The book journal, part four: how do you start writing, and when?

Knowing when and how to start writing a book is a skill acquired over time, honed through the actual writing of books. Every author is different. Some prefer to research the entire thing thoroughly before settling down to a draft. Others write things up as they go. There are many disparate methods, but this is a journal, so I'll tell you mine. It is a method developed in the writing of my first two books, and it is one I will refine and use for this third book.

Instead of starting the story chronologically, or making myself write preliminary matter before getting to the meat, I like to dive right in with a bit of the story that interests me and that I understand now. It doesn't matter what I don't yet know -- those things will come in time. What does matter is that I know one tiny piece of the thing, and that I feel good enough about it to start drafting it.

In graduate school I was initimated by the academic writing process, so I knocked on the door of a famous scholar named Alastair Fowler, who is now Regius Professor Emeritus of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He taught at the University of Edinburgh half the year and at the University of Virginia the other half. Lucky us. I don't know what came over me that day in 1990, or why I thought he of all people would help me given his international standing in Renaissance studies, nor do I know why I was so blunt that morning, but when he asked why I had come I blurted out "I don't know how to write a paper for graduate school." He laughed and motioned for me to come in and sit down. "I wish," he said, "that more of your colleagues would admit it." Then he gave me a 40-minute talk on getting your thoughts on paper without putting them in straight lines or any particular order (he preferred using oversized white paper that allowed you to write all over the sheet, be circular, etc.), not setting them in concrete too soon, but allowing your written musings to naturally coalesce into meaning. "Ideas are like sheep," he said, indicating that they want to wander and to a certain extent should, "but then you have to put a pen around them." He showed me his method of circling related ideas and gathering them into intellectual units that would eventually become paragraphs and chapters.

It worked so well that I yammered about it to all of my friends, and a number of them went traipsing to him. Eventually he began offering it as a talk for graduate students, and last year I noticed that he published a book with Oxford called How To Write. Some like to say it's for novices, but I laugh at that notion. Many of the most seasoned writing veterans keep about them the "novice mind," and accept instruction willingly from new sources. I think anyone should read it, no matter how well-published, because Dr. Fowler's insights are unlike any other.

NB: I have no idea if my blurted-out question eighteen years ago actually inspired this book, but I like to flatter myself and think so. At the very least I believe I contributed to it by helping blaze a path for other graduate students to his door.

So how do I start writing? Simple. I take the aspect of the story that interests me the most, and I map it out with the Alastair Fowler Writing Method, hearing his words all the while in my ear "Ideas are like sheep..." I don't pressure myself to make this written bit long or short -- it's just a bit. Some pages. I don't even worry about where it will go in the book. Instead I marshall the research for that tidbit, read it, think about it, map it (mindmaps are also good for this, and I used them often), and then in straightforward prose write it up. Those few pages are just a snippet, but they represent what I can see now. It's like Anne Lamott's concept of the one-inch picture frame from Bird By Bird. She says that her only job is writing down what she can see in that tiny space, nothing more.

So today I'm writing about the day my author went to prison. I don't even know how she got out, but it doesn't matter. I simply know that she went, and I'm sticking to the documented facts of the case (what we have from newspaper accounts and judicial records). I'm writing my one-inch picture frame, using Alastair Fowler's insights, and standing on the shoulders of these two giants.

The book journal, part three: choosing a press

What? I'm choosing a press now? But the book isn't even written yet! Shouldn't an author choose a press after writing the book?

Absolutely not; many successful authors aim for particular presses, and even specific editors, long before they begin to write. Here's a simple example: if I assign you the task of building a ship to sail to a destination, you would logically ask "Where are we going?" One takes a different sort of vessel to Belize than to the Arctic Circle. In many ways a book is a vessel -- it is a paper repository of thoughts expressed as words that somehow must find its way into the homes and hands of readers. Many never complete that journey, but happy is the ship builder whose literary vessel sails true. Choosing a publisher early makes sense in this analogy, because different slants and styles of books work at different publishers.

Typical authors, especially first-time academic authors, write whatever they want to write, and then go knocking on doors trying to find someone to publish it. Seasoned authors, however, are aware that presses have specific characteristics, and that the more one knows about presses and even individual editors, the better the chances that the book will communicate with those professionals, and through them to a precise audience. Also, many editors see themselves as partners in the shaping of the final book -- their jobs are intellectual, not clerical, and they are there to help you craft your work to fit in that artful collection known as their list.

How can you get to know presses? The simplest way to start is through their official self-representation in their catalogues. Publisher catalogues are often works of art in themselves (I collect attractive covers), and they reveal much about the identity of a press over time. If you want to see a lot of them at once, make friends with a bookseller and ask to view back catalogues. Many publishers have good web sites as well, and you can peruse these sites for more than a simple roster of authors and titles. You're searching for editorial identity -- what makes one house distinct from another. In the case of university presses this is often an extension of the university's own stature and image.

I have chosen a press, although for the purposes of this online journal I won't name it until/ unless my proposed book gets in. What I will say is that it is a press where (1)I have visited in person; (2) I have studied its catalogues going back ten years; (3) I have chosen a target editor based on her/his stated editorial interests and upon the output over time that I respect (this is so important -- you need to know what an editor has done -- look at the final product and read her or his books!); and (4) although it is a university press, it has a strong track record of books that have been successful in the big bookstores. Only a handful of university presses fit this last description.

Whether or not my book makes it in at this press, I am improving my chances simply by knowing where my boat is supposed to go. If I do get in, it will be partly because research and forethought pay off. If I don't get in, I have still improved the chances that my book will find a home elsewhere because I have crafted it to actually fit a stated and successful editorial need.

(Hint: It's not the press in the photograph!)

The book journal, part two: setting up a file box

In Chapter 5 of her 2003 book The Creative Habit, one of a handful of books that I re-read, award-winning dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp writes "Before you can think outside of the box, you have to start with a box." She then explains how each of her dances begins as a cardboard file box with a lid (the kind you buy at office supply stores and assemble yourself). "I write the project name on the box, and as the piece progresses I fill it up with every item that went into the making of the dance. This means notebooks, news clippings, CDs, videotapes of me working alone in my studio, videos of the dancers rehearsing, books and photographs and pieces of art that may have inspired me.... If you want a glimpse into how I think and work, you could do worse than to start with my boxes." One Broadway show can fill as many as twelve boxes. She cites other artists such as Maurice Sendak who have different but also organized systems, but she loves hers as order among the disorder.

She puts certain iconic things in each box, for example blue index cards with her stated goals for the project. She tries to make these goals simple and clear, such as Tell a story or make dance pay for the dancers. For the show Movin' Out (for which she won a 2003 Tony), she included the first line of the Iliad, "Sing to me muse of the rage of Achilles." She adds copies of movies or music that inspire her, notebooks that she fills with thoughts about the show, even meaningful tchotchkes. "That's how a box is like soil to me. It's basic, earthy, elemental. It's home. It's what I can always go back to when I need to re-group and keep my bearings. Knowing that box is always there gives me the freedom to venture out, be bold, dare to fall flat on my face."

I'm not exactly Twyla Tharp (she just received the Kennedy Center lifetime achievement honor). But I grew up with the idea of her, and I've paid attention since age nine when I first learned her name. So in honor of her, I started a file box for this book I'm writing in public. Books are more paper-based than dances, so I put red hanging files in it, and manila file folders carefully labeled (using the Brother P-touch 1180 labeler) as I begin to grow the materials for this new book. I also included the first of what will probably be several file cards for goals, blue just like hers. Upon the first one I wrote clearly: Tell a story.

The book journal, part one: why write?

Over the next few months I'll publicly track my progress conceiving, pitching and writing the book that I need in order to justify my job. No one has said that publishing a third book is mandatory, but ongoing publishing is part of my personal value system. It has always been my firm belief that teachers should be current practitioners, and I bristle (or become outright hostile) when I hear ignoramuses spout the line "Those that can't, teach." Ahem. Some of the finest practitioners I know in various fields also teach, and do so wonderfully. Teaching is an honor, and it should be the fruit of a thriving career, not the refuge of a failing one. Now my goal is to publish a third book in order to justify this great privilege.

Thrashing about like this in public feels a bit odd, given that I don't even have a contract yet, but in another sense it is quite freeing. Public accountability is an important part of productivity, at least for me, and many of the authors who come to Booklab also say that they want and need someone or some thing to answer to. A university tenure or full-professor-promotion committee can function as that taskmaster. But university life can also become a "velvet coffin," for once you pass a certain level of acceptability (publishing a couple of books, getting tenure, receiving the acknowledgement of peers), it's easy to put it on autopilot for the next twenty years.

Career autopilot is not what Booklab, or Georgetown for that matter, has ever been about. A global university that aims not just for relevance but for essential status in the 21st century requires active, publishing scholars. Publishing in this model becomes not merely a tool for getting tenure (ack, what a low bar!), but a means of participating in public intellectual life in a powerful and life-changing way for author and audience. As Sartre pointed out in his 1947 essay "Why Write" -- an essay I've taught undergraduates at Georgetown so many times I can almost recite it by heart -- the author requires a reader in order to exist. "Since the creation can find its fulfillment only in reading, since the artist must entrust to another the job of carrying out what he has begun, since it is only through the consciousness of the reader that he can regard himself as essential to his work, all literary work is an appeal" (emphasis added). In this sense both writing and reading are bound inextricably together in what he terms "the greatest act of pure freedom."

So I will celebrate pure Sartrean freedom on this blog by mapping a new book project, writing a proposal, and sending it to publishers, all in public. Onward.

How a book on plotting thrillers helps with scholarly nonfiction

Okay, here's a revelation (or at least it was for me and two other academic author friends who tried this). A good book on how to structure a plot can work wonders with the organization of your scholarly work. Why? Because any narrative -- whether fiction or nonfiction -- benefits from the application of some basic storytelling principles. Just because you're writing about something that really happened, and just because you've heavily end-noted it, doesn't give you a license to bore us silly, or for that matter to confuse us. A crucial element of what we know as readability has to do with your book's basic structure.

Chronology -- the "structure" that most academic authors initially use when outlining their books -- is almost never the best choice for a literary plan. How many dull biographies have begun with "So and so was born on a wind-swept day," yacketa, yacketa. And how many first chapters of books have begun with prehistoric humans and their cave paintings as the "background" to a subject that begins millennia later? (I have an odd habit of looking in the first chapters of various nonfiction books to see how many start in prehistoric times... quite a few!) Many of these same books save the information on the exciting, relevant cultural meaning of the person or phenomenon until the last chapter or even an epilogue, in the naieve belief that readers will actually make it that far. In those cases, if I'm editing the book or if the author asks my opinion, I usually pluck that material wriggling from its shell and plop it down as Chapter One. Much of the time, this simple re-structuring works.

But now I'll have even better ideas. The book that helped me and my two author-buddies so much is Plot and Structure by lawyer-turned-author James Scott Bell ("The suspense never rests"), better known for fast-paced thrillers with titles like Deadlock than anything having to do with university presses. So why am I gaga over his book in this context? Because more than any other that I've read on plot (and Lordy, have I struggled with a few), this one provides strategies you can actually use to make more sense of any story you're trying to tell. It solved a problem that I was having with a narrative about an 18th-century author, and it did so in such a simple and straightforward manner that I could not believe the challenge had vexed me for two years! Give the book a whirl, and post comments about it here.

Creating a list of works cited? Ask a librarian BEFORE you start!

I keep forgetting what an amazing resource professional reference librarians can be, but then life rises up to remind me.

Of course, being a good introvert, I started work on my new book alone in an upstairs office. Zzzzzzt! Shoulda asked a librarian. After spending hours compiling a cut-and-paste bibliography and remembering what a mess it was to advise a fellow faculty member on how to format hers for the University of Pennsylvania Press (they wanted Chicago style, and hers were all MLA-from-memory, many with typos), I started searching online for endnote software. I found several competitors, and began to get excited. The best ones not only format your notes in whatever professional style you request (changing formats at the touch of a finger), but they also collect the data from online research resources directly, without you having to re-type a thing. They can even use full-text resources online to provide you with archive .pdf copies of articles. Amazing.

Thinking I was hot stuff, I started to sign up for one of the most popular of these. Then a tiny voice inside my mind whispered "Have you asked a librarian yet? Maybe Georgetown's library professionals have already solved this problem." Hmmm. First I sent e-mail to my friend Jill, the Humanities Reference Librarian in Lauinger Library. Jill and I have known each other since 1997, but still I often forget to ask her questions in a professional capacity.

While waiting for Jill's reply, I fuzzily remembered that the library probably already had answers to questions like these listed. So I looked at the Research Help tab on its home page, and voila... a link to RefWorks that the university supports and has already signed up for. There's a free tutorial available either at the library or in my office (I'm going to the library as a fun excuse to take a break). By the time I found the answer, Jill had gotten back to me confirming that yes, that was the answer. Oh, why didn't I just contact Jill weeks ago?

Total time I spent futzing around with my own cut-and-paste bibliography: about seven hours spread out over several weeks.

Total time I spent search for endnote software online when I thought there must be a better way: about one hour earlier today.

Total time it took me to find the answer once I consulted the library's research resources: one minute, rendering my e-mail to Jill redundant/unnecessary.

Um, next time I'll check online to see what the library offers instead of trying to re-invent the wheel all alone, and if I don't find it, I'll ask a librarian.

Funny Footnote to the Byron Katie Post

When I first discovered Loving What Is (below), I wanted to tell everyone. I started ordering books for people. But then I stopped out of some merciful realization that my well-meaning impulse might be insulting to others. As Byron Katie writes, "If you want to alienate your friends and family, go around saying 'Is it true?' or 'Turn it around" if they're not asking for your help . . .. It's uncomfortable to believe that you know more than your friends and to represent yourself as their teacher." Amen. So I stopped ordering books for people, but I did blog. :-)

The Best Book on Writers Block, Ever

I have a shelf full of books on writer's block. It is one of the key problems authors face in Booklab (though they rarely label it as such), and I'm honored whenever I can help. I've faced it myself, and I read whatever I can find on the subject. Many books are smart, interesting, informative and comforting, but for the most part they don't really change anything. They can lessen the burden, but none I have found truly lifts it.

Then I discovered Byron Katie's book Loving What Is. She's been around for years with a fascinating model for questioning your thoughts and freeing yourself from the tyranny of what she calls "your story," the litany of mind-pictures and words that make up what we call reality, whether present, past or future. To understand Byron Katie's Work (capital W, "The Work," the process for which she is known), read her books and also watch the helpful videos on her website that show it in action.

To my knowledge she doesn't address writer's block directly, but here's an example of how I observed The Work zapping blocks. She asks participants to write a judgmental statement (the harsher and more rudely honest the better), and then analyze it using her four questions and what she calls a "turnaround." [NB: Before trying this, please read the book and visit her website -- my thumbnail version is not sufficient!] Her four questions (1. Is it true? 2. Can I absolutely know that it's true? 3. How do I react when I believe that thought? 4. Who would I be without that thought?) effectively challenge the statement in a way that most people's minds can accept.

Statement: I have writer's block

Question 1: Is that true? (Yes, of course it's true)

Question 2: Can you absolutely know that it's true? (Well, no, not absolutely. But it feels true.)

Q2: I invite you to commit to a yes or a no. (Okay, no. No, I don't absolutely know that it's true.)

Question 3: How do you react when you believe that thought? (Depressed. Like there's no use. Lazy. Unworthy of my title or position in this university. Secretive. Sad. It makes me want to write even less.)

Question 4: Who would you be without that thought? (Wow, if I didn't have that thought? Much freer. Loose. Open. Unburdened. Happier. Able to write freely like I did when I was a kid.)

Turnaround: Now turn the statement around. [NB again: there are several ways she teaches you to do this, and I'm still learning how to do the turnaround] 1. I don't have writer's block (opposite of the statement); 2. (substituting the word "my thoughts" for "writer's block") I have my thoughts (or "I only have my thoughts" or "My thoughts have me.").

Byron Katie does NOT ask you to drop the thought "I have writer's block." Trying not to think about something doesn't work. Instead, she asks you to analyze it, to submit it to the rigor of the four questions and the turnaround. The more you shine light on this area of your own mind and your story that plays in your mind, the more you free your mind to drop the thought on its own.

The result? Nothing short of miraculous. Once I questioned my own self-analysis of writer's block, and once I began helping authors in this office question theirs (I don't try to be Byron Katie Jr., but I lead them to learn The Work directly from her), things changed. Writing began to happen because there was no Story saying that it shouldn't or couldn't or that we were good or bad people if we did or didn't do it. For my own part, I began writing more as I did as an unfettered teenager, when I poured out my thoughts in spiral notebooks and enjoyed the process for its own sake. It wasn't enough just to question the thought "I have writer's block," though. I had to question a whole host of persistent thoughts that made up My Story, the one I have carried around in my brain for so long. The Work is ongoing, and whenever writing stops for painful reasons, I will continue to do The Work on my thoughts.

Byron Katie likes to describe herself as "a woman without a future" because she has questioned the thoughts that used to lead her to write a Story in her mind about what the future will be. Having no future helps blocked writers as well, by guiding us to question the future-stories about what we're writing (this will be a bestseller, this has to satisfy my agent, this won't be crowd-pleasing enough, I have to earn a big advance, etc.). As writers without pasts, and without futures, we can just be, and thus unburdened, we can just write.

Will it be any good? Who knows? In a hundred years the world will be populated by all new people and it won't matter. But for right now writing is happening, and that's the first step, yes?

Cary Goldstein's Talk -- the Reviews are in!

A record number of Georgetown faculty turned out to dine and chat with acquisitions editor and chief publicist (yes, both roles can reside in the same professional) Cary Goldstein from TWELVE. What struck many participants about Cary's talk was how affable he is, and how easy it was to communicate with him about books. The myth is that New York editors expect formal interaction and prefer stiff introductory letters that will make or break your case by paragraph two. The reality is that they're just people -- smart, well-read people with a lot of experience in publishing -- but human nonetheless, and a good deal more approachable than folks in many other professions. I've been getting e-mails all afternoon from faculty who were inspired by the event and who are interested in thinking about their work for a larger audience.

Academic vs. trade is an interesting choice. Most recently hired scholars choose academic for professional reasons (tenure), but that's not a sufficient reason to choose one press over another. Scholarly work should be crafted to speak to colleagues and to work beautifully within the university press publishing realm. Trade work -- even if based on the same research -- must be written differently, and operate in a way that meets the demands of a fickle and volatile book market. Cary emphasized the importance of the work itself -- not the pitch for the work, or the stature of the author, or the needs of the market, although all those elements are important -- but the art of the words on the page and the way they do their job.

As conceived by founding editor Jonathan Karp (the editor behind Seabiscuit and The Orchid Thief among many others) TWELVE only publishes twelve titles a year, so it is committed to a challenging combination of selectivity and success in a way that other presses are not. It can't hedge its bets by publishing 50 solid choices, and hoping that ten break out. Every book should pull its weight both in the intellectual arena of The New York Review of Books, the few other book reviews that are left (Cary cited NYTimes, Washington Post, and San Francisco Chronicle as the last three papers with separate book review sections, and I've heard the latter is in flux), in the intellectual blogosphere, and in the bookstore. It's an enormous challenge, and one that it was exciting to hear about from such an exceptional publishing professional and one of its two intellectual guiding forces.

Write your book in five (days, weeks, months) or less, guaranteed!

I confess to being occasionally charmed and even lured in by those "write quickly" schemes. They're all over the internet, but they've been with us forever -- smiling gurus promising that you can produce a draft of your nonfiction book or novel in a specified and seemingly short period of time.

To a certain extent I believe them. We make a much bigger fuss about writing than it actually deserves. Writing is really just a sibling to speaking, and many of us speak all the time -- eloquently -- about things we believe and care about. What you can say to a friend in a few hours of chat on a beautiful drive out into the country you can surely share on the page. Usually, however, something is lost in the communication between brain and page, and that's where I end up having a job to do. If writing were as easy as speaking we'd have a completely different set of books in the bookstore because there would be so much more available and (I suspect) the bar for publishing would become much higher. The more people who actually write their work, the better for letters generally, because the more there will be to choose from which would give editors the luxury of being even more selective.

Mediabistro.com (which I love and to which I gladly pay subscription fees) is the best of these, to my eye. Mediabistro courses are taught by working professionals with exceptional credentials -- kudos to them for getting people who are fruitful in their chosen fields to teach -- and I've written here before about how much I enjoy them. Here are just some of the "write quickly" titles they offer: "Start (and Finish!) Your Screenplay in Three Months"; "Weekend Warrior: 2-Day Film School"; "Write Your Young Adult Novel in Three Months." (As a note, I only recommend their in-person courses. I took one online and it was dreadful, but the in-person ones have been amazing.)

What charms me about all of these "write quickly" schemes -- whether or not they completely work all of the time -- is that they kickstart amateurs into the world of working, professional writers. People who earn a living from their pens don't have the luxury of writers block or delayed projects that stretch on for years. Writers in history from Henry Fielding to Helen Fielding have understood the art of writing quickly and well. A poet friend of mine is currently writing a poem a day for a month, just to see if she can. Are they by definition either bad poems or good ones? Of course not -- they're just words, and as such some will "work" and some won't, but they're as valid as any other poems she writes. It's a marvelous scheme.

But of course this leads to a touchy question -- can you write and publish serious academic work quickly as well? I believe you can, and that many of the best-published scholars do. The trick, however, is to have a rich fund of ongoing research upon which to draw so that you are regularly plucking the fruit of it and offering it up as conference papers, articles, and books. There is a certain bravery to simply getting the idea out there and sharing it with colleagues without slaving over it for years. In future posts I'll ponder scholarly books that were written (relatively) quickly and also managed to be very good or even excellent.

James J. O'Donnell and "The Ruin of the Roman Empire" at Politics and Prose

Jim O'Donnell will be at Politics and Prose bookstore on Saturday, September 20 with his new book, The Ruin of the Roman Empire. The bestselling author of Augustine: A New Biography will discuss his fresh take on a not-so-well-known story, and sign books. 1 p.m. A map to Politics and Prose is here.

Editor and Publicist Cary Goldstein of TWELVE Comes to Booklab

On September 4 at 12:30, Director of Publicity and Acquiring Editor Cary Goldstein at Hachette's estimable imprint TWELVE will be our guest at a faculty roundtable to discuss how academic authors can become quoted experts in today's voracious news climate. How do serious works (history, investigative journalism, politics, etc.) rise to the top in the age of the internet and 24-hour news? From framing your nonfiction book proposal to anticipate this question, to the differences between the academic and commercial book markets when it comes to writing your work, Goldstein will analyze nonfiction from both of his unique perspectives: as an acquisitions editor, and as a senior-level publicity strategist. He'll also discuss TWELVE and what distinguishes its editorial and promotional approach from other houses. Faculty are welcome and lunch will be served. RSVPs are an absolute must, so please drop a note to booklab for confirmation and the exact location.

A recipient of the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Poetry Prize at New York University, Goldstein's poetry has been published in The Literary Review. His reviews and articles have appeared in Publishers Weekly, The Village Voice, and Time Out New York. Goldstein has handled publicity for all sixteen titles published by TWELVE, eight of which have been New York Times bestsellers, including Boomsday by Christopher Buckley, God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens, Microtrends by Mark Penn, The Commission by Philip Shenon, and The Fortune Cookie Chronicles by Jennifer 8. Lee.

Time for a writing and publishing tune-up?

Summer is a traditional season for academic authors to write, because of the relatively uninterrupted stretches of time that are supposedly available. What usually happens, however, is that summer school crops up (such a tempting extra paycheck, for engaging work), book research travel turns into a mini-ordeal (all that effort just to arrive at the Biblioteca de Catalunya in Barcelona and learn that the collection you want to examine has a restriction on it from the family, and nobody informed you of this before you spent $5,000 and traveled 3511 nautical miles -- 4040 of the regular kind -- to get there), and motivation often flies out the window because it's summer and summer is Just That Way. August slams up before you know it, and the book still isn't done.

If you find yourself needing a mental recharge to get going (after all, it's only July 27 -- there's still time!), you might try something I enjoyed: one of mediabistro.com's many publishing workshops, in-person in New York. It is ridiculously easy to get from Washington to New York these days; I prefer to stroll across the Key Bridge and hop the Vamoose Bus, but there are other cheap, comfortable choices such as the Bolt Bus and the Chinatown Bus. This ain't the scary old Greyhound -- today's sleek motorcoaches have internet, restrooms, and they're comfortable enough to snooze on. They cost about 1/5 as much as the train, and if you factor in travel time to and from Union Station, they take you to the same places almost as fast. Vamoose put me at Madison Square Garden, just five blocks from the seminar building over near Park Avenue and 31st.

I have taken several mediabistro classes in the past, but mostly in DC, and one online. Not to be a snob about it, but the New York ones are so much better. My course was taught by Joy Peskin, a senior editor at Penguin with a successful career. Networking with her alone was worth the tuition for a four-hour class (what's the value of meeting and chatting with an editor in person?), but when I saw the caliber of my fellow writers, I fell in love with the idea of visiting New York once in a while for an energy transfusion. There was another employee from Penguin in the group, plus a fashion designer with a sterling resume, an editor for a higher education publication, a renowned Sherlock Holmes expert, and so many more. Although mediabistro can seem to have a youngish and greenish online image, the age range was all over the place, and most of us were experienced writers in mid-career. Total out of pocket (bus fare, course fee, and what I spent on lunch, coffee, and crab dumplings for dinner): $175.

I enjoyed the four hours to New York and back reading manuscripts from Booklab authors and studying Italian, so travel time wasn't wasted, and it flew by. I left at 7 a.m. and was home before midnight, recharged, refreshed, and ready to face my own summer manuscripts again.

The political tome as a university press niche

Here's an interesting trend I've found at university presses -- many of them publish tomes from politicians in their home regions, whether memoirs or prescriptions for political change. The first time I noticed it was during a wonderful visit to the University of Arizona Press when Senator Dennis DeConcini: From the Center of the Aisle was in press, written with Jack L. August. Then this season, while I've been working as Chair of the 2008 Centennial Book Fair at the National Press Club, I was pitched Fritz Hollings's new book Making Government Work from the University of South Carolina Press, written with Kirk Victor. Ten years ago the University of Illinois Press published a recently discovered memoir by legendary Senator Everett Dirksen (the Dirksen Senate Office Building is named for him).

Late to the wine party

Well, after that last post I did a search on the University of California Press so that I could call an editor to talk about wine, and I found this L.A. Times article instead. It seems as though I stumbled on a story that has already been news... instead of taking down or editing the post, however, I'll let it stand and do a follow-up interview with the editors.

Making wine scholarly (or making the scholarly popular)

A new title from the University of California Press caught my eye this month, Wine Politics: How Governments, Environmentalists, Mobsters, and Critics Influence the Wines We Drink. Cal has a small industry going with its wine titles, for this year it also offers a revised edition of The Wines of Burgundy by Clive Coates, and I counted at least 30 other wine titles from past years. (NB, many university presses have regional publishing specialties).

Wine seems to work for a number of other fine UPs: just this year alone Cambridge University Press offers Grape vs. Grain: A Historical, Technological and Social Comparison of Wine and Beer by Charles Bamforth; the University of Nebraska Press will bring us Corkscrewed: Adventures in the New French Wine Country by Robert V. Camuto in November; the University of Georgia Press will serve up Pioneering American Wine: Writings of Nicholas Herbemont, Master Viticulturist next February; and Oxford will pour the second edition of Wine and Conversation by Adrienne Lehrer that same month.

Yet another reason to love university presses...

... is this quote from Yale UP Director John Donatich in Publishers Weekly for June 30: "...a midlist author at a trade house can be a star for us." Yes! Fantastic. And precisely the reason that I sometimes encourage academic authors who seek a wider audience, and who are thinking of jumping to one of the respected trade houses, to re-consider certain university presses.

Think about it this way. 35,000 copies at a major trade publishing house is respectable but nothing to issue press releases over. Although not every top author sells in the millions (and you'd be surprised how many books on bestseller lists only sell in the mid five-figures or slightly above), 35,000 books usually means "midlist," which is another word for "fine, but no guarantee of a publishing future." Depending on where you publish and what the book was, it's either just solid, so-so, or the dreaded kiss.

But at a university press that same 35k is just wonderful. Many UP books only sell a few hundred copies, so authors cracking 5,000, let alone breaking into the five figures, are stars. Of course the discussion may come back to money again (it usually does). It's true that literary advances (if they come at all) can be . . . well . . . "modest" is a polite way to put it. But there are ways to structure the contract so that you do well if the book sells. I have often observed that book sales and subsequent royalties are more under the author's control than most are prepared to admit anyway.

Go down the list of bestselling authors over the last twenty years, and you will find person after person who took exceptional responsibility for their own book promotions, their own speaking engagements, their own careers. Fluke bestsellers do happen, but the majority are more often the result of hard work and learning how the book business works. (Don't believe me? Then read John Bear's aspirationally titled The Number-One New York Times Bestseller. It's a roster of authors who made their own magic.) That "magic" can happen at a university press just as easily as it can at a trade house, since there is nothing stopping the book from breaking out from either source.

The Publishers Weekly article celebrates Yale University Press at 100. Who knew (I didn't) that it is the home both of the classics Life With Father (1936) and A Long Day's Journey Into Night (1956). Happy centennial!

Why didn't I post for a month?

Because I went to Africa and now want to think about it before posting anything about it...

Instead of book websites, book videos

Although this isn't entirely new, HarperCollins Canada has added an interesting fillip to the idea of having a video presence for a book. You can view a teaser for a new title on YouTube. I found this while reading Liesl Schillinger's New York Times Book Review coverage of Rivka Glachen's first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances.

What do I think? Kinda promising, actually, although two caveats immediately come to mind:

(1) Just like music videos, book videos do much imaginative work for the reader, replacing our own mental theatre with pre-chosen images that may be less interesting, relevant, or psychologically satisfying than what we might have crafted on our own. These video images are generally so colorful and loud that they tend to override and obliterate the mental wonders that preceeded them.

(2) The music on this choice is sooooo self-important in that arthouse "We're lit'ry" way. I would have preferred something more laid-back. It reminds me of the trailer for Everything Is Illuminated where the Significance of it quickly edged into self-satire.

HOWEVER

(3) This medium still feels promising to me. There are so many books out there, and so much blather accompanies those books. This feels refreshing and hopeful. Plus, the video did its job -- now I do want to read the book and perhaps post something about it here (e.g. whether or not it "feels" like the trailer, how I feel the anticipatory drumroll stacks up against the artistic delivery, etc.). Any publicists out there want to send me a review copy? ;-)

Book publishing grants, part one

Wow. There are a lot of book publishing grants available out there! Some are highly specific (books about Singapore written in Japanese), but others are looser. For example, Brigham Young University has a grant that will enable university press publishers to lower the cover price of books about the Mountain West. The Association for Asian Studies offers a subvention grant for first-time book authors who are hit with a big subvention from a university press. While you are in the planning stages of your book, be sure to stop by the OSLP to learn tips and tricks for searching these grants. Many people do not apply for the smaller ones (less than $10,000), which increases your chances of landing one. When I asked one of our librarians about the availability of these grants, she said they're everywhere. When I asked how many of our faculty apply for them each year, she said "Hardly anyone does."

"Dear Agent: I got your "Dear Author" form letter . . .

. . . and frankly you're embarrassing yourself!"

One of the funniest things about working in an office where we submit work on behalf of authors is seeing some of the correspondence that agents send out. No wonder authors get discouraged. Maybe the agents mean well, but to our ear some of these letters are really bad. Here is one we received today on behalf of an author, from the automated mailbox of an agency with which we have had quite a bit of personal contact (and we will have none in the future):

*****

Dear Author,

[Blah-blah paragraph about how good it is but we don't want it anyway...]

Sincerely,

The XXX Literary Agency

PS. Since you did not include postage with your materials, we were only able to respond to you via email. In the future, please send us a self-addressed stamped envelope with the proper postage.

*****

My response to this? "Dear Agent. This could not have sounded more like a form letter if you had used a rubber stamp to send it. You claim you gave it 'ample attention,' but you can't be bothered to communicate with a fellow professional about her author in any manner other than this one. Why not just send a polite one-line e-mail that says 'Thanks, but this isn't right for me now,' especially given that your office was just on the phone with mine last week telling us how much you want to see what our authors are working on?

Oh, and what's with the P.S. about self-addressed-stamped envelopes? This isn't the 1970s! We don't need our typescripts back. Welcome to the 2000s, where printing is cheap and we never enclose SASE with anything because if you don't want it, you should roundfile it (we handle 98% of our submissions electronically anyway, because it makes more sense for both parties). In the future, we will submit to agents who communicate with us personally (however briefly), and who lose the SASE rhetoric. Much love, the OSLP."

And a real PS to our authors: don't let these agent form letters get you down. :-)

PS to agents: if you send these stupid letters, we stop giving you author submissions. Period.

Are you an old friend, and are you googling me?

I ask because I google people from the past, sometimes for the oddest reasons. They don't have to be people I miss, or even people I knew very well. But if their names stick with me, especially the unique names, searching for them online becomes an odd, repetitive habit. It can bring back heavy memories.

I feel as though in a more natural world we ought to be able to move on from the past without it haunting us in vivid words and pictures, but the internet floats it up like debris on a river after a storm. Also in a more natural world we wouldn't constantly move on from people and be forced to meet new ones all the time -- we'd be more geographically stable.

Wouldn't we?

Ah, what difference does it make? Why can't I let it alone?

This isn't a literary question, really. Back to the publishing stuff next.

PS: If you are googling me from the past and you're the kid in the painting, please drop me a note.

Competition, part two

After that post about competition and art, I remembered judging the Maryland Writers Association fiction competition again this year... it is either my third year or my fourth, and the entries are always great. Some are publishable, and they are all worth reading! MWA is such a supportive and smart organization. I spoke at their annual writers conference a few years back, but didn't tell them them a little secret -- that was my first writers conference ever! Normally I'm highly allergic to the usual writer-industry stuff (and a later visit to another gackawful conference reminded me why), but the MWA is different/better. Visit them, and if you have a few Andrew Jacksons burning a hole in your chinos, make a donation...

Stomach aches and contest entries

Oh the resistance I have to the concept of "competitive" art. Whether it is writing, painting, music -- the notion that art wins prizes, and that there is good, better, and best expression rubs my fur backward just a bit. I acknowledge that certain accomplishment is genuine, and should be rewarded. But what if three wonderful novels are entered into competition, and they are all quite different? How is one the "best" of the three? And even more complex, what about the politics of the competition? Once I walked off of a journalism judging committee because first-, second- and third-place votes were all given the same weight, and since we each voted for a different first-place work but we all voted for the same third-place work, that author won the grand prize! It was absurd, and the institutionalization of mediocrity. I complained to the head of the awards committee, who shrugged and said it wasn't worth her time to weight the votes and try again. So several excellent journalists who had earned our various first-place votes walked away thinking they didn't make the cut, and one obvious third-placer is out there now putting "Grand prize winner" on his c.v.

So why after all that kvetching did I choose to enter the Arts Club of Washington's first-ever playwriting competition this year? First because I admire the organization. Founded in 1916, it is the oldest arts club in a city that desperately needs more focus on the arts in general. It has been tireless over the years in promoting opera, cultural programs, photography, and overall cultural literacy. Washington is a city of vast artistic treasures, yet not nearly enough practicing artists of national or international acclaim. There is room for many, many more, and in a city this financially flush there should be generous funding available as well.

I've heard some fanciful souls refer to Washington as "Paris on the Potomac," and it can sometimes resemble that city in its L'Enfant design if you stand in just the right spot, sip enough vin rouge, and squint. The Arts Club of Washington is doing what it can to make that hazy half-vision a full-fledged reality, so I wrote a play just for them, and submitted it, and prayed...

Dr. Laura Benedetti wins the Flaiano Prize!

Contratulations to Dr. Laura Benedetti of Georgetown's Italian Department for winning the Flaiano Prize for her latest book, The Tigress in the Snow (Toronto 2008). It is named for Italian playwright, poet, and screenwriter Ennio Flaiano, most famous to film lovers as the co-author of such Federico Fellini screen classics as La Strada and La Dolce Vita. Flaiano was also a prize-winning novelist, and a noted journalist.

Why did Starbucks hire the William Morris Agency?

I'm still scratching my head over the relationship between William Morris and Starbucks. If a proprietor (Starbucks) wanted to find the most interesting projects that were great matches for its stores, why would it enter into a relationship with an organization for whom recommendations would seem to pose such a clear conflict of interest? As a corporate leader, I would personally prefer an unbiased literary partner, not one for whom obvious and inherent biases would seem almost overwhelming. This is no jab at William Morris. I'm neutral about most literary agencies -- they do good things, and they are over-rated at other things, but mostly they're fine, and I recommend that all of my academic authors who move out of the university press publishing realm seek competent representation, preferably from agents who have also worked inside the publishing industry at the highest level. Still, how can any talent agency do such a job without consistently preferring its own properties and projects? Anyone with industry insight is welcomed to comment.

For those who read this occasional blog for its bits of literary industry detail (what few I know, being an 'umble Washingtonian), sales in a store like Starbucks are known as "special sales" (i.e. book sales outside of traditional literary outlets such as bookstores). I suppose the classic special-sale example is a cookbook bundled with a bread machine, so that every sale of the bread machine results in an automatic book sale as well. But there are other cool special sales opportunities, and getting your book picked up by a national coffee chain is certainly one of them. So what happens if you're the author/client of another agency? Do you have a prayer?

Mildred Marmur visits Booklab!

Booklab has a new mentor -- literary agent Milly Marmur, who has generously offered to hold a Q&A with faculty on Tuesday, April 15 from 3-4 p.m. Milly was president and publisher of Charles Scribner's Sons before founding the Mildred Marmur Associates Ltd literary agency in 1987. Prior to that she was Vice President and Director of Subsidiary Rights at Random House Adult Trade, and she previously held the same position at Simon & Schuster. Whew!

In 1974 at Simon & Schuster she auctioned paperback rights for ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN for a then-record $1,000,000. At Random House the following year she did the same for E. L. Doctorow's RAGTIME, earning a record $1,850,000 for a literary novel. During her leadership at Scribners, she published Ernest Hemingway's last novel THE GARDEN OF EDEN, 25 years after his death, and Barry Lopez's ARCTIC DREAMS, both of which became best-sellers. As an agent, she has represented food scientist Harold McGee (ON FOOD AND COOKING), David Bornstein (HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD), Ethan Bronner, Middle East correspondent for The New York Times, Lawrence K. Altman, M.D., medical writer for the Times, Georgetown adjunct law professor William Taylor (THE PASSION OF MY TIMES), and stage and screen actor Theodore Bikel (THEO: An Autobiography). Mr. Bikel, an Academy Award nominee, is of course in residence here at Georgetown this week with Serendipity4, including Grammy-nominated conductor Tamara Brooks, accordionist Merima Kljuco and Yiddish folk singer Shura Lipovsky.

Besides her work as a publisher and then as a literary agent, Marmur has a master's degree in French literature, and has published a number of translations from the French. Her translation of MADAME BOVARY, edited by E. L. Doctorow, is available as a Signet Classics paperback and was issued in audio with Claire Bloom reading. Her translation of Moliere's THE IMAGINARY INVALID has been performed in many states, and most recently at Columbia University.

Milly will field questions from faculty members and offer a glimpse into publishing as she knows it so very well.

The "Impact Academic Book"

I learned a new term while visiting Oxford University Press in New York two weeks ago. Books that successfully cross the line from purely academic to trade, and that do well in trade bookstores as well as in library and institutional sales, are sometimes known as "impact academic" titles. It sounds kinda slick, so of course it made me edgy, but I have to admit the term does sum up something I've been trying to say with more words. After all, how do you define a book that stands up to scholarly scrutiny, but that also speaks to a larger audience and sells well outside of the academy? "Impact academic" will do for now, I suppose.

So how doth one write an impact academic book? Answers vary, but one way is to examine the fate of other books that accomplished this feat. We discussed many during my visit, and I took some home, including Caroline P. Murphy's Murder of a Medici Princess. It's a beautiful book with a fetching, reader-friendly cover painting of Felice della Rovere, the princess in question. Oxford priced it at $24.95, not the usual hundred or so that so many university press publishers love to insist upon. "Murder" in the title is always good for a glance or two in a busy bookstore, and the book is written in accessible style, sans criticalese or unnecessarily complicated sentences. But it's not watered down, either. Endnotes carefully document everything, the prose is still a challenge (possibly too much so for readers who devoured books like Random House's huge hit Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire a few years ago), and it is quite comfortably an Oxfordly title, but it promises to sell far beyond the usual academic libraries.

Will Murder of a Medici Princess really be able to have it all -- that is, be taken seriously in academic circles while sustaining trade sales? It is just peeking out now along with the first spring blossoms, so it's hard to tell, but I'll watch this title with interest and report anything exciting that I may learn about its progress.

The Box of Paperbacks Book Club

This book club sort-of-parody charmed me, because it goes right to one of my fondest habits: finding old, forgotten books in odd places like the Salvation Army bookshelves, and actually reading them. I'm happy to hear that others do it as well. We know the books we know by happenstance anyway, a curious mixture of publicity, collective memory, memes, and chance. I've discovered talented authors by doing such counter-intuitive things as buying 50-cent hardcovers by publisher only -- without looking at titles or authors other than to reassure myself that I had never heard of them -- and then reading a bit to see if the books were any good. This led me to the odd discovery that (besides its many bestsellers) Knopf has for years taken risks and published fiction that never sold very much, but that is still wonderful to read. I'll now pick up an old, no-name Knopf novel at almost any yard sale and be guaranteed an interesting time with it. Knopf had a spate of these in the '80s and early '90s that were engaging, smart, worthy novels, and for some reason mostly forgotten. I also enjoy exploring all the books in a two-foot length of library shelf space (reading, for example, every novel within a foot on either side of one that I enjoyed, simply because their authors are near mine in the alphabet), or seeing what I can discover at those take-a-book-leave-a-book shelves in coffee shops. I always give myself permission to bail out if the book is bad, or (sometimes worse) a waste of time, but good books hide in the oddest places, and these can be ways to discover some of them.

Now the Onion A/V Club, an online feature I have rearely read in the past, as I usually found it somewhat like that arty, depressed, noirish kid you knew in high school who smelled like pot and really wasn't even all that talented, has launched a gem, and I hope it means more to come. A/V Club editor Keith Phipps is running an engaging series that I hope to continue following. The Box of Paperbacks Book Club is Phipps's effort to read and review all of the paperbacks he bought second hand, organized under no other rationale than that they were all thrown together in the same box. The cover above is for Earth Abides, a novel by Berkeley professor George R. Stewart.

We think we know things (the 100 best books of the 20th century, the five most important poems in French, the superbest this, the most influential that), but we actually know very little, as our collective "forgettories" can be so powerful, chewing up, deleting and erasing far more than we ever manage to keep. Efforts like the Box of Paperbacks Books Club offer charming push-back to all that, and a glimpse into a dusty pile of things people cared about in the past, if only for a while.

Know how a publisher views its niche

There are many ways of identifying a potential publisher for your work, but one of the most interesting is by ascertaining how that publisher views its niche. 95% of the authors I meet think about themselves and their needs, focusing on what they want to write, and why. But that rare 5% who have the insight to consider what various publisher need to publish are often rewarded.

Studying the publisher's catalogues is vital. One catalogue is helpful, but a series run from two or three years back yield exceptional insights to the scope of a publisher's list. What sorts of books is the publisher always interested in? What nonintuitive choices did its editors make? What books succeeded best for that publisher over time? What awards has the house won, and what kinds of starred reviews or other industry recognition has it enjoyed?

After thinking about the house as a corporate entity, it is also fun to look at individual editor lists. Every editor is different, even if she or he took over from another editor with ostensibly the same specialty. It's helpful to try to understand as much as you can about how and why individual editors make the choices that they do. Sometimes they'll tell you themselves ("I'm looking for more narrative nonfiction now," or "I'd love something with an emphasis on Eastern Europe because my list is lighter there" . . . ), other times you have to intuit it from the track record and what seems to be missing.

I'm not suggesting writing just to fill a publishing gap, or twisting what you do to meet some imaginary publishing need, but rather to try as an author to perceive how and why certain publishing houses make their choices. This involves publisher research, dialogue with interested editors (conferences are good places for this), and following the paper trail of what has done well in the academic marketplace for that particular house.

Bestselling author Thomas Moore comes to Booklab

Last fall Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm and A Death in Belmont came to Booklab for a faculty lunch and roundtable on nonfiction book publishing. Now we have another bestselling author on the way! On Tuesday, March 11, Thomas Moore -- author of The Care of the Soul among many others -- will be here to discuss his new book A Life at Work. This lunch and roundtable for Georgetown faculty will focus on publishing works of faith, and how authors who write about spiritual matters might think about their work for mainstream audiences. Moore will join us at the John Main Center for Meditation at 12:30, and then his talk will begin at 1:15 p.m. in the Provost's conference room on the 6th floor of ICC. RSVPs are an absolute must because of space limitations. This promises to be just as informative and one-on-one as the Junger event, so please reserve early.

"Where was the editor...?"

Today I read yet another book review that lamented the author's dry style in an otherwise excellent book, and asked mournfully "Where was the editor on this?" The short answer is that editors -- even the most gifted of them -- don't re-write authors' books. Not only is it not their jobs, it can't be. Can you imagine how much time it would take to laboriously re-write chapter after chapter for an author who would then immediately "fix" it all back to the terrible way it was, because he or she lacks the fundamental literary ear to recongize superior writing? This sort of back-and-forth can take months if not years, and sharp editors learn early in their careers not to engage in that sort of unproductive labor.

There are indeed line editors available to authors for a fee, and some of them are excellent. A few are retired publishing house editors who earn a fine post-career income doctoring books. But anyone good will charge a minimum of around $10,000 for a 100,000-word book, and will be worth every penny. And once again, there is nothing to stop a determined author with a tin ear from "fixing" half of it back again, simply because clunky writers can't tell the difference between their prose and the professonal's.

Frequently when reviewers ask "Where was the editor," what they should really ask is "Why didn't this author hire a ghostwriter?" Ghostwriters are the unsung heroes of readable literature, and they rarely get their due either in credit or in pay. They deserve much more of both.

More James O'Donnell on radio . . .

This is a fun one: the radio show Philoso?y Talk, "the program that questions everything... except your intelligence." From Stanford University, it is hosted by Ken Taylor, the chair of the philosophy department, and John Perry, a philosophy professor.

Hear JO'D on the BBC

Georgetown's Provost, James O'Donnell, recorded a piece about St. Augustine for BBC Radio 3’s new 12-part series The Essay: Greek and Latin Voices. (I was the producer on the Georgetown side, and then handed it off to a BBC producer in the U.K.) Since this office specializes in recorded pieces for radio, his BBC invitation provided an excellent opportunity to showcase our new capabilities, and to think about the spoken word and books.

You can hear the audio online here.

Books and radio are a natural pairing. For example, we know from audience analysis that public radio listeners and book buyers are almost a 1-1 match. If an author finds a public or news/ talk radio audience, book sales very often follow.

If you're an author, how can you get your pieces on radio? Drop a note to booklab@georgetown.edu and ask about a radio consultation. You may not start out on the Beeb, but there are public radio stations all over the country where your voice very well might be welcome.

A "Wee Reversal" at the Library of Congress

I laughed upon reading that the Library of Congress even briefly pondered lumping all of Scottish literature as "English literature" recently. What it succeeded in doing was gaining international headlines for itself in what surely must have been a highlands uproar! We applaud the decision to back down (after intense lobbying, as reported in today's Washington Post) and put Scotland and its wonderful authors back where they belong.

Writing and re-writing in 2008

Writers and New Year's Resolutions go together like cats and cream, and many of the Booklab authors are making lists. But how do you go from constructing a list to actually doing some of the activities on it? How can you make it out of January and into the rest of the year with your resolutions intact? Many authors have excellent suggestions for making your goals reality (see Brian Tracy's Goals! and Jack Canfield's The Success Principles for great ideas), so I won't repeat their wonderful advice here. But I will suggest that in addition to putting actual dates on your goals, and on learning to voice your wishes as though they were reality, there is nothing quite like a creativity partner to help you on your way. When we team up with others who share similar goals, we create a powerful aura of both accountability and healthy competition. I'm whiff-sensitive to the other kind of competition (one-upsmanship disguised as collegial behavior), but there is a healthy kind that involves reaching farther out of respect for the individual or group you've recruited to help you along. This is also one of the finest cures for writer's block I know... it is part of why in-person classes work better than online ones. We often work harder when we know someone's watching.

Amazon advanced search changes

For those of us who relied on the hidden "advanced search" feature -- the great one that almost nobody knew about -- at Amazon.com to do book research, it's over. Amazon switched to an idiot-proof advanced search that only allows you to select from drop-down categories. Gone are the glories of typing in complex statements (subject: "political theory" NOT science AND title: energy AND publisher: "university press"). Basically -- for my purposes -- Amazon is now a little better than useless.

Heavy sigh.

UPDATE December 18, 2007. I'm thrilled to report that Barnes & Noble does a much better search job, far more flexible than the new Amazon interface. It's still not possible to do the more complex searches that made Amazon so helpful before, but at least you can drill down to a sufficiently narrow category to do some serious book research. For example, if I need all the foreign affairs titles on North and South Korea, Amazon forces searches to start with all nonfiction, and then will only let you get to a certain level of detail before it insists on a keyword search to pick out the Korea titles. Given that just about EVERY foreign affairs book these days has Korea somewhere in the text, that's pretty much useless.

Barnes & Noble, however, groups things as follows:

Level 1: Politics & Government
Level 2: International Politics
Level 3: Asia - Politics & Government
Level 4: North & South Korea - Politics & Government

Much, much better. For those of us who spend much of our days researching comparison titles for books to propose to agents and editors, this is by far the better tool.

Congratulations

A colleague from the English Department (where I taught from 1997-2003) has won a literary award! Gay Gibson Cima won the 2007 Barnard Hewitt Award for her 2006 book, Early American Women Critics: Performances, Religion, Race.

Theatre review: Mojo Mickybo

It was always in the plan to include theatre reviews in this blog, but the year got away from me. Mostly I want to focus on plays based on books (to stay with the publishing theme), but I can't resist starting off with an Owen McCafferty gem that was written as a play: Mojo Mickybo. You can watch an interesting preview here, and this is a link to the theatre and a slew of reviews.

It is an absolute must that you have seen Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid before attending this play... some of the wittiest parts including the music will make absolutely no sense unless you do! I don't know why they don't emphasize this more in the play's materials, but since the story is about two boys who love the movie and transpose its hipster outlaw themes to their war-torn world in 1970 Belfast, it surely makes sense to have experienced the movie yourself. Perhaps the playwright thought everyone has seen it, and I'll grant that it was a cultural phenomenon when it came out, but many people born after 1980 probably missed it, even on video or DVD.

Overall I felt that Mojo Mickybo is less a play than an extended riff: it's a way of putting the audience in the minds of the children of Belfast. But could it or should it have been more? The actors, Christopher Dinolfo and Mike Innocenti, are spot-on, even with simulated accents (an affectation I normally loathe, but they handled it well), and director Eric Lucas demonstrates cleverness beyond mere technical skill... he drew children out of these grown men on the stage, and we seldom remembered that we were watching actors at least 20 years older than the boys they portrayed. But why did the playwright stop there? At a mere 85 minutes we have some laughs and a poignant portrait of McCafferty's Belfast to stand alongside Brian Friel's fictional Ballybeg, Roddy Doyle's Dublin, or (perhaps) Frank McCourt's Limerick (albeit with many of the same, tired stereotypes of Ma at the ironing board and Da at the pub). Now I would love to see a richer play with two full acts and substance beyond mere interest.

Should you see the play? Absolutely, if only for the great buzz of watching two talented actors in the hands of a gifted director fully embody these boys. Also, the charming and comfortable Church Street Theatre in Dupont Circle charges an entirely humane $25 rather than the nosebleed ripoff prices of some other DC theatres I could name, and that sanity in pricing should be rewarded with full houses. But what will you get out of it besides a sense that the playwright is really onto something, and ought to expand that idea? Please see it and comment here with your thoughts.

There is no such thing as literary competition

When creating trade book proposals, it is standard to include a "competition" section examining other similar books in the marketplace and demonstrating that there is room for yours. The concept of competition is an especially keen one in the university press world, where scholars are supposed to make original contributions to their various fields. Authors are urged to check Forthcoming Books in Print and make sure that nothing too close to their topic is on its way. A gap in the literature is supposed to indicate room for a new title.

I beg to disagree, however, and now Harvard University Press has offered some backup. According to Publisher's Weekly, HUP originally planned to publish Jeremi Suri's Kissinger and the American Century this fall. But last Spring they moved the pubdate earlier. Why? To capitalize on the appearance of a HarperCollins title by Robert Dallek, Nixon & Kissinger: Partners in Power.

Conventional wisdom would say "Oh no! Competition! Two Kissinger books in one season!" But HUP knew better. Books tend to sell each other by demonstrating the viability of a market. Interested readers may want to pick up both titles. Booksellers have an easier time displaying multiple titles, and so-called competing publishers can even team up and share the cost of in-store displays. Apparently HUP also hoped that Suri and Dallek would be invited onto the same talk shows. You can even buy the books together at a combined discount on Amazon.com.

.

If you have a big book planned and then you learn to your horror that another one is coming out from a competing publisher, relax. Or better yet, pop some champagne. No two scholars will ever write the same book anyway, and literary company is a fine excuse to make a new friend of the other author and combine your resources to promote your books together.

Orhan Pamuk, the follow-up

Okay, so I was trying to think of what to say to a Nobel Laureate who just received an honorary doctorate, and not sound like a dork or like some bah-hah academic or something. I closed my eyes for a moment and remembered what it looked like to see him walk down the aisle in Gaston Hall with all those be-robed colleagues, ascend the stage, and receive the honorary doctoral hood. It kinda looked like getting married! I asked him about that, and he laughed and said yes, that's exactly what it felt like. He said the moment is surreal, and over very quickly, before you realize what is happening.

He was so laid-back and he seemed to have fun, like he does this all the time (which perhaps he does). His beautiful daughter Rüya was with him. I have met enough famous authors by now to be tired of the thrill. Most are okay, some are awful, but overall writers are better on the page than in person. Orhan Pamuk was an exception to that. He's a bit more interesting in person.

He snapped a photo of the three of us with his digital camera, and I regretted not having one myself, but I didn't know if it would be appropriate. D'oh. I hope he reads this and decides to send the image. Booklab at georgetown dot edu.

A wacky quote in PW, and a mystery

Okay, now here's a news tidbit that made me wonder whassup at university presses. This is from Publisher's Weekly a while back (June), but I just now found it and marveled. Joseph Esposito, who is listed as the founder of a firm called "Portable CEO," and a former executive at Simon & Schuster and Random House, is quoted in the following context: "In an age of diminishing university subsidies to their presses, . . . Esposito emphasized the value of being self-supporting, partly, in Esposito’s words, 'to stay one step ahead of the ax,' but also, he said, 'to make money available for other central activities at the university.'"

Excuuuuuse me? Isn't it enough that universities have put their presses under tremendous pressure to make money, even while charging them with the crucial mission of continuing to publish scholarly work? This nearly impossible task is what gave us those awful faculty subventions in the first place! So now am I correct in reading that some critics say beyond this, university presses should try to earn enough to actually give back to their home universities, rather than having the university subsidize the press? What will happen to scholarly publishing if this is true?

I find this sufficiently hard to believe that I will contact Esposito myself and ask him to clarify. Maybe PW got it wrong (that wouldn't be the first time, although I am a loyal reader). Maybe the quote would sound more sensible in context.

Watch this space for details.

Literary conferences can and should be more encouraging!

Okay, today my rant is about literary conferences. Authors go to them seeking support and professional guidance. What they often get is institutionalized discouragement packaged as "no-nonsense advice," usually in the form of literary agents looking over the authors' sample work. Some authors report that they have actually paid money at conferences to meet with an agent for 15 or 30 minutes in person. I simply have to ask, "For what?"

Agents can be great, and I know some of the best in the business. For the most part, though, these wonderful agents are not out scouting the conferences. They tend to send their more junior colleagues instead (there are notable and noble exceptions to this, but not that many). I have dealt with the emotional aftermath of these unwitting bloodbaths. Authors have been in my office in tears, describing how an agent at a conference pronounced the work unpublishable, or said that there is no market right now for books of this kind. When I recount the wonderful authors who heard such news in the past and who soldiered on to publish books that did very well, my authors are encouraged, but the wound only heals when the author finds a great agent and a publisher.

Herewith a word to all authors, both academic and trade: you should only listen to agents with amazing personal track records (who cares what the name of the agency is... follow the individual), and even then, in the words of Bob Dole, "Reasonable minds may differ." Many's the project that failed to captivate any agent anywhere, but that sold to a publisher straightaway. Learn who the best agents are -- this office only works with exceptional ones who know the business and who have decades of experience -- and focus on getting your work in front of these professionals. And stay away from literary conferences! Your time would be better spent researching your next bestseller.

In warm memory of Brooke Stauffer

One of Booklab's (and my) earliest literary supporters has died tragically, and I'm deeply shaken. Brooke Stauffer hired me to help him sell a novel he had written, and he also took my nonfiction book proposal seminar in 2004. He was such a gifted writer that I eventually brought him on board as a ghostwriter, and I nominated him for membership in the National Press Club, where we served together on the Book and Author Committee. Brooke was the author of many technical books, but his true gift was for fiction. He was beyond talented.

On August 24, 2007, he sent me an e-mail titled "Greetings from Mackinac Island." We had been writing back and forth about the ghostwriting assignment, and he said he'd contact me when he returned. I knew he was there with his fiancée, Karen Dodds, who was a private pilot. He was so proud of the fact that they could travel to so many great places in her plane. According to The Washington Post, Brooke and Karen died later that same day when their plane vanished in the Straits of Mackinac, near Bois Blanc Island, Michigan. Karen's body has been found; Brooke's has not.

Although I hadn't heard from him after that e-mail, I didn't worry. Brooke and I sometimes wouldn't communicate for weeks or even a couple of months when we were busy, but we usually found time to catch up, or else I'd get one of his famous hand-written postcards (apparently he sent them regularly to family and friends) with his large, block writing, explaining where he was and what was up. When a mutual friend contacted me this morning to point out the very late obituary (although they died in August, in ran on November 4), I could barely speak.

Farewell Brooke Stauffer -- magnificent and sexy-voiced writer, urbane beer companion (especially Belgian Chimay), literary friend and all-around charmingly odd duck. It doesn't make sense that you only got 56 years, and frankly, I thought you were a good bit younger than that. I believed you would publish your novel. I believed you and Karen would get married. I believed the book you were ghostwriting for me would win the Pulitzer Prize.

Maybe I still believe all of it.

Love,

Carole

Does being around too many literary stars make you feel small?

Comparisons are funny things. Healthy comparisons between/among people can lead to either self-acceptance or change. Unhealthy comparisons can lead to competitiveness, jealousy, and even worse, undermining.

This week I was around so many literary stars that I had to take a nap. First there was the Orhan Pamuk event in Gaston Hall, that was much more fun than I expected. Giving someone an honorary doctorate can be a recipe for snoozy, safe speeches and lots o' pomp, but this ceremony was brief and elegant, plus the author seemed genuinely moved. I've gone to the Folger for the PEN/Malamud awards and seen the other side... where the author treats it as something akin to a living canonization. Mr. Pamuk was different. He seemed rather shy about it. Afterward, I asked him what it's like going through the ceremony, because it looked a little bit like getting married. He said it did sort of feel that way, and that it's over so quickly you hardly know what happened.

Later in the week on the day of the National Press Club's annual Book Fair, Booklab brought Sebastian Junger to campus to talk to faculty about his kind of publishing. This was for an audience almost all of whom had published, some in a highly distinguished way, so it wasn't a "how to write" chat at all... more of a master's round table. But the guy has done more than I have -- much more -- and that following on the heels of meeting a Nobel laureate felt a bit heady. Deborah Tannen was there (more amazing literary firepower), plus some of our stars like Charles King and John Glavin.

Then on to the Press Club to meet Stephen Hunter from the Washington Post, Hannah Rosin who now writes books all the time, John Prendergrast, plus Barbara Mujica and Bernie Cook from Georgetown. I was beginning to wonder (a) if I'd ever write again; and (b) if I'd get a bad case of "this sucks" every time I got started. Jealousy's not usually my main problem, and I'm not starstruck, either (they're people and they write books...). But then there's that whole other thing... that sense of feeling small.

Do you ever get a case of this? How did you handle it? Write to Booklab with your thoughts for dealing with "They're so big and I'm so dinky"-itis.