Question from the mailbag

Anyone is welcome to ask questions and have them answered on the blog. You can be identified by first name, or kept anonymous. Today's question:

Q: Is there a rule of thumb within the political science field regarding the simultaneous submission of a book manuscript to university presses? Is it common practice, or is it frowned upon?

A: This is a particularly timely question now, because many university presses are in transition, moving from more traditional scholarly practices to ones that resemble practices at trade houses. My answer to you is based on what UP editors have told me (I've personally visited Chicago, Northwestern, Arizona, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Oxford, and NYU, plus the academic division of trade houses Alfred A. Knopf and W. W. Norton; my publisher was Farrar, Straus & Giroux). I also ran this answer by a roomful of university press staff, including editors at places like Yale and MIT, at the Association of American University Presses conference last spring, and it received a 100% positive response.

You may send a prospectus and sample chapter anywhere. To a university press, a submission is an entire manuscript sent to an editor in the hope of triggering the peer review process, so a prospectus and a sample chapter alone do not a full submission make. Just to be sure that the editor understands this, however, I also include a very brief cover note with this package that says clearly "This is an inquiry only, not a full submission." In other words, you're just trying to gauge interest, and that's perfectly fair. You may send as many of these as you wish, as long as that "inquiry only" language is up front.

My recommendation is that you research presses respected in your field (especially important if you are up for tenure or full professor), study their catalogues, and identify books in your field you admire. From this industry-based research, make a list of 3-4 editors who might be appropriate for your work, and send this inquiry package to all of them. Once the yeses and nos come back, rank the yes responses and then submit your full manuscript to them one at a time as per the traditional approach. Everyone will feel that you played fair with them. Two good rules to follow are to only inquire at a press where you would actually want to be published, and to be transparent whenever possible so that an editor does not mistakenly think she or he has a lock on your book.

This process is a huge blessing for academic authors who want to be able to weed out the no responses early, and get on to the potential yeses. This can save months if not years of time.

The William Morris Agency at Booklab

Eric Lupfer of the William Morris Agency will be my guest for a Georgetown University faculty book talk at noon on October 15. I'll have more details on the blog closer to the date, but if you are a Georgetown faculty member and would like to attend for lunch, chat and a Q&A, by all means let us know by sending e-mail at the right or contacting me in person.

If you are not a faculty member but would still like to attend, non-faculty can participate in all Booklab offerings on an academic/course fee basis. Please contact us for more details!

The book above is one of Eric's most recent titles.

The joy of the 8 o'clock hour

The first faculty writing group of the new season met this morning at 8 a.m. Although I'm traditionally a morning person, 8 a.m. for the first meeting of the day still seemed daunting. It's one thing to be at the office at 8, but quite another to be sharp and ready to roll.

It turned out to be one of the best groups. Fortified with hot coffee (I hope I made it strong enough), we updated one another on what we did since the summer groups ended, and what we want for (1) this entire semester; and (2) just the coming week. We assessed the past, looked to the future, and set specific goals that included writing time per day and thoughts about how to balance writing and teaching. This group was a technologically focused bunch, with the majority from the School of Foreign Service conducting research with an international aspect (Iraq, Afghanistan, China, and India).

Two more groups meet today: 1 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. There are still limited spaces available, so please notify Carole if you would like to reserve a place.


Tasty coffee image from The Coffee Company in Australia.

Wisdom from Robert Boice

I love the research of Robert Boice, author of the 1990 book Professors as Writers. Although his research has been incorporated and stated somewhat more accessibly by Paul Silvia in How to Write a Lot, which I also love, Boice is The Man when it comes to research, data, hard numbers, or whatever else you want to call it. They make a great pair. Booklab doesn't focus as much on how we feel about writing, and neither does Boice. Instead, we care what works, and that makes Boice our go-to guru.

Today's tidbit is from Boice Chapter Five, Generative Writing, and his fondness for what he calls the "results-first approach." Boice thinks you have to write something before you can edit or perfect it, but he notices that most academic authors do the opposite, trying to be perfect on the first bounce. He isn't recommending spontaneous writing (he thinks that's a big Fail for different reasons), nor is he suggesting binge writing. Generative writing is more substantive, but it is still produced without judgment. It creates the stuff that can then be edited by a completely different part of the brain.

Over the course of the semester I'll post tidbits from Boice. A great way to read him is to buy both books, read Silvia first, and then read Boice second for backup material.

And speaking of Peeps...

Speaking of Peeps, I'm also obsessed with the diary of Samuel Pepys (yes, his last name is pronounced just like the marshmallow confection). Pepys was one of the great diarists in English history, and his diary -- written in a shorthand code as many men did in his day, both for privacy and for expediency -- forms one of the best firsthand accounts of 17th-century England. Pepys lived through both the Great Fire of London and the Plague. He was a fellow of the Royal Society and he knew Isaac Newton. His remarkable library is one of the jewels of Magdalen College, Cambridge (as a classical radio announcer I learned to pronounce that "Maudlin." It's a sideways pronunciation, kinda like Peeps.).

An English web designer and actor named Phil Gyford runs the Best Site Ever if you're a 17th-century history geek like me -- The Diary of Samuel Pepys. This is Gyford's decade-long effort to put the entire magnum opus on the internet, day by day with links. Wowie. I like it so much that I read it every day and I also sent a monetary contribution to Project Gutenberg as he requested (he also has an Amazon wish list, so I sent him Season One of "Arrested Development" at his request -- he doesn't accept money, but he'll allow the occasional DVD of Gratitude).

Above is Pepys's signature from England's National Archives.

A new take on rejection

Publishing necessarily entails the "ask," the moment where an author offers work to an editor or agent (EoA) in the hope of having it accepted for publication, or representation. One might think of this as a yes/no moment, and sometimes it is, but the closer you get to "yes," the more complicated the transaction becomes. EoAs faced with the prospect of actually accepting something go through a complex internal process of gauging what this will cost them in time, effort, and actual dollars.

Yes, publishing your work costs them money. Surprised? Don't be. Most authors think about the $ coming in, without consider what those brave souls known as publishers have to pay to produce a work, and I'll consider this in detail in a future post. Beyond the warbucks, the act of publishing you or me will require an investment of their time, and also an emotional commitment. They're not just clerks processing Halloween peeps mindlessly in a marshmallow factory. Your work becomes part of their careers, too.

Interestingly, authors tend to hear "no" when an EoA actually said "maybe." For example, sometimes an EoA will say "This would be interesting if x happened" (e.g. if if were more narrative, if it was told from an eyewitness perspective, if it was more scholarly, less scholarly, etc.), and most of the time authors will return to me with "They rejected it." Another typical EoA answer is "The author has a great background, and it would be wonderful to see a book pitch that works off of that base." Again, the author usually hears this as "No," when in fact the EoA was making a bid for a potential future relationship. "Try me again" usually means just that as well -- the EoA sees potential and wants to hear more. But the typical author simply tucks tail and skedaddles.

The next time you think you're hearing no, stop and wait through it. Instead of responding, just be quiet with it for a while, maybe even a day or two. Is it really a rejection? Did the person actually say no? Or is that the pre-recording in your head left over from the fifth grade, and was the answer actually more ambiguous, and potentially much more interesting?

Image from Sugar Shop.

Fiction and the academic author

Most of us who work in the publishing-focused realms of academia are here because we love research and scholarship. We like archives, libraries dusty books, and obscure stuff. We don't think it's dry at all, we think it's tasty! However, once the academic publishing is well underway or comfortably accepted at a great university press or a journal, many academic authors confess to me that something else lurks in their computer files or desk drawers: Novels, poetry, essays, plays and more. Fiction! Yes! I said it!

The new fiction group starts this week at Booklab, and another will begin in January. Just like the scholarly book groups, this one will run for twelve weeks, meeting once a week. Some of the fiction group members will work through the book The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron. Since 2002 I have facilitated five groups based on The Artist's Way, and they're wonderful. Other group members who choose to work on their own (either because they've done AW or because it isn't quite their cup o' tea), will simply check in and let us know how their fiction progresses.

Each week we will also focus on a different literary journal, viewing examples and discussing how to learn more about a journal, and how to submit work to it. For week one beginning Wednesday, September 9, we will focus on Ploughshares, published by Emerson College.

This new season of book groups comes with a pledge to you, my readers. I commit to publishing at least one post per day for this entire book group season, beginning today and ending December 11. This means several things:

**	A revival of The Journal Experiments (whoo-hoo!);
**	Exploration of how each of the ten book groups is going. Participants will be anonymous, but the blog will feature real-life book publishing trials, tribulations and joys;
**	More about my own day-to-day publishing process. Much has happened since I began a scholarly book last year based on research and writing from the past 15 years, and I'll include it in the third person under the name Fortuna.

The new Folger poetry schedule is available

Sometimes poets come to Booklab, asking me about the market for their poetry. Believe it or not there is one, although I don't call it a market per se.

Naysayers who insist poets "can't earn a living" are -- to put it gently -- wildly mistaken, and just a few evenings with some of the world's successful poets will lay that misconception to rest. There are a number of distinguished literary worlds wherein poetry is read, published, and valued, and (yes) where poets are paid.

One of these worlds is exemplified by the reading series available at the Library of Congress, and another one across the street at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Hmmm... I've often wondered if they compete. Whatever the case, each of these institutions works hard to bring in prominent poets for events that are usually low cost or free and just terrific. If you live in Georgetown, there is even a direct bus from Wisconsin Avenue to the Hill! Here is the reading list for the Folger. If you want to sign up to attend, the link is here.

10/9	O.B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize Reading: Juliana Spahr
11/3	Arthur Sze and Afaa Michael Weaver
12/14	Emily Dickinson Birthday Tribute: Lucie Brock-Broido
1/11	Kim Addonizio & Kyle Dargan
2/8	Charles Wright
3/1	Patricia Smith & John Burnside
5/3	W.S. Merwin
5/18	Folger Poetry Board Reading: Richard Wilbur

The above image is from the Folger's own archives.

Tracy Kidder's writing life

One of the most helpful things in my world as a writer has been going to readings or other live events and hearing how famous authors discuss their process. Some of them complain about being asked what they perceive as a silly question ("How do you write each day"), but the answers are more illuminating than most of them realize. For example, I learned from a reading with Jane Smiley that she only writes about a page a day. She is slow, but methodical, because she writes every day and over a year it adds up. Most of the authors I've seen live (John Irving, Sebastian Junger, Michael Crichton, Anne Perry, Harry Shearer, Anthony Bourdain -- there have been many of them) do report one consistent thing -- they tend to write on a predictable schedule rather than catch-as-catch-can. Writing becomes part of the fabric of their lives, rather than some sort of marathon they run once in a while.

Here's a bit from today's New York Times about Tracy Kidder's work schedule. You can read the entire piece here. He's known for many books, but the one above -- for which he won the Pulitzer Prize -- is also the one I liked the best.

What is a typical day in your writing life?

I tend to start early in the morning, the time of day when l feel most nearly capable of thought. When I’m writing a rough draft, I have a hard time staying with it for more than a few hours. I used to be able to spend 12 hours or more a day when rewriting, but I can’t do that for many days in a row anymore. In the summertime, I go fishing after writing, for me a lovely antidote to frustration.

The Google Books Finger

I admit to being a bit of a Google books junkie when it comes to 19th-century stuff. This old, hard-to-find, well-out-of-print material was often the thankless task of the literary sleuth who just wanted to find (for example) as many 19th-century references as possible to one obscure 18th-century author. If the name is unique enough, Google books can bring up a lot of references.

It can also bring up a lot of fingers. Turns out that people scanning Google books have also reasonably often inadvertently scanned their fingers or whole hands, sometimes in color. I wish I was the first to notice this, but as soon as it occurred to me to blog about it I checked for "google books finger" and came up with plenty of hits. Others have noticed. Others have laughed.

Feeling embarrassed over a draft

I've isolated a particular moment in the writing process that can lock up scholars -- finding an error in a draft, and feeling embarrassed about it! Now, one would think that the draft stage would be the appropriate place to identify errors, but for some reason I felt an enormous sense of not only shame, but potential public humiliation, when I saw a mistake in the title of a draft of one of my book chapters this morning. Immediately thoughts popped to mind: "What if it had gone out that way?" "What if the editor saw it and thought how stupid I am?" "How could I have missed that after looking at it so many times?" None of these recriminating questions was particularly helpful, but they made up for that by being loud and persistent (or as a version of the old saying goes, he was slovenly, but he made up for it by being rude).

The frog above agrees that shame is the only appropriate response to any mistake. Visit him and other disapproving critters at one of my favorite websites, Cuteoverload.com.

Booklab takes your questions

Are you an author or author-to-be? Do you have a pressing question about book publishing? Write to Booklab, and I'll answer for free if your question is selected, and if you agree to have it posted on the blog. It's all anonymous unless you wish to be identified. Booklab does charge for classes and professional literary advising, so this is a great way to communicate gratis. Maybe it will turn into a column!

HINT: To really keep it anonymous, post your question as an unsigned reply to any blog entry.

The never-ending quest to spout the best book advice, ever

After a bit of a hiatus from NPC events and festivities, your book blogger will be back at the National Press Club tonight for a panel event, "Make Your Book a Reality," sponsored by the Club's Professional Development Committee. My copanelists will be Paul Dickson, an accomplished author and fellow club member, Howard Yoon, an agent with the DC's venerable Gail Ross Agency, and editorial expert Barbara Hart.

We will each speak for about 10 minutes on what we think makes a book successful, and I'm on the fence. Part of me wants to say "Model greatness" by looking at what has succeeded before, and another part of me wants to say "Forget all that" since so many wonderful books have arisen out of their authors' own quirky vision of the world. Part of me wants to say "Write about something you love and care about," when my more pragmatic side whispers that many excellent books have been written because someone commissioned the book, or because the author did it for the money. There is nothing wrong with doing something for profit, and sometimes fine work is the result. I think the bottom line is to build your workbox of professional tools by writing a lot and publishing everywhere you can, so that you're really good at what you do when you sit down to write the book. But then again, I know first-timers who wrote terrific books, so maybe that's wrong, too.

Write or wrong (pun!), I'll be there tonight with fellow book lovers. If you want to come, the sign-up information is at the link above. And the photo is of your book blogger looking as geeky and happy as possible standing next to Anne Perry. The National Press Club is a great place to meet famous authors and pretend you know them. :-)

Save August!

Summer book group participants are starting to flag. The excuses are pouring in (we're leaving for vacation on Thursday and I have to get the car inspected; my husband had the kids for all of June and July after day camp, and now it's my turn; I'm already anticipating September and all the work that will hit me when the students return; blah, blah, blah), and groups are smaller.

But ladies and gentlemen of the summer book groups, I am here to remind you of one profound, inarguable fact: August is 1/3 of summer! It's still a big chunk! Giving up on August would be as silly as giving up on July. August is a spectacular writing month, and unless you are going on vacation (I believe in true vacation), if you're in town then you can and should be cranking on that manuscript.

Here are some tips from this week's groups for making August work for you:

1. If looming work in September is starting to freak you out, write your woes down on a sheet of paper. Put the sheet of paper in a mason jar, and tighten the lid. Set it aside during your writing time, with a promise that you'll take it out of the jar and worry when you're finished writing. This trick has been known to appease the scientifically identified Worry Center of the brain.

2. If your days are feeling even blobbier than usual, make a schedule, share it with a friend, and check in with each other every morning to commit to it. This can be a nice excuse to meet someone for coffee. Yes -- check in every morning. August requires desperate measures.

3. Try to define a chunk of writing that -- when completed -- will represent a successful August. Then break that chunk down into smaller pieces that will become your weekly and daily tasks. It is only August 4 today, so imagine what can and should be true 27 days from now.

4. If you've tried and you're still flagging, make an appointment to write at Booklab every day if you have to.


Image from August: Osage County, a play I saw in NYC in June.

Shapeless days and shapeless nights . . .

Yesterday in one of our faculty summer book writing groups, a professor commented that her days have been feeling "shapeless" in the summer time. We're all supposed to be writing and oh-so-productive, but in the absence of a daily office structure that can be more difficult than it sounds.

The groups have come up with several smart ways to impose add shape to our summer days and get your academic book done. First -- and most important to all of us -- is joining and committing to a weekly faculty book writing group. We find that peer pressure is a terrific motivator, and that on days when we just don't feel like writing, the sense that friends/colleagues who care about our progress will want a full report is often enough to get us moving.

Second is setting up regular -- even daily -- writing dates with fellow authors. For example, it's Friday and I don't have any faculty book writing groups today, so it might be tempting to whittle away my whole morning on e-mail and low-value busywork. However, a faculty member is coming over to write for an hour and a half at 10 a.m., so I need to have my act together when he gets here. He has been here to write every day at 10 all week. Voila, structure!

If you're worried about wearing out a colleague's good will, then spread the energy around by writing with more people. Five authors come here at different times of the week to write (I write during most of these sessions, too), and in the fall there will be more.

Parking your car on the downhill slope

Two of the nine summer book writing groups for faculty have yielded the same tidbit of writing advice that they heard "somewhere." It goes like this. When you're having a great writing day and the time you allotted for writing is up, instead of going on and on until you burn out, stop your work while you're still on a roll, and leave yourself notes for where to pick it up the next day. Then you'll be excited and eager to return to the task, and you'll have a much better time getting started.

Hmmm. Has anyone heard this before? Any idea where it comes from? And does it work?

A completely lazy web search yielded these links about it, and suggest that it may come from the book Writing Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day:

http://www.43folders.com/2005/04/27/park-on-a-downhill-slope
http://is.gd/1FOp3


Above image for sale at art.com.

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!

This series is a genius idea, and I'll post all of the installments if the press makes more. 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.