-Catholics, including nonbelievers. The point isn't to look at things a certain way, but to gather fresh perspectives on whether and how there is something unique and worth preserving in Catholic higher education that may be lost over time as fewer people choose to join the religious orders that founded these campuses long ago. Does it matter that the orders such as Jesuits, Benedictines, Franciscans, Salesians, and other groups are shrinking? Can lay people -- both those who share the faith of the founders and those who do not -- take up the slack, and more important should they? Is this even reasonable to ask of any faculty member, ever? Some say yes, others no, and the debate was engaging and smart. I had a great week.

Of course, writing can and should be part of this as a way of collecting and crystallizing ideas that groups like Collegium generate. But another interesting point about writing came out of Collegium, and that's the model of Collegium itself. There is a way to think about our books as potential beneficiaries of Collegium-type thinking. What if, for example, when undertaking something enormous such as a volume dedicated to the life and career of a major author, it were normal to gather a group of scholars and collectively consider some of the important aspects of the project? This kind of "brain trust" thinking is antithetical to the lone-wolf scholar approach, but that's part of why I love it. Collegium reminds us that there can be great wisdom in a collection of like minds. Although I'm not crazy about committees per se, this isn't committeethink, but rather a way to percolate ideas without having to all agree on the outcome.

Above: A group of great minds on our way to dinner in Minneapolis. Your book blogger is at the far left.

I almost forgot to mention the book

In the post below, Menand's article focuses on The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Harvard UP 2009) by Mark McGurl, associate professor of English at UCLA.

Quote about workshops that hits home

People who know me and my rants know that while I love writer's groups, I loathe "workshops," specifically those squads of usually unpublished fiction writers or poets who get together to comment on each other's art. A writers' group can be a wonderfully productive, supportive, collaborative enterprise. But Workshop in the way it has come to be defined in MFA programs and the creative writing side of English majors can be unnecessarily brutal, and more often than not just plain wrong. It can help to have a successful, published author guide you in your writing. It does not help to have a wannabe who has never published a word eviscerate you in front of your peers.

Louis Menand of The New Yorker said this better than I could when he wrote the opening paragraph of his article about such matters this week: Creative-writing programs are designed on the theory that students who have never published a poem can teach other students who have never published a poem how to write a publishable poem. The fruit of the theory is the writing workshop, a combination of ritual scarring and twelve-on-one group therapy where aspiring writers offer their views of the efforts of other aspiring writers.

Amen, and I breathed a sigh of appreciation at his understanding when I read it: "He gets it." Menand has published some wonderful books, including with publishers I love such as Oxford and FSG, yet I can hear in his words a yelp of pain that surely he received from a remembered blow in one of these courses somewhere, sometime. Either that or I'm imagining things (that never happens).

Meanwhile, the summer book groups proceed apace. We meet, we challenge one another, we offer support and goals and accountability. But we never, ever tear into each other, not even in the name of "constructive criticism." There is a place for such things, but in private, and only from someone who has published and who is offering genuine, caring guidance.

Photo of Louis Menand from the Harvard website. He even looks like someone who would understand. A-men.

A Booklab Baby

Charlene Brown-McKenzie, who is the Director of the Meyers Institute for College Preparation at Georgetown, and her husband Alton had another baby. Maybe we should start a tradition of posting pictures of Booklab Babies (Charlene doesn't work at Booklab, but Carole sometimes teaches summer school writing for Charlene's program, and she has tutored on Saturdays during the school year).

Say hello to big brother Micah McKenzie holding new baby Gabriella Rose.

Do you have to write your book ALL by yourself?

The headline is not rhetorical, it's a serious question. Who says you have to do every bit of your book all alone? Participants in the summer publishing groups (six groups! forty faculty members!) are gasping with joy and relief when they learn that it's perfectly fine to assign portions of their books to graduate students we have identified who are eager to help with publishing projects. One professor has hired a grad student to do all of her translations. Another has asked a student to take all of his data and findings and write snappy, accurate prose captions for each of the charts (38 in all -- and a lot of work!). Still another has a grad student double-checking all of her citations and making sure they are in Chicago style. The grad students love this because it's rewarding summer work, there's some pay involved (usually an honorarium), and they are adding actual books to their CVs so that they can hit this bleak job market with experience in addition to the coursework. Book experience is vital for any student who wants to go into publishing, so these are desirable jobs. And of course, every grad student gets a mention by name in the books' acknowledgments.

I worked on three published books during graduate school, and even though only one book offered any pay at all, I made valuable contacts including editors at the W. Alton Jones Foundation; Yale University Press; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; and Ballantine Books. One of those editors went on to become my editor for two books, both with FSG. So if you're a faculty member worrying that you are somehow "exploiting" grad students by enlisting them on your book, think again. You need each other.

Amusing ant image from http://www.strate.co.za/Strate/AboutUs/Strate+DNA/

Booklab seeks experts

One of the wonderful benefits of operating from a university campus is having an entire faculty of experts to help this office guide authors to book publication. When authors from outside Georgetown hires us, they aren't just hiring me and my staff. They also get a consultation with an internationally recognized expert in their subject area. This usually means that the expert reads either the manuscript or the materials that exist in lieu of one (such as a proposal, sample chapters, or notes), considering the professional opportunities and possible publishing trajectory for such an author (articles first? more studies? time to pitch this as a book?), and meeting with the author for one hour to discuss all of this. A follow-up editorial letter memorializes your work together and helps the author think about next steps.

If you are a faculty member who would like to guide authors in your area of expertise, please contact Carole to discuss what's involved.

James J. O'Donnell on the BBC

Listen to more about The Ruin of the Roman Empire, plus Jim O'Donnell's "Sixty Second Idea," a moment about 18 minutes in when host Bridget Kendall asks him to change the world in just one radio minute, all on "The Forum," a program from the BBC World Service.

NEW June 5, he also has a forum on "The Reality Club," from Edge.org, responding to The Impending Demise of the University.

The Tribble With Translations

An article posted on the New Directions Poetry blog shows just how maddeningly subjective and imprecise translations can be, especially of poetry but certainly of any text.

Literary agent Matthew Carnicelli on May 20

Next week we welcome literary agent Matthew Carnicelli of Trident Media on Wednesday, May 20 to discuss how academics can think about writing their books for larger audiences. He began his publishing career as an editor at Dutton, where he worked with such authors as Vice President Al Gore, Martin Duberman, Judith Warner, Jane Mayer, Cornel West, and many others. From Dutton, he held senior editorial positions at Contemporary Books and McGraw-Hill, and worked with such authors as John Wooden, Victoria Moran, Roland Lazenby, Picabo Street, and Robert Kurson. He has a broad list of authors writing in history and biography, current events and politics, business, science, fiction and memoir, sports, science, and health.

Where? Leavey Program Room (across from the bookstore in the Leavey Center)
When? Wednesday, May 20, 10 - 11 a.m.
What? Talk plus Q&A
Who? Open to faculty, staff and graduate students, and coffee and snacks will be served.

Another summer, another clear pattern about publishing

This summer's book publishing groups are shaping up; about 40 faculty members have asked to be teamed up with others working on similar projects. The excitement is infectious, and I can't wait for the first groups to meet next week.

However, a clear pattern is re-emerging, one that I've seen before. The people who want to be put in groups tend in general to already be published. We have some first-time book authors, but most people who are asking for help now have already made some progress in the publishing world.

So where are the beginners? Right where they've always been since I established this office in 2006... hiding in their offices, lingering under the toxic misconception that writing a book is supposed to be solitary work. It doesn't help when those ghastly, finger-wagging "How to write" authors snark about how writing is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration, or that it's all about applying butt to chair. That kind of advice (a) produces guilt; and (b) just isn't true. Most of the well-published authors I know are collaborative, collegial, and willing to take advantage of every opportunity to learn from others. They are the spiritual opposite of the writer stereotype: the scrivener in the garret subsisting on stale cheese.

So if you're working all alone this summer and feeling isolated and pressured, why not come out of hiding and join us? We have cookies. We have inspiration. We have contacts in the academic publishing world. And best of all . . .

**We have each other.**


Art above from Dorothy Frankel sculpture.

Creativity is a product

Herewith a wonderful quote from visual artist Joanna E. Ziegler, the Edward A. O’Rorke Professor in the Liberal Arts at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts: Although young people like to believe creativity is a possession -- either you have it or you don't -- creativity actually is a product, built on a foundation of practice. The very essence of practice is habit and daily routine.

From chapter 3: "Practice Makes Reception: The Role of Contemplative Ritual in Approaching Art," in As Leaven in the World: Catholic Perspectives on Faith, Vocation and the Intellectual Life, edited by Thomas M. Landy.

Karp confirms what has long been true

The #1 author fantasy I work with in this office says marketing and publicity are the publisher's job, and writing is the author's job. In fact, marketing and publicity have always been author jobs, and the bestseller list is often a reflection of authors who were willing to take those jobs seriously. There are exceptions to this, such as reclusive authors who sell in the stratosphere, but for the most part books do better when authors promote them.

Here's what Jonathan Karp, editor-in-chief and founder of Twelve, says in the April 20 Publisher's Weekly about the matter. He offers twelve recommendations for improving the publishing industry, and with tongue in cheek at the beginning of #8 he says this: We all know that one of the big functions of today's in-house marketing professional is to explain why the publisher can't afford to do much marketing. So who has the money? Authors, from the advances we pay them. Publishers should contractually require that a part of the advance be allocated to marketing and promotional efforts supervised by the author. Publishers, of course, must also do their important marketing work. But authors usually write the best promotional copy (they're writers, after all), and they certainly know their readership best. Yet they are underutilized in the publishing process. Empower them. (Emphasis added)

There are so many things right about this statement that I hardly know where to begin. First, Booklab's recommended proposal model has always included the promise from the author to allocate a portion of the advance to promotion. Second, an author is always the best writer of her/his promotional copy, even if it gets edited in the publicity office. It fascinates me that authors think an underpaid marketing person with a stack of 50 books to promote will somehow write better things about a book than the author will. Some authors are wonderful about this. Others grumble and ask what "their" publicist is for.

One interesting thing to note about excellent book proposals is that much of the copy makes its way to the book jacket eventually. I encourage authors to think this way and write for posterity. You never know when the same copy you wrote to lure an editor to your cause winds up being exactly what a reader in a bookstore encounters, leading to a decision to buy your book.

Academic authors rarely see advances for their work (although some of Georgetown's scholarly authors do enjoy advances -- even large ones!), but even in unpaid instances it makes sense for the author to partner with the publicist and do a lot of work for a book, beginning about six months before it appears. Make an appointment if you'd like to discuss proven strategies for this in more detail.

Summer is busy season at Booklab

I'm laughing at having received yet a third e-mail from faculty members who say "Now that things are slowing down you should have time to look at this," as they attach 30 or so pages of text. When everything slows down around the university, Booklab speeds up, simply because all the faculty use the same blocks of teaching down time to focus on books and articles. Thirty people have contacted me since Thursday, and more will surely come as we finish finals (today) and get through graduation.

"Busy season" is May-August and December, with slight spikes at Fall Break, Thanksgiving, and Spring Break. The quietest two months around here are September and January.

By the way, the response to summer book groups was wonderful, and twenty-six faculty members said they would like to be in groups. I will spend the next week sorting people by the nature of the books being worked on, and also by the publishing experience of the authors in the group (keeping the first-timers in their own group, and letting those with more experience stay together). Some would say that it makes sense to put seasoned faculty with beginners, but I find that it just annoys one group while intimidating another. ;-)

Georgetown Faculty -- Finish writing your scholarly book by August 15

Georgetown's Office of Scholarly and Literary Publications, part of the Office of the Provost, announces new summer manuscript finishing groups. You'll be matched with a maximum of four colleagues from other departments facing similar literary challenges. In weekly meetings you'll enjoy a firm schedule, ambitious goals and deadlines, and the ability to share and discuss scholarly publishing resources and read one another's work. Organizational principles are based on the Franklin/Covey FOCUS program, the research of psychologist Paul Silvia, and Booklab's hands-on experience for the past three years with how and why faculty finish scholarly books in successful and even award-winning ways.

This tested process works for any book -- even older, abandoned projects. Every accepted participant will end the summer with a complete manuscript.

Please contact the Director, Dr. Carole Sargent, for more information and an application. The first groups will begin the week of May 18.

Oh, baby!

Now this is the best way to greet Monday morning, ever. BabyCakes bakery in New York celebrates the publication of its new cookbook with a two-minute party!


BabyCakes, the Book of Recipes: It's Here (Almost)! from BabyCakes NYC on Vimeo.

Stop, yer makin' me HUNGRY!


News about the videos from Publisher's Weekly.

Marilynne Robinson is shortlisted for the Orange Prize

Recently I wrote here about seeing Paul Elie and Marilynne Robinson at Georgetown in a wonderful, intimate, smart Q&A that felt like such a privilege. Now Marilynne Robinson's novel Home has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize.

Sometimes even Pulitzer winners are forgotten

Abe Books has an engaging feature today on its top-10 forgotten Pulitzer Prize-winning books. All of them were new to me save one -- I had definitely heard of Advise and Consent, and it was a surprise to find it out-of-print. None of the authors was familiar to me.

Katie Benton-Cohen gets a starred review in Library Journal!

In a riveting display of first-rate scholarship, Benton-Cohen (history, Georgetown Univ.) shows how entangled ideas of race and nation shifted as conditions changed in the place that became Arizona's 6000-square-mile Cochise County. She traces tumultuous interactions among Indians, Mexicans, Europeans, a smattering of Chinese, and a few blacks who grappled to civilize the land, one another, and themselves in the territory acquired from Mexico in the 1853 Gadsden Purchase. To solidify their grasp, Benton-Cohen explains, the increasingly dominant groups used an ideology of a self-constructed Americanness that combined antilabor, industrial capitalism with white supremacy to define the place and its peoples. Her complex story of community creation and cleaving details the hardening of race as a community divider and determiner of the status and norms of class, family, and gender. She unmasks many fictions in the invented political economy touted in the imagined identity of "white Americans." Telling more than local or regional stories, this is essential for all those deeply concerned with U.S. history, race relations, and society.-Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe.

********************

Publisher's Weekly loves it, too: In 2005, a, rancher and newspaper editor named Chris Simcox set out to maintain the border between the southwestern states and Mexico. He and his Minutemen Civil Defense Corps, dedicated to reporting undocumented migrants crossing into the U.S., were merely the latest in a lineage of self-appointed patriots patrolling the border. Nearly 100 years earlier, Harry Wheeler, an Arizona sheriff, stormed through Cochise County asking illegal residents, “Are you an American, or are you not?” before rounding them up in the Bisbee Deportation. At the turn of the last century, Cochise County represented the “New America” that emerged from the nation's incorporation of northwestern Mexico, the immigration of Europeans to work as miners and the passage of constitutional amendments loosening the racial strictures around citizenship. Benton-Cohen uses the backdrop of the Wild West, with its bustling commerce and growing population, to wage a discussion on racial division and the power of “white privilege”—even where the black-white dichotomy didn't necessarily exist—in this richly detailed anthropological look into the creation of racial boundaries and their application in present-day immigration reform debates. (May)

Open questions about the author-editor relationship

I read a New York Times article about a new collection of stories today, and one of the anecdotes somewhat alarmed me. Now the question is whether the anecdote is balanced and accurate. The author Wells Tower has just published a book. Here are the paragraphs in Eric Konigsberg's piece about it that gave me pause:

The book is a lot of things, in other words, but, given the subject matter of the stories, which range from marital infidelity to a boy’s mistreatment at the hands of his stepfather to the dismemberment of a moose to Viking mutilation, you would not expect anybody to call it cute. Yet when Mr. Tower submitted the finished manuscript to Courtney Hodell, his editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, the words “too adorable” were among those she wrote most frequently in the margins. And she didn’t mean it as a compliment.

“Initially, there was a lot more corn-pone-ing and self-consciously vernacular language, cute little moments,” Mr. Tower said in an interview the other day, adding that he reined all that in upon revision. “So I actually didn’t sit down to write a bleak collection. When I look back at the early stories, it seemed much more like a ‘Hee Haw’ episode.”

So now (again, if this story is accurate), because an editor apparently thought it best, an author's voice has been irrevocably changed? Is this an editor's job?

So often "self-consciously vernacular language" and those "too adorable" moments are the very aspects that make a collection worth reading. Is the bleak vision of an editor in New York appropriate to paint onto the more humorous one of an author from Chapel Hill, North Carolina?

I encourage responses on this, especially from the parties involved. What really happened? And how does the author feel about his art being changed in this way? How does the editor feel? Is this necessary? Is this right?

Brilliant series from Duke University Press!

You must watch this video if you want to publish with a university press! It's a genius idea, and I'll post all of the installments. This is Duke University Press's Editorial Director, Ken Wissoker, explaining how it works at Duke:

I love this book about academic writing

My "best book lately" award goes to the mercifully short and delightfully witty How to Write a Lot by Dr. Paul J. Silvia. This is not The Artist's Way. It is not therapy. It is not sensitive. It is a smart and usable guide for producing voluminous reams of scholarly writing without resorting to blather and jargon. Dr. Silvia has more sense than a dozen other would-be how-to-write authors, and he's funny, too. Here's a quote:

Always write during your scheduled time, but don't be dogmatic about writing only within this time. It's great if you keep writing after the period is over or if you do some writing on a nonwriting day -- I call this windfall writing. Once you harness the terrible power of habit, it'll be easier for you to sit down and write. Beware, however, of the temptation to usurp your writing schedule with windfall writing. It doesn't matter how much you wrote over spring break -- you committed to your scheduled time, and you're going to stick to it. If you find yourself saying absurdities like "I wrote a lot over the weekend, so I'll skip my scheduled period on Monday," this book can help: Close it, hold it between the thumb and index finger of your nondominant hand, and wave it menacingly in front of your face.

I'm laughing sooo hard at this, but perhaps to wring the true humor from this graf you have to be a veteran of a zillion how-to-write books that advise writing with the nondominant hand, writing with a blindfold, etc. Those things can help (I'm not a complete scoffer), but Dr. Silvia can help more.

NB: He writes for psychologists, with the attendant emphasis on journal publishing. This isn't so much about books, although he has smart things to say about them. You'll need to adapt his advice to suit your own situation unless you're in the sciences, but this is still an amazing book. Buy it, read it, tell your academic friends.

J. Peterman sells an important book, sorta

J. Peterman offers the Bound Book of the Internet.

I remember the good old days when the internet was slow. When it took hours to download a document and minutes to refresh a webpage. That was a tolerable rate of growth.

Maybe you're like me. Thirsty for knowledge but you drink a little slower to savor the flavor.

So like a clonk on the head, the Internet book was born.

Thanks to @NewDirections for tweeting this.

Marilynne Robinson and Paul Elie

This upcoming event for the Georgetown University literary community looks wonderful. Paul Elie is the author of one of my favorite books, ever, The Life You Save May Be Your Own. A friend bought it for me after I said that I had (briefly) met him. I loved his intertwined history of four major Catholic writers of the mid-20th century: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy. He is also an editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, where I published two books. When we met at Georgetown, I was too shy to say much more than "Roger Straus met my poodle," which was true -- but it was also true that the FSG founder made a fuss over the dog as he did over many, yet he wouldn't have known me from Eve.

My relationship with Marilynne Robinson's art is more complicated. I've never met her, but one of my literary students who became a good friend gave me her 1981 novel Housekeeping two years ago, saying it was one of the best things he had ever read. I didn't read it right away because I was so busy, although he kept urging and asking if I'd gotten to it yet. Later that summer he perished as a passenger in a small plane accident -- he still lies buried within the fuselage under many feet of water, and the wreckage has not been found, although they know approximately where it is. In my sadness I picked up the novel to read it, and I was stunned when it opened with a similar accident, and continued that imagery throughout the novel: "The train, which was black and sleek and elegant, and was called the Fireball, had pulled more than halfway across the bridge when the engine nosed over toward the lake and then the rest of the train slid it into the water like a weasel sliding off a rock" (6). I never believed in premonitory visions -- even though I wrote a dissertation about dreams in 18th-century fiction -- until then. Now I don't know what to believe, but I do want to know more about the author.

Here's an excerpt from the Georgetown invitation:

The Resurrection of the Ordinary: A Conversation with

Marilynne Robinson
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author of "Gilead" and "Home"
&
Paul Elie
Author of "The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage"
Monday, April 6
2:00 p.m. - Riggs Library
(Reception immediately following)

Marilynne Robinson went to Brown University, graduating in 1966; she then enrolled in the graduate program in English at the University of Washington, where she started writing her first novel, Housekeeping (1981), which tells the story of two girls growing up in rural Idaho in the mid-1900s and is regarded by many as an American classic; it received the PEN/Hemingway award for best first novel and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. After the publication of Housekeeping, Robinson began writing essays and book reviews for Harper’s, Paris Review, and The New York Times Book Review. She also served as writer-in-residence and visiting professor at numerous colleges and universities, including the University of Kent in England, Amherst College, and the University of Massachusetts. Her second book, Mother Country: Britain, The Welfare State and Nuclear Pollution (1988), revealed the extensive environmental damage caused by the nuclear reprocessing plant at Sellafield, in the north of England; the book evolved from an essay that she wrote for Harper's Review and was a finalist for the National Book Award. A decade later, Robinson published a collection of essays entitled The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. Gilead, her second novel, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in November 2004, is an intimate tale of fathers and sons and the spiritual battles they face. The work won universal acclaim from critics and the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her most-recent book, Home, published in 2008 - a companion piece to Gilead - is an elegant variation on the parable of the prodigal son's return.

Paul Elie, Senior Editor with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, New York, is the author of The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (2003), a group portrait of Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day. The Life You Save May Be Your Own received the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, a Christopher Award, the Beliefnet Book of the Year award, and the annual awards in Christianity and Literature and in the Literature of the South given by the Modern Language Association; the book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography. Mr. Elie’s article “The Year of Two Popes,” about the death of John Paul II and the election of Benedict XVI, appeared in February 2006 in The Atlantic, which published an earlier article of his, “In Search of a Pope,” about the run-up to the conclave. The magazine published his article about the contested legacy of Reinhold Niebuhr in its 150th anniversary issue last November. His writing has also appeared in Commonweal, The New Republic, and The New York Times, among other periodicals, and in several essay collections.

Here's the smoking press release

Thanks to Newspaper Tree of El Paso for posting the press release in full. It was written by angry staff members who pushed back on layoffs at the University of New Mexico Press (see my previous post for the Chronicle of Higher Education article). Caution, hot content!

Employees at the University of New Mexico Press push back

Wow. Jennifer Howard has an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about pushback from staff at the University of New Mexico Press over layoffs. Scalebacks have happened at a number of university presses in recent days, but this is the first time I've heard of the staff resisting, and pointing back at management. Watch this space for details if they come to light.


Coyote fight image from taxidermybymarkditzel.com.

A chapter isn't actually real

I had an interesting discussion with an author this week who wanted to know if she should change her sections -- with headings -- into chapters. Her book is presently divided into five chapters representing five decades, with sections within each chapter clearly delineating the action. It works.

When she asked if sections should be changed into chapters, I had to think a bit before saying that it really didn't matter. Call a division what you will -- a section or a chapter -- and it's the same thing. A chapter isn't a real unit. It's just an agreed-upon segment, something to help the reader make sense of a very long work of prose, and it doesn't actually have to exist. The only reason it does exist is because people seem to want it.

I looked up "Chapter" in the OED, and was charmed to find this:

A later syncopated form of CHAPITER, a. OF. chapitre, earlier chapitle: L. capitulum. dim. of caput head, used, in ancient Latin, in the senses ‘little head, head of a plant, capital of a column’, and later, those of ‘head-dress of women, chapter of a book, section of a law’. The form chapter appears in Sc. in 14th c., but in Eng. is rare before the 16th; chapiter survived beside it till the middle of the 17th, and is still occasional in the sense ‘capital of a column’. Cf. also CAPITULUM, CAPITLE, CHAPITLE, CHAPITER, all orig. the same word. 1. a. A main division or section of a book (whether the latter is an entire literary work, or one of the divisions or parts of a large work). Esp. used of the main divisions of the books of the Bible. Cf. BOOK n. 8.

I'm not surprised that it was first used in reference to the Bible, since for a long time that was probably the longest book of which anyone knew, and the one that most easily lent itself to chapters. But within those chapters were something else entirely -- verses! And we rarely see a book today divided into chapters and verses, do we?

Perhaps we should.

By the way, did you know "chapter" can also be a verb? "I chaptered my book." It hasn't been much in use since the 1800s, but I rather think it's due for a comeback.

Why is poetry reading down?

Just as I started having epiphanies about literary journals, and just as I started blogging that for the first time in my adult life I was even reading new poetry on purpose (in contrast to it being assigned in a class), the NEA releases a new report saying poetry readership is at a 16-year low.

In a way this isn't surprising. Two of the key aspects that have tended historically to keep me away from contemporary poetry are those that also probably make me a cavewoman on the subject: (1) it doesn't usually rhyme and most of it is in free or blank verse (I love rhyme, meter and rules); and (2) it's often written as a word puzzle where the author knows the meaning, and the reader/listener is supposed to figure it out. That's rewarding for many, but I get tired at the end of a long work day, and so prefer things I can understand. Enter fiction, exit poetry.

However, to give poetry a better shake, I have been regally impressed with the work I've been reading in Ploughshares, The New England Review, The Georgia Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, etc. New and different journals came in today's mail, so I'll post soon about them as well. In other words, I may not be much of a poetry reader overall, but I've been gratified with the job the journal editors have done of finding words that are worth the work.

My latest theory has been that the literary journals will protect and even save fiction. To that I would now also add that they may end up being the salvation of poetry as well. All hail journals. If you haven't done so this week, subscribe to one! ;-)


(Image above from TattoosOne)

"Shock waves?" No, I wouldn't exactly say that. . .

An item in today's Publisher's Weekly claims that the University of Michigan Press's recent decision to switch to a digital format for scholarly monographs has "sent shock waves through the academic publishing field." Um, I would add "or not."

Who would be shocked by this? Anyone paying attention to discussions of scholarly publishing over the past few years would know that the monograph is a serious point of contention because by definition it has a limited audience. At the same time, almost anyone who does academic research would argue that the monograph needs to exist. It needs care, protection, support.

The University of Michigan has always been a bit digitally precocious, for good or ill, and it likes to involve itself in electronic solutions early. Some fret that tenure committees won't accept books that exist primarily in digital form, and I can't speak for tenure committees to answer that question. But this has been a long time coming in some form or another, and it will be interesting to see how it plays out in tenure bids, and also in scholars' future decisions to publish with Michigan or not. Here's the original piece:

University of Michigan Switching to Digital Format for Scholarly Monographs
-- Publishers Weekly, 3/24/2009 7:17:00 AM

The University of Michigan Press sent shock waves through the academic publishing field Monday when it announced it is switching to a primarily digital format to publish scholarly monographs. The press expects that within two years, most of the 60 monographs it publishes each year out of a total 140 new releases will be published only in digital editions. A POD option, however, will be made available for all digital books, said University of Michigan Press director Phil Pochoda. He said the press’s regional titles and its ESL list will continue to be released primarily in print editions, though select frontlist, as well as backlist, will be made available in digital formats as well as print. Print runs consequently will be more conservative, to cut down on returns. “We’re going to try to keep [initial] print runs close to orders,” Pochoda said, with more of a reliance on offset printing for smaller print runs.

When a publisher acquires a book, everyone isn't always on board

Publishing houses don't always agree on books, and that may include your book. Yes, your editor wanted it. That's usually a given unless your editor left and someone else took it over. But sometimes that editor prevailed over the skepticism of other editors, or of the marketing team, or even of the editor-in-chief. Sometimes editors get shot down in contentious acquisitions meetings, but other times they prevail. That still doesn't mean that everyone loves your book, and it could account for some of the ambivalence you feel from the publishing side.

Is this bad? I personally think it is neutral, and just part of the real world versus the imaginary one. It's like being hired at a company and fantasizing that everybody voted for you. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn't, and sometimes you have to deal with the guy down the hall who applied for your job and didn't get it.

If you know going in that publicity is difficult, that publicists have a whole catalogue of books to love and care about, and that yours is certainly important, but not the only consideration in their day, then you can start to think constructively about how to work with your publicist. One editor in a recent edition of Poets & Writers suggested flowers. My personal style would lean more toward a terrific sandwich platter sent to the whole publicity team with a thank-you card. Either would be a great start. Along with this outreach, consider making a personal, 40-minute visit if you live close enough, or at least plan a phone conference with your publicist about six months before pubdate, armed with the attitude that you want to learn how to be the best author ever when it comes to teaming with your publisher to sell your book.

Gifts, thanks, and a terrific attitude? These will go a long way toward engaging publicists in your cause beyond routine efforts, and they can also overcome any in-house ambivalence that may have lingered around your (or any) book's initial acquisition.

Perusing "The New England Review"

The journal experiment has been such a glorious thing, with unexpected surprises. This office's first copy of The New England Review arrived, and again, it is different from any other journal out there. The more I practice this fascinating exercise of studying literary journals, the more convinced I become that the time-honored practice of writing a poem or a short story in private and then sending it various places to see where it sticks is less my style -- I prefer the notion of understanding a journal as an entity and writing just for it.

(Flannery O'Connor might argue with me. She had her own way, and in the late 1940s she resisted so strongly her first editor's pleas for conformity that they ended up not working together, with each party declaring the other intractable. Maybe she was right. But this is for now my opinion.)

My first impression of The New England Review is that its size and the unfussy quality of the paper combine to give it the feel of a workbook. Unlike The Georgia Review that is rich with illustrations, or The Virginia Quarterly Review that features photography leaning toward a global, human rights focus, this copy of NER has no images except black-and-white ones in the ads, and the simple cover is a closeup of an abstract painting. No fuss, no drumrolls, just the work, laid out page by austere page. There is a certain cleanness to that, a lack of sentimentality. Also, NER has less of the perceived pretension that kept me away from the literary journals for such an unfortunately long time. Dare I say, it seems approachable. (But then, so does Ploughshares in a different way).

Of the 27 contributors to this 30th-anniversary edition, nine are faculty members, and that's good news both for those employed within and without the academy. For academics, it is comforting to know that a full third of the contributions come from us. For non-academics, it is good to know that two-thirds work elsewhere and publish very well. The notion that there would be a robust representation of academics but not an overwhelming majority interests me. I don't know what it means, but it seems balanced.

The oddest thing about all of this is that I have begun to read more poetry. It has long been my greatest challenge, as I have consistently preferred prose forms. But the poetry showcased in these journals has tended toward the extraordinary, and I begin each day with anticipation of it.

To a reader who might ask if I read these journals in one sitting, the answer is absolutely not. I try to make one copy last about two months, with readings from it every day or two. Sometimes I'll go a few days and not read, and then other times I might read for an hour, but I do dip in and out. One goal of the journal experiments -- besides learning the nature of many journals by reading them as a regular subscriber, and besides heightening awareness of their richness for those aspiring authors who may benefit richly from discovering that world -- is to make shorter work such as short fiction and poetry part of the fabric of everyday life. I eat, I wash, I walk the dogs, I read poems, I garden, I visit friends, I read short fiction, I dance, I sing, I pray, I study, I read novels, I rise, I sleep, I worship, I read nonfiction. Amen.

Publishing cliché series -- is it true that "Editors don't edit anymore"?

I've decided to start a little series dedicated to the shopworn publishing clichés I hear in this goofy, amazing profession. The first is something I hear from unpublished authors mostly, that "Editors don't edit anymore." Then Ecco editor Lee Boudreaux brought it up again as a sore point in the March/April Poets & Writers. Boudreaux points out "Having worked at two different houses, I literally do not know who they're talking about. Who just acquires and doesn't edit? I feel like everybody I've ever worked with sweats blood over manuscripts. And you reap the rewards of doing that."

Agreed. My editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Elisabeth Kallick Dyssegaard, worked so hard. I was amazed at the dedication, the time invested in back-and-forth work over drafts, and the general sense of care and craft that went into Elisabeth's work.

When some people hoist this particular canard (and yes, I know that I'm combining clichés here), they also like to cite Maxwell Perkins -- the longsuffering editor of Thomas Wolfe's Southern Gothic doorstop Look Homeward, Angel -- as a real editor. Oh please. Even Wolfe finally decided that the interdependence had to end, and he left Perkins's publishing house, Scribners, to sign with Knopf. If you're going to cite Perkins as a real editor and the rest as pikers, then I'll consign you to a corner of literary hell where all you can read for eternity is The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises over and over and over and over again.

Corny song for a Friday

@Booklounge, the digital team of Random House of Canada, tweeted this goofiness for a Friday and the First Day of Spring. It's by '90s Canadian band Moxy Früvous.

Hmmm, I may enter this contest

This gem comes from indiebound.org, a web resource to help you locate and shop at your local independent bookseller. It's sad that you'd need a website to find an independent bookstore any longer, but so many of them have closed that this really makes sense.

Announcing the IndieBound Voices of Indie Consumers Contest!

It's really easy: make a video, no more than 3 minutes long, about why you shop at indie retailers, what resonates for you about the Shop Local movement, why you feel passionately about your community, and maybe even mention a local store or two . . .

Post it to YouTube or Vimeo or any video-sharing site, and send us an email when it's there. One videographer will be chosen to win a bunch of IndieBound swag!

Details are available at the website.

To understand a university press, know its catalogues

University press catalogues are indispensable to learning a press's tastes and culture. Yet I'm amazed when faculty members come to me with an interest in a certain press, but no particular drive to read its catalogues. One woman even gently asked, "Isn't that your job?"

Of course it is, but it is also the job of each author who approaches a press with a prospectus and a dream. The common-but-naive notion that the manuscript is what it is, and therefore should be shopped to 20 or 30 presses until one of them "gets" it, represents one of the most interesting bits of human psychology that I've encountered in this wonderful profession. It's not the author or the manuscript who should adapt, this thinking goes, but the press. If only the press would see things differently, squint a little and appreciate, read more deeply, then it (depersonalized, not an editor but an edifice) will at last understand.

In reality, publishing decisions are made by teams of actual people, and they are usually made at meetings, not in imagined solitude. One of the first things a group of editors considers when examining new prospectuses is the rest of its list. What else does the press publish and why? Where will this proposed book fit in? How will this author's reputation enhance the house? What about the press's other authors who publish similar work? The more an author understands those same questions via the study of catalogues, the better the chances that the prospectus will address these important considerations.

A case in point is this month's catalogue from the University of Minnesota Press. It arrived last week, and today I spent a joyful hour reading it. Not skimming it, not riffling through, but reading. I read book descriptions, I looked at cover art, I considered not only who was writing, but where they were placed in the catalogue, and I pondered the press in terms of its extremes (Native American studies at one end, the visual image at another, narrowly focused monographs at a third point of departure). The press publishes everything from potential bestsellers such as Paul Chaat Smith's Everything You Know About Indians Is Wrong, a book that I can imagine selling both in the Museum of the American Indian, where he is associate curator, and in Barnes & Noble, where it might logically appear alongside work by Sherman Alexie. On the other end of the spectrum is Reticulations: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Networks of the Political, representing the scholarly monograph that many of us yearn to keep alive in university press publishing, and would hate to see pass away in favor of the potential bestseller.

A salt with a deadly weapon

Whenever I meet wonderful new people, I try to get a group together of ones who seem as though they might enjoy one another's company. By last autumn I had met several these fascinating folks, all of whom are writers (a playwright, a journalist-playwright, and a poet), and that always calls for a dinner party. Little did I know that something as innocent as mango chutney on pork could have sent one guest to the emergency room. It didn't (thankfully), and she was so cool about it that I never knew there was a problem. Later, however, I learned that she had made art out of her suffering by selling a book on the subject. Sandra Beasley's book Don't Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales From an Allergic Life will be published next year by Crown. Besides writing about such serious stuff (albeit I'm certain with her characteristic flair), Sandra is an editor at The American Scholar, an award-winning, much-published poet, and the Literary Chair of the Arts Club of Washington. Her website is www.sandrabeasley.com.

Meanwhile, here's what she had to say in The Washington Post about my not-so-innocent dinner party, and the near-mayhem caused by those malicious mangoes.

I heart literary journals

It should by now be obvious to all seven readers of this blog that I am insanely, over-the-moon in love with literary journals. It's a new love. For some reason I was previously put off by some of the tweedy names, earnest covers, and a faint but unmistakable whiff of pretension. Plus I didn't much care for the handful of people I knew who submitted (an arty girl in my high school who played guitar in minor chords only; a guy in grad school who had a habit of slyly and poetically insulting his friends; any number of twits who name-dropped all the poets they met for five minutes at public readings), and I mistakenly thought that meant the journals themselves were amateur-ville.

I was completely wrong. Now that I have subscribed to several and actually read each one, issue after issue, I'm deeply impressed with the quality of the writing, the astonishingly good taste of many of the editors, and the consistent caliber of already-successful authors who don't need to publish there but who choose to because of the readership and the credibility. Receiving these journals is like receiving a valentine from the literary world each time they appear. Thank you, editors and staffs, for creating these gems. I believe journals will be the keepers of literary fiction and poetry during tough economic times for books, and that the good ones will survive.

Here is a partial list of those to which I have subscribed. There will be more in the future: Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, New England Review, Missouri Review, Threepenny Review. Any suggestions for others?

PS: If you love fiction and/or poetry, please show it by subscribing to literary journals. Yes, you can read them at the library, especially if you work at a university, but do consider going that extra step and buying actual and ongoing subscriptions.

Great quote, but is it Vonnegut?

So much has been falsely attributed to Kurt Vonnegut that I hesitate to quote this, but it's apt. I first saw it in Poets & Writers on an ad for Butler University's MFA program, but a quick internet search suggests it has been a darling of book bloggers for quite a while.

"When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth."

I love the word "ineffable," because it sums it up: it means "Incapable of being expressed in words."

Sara Nelson in The Daily Beast

Kudos to The Daily Beast for running work by laid-off Publisher's Weekly editor-in-chief Sara Nelson. The blog item below came from her work.

How to get your fiction or even poetry published

Hudson River hero Chesley Sullenberger has demonstrated once and for a key publishing principle I've emphasized for years. He just got a $3 million book deal for a quickie about his splash landing on New York's iconic river, and his agent scored a tagalong coup. The publisher will also issue a volume of his inspirational poems. This is a variation on what I've said to authors since at least 1997: if you want agents and publishers to care about your fiction or your poetry, make some money for them first on a commercial nonfiction project. Many publishers will please a moneymaking author by agreeing to publish fiction, even if it doesn't "earn out," as long as the author's nonfiction is a steady plus for the team. Poems are a longer shot, but if your nonfiction earns enough (and Sullenberger's probably will), it's possible.

Personally, I'm no more likely to read Sullenberger's poems than I was to ponder the musings of that sweet but ubiquitous kid, Mattie Stepanek, and his Heartsongs series. But he'll surely find an audience -- perhaps enough that the poetry will do well. And who knows? Sullenberger might surprise me and become a meaningful addition to my poetry reading life (I'm still campily fond of Rod McKuen, and I'll defend him to the death, me hearties), but whether he does or doesn't, he got what he wanted from a publisher by bringing home some bacon for them first.


The above image of Rod McKuen is from Life magazine.

Maurice Jackson at the Library Company

Dr. Maurice Jackson's new book, Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism, is taking off like a rocket. Here's a great photo of him at the Library Company of Philadelphia this week. This office hosted him on campus last week, and his talk was electrifying. As soon as photos are available (the bookseller from our campus bookstore took some great shots), I'll post them here as well.

The Revenge of Bonnie Morris

I get a major kick out of Georgetown Women's Studies lecturer Bonnie Morris, who appeared like a comet in my office when Booklab was just getting rolling. I went to see her amazing one-woman show "The Revenge of the Women's Studies Professor" when she performed in DC a couple of years back, and now I'm happy to note that it's a new (last month!) book from Indiana University Press. "Dr. Bon" is an oldskool feminist with two books that were finalists for the Lambda literary award, and a seat on the board of Mothertongue, a DC-based spoken-word theatre space for women. She has more energy than a sugar-fed fifth-grader, and if you thought sexism was a thing of the past, her books will get you thinking twice.

It be National Grammar Day

To celebrate March 4, the official National Grammar Day, I'm gonna confess something. I was never hot stuff at grammar. Ever. I was always one of the best writers in class, and one of the most mediocre grammarians. Apparently I have an ear for the vernacular, and I even do okay with formalish text, but when it comes to not splitting one's infinitives, um, I do. Sometimes.

Even so, they have a fun way to celebrate that I might just participate in anyway... if you find an example of bad grammar on the web, take a screenshot of it (hit "print" and then paste into an e-mail) and send it to info@spogg.org (SPOGG is the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar -- a club that would never have me as a member).

Here's a link to the Official National Grammar Day website. Those of you who have better grammar than me can freely correct whatever nudge-wink blips you find in this post.

In love with the "Most Coveted Covers"

If you want to fall happily into a blog and not come back, visit Readerville Journal and check out the Most Coveted Covers. The founder and editor, Karen Templer, is a former art director at Salon.com who now works as a writer. I was immediately taken with the artful way she describes the covers she loves and craves. Most artists I know are less adept at saying why they love something, and helping the not-so-artful understand not just that it works, but some of the reasons why.

Kudos to the Authors Guild

Amazon backed down remarkably easily on the text-to-speech question, and it now leaves the decision to individual copyright holders whether or not to include their books in Kindle2's new text-to-speech feature. Amen, amen. I haven't read the Guild's press release on this yet (maybe they're snowed in), but it seems like a victory.

Journal Experiments -- Back to Basics

Last year I started The Journal Experiments, but then life and work got in the way and I drifted. Now I'm back to them again, and interested in hearing your thoughts about supporting journals. The Experiments consist of subscribing to, reading, and getting to know journals as unique entities -- little artistic corporate cultures, if you will -- and then submitting to them based on that understanding. This is the opposite of the usual author or poet strategy of writing something and then sending it out scattershot to see where it lands. The latter is part of I Am Writer, World Bend To Me... whereas the Journal Experiments are about the writer serving the medium (think about 17th-century bards writing for the stage, that sort of thing). One is author-focused, the other -- my preferred -- is audience-focused. Neither is correct in contrast to the other's incorrectness, they're simply different.

On that note, the Winter 2008 Georgia Review that I'm just now getting around to contains a fun Call For Submissions. The journal plans a special feature, "A Devil's Dictionary for the Twenty-First Century," "an update of sorts of Ambrose Bierce's brilliant satirical work... published just about one hundred years ago." Interested in submitting? Here be the link.

Reading to earn freedom

Did you see this piece by Leah Price in The New York Times about prisoners who can join a book club to earn time out of jail? English professor Robert Waxler at UMass-Dartmouth started it, working with a judge and a probation officer. Here's how Price describes a class: The eight others are convicted criminals who have been granted probation in exchange for attending, and doing the homework for, six twice-monthly seminars on literature. The class is taught through Changing Lives Through Literature, an alternative sentencing program that allows felons and other offenders to choose between going to jail or joining a book club.

What an unusual and smart idea. The biggest hurdle I can see is fundamental literacy. I have taught in jail before, and some felons have such challenges with simple reading and writing that they will need to do a lot of work before a book by John Steinbeck or Toni Morrison makes sense to them. For those who read well, though (and I encountered some highly literate people in jail, too), this is a creative and constructive idea.

There are also two fair arguments that (a) it's not right for prisoners to get personal tutoring from college professors and access to their otherwise expensive classes when many of their victims cannot afford such luxuries; and (b) books shouldn't be transformed into punishment. I'll grant both arguments have merit. But I still like to see people thinking laterally about alternatives to incarceration, especially for nonviolent offenders.

Why I agree with the Author's Guild lawsuit

The new Author's Guild lawsuit regarding Amazon Kindle's text-to-speech feature is quite controversial. Many who supported the Guild when it sued Google over digitization of books under copyright and won are now not supporting it on this fight. His eminence (at least to me) Neil Gaiman has weighed in, saying that he doesn't understand why the Guild opposes free text-to-speech, since it's the equivalent of having the right to read it aloud himself. Gaiman's agent argues the opposite, that Amazon is infringing on quite valuable audiobook rights. That's the Guild's position as well.

Why do I support the Guild? Simple. I don't think we're talking about the technology as it exists today. Text-to-speech at the moment is still robotic and largely uninteresting -- it would never compete against your favorite readers of audiobooks. But what happens when it gets better? What happens when you can even tweak it to sound like your preferred gender, age, and region of the country? What happens when it's so good you think you're hearing a live person read?

What happens is that the book's author, who under today's rules would have earned a nice profit from that audio version of the book, won't get anything. I think authors make precious little enough as it is. And though I enjoy my Kindle, I think Amazon is dead wrong on this one. Unpopular position? Yes, I know. But that's where I am.

Pogue said it

If you like new tech toys, how you feel about David Pogue probably says a world of other things about you, such as your clothing choices (Brooks Brothers or quirky designer?), your food preferences (three squares a day with meat, or vegan grazing?), and your voting habits (red or, um, you get the picture). The only problem is, I'm not sure whether liking or loathing Pogue makes you one way or the other. It just says something.

I like Pogue most of the time, and if he should fail to please me then I just don't keep reading him. But mostly he makes me smile, and today he did with his review of Amazon's new Kindle. I've had Amazon's old Kindle for about a year and a half now, and I love it. My only gripes are small -- I keep forgetting to bring it with me, and when I do remember it, such as on vacation, I keep forgetting to bring the charger. But the Kindle is convenient, easy to read, and (best blessing of all) you can download a book while stuck on a city bus without having to pay for a monthly account.

Nothing in Pogue's review made me want to buy the new Kindle. I'm fine with the one I have. But here's the nut graf (for me) when he discusses those who claim one type of e-reader will win out over all others, who will of necessity fade away: The point everyone is missing is that in Technoland, nothing ever replaces anything. E-book readers won’t replace books. The iPhone won’t replace e-book readers. Everything just splinters. They will all thrive, serving their respective audiences.

Amen, and I think that statement can be expanded to include the false dichotomy between paper books and e-books. I welcome e-books, but some who know my paper-loving, rare-books-buying ways are horrified. Am I nuts? A traitor? Nope, I simply agree with Pogue. Different products will serve different audiences in various specific applications.

Not scary at all.

How much do I love this?

At last, someone even odder than I when it comes to re-reading. I am a compulsive re- and re-re-reader of certain special books, even when stacks upon stacks of unread books beckon. It makes no sense (or maybe it makes all sense), but now The Rumpus has a story about a woman who has read Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native over and over again for twelve years.

That reminds of the summer a few years ago, when I still taught in Georgetown's English Department, that I decided to read three Thomas Hardy novels back-to-back: The Return of the Native was one, along with The Mayor of Casterbridge and Jude the Obscure. I had twice taught Tess of the d'Urbervilles as part of an 18th-19th Century Survey course ("snortin' the Norton" as students waggishly called it), but I hadn't read the rest, so this was a great treat. Between books I'd wander down the hall to John Pfordresher's office and ask him questions about them, which he'd patiently answer. I loved them all and became an enraptured Hardy admirer, though I can't quite imagine reading one over and over again for twelve years. But cheers to Julie Vanderburg, that noble reader, and to The Rumpus for writing about her.

Thanks to @MaryContrary08 on Twitter for tweeting the link...

E-textbooks? Really? NPR reports.

Are physical college textbooks due to to become relics? At Northwest Missouri State the change to digital is already happening. This NPR piece by Sylvia Maria Gross demonstrates through audio clips how this "new generation of textbooks" capitalizes on interactive technology.

For those of you who want to publish textbooks, is there a way to make this work in your favor? Are there ways you can think of to make your proposed textbook intelligently (rather than arbitrarily, I suppose) interactive? Think about it -- you can have more maps and images, alternate text, audio. This represents a serious change, but also (possibly) a serious opportunity.

NB: On this piece, the comments section has some interesting tidbits (see the bottom of the article accompanying the audio piece), and are worth reading.

Kudos to a writer

Laurence Hughes has a strong and resonant article in the last-page "Soapbox" section of Publisher's Weekly for February 23 about how it feels to be laid off in publishing right now. All I can say is that I hope he considers writing a book of his own if he hasn't already.

The piece is so well written, and while what's happening in publishing is heartrending (don't these companies imposing such brutal layoffs know the meaning of the words pull together?), I found myself cheering for him to find his true north as an author, and have the last laugh.

Throw Down in Poets & Writers!

You have to look for it, but the March/April edition of Poets & Writers contains a wee bit of controversy. First is the outraged, almost bitter letter, aghast at the notion that authors should be responsible for any aspect of book promotion: I would think agents would want their writers holed up in a shack in the boonies typing away at their next project, not wasting precious moments plying the very superficial talk show circuit. Book promotion belongs to the publisher, who seems to be tossing off many of its duties these days. I say let's let writers do what they do best and leave sales to the people in suits.

Then, on page 57 there's a terrific interview with four editors, and Richard Nash of Soft Skull Press articulates the opposite opinion: Get out into the world. And if you don't have the personality to get out into the world, then you have to ask yourself, "Why does everybody else have to have the personality to get out into the world, but I don't? What makes me so special that everybody else has to go out and bang the drum for me, but I don't?" I have a fairly limited tolerance for people who assume that it is everybody else's job to sell their books while they get to be pure and pristine.

It's probably obvious if you have ever read this blog that my heart is with Nash, but the opinion of the unhappy author (whom I won't name, but you can identify at the above link) is quite common. Authors imagine that their publishers don't care, that they haven't tried, and that somehow it's someone else's fault if the book fails to find its most perfect (usually identified in authors' minds as "largest") audience.

Most publishers play their hearts out, authors. And a tip of the champagne glass to those of you who understand that, and who do what you can to help your own books find their homes on shelves, and in hearts.

A quote that's either funny or depressing

From a Publisher's Weekly interview with Charlotte Roche, a German television presenter who has just published her first novel, Wetlands:

PW: Who are your [literary] influences?

HM: I don't read at all. Since my daughter was born six years ago, I've only read one book, and that was because my best friend pushed me to read her favorite book, "The Great Gatsby." But I think not being a big reader makes me freer in writing; I always hear that authors who read lots also get blockages -- they have these idols and they try to be like them. I don't have that problem at all.

The novel is reportedly an increasingly uncomfortable meditation on bodily functions. A bestseller in Germany, it will soon be printed in 27 countries!

What libraries' buying patterns mean for you

If you're an academic author, you're familiar with the same old problem: the university press prices your book at $90 or $100 and releases it in hardback only, to profit as much as possible from academic libraries. Many of you have shaken your fists in frustration while telling me that your publisher "won't listen" when you beg for a more affordable price. Elsewhere in this blog I've explored alternatives (negotiating a special, lower cover price only for your students at your academic bookstore, for example -- something some presses will do if they want you badly enough, as long as they are protected by the assurance that you won't open these sales to others), but the process of educating academic authors about university press financial realities is always with us.

Now along comes a report from the Association of Research Libraries about what may change in acquisitions during the economic downturn. Libraries are facing acquisitions budget cutbacks that may be permanent. You may not have known it, but some publishers have structured book prices differently depending on the size and budget of the library. From the report: Large libraries have also been subject to a novel form of inflation pressure as some publishers have implemented new pricing models, such as tiered pricing, that shift revenue generation to larger institutions that are required to absorb significant price increases to compensate for discounting to other customers. Publishers implementing changes in pricing models that provide discounts to small customers by balancing them with increases to larger customers will be especially likely to force large institutions into cancellation decisions.

Whoa, that's deep. The upshot is that the report calls for university presses to consider cutting prices. But don't pop the champagne just yet. After many university press visits, I've become convinced that the price structures have their place -- the margins are so thin at so many places that if they couldn't get this guaranteed money from research library acquisitions, some books couldn't be published at all.

Any trainwreck usually results in the little guy getting thrown into a cowfield somewhere, and guess who that is? Yep, the author. If the engine (research libraries) cut back, and the middle cars (university presses) lower prices, the caboose (those academic authors who have niche audiences) may just find themselves fishtailing wildly and hurled from the tracks.

It's my job to look out for all of my academic authors, but especially the caboose. I'll make recommendations as I can (how about "Look out!"). But this key recommendation has always been true -- be bold, and write a book with a measurable audience. You don't have to turn yourself into a trade author and you shouldn't, but now more than ever it is important that academic authors ponder along with their future editors about who the book serves and why -- what makes it essential. And if you're getting feedback from editor after editor that your book looks fascinating but just doesn't have a demonstrable audience, listen to that and think about what you as an author can do to help. Then come talk to me, and we'll try to sort through this together.

James J. O'Donnell at the Smithsonian Associates

Provost Jim O'Donnell's evening with the Smithsonian Associates is just a month away, and it's selling briskly so reserve now if you want to attend. Wednesday, March 18, 6:45 p.m., at the S. Dillon Ripley Center on the National Mall, and he'll be speaking about his new book, The Ruin of the Roman Empire.

The Smithsonian Associates program is one of the most elegant ways to see authors in Washington. I'm a huge fan, and the range and depth of classes and presentations is amazing. While you're at the website, be sure to browse their other offerings. It is one of Washington's jewels, and one of the best benefits of living in this great city.

Questions from the most recent, um, webinar

It amuses me that after having once made a bit of a name for myself as an outspoken critic of distance learning, I've gotten roped into teaching something called a "webinar," but it was for the best of reasons -- alumni! -- and it actually turned out great. Yesterday I had the privilege of spending an hour with 40+ Georgetown alumni on the web, discussing nonfiction book publishing and how to get a literary agent. Next week we'll meet again for a one-hour session on publishing fiction.

The best part of leading one of these seminars is the Q&A afterward, because the questions always surprise me. One author with amazing media credentials wanted to know if a literary agent would help her place articles in national magazines as a prelude to creating a nonfiction book proposal. For most people the answer would be no, because there isn't any money to be made on a percentage of the fee for an article. However in this questioner's case the answer is "It depends." A literary agent who happens to have a background as a subsidiary rights director in a publishing house (and there are a few of those) might have strong contacts at national magazines, so it might be worth asking.

Author credentials are the key, and this potential author had extraordinary ones. If you have them, great, but if you happen to be a mere mortal (aren't most of us?) then you will still want to land those major magazine or journal pieces, but you probably won't be able to enlist a literary agent's help. I'm not 100% certain that Ms. Media who asked the question will, either, but in her case I do think it is worth an ask.

A Valentine For You

People have asked if I can name a great, romantic book for Valentine's Day. Not offhand, but I sure remember a great sex scene! It's from Ken Follett's 1981 Eye of the Needle, pages 247-247.

Happy Valentine's Day.

View the actual Emancipation Proclamation. For reals.

If you want something fascinating to do tonight and you're in the DC area, hop over to the opening of the Library of Congress's Abraham Lincoln bicentennial exhibition. You'll see the actual first drafts of the Emancipation Proclamation and the Gettysburg Address, plus his first and second inaugural addresses. The exhibition runs through May 9, but tonight is the time for special evening hours.

Okay, yeah, this isn't exactly a book-packed event, but the Library of Congress is an amazing treasure, and I enjoy giving people excuses to go there whenever possible.

A C-Note Well Spent

I'm a contrarian, so in these tough economic times I'm going to suggest that you spend money on something you can't even take home with you. The Folger Shakespeare Library is hosting Acquisitions Night on March 18, as a fundraiser. Why is it worth dropping a hundred dolla on them? Here's the squib:

Guests have the chance to personally examine books and ask questions as the curators and librarians reveal the newest additions to the world-renowned Folger collection in the Old Reading Room. The reading rooms are only open to the public once a year and are a stunning setting for this special night. A buffet dinner is served in the historic Great Hall, where guests can enjoy the spring exhibition, To Sleep, Perchance to Dream.

You will even have the opportunity to adopt a rare book, manuscript or work of art. If you have ever had the extraordinary pleasure of doing research using Very Old Books and coming across someone's bookplate from 300 years ago, you'll appreciate the shivery excitement of having your own name put on a literary treasure to delight and surprise someone 300 years hence.

The photo above, from the Folger web site, shows guests at Acquisitions Night 2008.

Don't mind me and this 100-pound anvil

Some authors have a funny way of defending their approaches to books. Something psychological can occur to cause the author of a magnum opus to feel extraordinarily attached to it, even if it has obvious flaws that cause near-universal concern. Take, for example, the scholar who knows that he has written about two ideas that don't really mesh together naturally, except in his own mind. He has now written a longish manuscript (450 pages) about both, dealing in the first half with the earlier phenomenon, and then through a linking chapter, turning to the second phenomenon. Several editors have suggested he turn it into two books. One would think, given the pressure to publish academically, that notion would appeal to him. Two for the work of one, what's not to love? But instead I often find him in my office, defending his doorstop and asking me to give him the magic words to help editors see that the book must be this way.

Another author has a book with a universally acknowledged boring first chapter, but (says he) it has to be there as an introduction to what comes next. Hmmmm. I suggest that if it remains there then it renders the rest of the book unnecessary, because no living begin will read that far.

But many authors defend their literary anvils, often furiously. Sometimes the authors become quite annoyed with me, before I've had a chance to say a word. I'll just sit there while the author explains the enormous, obvious problem of the book, and then proceeds to argue for it item by item, becoming increasingly annoyed with me for what s/he perceives must be my unspoken thoughts on the matter. (Either that or my eyes speak volumes, and I'm unaware of it.)

I'm not saying that authors should cut, rearrange, re-write or otherwise muck about with their books just to please colleagues, editors and agents. That kind of insecure pandering is dangerous, and it can lead to a bland, groupthink manuscript that speaks to no one. But I do believe that collective wisdom can occasionally be wise, especially when every reader has the same issue in the same place.

Chick lit as a career move

As the post-holiday bad film season settles around us, I notice a couple of big-budget films based on chick lit books: Confessions of a Shopaholic and He's Just Not That Into You. I'm blogging about this because one of the biggest surprises of this job was the interestingly high number of full-time academics who would like to write and publish chick lit. I see at least one every season or so in my office who imagines this would be a fun, quirky career move.

In an act of full disclosure, I confess that I develp a rash whenever near the chick lit genre in any of its forms, and even though I pride myself on trying to read a bit of everything in the name of research, I have not been able to force myself to dip into a single one of those pink-covered literary confections that celebrate shoes, shopping, and sex. But then, I haven't read a word of Harry Potter, either, and the globe still seems to spin. But perhaps my allergy to the genre means I'm not the best judge of any of this. In fact, I'm probably the worst.

Still, the phenomenon is remarkable, whether you share my distaste for all things shopping, or whether you're a girlier type who enjoys that sort of book as an escape now and again. Why do so many academic authors also want to publish chick lit? What makes an otherwise intelligent and arguably over-educated faculty member think "Hey, in addition to my teaching, committee work and scholarly publishing, I think I'll type up a frothy little romance about an American doctoral student in London, no, make that Paris, who has an ooh-la-la affair with a sexy Middle Eastern scholar, only to return to the States and realize that he's the new head of her department. Along the way she goes shopping in the world's most famous venues (all on her teaching assistant's salary, but this is fiction), and she finds herself fending off advances from a surly, sexy biker who turns out to be an English movie star in deep disguise, and . . ."

My usual advice to someone contemplating this is to ask what will happen if you become famous for the book. What if it's a hit? The authors usually pooh-pooh this ("It's just for fun," "I'm doing this on the side," "I really want to be known for my research"), and I say that's great, but we can't control the world once we launch a book into it. We've conditioned ourselves for marginality and irrelevance, but what happens if you become a chick lit star? Do you want that reality for yourself? Is that your choice and goal?

If yes, then type away. I'm sure Sophie Kinsella or Greg Behrendt are easy enough to knock from their pedestals... and I will be happy for you if you succeed. I'll even bring pink champagne to your book party! But if your interest in writing the book is contingent on it remaining hidden from the world, then think twice. Go out there with something you will be proud of whether in its obscurity, or in the brilliant glare of its international fame.

Who is buried in Derrida's tomb?

Michael Bérubé has given me realistic flashbacks along with chills and attendant paranoia. How, you ask? By writing an excellent article for The Chronicle of Higher Education about re-taking the GRE in English Literature. We both went to graduate school at the University of Virginia (different years -- I didn't know him), and we both struggled through what I personally thought was a ridiculous exam. I never knew that others felt the same, except for one good hint... after I was in I met one of the committee members who had accepted my application. I asked her what she thought of the subject test (where I struggled), and she said "Oh, we've known for years that it's flawed... I personally didn't count it although I can't speak for my colleagues."

Here's the funniest quote, although it's rather insider-y unless you have taken this particular test: The three questions that asked you to identify which city was being described in which poem — those were bad questions too, suitable more for Jeopardy! than for an exam in English literature. Alas, I got many bad questions right, sometimes through sheer dumb luck. Among the ones I missed, I couldn't remember what the "euphuistic" style is, and I couldn't remember which war novelist — Stephen Crane, Faulkner, Joseph Heller, Ernest Hemingway, or Norman Mailer — had not seen combat.

It was precisely the latter sort of questions that infuriated me. They had nothing to do with the study of anything, and I'm thankful that the admissions committee at Virginia agreed. My criticism of standardized testing is well-documented -- I wrote about it in my second book -- so this piece was most welcome.

Scary, though.

How an academic author earns global publicity, click by click

Bob Thompson of The Washington Post has an interesting longer piece about American-gone-to-New Zealand academic author Denis Dutton, best known at least in this office for Arts and Letters Daily, a site I have enjoyed since its launch in 1998, moreso in its early years. Thompson explores why Dutton has been so successful flacking his new book The Art Instinct. My only surprise is that there is any surprise -- Dutton was early onto the internet with a useful site, providing content when there wasn't much, and he must have worked extraordinarily hard. Coming up with a great idea for a website is easy. Making it successful and keeping it that way year after year is extraordinarily difficult.

Author after author comes to me with the same pitiful lament about the publisher's publicist who won't do enough to push the book. (It's the most vintage whine in publishing.) Please, authors, know that there is only one person who woke up this morning passionately in love with your book, and that is you. You are the publicist. If the book is to succeed, it is your job. Yes, publishers try their best, but they have hundreds of books to sell. At any given time you usually have only one.

So does this mean you should run out and found a website like Arts and Letters Daily? Maybe, but I certainly couldn't pull that off. It could mean more simply that you might have wonderful fun being creative about what you do have to offer the world, and how through that gift the world might also learn about your splendid books.

**

If you visit ALDaily now and wonder what all the fuss was about, it used to be better. It's okay now, but lots of sites aggregate good content and it has competition. But back in the day it was fresh and different.

Words Without Borders

A friend of mine loves the work of novelist Junichiro Tanizaki. When I first met her years ago and asked "Who?", and she rightfully looked at me with shock. How could I not know? Well, now I do know, and I also understand better just how little of the world's literature is available in the United States in translation. Even when it is, it takes something like the Nobel Prize to give its sales an uptick. There are some exceptions, but few. Blame our literary isolation on the phenomenon of geography, xenophobia, or what you will, but as a nation we're just not as aware of world literature as we could be.

That's part of why I was so pleased to learn of the online magazine "Words Without Borders," a site that publishes its own original translations, plus book reviews and other information about international literature. In its publishing rationale, the journal notes: Few literatures have truly prospered in isolation from the world. English-speaking culture in general and American culture in particular has long benefited from cross-pollination with other worlds and languages. Thus it is an especially dangerous imbalance when, today, 50% of all the books in translation now published worldwide are translated from English, but less than 3% are translated into English. (Bold emphasis added)

My friend Katie King pointed the organization out to me two years ago, but it really caught my consciousness when I met its founder and president, editor Alane Salierno Mason, at W. W. Norton a few weeks ago.

I follow them, so they follow me

Okay, this is scary. About a year ago my digital strategist friend in London, Katie King, tried to get me onto Twitter. That's kind of like trying to get your 81-year-old granny to read Perezhilton.com, but I dutifully signed up for an account and then ignored it. This year, in a burst of confidence, I started Tweeting (it sounds like an adolescent rooster chick learning to crow). Soon, however, I rather liked it, and I found that many publishers are on Twitter, so I looked some up and started following them.

Now they're following me! Here's what the e-mail said:

Hi, Carole Sargent (Booklab).
Little, Brown and Co (littlebrown) is now following your updates on Twitter

Rut-roh! Isn't that a bit like reading The New York Times, and then realizing that the Times is reading you? Or as Byron Katie would put it, you're not just breathing, but you are being breathed?

I'll try to live up to my, um, following, by posting things worth knowing about. But it will be difficult. I am, after all, an 81-year-old granny trapped in the body of a much younger woman.

Dearie.

A blog about readings

For those of you who are becoming understandably concerned about the fate of literary readings in the DC area in the wake of closings such as Chapters and Olsson's, and the folding of "Book World" in The Washington Post, a local author and blogger named Mark Athitakis offers one answer: Mark Athitakis’ American Fiction Notes It's a one-stop shop of readings in the region, and to my eye both complete and easy to use. Thank you to Dr. Maurice Jackson for pointing this one out.

NB: He spells the possessive Athitakis', and I spell it Athitakis's. I think I'm one of the last editors who still prefers the full possessive. About 70% of my faculty authors agree with him, not me. The NYTimes agrees with him, too. All I have in my corner is fusty old Strunk & White, and I'm not even a major fan of that volume. ;-)

When you think you had it first

Publisher's Weekly recently launched a column about food and cooking titles called "Cooking The Books." That's such a great title, I wish I'd thought of it! Wait... I did. A few years ago. I wrote two columns with that title on cookbook publishing for Foodservice Monthly, a terrific mid-Atlantic publication edited by a dedicated Washington foodie, photographer and editor Michael Birchenall.

So did PW steal my title? It's tempting to think so, but probably not. In reality, people often think up the same titles, and even the same concepts; it happens all the time. It's part of the principle behind zeitgeist. Most of us consume a surprisingly similar porridge of popular culture, both low and high, in varying amounts, and because of this disparate people are bound to make the same mental connections simultaneously. That's part of why so many Hollywood "he stole my screenplay" legal fights aren't always open and shut. Many people may have a similar idea for -- say -- a romantic comedy, simply because we've all ingested the same formulas for so long. Think back to the Restoration stage, and how similar many of the comedies can seem.

But I still admit it grates (joke!) a little.

Origin of the Spouses

It's finally February, and I love Valentine's Day. In honor of it, I offer this quote from Charles Darwin when he courted his wife Emma. I first read of it in Christopher Benfey's New York Times Book Review article on Darwin's Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution by Adrian Desmond and James Moore.

Then I found the Darwin Correspondence Project online, and looked it up.

Charles Darwin wrote to an old school friend on May 8, 1838: "As for a wife, that most interesting specimen in the whole series of vertebrate animals, Providence only knows whether I shall ever capture one or be able to feed her if caught."

Who says science types aren't romantic?


The title of this blog post and the photo above are from London's Daily Mail.

What to give your publisher on the questionnaire

When you publish a book, you'll get a questionnaire asking you many questions about your book, and asking you to write thoughtfully about it. Many authors like to postpone this, handle it quickly, or put it off altogether until the editor all but demands it.

Here's a hot tip: spend a lot of time on this important document, fill it out carefully, and turn it in early. Why? Because the book marketing team may use much of it to create important aspects of your book, including your media kit and even the copy that will go on your book cover.

Words you write on that page could actually end up on your cover if you do a really good job. They can work as flap copy, as the book's description -- if you have talent for this sort of thing, your own words can even make it into the book's advertising.

"But isn't that my publisher's job?" some authors ask. Hmmm. Let's see. They have how many books on their list each season? And besides, who better than you to perfectly describe your own work? I'm not saying that publishing professionals don't or won't write this stuff, because they do and they will, but I urge authors who are of a mind to do so to try their hand at the art form of the questionnaire.

But when they say 150 words, they mean it!

Do you listen to music while you write?

Some writers love music, and use it as a muse. Others cherish silence. I'm usually of the silence school of writing, but lately some music has worked for me... either early baroque, very old jazz, or oh-so-occasionally some new stuff like the bird and the bee (although I wish there were versions that had vocal noises but not actual words, since actual words can confuse me while I write...).

I do think people can change in their preferences over time, and even then change back again; I do imagine going back to silence more than falling further into music.

Any thoughts?

The Suspicious Cheese Lord

This is a great quote from director Darren Aronofsky about the ending of "The Wrestler" that easily applies to books as well: "I just have too many cheese alarms. If something's cheesy I just run. I just can't do it. I'd make a lot more money if I had a little more cheese in my arsenal."

PS: Wrestling seems to be my theme this academic year. See my previous post about working with Bret "The Hitman" Hart at the National Press Club Book Fair.

My favorite piece about John Updike

John Irving offers a charming and offbeat story about getting John Updike's fan mail for years, and vice versa. It is the best thing I've read about Updike; the piece makes him seem engaging, human and less like the stuffed literary lion that places like the New York Times Book Review would make him out to be.

Come to think of it, the mainstream literary establishment often does this to writers. It can shape them into creepy icons. The worst was when Barnes & Noble used to have those green shopping bags with authors' heads on them... the Anne Tyler was the most sacrilegious (although the Mark Twain was pretty gross, and Emily Dickinson was just unspeakable), and I remember wondering why on earth someone as quiet and sensible as Anne Tyler would have agreed to such a thing. It's not that the art was technically poor -- in fact it was quite good -- but that if being an author meant finally getting one's oversized head caricatured on a book bag, then make me a bricklayer, please.

I'm sure there was an Updike head at some point (can anyone find an image?). So thank you, John Irving, for writing something memorable about the man.

An article in the Chronicle about university presses

Jennifer Howard published a must-read article in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education about what various university presses are doing in this icky book-buying market. Sales are down as much as 13% at some shops, although others are doing better, largely because of individual successes in various books, or a core strength in an area such as economics that is more popular because of the downturn.

Losing Sara Nelson

It's funny how someone just doing their job can become a quasi-celebrity sometimes, but that's how I felt about Publisher's Weekly editor-in-chief Sara Nelson, who was surprisingly laid off this week. I've met plenty o' famous writers and never been tongue-tied, but when I saw Nelson at a party in New York, I got flummoxed and didn't approach her or say anything. It was her. (Silly, I should have piped up, but I had an easier time talking to Erica Jong... life isn't logical.)

She wrote a column for every issue of Publisher's Weekly, and while it was mostly a re-cap rather than news, I found it warm and engaging, and I read it every week. She often posed in that familiar wrap dress with the autumn leaves on it (see photo), and her expression was one of serenity and concern. Sara Nelson reminded me of the Washington Post's inimitable Marguerite Kelly, whom we fans probably read less for exactly what she says, than the unique and engaging way she says it.

Given Nelson's considerable experience in the publishing industry, I hope she writes a book about the bloodbath from her perspective without the muzzle of being a spokesperson for an industry journal.

And boo to the short-sighted pooh-bahs who laid her off. Way to demoralize an industry, folks.

Publishers in the news

The Washington Post has run an article about one of my professors from undergraduate school, and his elegant independent press. I didn't know that he occasionally typed on manual typewriters. My personal quirk is sometimes using an old IBM correcting Selectric II from the late 1970s, but an actual manual typewriter is even more startling.

In these days of print-on-demand publishing that creates good-looking books in small batches, running your own press doesn't seem like such a big deal, but he was doing this decades ago when a publisher still needed some sort of financial backing, or at least a significant trust fund (the latter being the genesis of many New York houses); it was and remains quite an accomplishment. You can visit the press here.

Maurice Jackson at the Library of Congress, February 26

Dr. Maurice Jackson will discuss his new book, Let This Voice Be Heard: Anthony Benezet, Father of Atlantic Abolitionism, at the Library of Congress from 4-5 on February 26. Here's information adapted from the invitation:

Anthony Benezet is recognized as the founder of the antislavery movement in America in the mid-1700s. Benezet believed the British ban on slavery should have been extended to the colonies, and worked to convince his Quaker brethren that slave-owning was not consistent with Christian doctrine.... A book sale and signing will follow the lecture, which is sponsored by the Library’s John W. Kluge Center.

Benezet transformed Quaker anti-slavery sentiment into a broad-based transatlantic movement. According to Jackson, Benezet translated ideas from diverse sources – Enlightenment philosophy, African travel narratives, Quakerism, practical life and the Bible – into concrete action. He founded the African Free School in Philadelphia, where future abolitionist leaders Absalom Jones and James Forten studied. Jackson, a former Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress, teaches Atlantic and African-American history at Georgetown. He currently is at work on a social, political and cultural history of African Americans in Washington D.C. (1790 to the present). He is co-editor, with Jackie Bacon, of "African-Americans and the Haitian Revolution: Selected Essays and Historical Documents," to be published in 2010. Jackson will be inducted into the Washington, D.C., Hall of Fame in April for his years of service to the people in the nation’s capital.

The lecture is free and open to the public; tickets and reservations are not required.

A ringside seat to history

UPDATE January 21. Now I know why it was so easy to get in from the Georgetown side. Crowds were held back at various checkpoints elsewhere, and were unable to use their valid tickets to see the inauguration. That's sad, and I wish that my good fortune hadn't occurred while someone else in the city didn't get to be there. I didn't actually take a seat from anyone (it was almost deserted on the side I walked through), but I now know that many Blue ticket holders were disappointed.

Here is the original post from yesterday:

This has nothing to do with books, but it is so remarkable I had to post it. Today at 11:30 a.m. I was able to walk from my Georgetown home to the Watergate, grab a taxi (because it was so cold, and cabs were plentiful), and make it within two blocks of the Lincoln Memorial. No crowds! I walked right up to the very steps of the Lincoln Memorial and listened to the new President's inaugural speech from that amazing vantage point. I had a perfect view of the Reflecting Pool, the Washington Monument, and behind it, the Capitol. I call it the "Forrest Gump" angle (this photo is from the movie and shows almost exactly where I stood).

No one ever once asked me for a ticket (even though I was in a Blue ticket area), and I was not questioned by any police or guards. Going back to Georgetown was also a breeze. I walked to George Washington University and hailed a taxi at the traffic circle.

What may have happened was that the people who came at three or four in the morning got frozen out and left, and others may not have been able to get into the city at all because of congestion in the subways.

All I know is that I had a beautiful trip on a sunny, 35-degree day, I stood in an historic place as people around me wept, clapped and prayed, and I was able to return home in an orderly manner. The insane Washington of the newspapers and the blogs wasn't in evidence. It was lovely.

External validation on a complex subject

Dr. Charles King's book The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus (Oxford 2008) has been named the 2008 "Book of the Year" by The Moscow Times. More information about him and his other books is available here.

Yes, I actually play Bookworm

This is so clichéd, but I do play Bookworm online. Wouldn't you think a book person could find something else to play, like a war game or something? Or maybe find a newer product? But I love it.

It doesn't have an end, however, so I put one in of my own. I try to get to 20,000 points within 20 moves. That's harder than it sounds.

Oh, and I play online rather than downloading it, even though doing that would enable the version that lets you make 9-letter words. Who needs 'em?

More about whether "your field" is your field

Several people wrote to me privately about the last post. Apparently there is a good bit of personal anxiety out there among many academic professionals about whether or not they're in the right field. I wish some of them had posted their thoughts in the comments, but in these days of Eternal Internet Footprints, many are shy about doing that, and I certainly understand. Still, my e-mail was lively.

Beyond the case of the assistant professor with the mashup disguised as a specialty, there are those who enjoy what they do, but don't quite know how they got there. They feel as though their careers are some sort of cosmic accident -- that they are experts in one thing when it could just as easily have been something else.

And then as if the universe were in some sort of secret accord, this quote came from Steven Pinker in today's New York Times Magazine: During my first book tour 15 years ago, an interviewer noted that the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould had dedicated his first book to his father, who took him to see the dinosaurs when he was 5. What was the event that made me become a cognitive psychologist who studies language? I was dumbstruck. The only thing that came to mind was that the human mind is uniquely interesting and that as soon as I learned you could study it for a living, I knew that that was what I wanted to do. But that response would not just have been charmless; it would also have failed to answer the question. Millions of people are exposed to cognitive psychology in college but have no interest in making a career of it. What made it so attractive to me?

He goes on to try and analyze it, and you can read his thoughts at the link above, but I consider his question more interesting than the answer. What, indeed, made any of us turn right instead of left, or this way instead of that way? I remember the moment I decided to study the 18th century. About eight of us were in a scholarly editing class at the University of Virginia with David Vander Meulen, and we sat around a table in the rare books room at Alderman Library. He showed us the University's copy of the Declaration of Independence. Sitting there, seeing that hand-printed document, and realizing that the 18th century was one of the fields my particular graduate program was best known for, made it fall into place like a puzzle piece clicking. Perhaps I should have known what field I wanted before entering grad school (many people do), but I was fortunate that one of UVA's best offerings happened to be a perfect fit. I wouldn't change it if I had it to do over again; rather, I would have begun earlier and studied even more deeply.

But if that day hadn't happened (and if I hadn't grown up near Alexandria, Virginia, an 18th-century port city), would I have been happy doing something else? Of course, or at least I think so. Would you?

Above image from an optical illusions website.

Are you sure "your field" is really your field?

This interesting conversation happened with a pre-tenure faculty member who was having trouble placing her manuscript. "There's just so little understanding," she said, "of what it is that I do." She kept referring to "my field," but when I asked how she defined that field, she launched into a complicated explanation of a how it was a cross between two distinct areas of historical research, with a third cultural component thrown in. The mix made not-so-much sense to me because both of the historical aspects were from the Dutch late-1600s, and her literary/cultural monkey wrench was from France in the 1920s. Both were fascinating eras, but also much-studied yet oddly tacked onto one another in a "see if you can follow my logic here" way that felt both obscure and culturally disjointed. I soon found myself mentally humming "One of these things is not like the others..."

Call me old-fashioned, but I think if you're going to refer to an area of research as a field, it should probably have more than just you in it. Otherwise you risk being just another lonely laborer out standing in his field. Sure, you can define a field, and that's bold and important work, but it's also usually best done post-tenure. In fact, her field wasn't really so much an area of research as the resulting mashup combining what she had studied in graduate school with what she liked to do now.

I asked her whether she had considered writing about something a bit more accessible. Something -- perhaps -- that a university press might actually be able to list in its catalogue and sell. She sighed. "But this is what I'm trained in. It's my expertise." She held on to her topic, and who knows? Maybe she will find a home for it, though I don't see how. But what I do question big-picture is how hard it would be to take some post-doctoral courses at (for example) Johns Hopkins that is just an hour away, and branch into a second area of expertise that more clearly connects her to a recognized field. I'm not saying she needs to give up what she loves, but rather it seems she is defining "her field" so narrowly that she can't quite imagine doing anything else. And is she really an expert? Her qualifications at present are quite slim -- just a few graduate courses, and a dissertation. Why can't this change, expand, grow?

Many scholars choose a number of areas in which to educate themselves as experts. A doctorate is hardly a badge of perfection in any field. As some of my advisors liked to say, it's just a union card.

Photo above of a woman out standing in her field taken from Somebody's blog.

Since when are an author's lies the editor's fault?

I grow weary of armchair critics who blame editors and fact-checkers for bold, audacious falsehoods by authors. "What happened to editing?" these critics cry. "Where are the fact-checkers?"

They're right where they've always been, stupendously overworked and underpaid. Do these critics seriously believe that a busy editor with 50 nonfiction books on her list is also personally responsible for making sure that every one of them is absolutely true? Or that an underpaid fact-checker who works for an entire publishing house, not just one editor, can possibly think of and then catch everything in every manuscript?

I'm not talking about having a basic fact-checking procedure. Some of that is routine, and if my own experience at FSG is any indication, it does happen. Not only did I have to provide evidence of certain facts to the publisher, but I also had to spend a couple of hours on the phone with a lawyer going over the potentially actionable parts. All fine, all good, but (I would add), all my responsibility as an author. The fact-checkers and lawyers were there to advise and instruct, not to police. Even if they were there to be the truth cops, if an author has the deep-seated, pathological ability to fabricate things that happened years ago in a place that no longer exists, how would an editor or fact-checker ever know?

If you think you're so smart and no one would ever pull one over on you, take down any major nonfiction bestseller from your shelf and ask yourself how you would start proving that the important, big-picture aspects of the book are true. Where do you begin? Someone says, for example, that they should have checked to see if James Frey ever went to prison. Really? Okay, but if you don't know that's the suspect fact, where does it fall in a list of maybe 2,000 other facts that need to be checked? Now multiply the book in your hand by dozens of books, piled up all around you. They all need fact-checking. Where do you start? How long will it take? Whom do you hire, and what happens when most of the facts do check out? At what point do you stop and conclude the book is true?

Sure, it would have been nice if somebody knew that a young woman in starving Eastern Europe in wartime couldn't hide a stash of apples to toss over a fence to a boy in a concentration camp, and that her beau couldn't have made it to the fence in the first place. But that fact amid all the other checkable facts becomes a needle in an amazingly complex haystack. In retrospect we know a lot of things that are not at all evident in the moment.

I believe the critics should give editors and fact-checkers a break. The responsibility for telling the truth rests with authors.

Vanity, thy name is option clause

The author was ecstatic. Not only had she been offered a publishing contract, but they wanted her next two books as well! Oh glory! Whoo-hoo!

Slow down.

I made her a cup of my amazing fresh-brewed coffee with lemon zest, and I convinced her to sit by the fire at Booklab a minute and take a breath. Yes, it sounds flattering when a publisher includes mention of your future works in a book contract. But dear author, this is what is known as the dreaded Option Clause, and it always benefits the publisher, not you.

The clauses are generally written in tricky ways. You usually have to show your publisher your next work of the same genre (for example, your next work of nonfiction), and give them right-of-first-refusal. Doesn't that sound innocent and also flattering? It does, but it isn't. First of all, it gives them a chance to bid on the book with no competition, so they can "buy" you on the same terms as your first book, even though presumably you're worth more on book two if you are angling your career the right way. Second, it prevents you from shopping book two around when it is in the earlier stage of proposal and sample chapter, a stage at which many publishers may want to give you a deal. This option clause won't be satisfied if you show your current publisher that same amount of work -- you still owe them a look and a bid on the whole manuscript. The overall effect is one of squelching healthy competition.

There is an old gentleman's agreement in New York publishing (although it is rapidly falling by the wayside along with such niceties as job security) that says if authors are bound by option clauses to publishers even in a manner that they can technically wriggle out of, other publishers won't bid. The general thought was -- and sometimes still is -- that you should satisfy your obligation to the publisher by producing the books that the option clause stipulates before you are free to go elsewhere, and other publishers would expect the same, so they back off. Would this hold up in a court of law? Of course not, but publishers know that turnip-poor authors aren't usually going to go crying to the judge over such matters. They can't afford to.

There are two ways to handle an option clause if you don't have an agent. The best way is to get the publisher to strike it out altogether, and if you do, that's a complete victory. Then the publisher can bid just like anyone else for your next book. But most publishers won't do this, and unless you are valuable and they're nervous about losing you, I don't blame them... why would they? What you usually can get, however, is a time limit. I prefer sixty days, but you can negotiate and perhaps settle at ninety. Once you close the loop by giving the option clause an expiration date, you at least render it into a gentler thing, if not completely harmless.


The book image above comes from the University of Nebraska Press.

Was your editor really angry in that e-mail?

Or were you being just a wee bit sensitive? I ask, because authors forward me correspondence from editors quite often, asking me to read between the lines and tell me what s/he was thinking at the moment they hit "send."

Almost always the e-mail is much tamer when I read it than it was in the mind of the nervous-nellie author who sent it to me. Sometimes the note is neutral, completely harmless. Other times it has a little bit of what I call "New York cheddar" to it, but nothing to worry about (New Yorkers can snap at each other when they're happy, let alone when they're not... it is getting better, but unnecessary snippiness is still their collective worst habit). Some of my authors have over-interpreted a simple "No," or "I don't think so," as "Go away and never come back, I'm canceling your contract you worthless excuse for an academic professional."

For the most part, everyone got up this morning thinking about themselves, not you or me. Most e-mails are just language, and the typical professional is careful not to put genuine anger in writing. Even if there was a major issue between you and your editor, you'd hear about it in a different way than casual e-mail.

Authors will continue to send me these e-mails, and I'm always happy to read them and try to help if I can. But your editor is probably not angry at you, and you won't lose your book deal just because you asked questions about it, even if you do get a sharp taste of New York cheddar in return.

Image swiped from Flickr.

As you resolve to write in 2009, does Dad's voice from 1967 still echo in your brain?

I want to have a word with dear old Dad. Not mine. Everyone else's. In 1967 He sat one of my authors down for a talk, when the then-adolescent was going through a particularly writerly phase that in those days involved wearing turtlenecks and playing guitar as well as scrawling his deepest feelings in notebooks. Dad said that writers starve, and He advised His college-bound son to major in something that would get him a job. Even though son eventually switched his major from Dad's choice, accounting, to his own preference, history, and even though he succeeded in graduate school, became an assistant professor, and eventually earned tenure, every fricking time he sits down to write he re-lives the scene from 1967, with my author's scruffy hair, the scent-memory of Dad's annoying aftershave and all.

Dads have "counseled" their offspring into fields for which they are poorly suited, while steering them away from that which could have made them famous, since forever. Songwriters, painters, dancers, actors all hear the same drivel from Dads coast to coast. Moms are guilty, too, but for that echoing voice that just won't go away when you're trying to go for it as a writer, there's nothing quite like the tuneless horn-honking of dear, old Dad to really lock things up.

In 1982, another Dad told one of my authors she should use her writing skills for something practical and go to law school. She did, and now she is a law professor (I'll bet if you scratch a thousand of those you'll find someone underneath who compromised between family expectations and inner pull a different way). Dads have told my authors that writers don't earn money, even though of the Forbes top 100 earning celebrities, 12 are writers.

Much of my job involves doing battle with a succession of Dad-voices from ages and places past. (Does that make me a kind of superhero?) I'm not saying that all fathers give bad advice. I'm just saying that many fathers push their kids away from the arts and toward business, and that is often not the right thing for the kid.

There are a number of quite successful strategies for making His voice go away, and they don't involve either electroshock therapy or drugs. My personal favorite is self hypnosis, but there are also good books you can read. Can you change your mind and your thought patterns? Absolutely! Here is my reading list of effective Dad silencers for 2009:

Loving What Is by Byron Katie. She is the queen of helping you shrug about what you can't change, and living fully in spite of it.

The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. Kinda heavy on the righteous anger and the twelve steps, but she'll help you figure out who you really are. I love to work with her book in groups, and I have led five to date.

Hypnotherapy recordings by Lyndall Briggs and Glenn Harrold. You can find these at audible.com. In my heyday with the self-hypnosis I was listening to one or another of these every afternoon for over a year, and they did a remarkable job and changing the internal chatter from negative to positive. Both authors have fascinating accents. Briggs is a strong variant on Australian, and Harrold's possibly comes from within the sound of London's Bow Bells (I'm no Harold Higgins and can't quite tell). To me that's charming, but it can also be something to adjust to if you're used to listening to the BBC. I love both of them.



And yes, I realize that the man above speaking to Ben Braddock in "The Graduate" is Mr. McGuire, not Mr. Braddock, but it's just such a perfect image for this post.

More about not using your longsuffering partner as your unpaid editor

Georgetown University's Matt Maples, one of the seven readers of this blog, brought a recent New Yorker article to my attention. Actually I had already read it, and with great jealousy, because it expanded on a theme about late blooming that I mentioned in my book about adults returning to college some years ago and never had the focus/drive/whatever to shape it into an article or book of its own.

"I was reading your booklab blog, and came across your post about advice columns, where you touch on the topic of spouses and authors. It reminded me of a recent New Yorker piece by Malcolm Gladwell about Ben Fountain and other late bloomers. I highly recommend it if you haven't read it already. It's a great story. And talk about your supportive spouses! Here's the link."

What he refers to is the story of Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award-winning author Fountain's wife, who was certainly not his unpaid editor. Instead of being forced to read and critique his manuscripts, she did what spouses can more appropriately do for one another -- she earned a living and supported him while he wrote (he had been a successful lawyer, but he quit to become a writer and it worked). Gladwell notes that she was far more than his tireless supporter, she was, to use an old-fashioned-but-accurate term, his patron. “Sharie never once brought up money, not once—never,” Fountain said. She was sitting next to him, and he looked at her in a way that made it plain that he understood how much of the credit for “Brief Encounters” belonged to his wife. His eyes welled up with tears. “I never felt any pressure from her,” he said. “Not even covert, not even implied.”

Romance author Debbie Macomber has a similar story. Her husband supported her while she wrote, long past the time when many spouses would have hung it up and said "Quit typing and get a real job." Now she (and he) are multimillionaires.

I'm not saying every partner has to spend years as the breadwinner while the other one gets to renovate the attic as an office and type away. In many ways that isn't fair or reasonable. But I am saying that partners should believe in one another. If you love somebody and they love to write, total honesty about your assessment of their talent (if it is low) is not the way to go. Love means support, usually more of the emotional and spiritual than the financial kind, but if the latter is possible, so be it.

One of my favorite books is self published

Occasionally I blog about self-published books, pointing out that they have a distinguished history, and that there is an enormous difference between publishing a book yourself and "vanity publishing." Self publishing can be practical for all sorts of reasons, especially if you have a built-in audience for your book.

That's the case with Kyra Alex, the owner of Lily's Café on Deer Isle in Maine. I have never met her, but one of my best friends in the world now lives in Maine, and he has vacationed there for about 15 years. He discovered her café, and in 2001 he brought me back Lily's Café Cookbook as a gift. It was a slim little thing, well-designed and full of happy photographs, yet still obviously self-published (no publisher colophon, just the mark of Thompson-Shore, a book manufacturer). I could see, however, why this kind of publishing made perfect sense for this author, as a way to share recipes and her outlook on food and life with her guests. Money from the book itself is probably secondary to the strong relationships it builds.

My habit with cookbooks is to write a little note next to each recipe with the date I first made it, my experience with the recipe, and a word about whether or not I would make it again since it is easy to forget five years later how each one worked. For some reason this book captivated me and I started writing notes all over it. For Barbara's Pumpkin Muffins: "Oct. 12, 2002. Amazingly good, and they freeze well. Made 1/2 recipe for six nice-sized muffins." For Banana Pecan Scones: "Nov. 21, 2003. Made for Artist's Way group, cut w/a heart-shaped cutter. Followed recipe exactly." For Lily's Café's Most Requested Chocolate Layer Cake: "Better than Martha Stewart's one-bowl chocolate cake, and easier!"

I ignored my other cookbooks by James Beard and Marcella Hazan in favor of this modest volume from a chef who to my knowledge has never been on TV, and who paid to publish her own book.

So what did I get for Christmas this year from the same friend up in Maine? Cooking in the Moment: Four Seasons of Cooking on an Island in Maine by none other than Kyra Alex. She signed it "For Carole, Here's to a decadent bite of chocolate cake and the wonderful moments it brings! Kyra Alex." I was as thrilled that she knew my name as if she had been M. F. K. Fisher or Julia Child herself (and yes, Kyra Alex has cooked for Julia Child... one year she made her official birthday cake!).

Imagine, all this excitement over self-published books from an author who doesn't even have a website, let alone a Food Network deal or her own line of kitchen knives. If you want to buy one of her books, I recommend the first one for now, until I see how the second one goes... but something tells me it will be just as wonderful.

Scary headlines

Friends and family have been sending me sure-to-terrify articles from The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times to point out (in case I hadn't noticed) that book publishing is shaky at the moment. Drudge Report screams it: CUTBACKS AT PUBLISHING HOUSES SPELL END OF GLAM JOBS..."

Glam jobs? Right, whatever. Publishing has always paid modestly, except for its titans. In that way it is similar to academia. And yes, it is going through upheaval right now. I thought most houses were mindless and monstrous for scheduling their bloodbaths right before Christmas, forcing their staffs to compete for the same jobs during a financial crisis (way to stick together, teams), but that has nothing to do with the fact that "glam" hasn't described typical book publishing for a long, long time.

Tweedy? Yes. Goofy? Often. But glam?

Iowa Book Doctors and the Hippocratic Oath

I have no direct information about whether the Iowa Book Doctors (http://www.iowabookdoctors.com/) are good or not, but it seems like an interesting organization headed by Cheeni Rao, a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop who has a book coming out from HarperOne in April. I love the Hippocratic oath on the website:

We swear to fulfill, to the best of our ability and judgment, this covenant:

We will help those who ask for our assistance, gladly share our knowledge, and teach them how to reach their goals.

We will apply all measures which are required, avoiding those twin traps of over-treatment and therapeutic nihilism.

We will remember that warmth, sympathy, and understanding are as necessary as constructive criticism.

We will respect the privacy of our clients, for their problems are not disclosed to us that the world may know.

We will teach the craft of writing whenever we can, for teaching a writer how to write effectively is a far better course than leaving them alone to toil in confusion.

If we do not violate this oath, may we enjoy life and art, respected while we live and remembered with affection thereafter. May we always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of our calling and may we long experience the joy of helping those who seek us.

PS: Why am I highlighting a competitor? Because there is no such thing as competition. We all do different things for authors. I also like Where Books Begin, http://www.wherebooksbegin.com/.

Thoughts on submission for 2009

Now that I'm back at Booklab after some decidedly non-bookish time in the Florida sun, I've had a chance to think about some of the odder aspects of publishing. The oddest for me personally is the submission process, as I have blogged before. The word "submission" carries strange overtones, primarily one where the writer is the supplicant and the agents and editors -- who supposedly hold all the power in the submission process -- are the grantors. Over time, a sensible soul might logically step back from the gatekeeping process and ask if this is really the only way to the page. It isn't.

The sane writer (whether of books and essays, or a singer/songwriter, or a playwright, or a poet) learns to thrive on internal validation, and understands that creative output is a God-given gift and right, not a gatekeeper-dictated privilege. It is not dependent on age (in fact, most bestsellers come to authors over the age of 55), it does not favor youth and innocence, and it need not stop if one gets what some people love to sneeringly call a "real job." Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive. Rita Mae Brown was once a bricklayer. (I've always found that really cool.)

If I could impart one useful phrase to everyone who visits Booklab discouraged over rejection, it would be this: "Who are these people?" Submission is often necessary, and I believe in heeding wise agent or editor counsel, but submission does not overturn the essential authority of you as an author. You're the one who chooses when you start, how you progress, when you stop, and -- even if it has been decades -- when you start again. No other person -- parents, teachers, mentors, employers, agents, editors -- controls a bit of it.

I guess this is the part of the post where I sum things up in a pithy way, and then add an image about perseverance. But I'm feeling too contrary for that. After all, some people really aren't good writers and never will be. Yet who am I to decide? I can think of five or six people on the bestseller lists right now who write books that I find problematic in the extreme, with issues ranging from poor writing to "ew" subject matter to aimless execution, and I can name a host of wildly talented people who aren't published and possibly never will be. Far be it from me to say your good work will prevail in the traditional submission process if you are diligent. Maybe it won't.

But you still get to decide. It's still your life and your ride. And if you silence yourself because you didn't get one over in an arbitrary, power-laden process called submission, you may deprive me and others of your breakthrough work.

Here's an interesting quote from Spike Lee when he learned that Barack and Michelle Obama went to one of his movies on their first date in Chicago: "Actually, Barack told me the first date he took Michelle to was Do the Right Thing. I said, “Thank God I made it. Otherwise you would have taken her to Soul Man. Michelle would have been like, ‘What’s wrong with this brother?’ ”

Lee made that movie, and all the others, without asking anyone for permission. In fact, Lee never really participated in the submission process as it is traditionally defined. Read his bio here, and you won't see one word about how he offered his work to someone else and silently begged for validation.

TV quotes over the holidays

As I (sometimes perhaps annoyingly) point out when people ask if I saw such- and- such show, I have not owned a television since 1988. But my family has several, and when I visit a TV is usually on somewhere. While walking from one room to the other I heard a character say "I've gotta write a book!" To which another responded, "You should read one first."

It was dry and funny enough to look up, and it turns out to be a somewhat well-known quote from Navy NCIS, a series that has apparently been on the air forever but I had no idea. Jethro Gibbs exchanges the lines with Tony DiNozzo after DiNozzo is let into an exclusive nightclub simply because he is recognized as a famous author.

Okay, so that's the literary part. I watched a few episodes over several days and concluded that NCIS writers have probably never been to Washington, DC, not even on school field trips. They get fact after fact wrong . . . it may feel like DC to outsiders, but to this insider the regional references feel clunky and off. The funniest blooper to me was the ambitious Georgetown University student who had a revealing MySpace page.

Um. Not likely. On so many levels I don't even know where to start.

But the book quote was still funny.

Draws versus drawers

I fully admit to being a "Best of Craigslist" addict. Most of you know what I mean, but for those who don't, it's a section of Craigslist devoted to the posts that readers voted on as being the funniest. Some of them are priceless.

Today I saw one that wasn't really one of the all-time best, but it nonetheless made an amusing point about books and publishing. You can read the whole thing here. The author rants about people who post on Craigslist and write "draw" instead of "drawer," and what this means for the literacy of society as a whole:

Literature: Madame Bovary kept things in drawers. Jo March used drawers. Franny and Zooey used drawers. Portnoy used drawers. Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and the Three Investigators all solved mysteries by striking an old desk, thereby unlatching a "secret drawer." Drawers aren't only in old literature; they are in recent, highly regarded and prize winning literature: staggering geniuses use drawers. People for whom things are illuminated use drawers. Even in current best-sellers there are drawers. According to a millisecond-long A9.com search, on page 31 of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle (#62 in Oprah's Bookclub), "...[at] odd moments she might discover Trudy rearranging the chest of drawers..." And in Extreme Measures - a Thriller (2008), on page 271, someone opens a drawer to take out a pack of Marlboros. There are many, many, maaaaany others. It's more likely than not that any work of fiction will refer to a drawer at some point within it's pages.

Even funnier is that this outraged poster mis-used the apostrophe in its (writing it's, a possessive). And yes, that is one of my pet peeves (although I once taught a class on the apostrophe for a group of sixth graders from the DC public schools, and I accidentally got its/it's backward at first... it was a laugh and also a humbling moment...).

Ah well, outrage is funny. Ironic distance outrage is even funnier.

A book you must read if you love books

Oh, what a wonderful book this is. If you want to understand publishing history from an insider's point of view, then find and read the excellent The Time of Their Lives: The Golden Age of Great American Publishers, Their Editors, and Authors by Al Silverman. Here's a NYTimes book review. Milly Marmur suggested it, and as in all things, she was of course correct. Maybe I love it more because the first chapter is about my publisher for two books, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and FSG has gone through some very sad, even agonizing times this month, or maybe it makes me feel nostalgic for a publishing past I never had the privilege to know (also well-documented in At Random: The Reminiscences of Bennett Cerf and Another Life: A Memoir of Other People by Michael Korda), but this is a don't-miss-it gem. Seriously, drop everything.

Words I Looked Up: Submit

After that last post about submissions, I began thinking about the strange sound of the word "submit," and all the things it can mean. As usual, the OED was helpful but a bit florid, so I turned to Merriam-Webster. The one that fascinates me most? "To yield oneself to the authority or will of another." Scary.

Main Entry: sub·mit
Pronunciation: \səb-ˈmit\
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): sub·mit·ted; sub·mit·ting
Etymology: Middle English submitten, from Latin submittere to lower, submit, from sub- + mittere to send
Date: 14th century
transitive verb1 a: to yield to governance or authority b: to subject to a condition, treatment, or operation 2: to present or propose to another for review, consideration, or decision ; also : to deliver formally 3: to put forward as an opinion or contention intransitive verb1 a: to yield oneself to the authority or will of another : surrender b: to permit oneself to be subjected to something 2: to defer to or consent to abide by the opinion or authority of another
synonyms see yield
— sub·mit·tal \-ˈmi-təl\ noun

Blogger bait part two

My second "I took the bait" post about this month's Poets and Writers concerns the cover. P&W gives them this front-cover line: "Four next-generation agents reveal what they love, what they hate, and ten things writers should never do." The list enumerates glitches that are hallmarks of the uninitiated, such as sending letters addressed "Dear Agent," gushing about how Oprah will love this book, sighing about how many times they've been rejected before, etc.

But why would anyone in publishing complain about this? Such mistakes are harmless enough, and it's not as though we don't all see them. Can't people be given room to learn? In fairness, I think the agents were just answering the question (after a bit of wine... it was a dinner interview). It was P&W's editorial decision to go the classic "never-ever," ruler-on-knuckles direction.

I have always loved the words of that great man of letters, Lewis Lapham, who once said that he received submissions to Harper's "with gratitude." I suggest that is how the literary profession should treat the submission letters or e-mails that come our way. Instead of instructing them on how they should dare approach the throne (the belly crawl? or perhaps the miserable grovel with a flourish?), we might consider remaining ever grateful that would-be authors think well enough of us -- and of their art -- to even try. If they get it wrong, we could simply bless them with the kindest words we can muster. (After all, even the least likely may become bestselling authors one day -- and here I think of Tennessee Williams, who legend says began with few social skills and spoke like a yokel when he first approached super-agent Audrey Wood, and who was known to write dialogue on cocktail napkins.)

We don't live long, any of us, and our relationships would benefit from more mutual ease and forgiveness, and fewer "don't" lists, especially from writer-focused magazines.