The Accidental Publisher

When I started looking for a job in publishing after moving to New York many years ago, the reason was simple. I wanted to know how it worked. It seemed a sensible thing for a writer (who at that time had written two unpublished novels and was working on a third) to know.

At that very early point in my literary career, my sole publishing “success” was a letter to the editor in Harper’s magazine. The letter, which I still have somewhere, was in response to a piece by Madison Smartt Bell (wow, Dragon Dictate got the correct spelling of his middle name) on “brat pack” fiction.

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Read, damn it!

(The fourth in a series of writing tips you don’t need and didn’t ask for, but are going to get, such is my insanely selfless altruism.)

Writing Tip #4

Many years ago, I went through a state of Salinger addiction. Anyone who has ever been a fan of the late stylist at an impressionable age likely goes through something like that with reading Salinger. His sentences are just so good. Can’t say I much re-read him these days, but there’s a moment in one of the Glass family books when he offers some really good writing advice.

The writer of the stories is allegedly Buddy Glass. His older brother, Seymour, is a saint too good for this world. In (I think) a note to Buddy about one of his early stories, Seymour (I’m paraphrasing, here) tells Buddy something to the effect that he’s trying too hard. He tells him that he was a reader long before he was a writer, and so he should write that thing that he most wants to read.

I think it’s exceptionally good advice, and I got similar advice from my professors over the years. I remember going to Richard Bausch, one of the earliest of my teachers, who (unbelievably) may have been unpublished at the time and asking how to end a story.

At the time I was maybe 18 or 19 and wanted to write more than I knew what it was I wanted to write about. The real problem was that I had no idea how to set up a conflict so that it could be resolved. (I was kind of hooked on Kerouac at the time, and just wrote, figuring that by doing so, I’d get something worthwhile.

He said something like read other writers. See how they end stories. I also needed to see how they began them, but the real point was reading.

Several years later, I taught an undergrad fiction class at the University of Houston. It was an evening class, at one of the satellite campuses, and it was pretty full, the first night. I handed out the syllabus, assigned the book (Burroway’s)

Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft), and stood hopefully in front of the class and asked what these hopeful young writers were reading. Few of them actually were, aside from the books they were assigned to read for their other classes.

I won’t say that I was shocked but I sure as heck was chagrinned. But the reality is that a whole lot of folks who take undergrad creative writing courses just plain aren’t interested in the idiotic life that being a fiction writer can be. They just needed an agreeable elective.

Part Two

Read poetry. One of my professors when I was an undergrad, Peter Klappert, said something to the effect that fiction writers ought to read poetry, and lots of it, to get the latest news on what language can do. I could not agree more.

Got the Advance Reading Copies

Of TFAOAFGND, and I think they look pretty good. But so I’m reading the first page, and thinking this is a killer first page, and then get down a few grafs and see, crap, a freaking typo. But this is what advance copies are for, or one of the things.

It’s a curious thing, a physical copy of a book that is going to be an ebook — all the heft you’d expect from a book that will, when it is finally published have no heft.

a stack of Final Appearance advance reading copies

If you’re a reviewer or tastemaker, thought-leader, or just a general bon vivant (you must have evidence of status as bon vivant), shoot Margaret an email at margaret@shelfmediagroup.com and request a copy. You might get lucky.

EBooks Mean the Ascendency of Whom or What?

Quo Vadis the Book?

If the eBook is ascendent, who or what else is also ascendent?
The excessively simple narrative of the history of book publishing goes sort of like this: writers hired printing presses to bring their work into the world in book or other form. To protect writers from unscrupulous printers, there arose publishers who would pay the writers a fair rate and also make money. But the scruple-less roamed the land and so came literary agents to protect writers from unscrupulous publishers, and also make a buck.
And this model worked reasonably well for a while until hypertext came along and screwed up everything.

But it’s a way slo-mo earth quake, this screwing up of things that hypertext hath wrought. Continue reading

I’m no prophet, but I don’t think Amazon’s Kindle will do much for electronic books

Best that I can tell, the one thing that dedicated electronic book readers have going for them is convenience. You’re traveling, for example, and you want to take half a dozen books but if you cram them all in your carry-on bag, it’ll weigh as much as college cheerleading squad. And you don’t want to pack them in your checked luggage, because then you won’t be able to get at them during your mind-numbingly dull flight.

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