More Genres Explained

The king died in a mutiny, and then the queen walked the plank is Sea Adventure.

The king died, and then the queen overcame great odds to live is a Thriller.

The king pretended to die, and then the queen went mad is a Psychological Thriller.

The king died, and then the queen was a witness for the defense is a Legal Thriller.

The king died at the cutting edge, and then the queen outsmarted the mad scientist is a Technothriller.

The king almost died at the hands of an evil nurse, and then the queen found the cure is a Medical Thriller.

Aspects of the Novelist's Dilemma (6)

6. Book bloggers replace book pages.

There’s another group to whom the publisher still seems to matter, and that’s print and television journalists and book reviewers who need a way to decide what to report on. The imprint of a major publisher can be one shortcut to deciding whether a book is worthy of their review or coverage.

There’s no question that a news or feature story in a major national newspaper or a large local paper can (though won’t necessarily) spike book sales. For nonfiction writers in particular this may be a good argument for going with an established publisher. But novelists rarely receive what we used to call “off the book page publicity,” and when they do it’s usually because their novel is already selling in stratospheric numbers or they’re a living legend like Stephen King.

The poet Philip Levine once commented that when you’re an unknown writer and can’t afford to pay your rent, nobody gives you anything, but when you’re already established and no longer need the money, you start to win awards and stipends. Mainstream media coverage is a little like that for novelists. Usually you already have to be famous or unusually successful to get it. These unspoken rules apply as much to Simon & Schuster as they do to a self-published author.

The real action these days, it seems, is on the internet, whether it’s via social media or bloggers. Indeed, as the number of newspaper pages devoted to book reviews has fallen through the floor, the number of book reviewers online has exploded. But it turns out that these people don’t have quite the same biases as mainstream journalists do. In fact, they might respond to the list of self-published authors I provided below by saying, “I knew that.”

So…

Dilemma: When you’re not already a famous novelist and book bloggers overwhelm mainstream media reviewers in numbers and impact, does it matter very much whether your publisher can open doors at the New York Times?

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3. Where does credibility lie?

As I was writing this post, an email blast arrived from bestselling author, blogger, internet marketing guru (and my old friend) Seth Godin. Under the heading “Self published” he listed thirteen well-known authors who had self-published, stated that “The question isn’t whether or not you should wait to be picked, the question is whether you care enough to pick yourself,” and included a link to a blog post on the “Information as Material” website entitled “Do or DIY.” You can read that blog yourself, but the site is down at the moment, so I haven't linked to it. Nevertheless it seems worth listing all the once-self-published authors, because the sheer number of important ones speaks loudly. In alphabetical order:

Kathy Acker, Jane Austen, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Kate Chopin, Tristan Corbiere, Stephen Crane, Nancy Cunard, Emily Dickinson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Benjamin Franklin, Nikki Giovanni, Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol, Ian Hamilton-Finlay, Nathaniel Hawthorne, A.E. Housman, Charles Ives, Rudyard Kipling, D.H. Lawrence, Martin Luther, Herman Melville, George Meredith, Anais Nin, Thomas Paine, Beatrix Potter, Ezra Pound, Marcel Proust, Irma Rombauer, Raymond Roussel, Carl Sandburg, Edith Sitwell, Gertrude Stein, Laurence Sterne, Italo Svevo, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Henry David Thoreau, Derek Walcott, Walt Whitman, Virginia Woolf

Seven Aspects of the Novelist's Dilemma (2)

2. Who’s adding value when distribution shifts?

Established publishers will say, not incorrectly, that a big part of publishing isn't about making stuff. Rather it’s about getting that stuff in front of people: distribution. But with the rise of digital books, distribution also changes markedly. So far, distribution of ebooks has proven to be a natural monopoly — or at least an oligopoly.

No one wants to go all over the Internet searching for a book to buy. And — at least as long as ebook formats (locked with digital rights management) are mostly tied to a particular brand of reader — once you have the reader you’re stuck with a single vendor. (Technically that’s not necessarily true, but it is as a practical matter.)

As a result, Amazon currently owns more than sixty percent of the ebook market, while Barnes & Noble has thirty percent. As ebooks continue to displace print books — especially in the fiction category — the effort required to achieve near-one-hundred-percent market penetration diminishes. Instead of shipping thousands of books to thousands of stores, you're sending an electronic file to three or four, and inexpensive services have already arisen to facilitate this distribution.

Dilemma: When ninety percent of the market is available to authors at the click of a button, what value is a traditional publisher adding?

Seven Aspects of the Novelist's Dilemma (1)

I just completed another novel, my third in three years, and now I have to figure out how to publish it.

Not long ago, all a novelist had to worry about was pleasing his reader. Getting published was a part of reaching that reader, of course, but presumably those who occupied the middle — agents, editors, bookstore buyers — were only super readers, people who stood in for the eventual customer.

Pleasing the reader meant facing up to certain dilemmas inherent in storytelling, matters of characterization, pacing, voice, etc. None of these is easy to master, but they’re the kinds of issues that authors enjoy resolving. Having to reinvent the book publishing industry, on the other hand, is a chore we’d rather avoid.

The Story of E?

For many years my father, who was the managing partner of a small accounting firm, had an impressive executive secretary. She was a refined old New York type who spoke in a cultured voice that came across with great assurance, especially over the telephone. She was also a large woman, built like an opera singer and with the refinements of one, a person whose physical qualities and classy manners led you to assume, without knowing for sure, that she was a serious consumer of art and literature. In support of that assumption, she was a voracious reader and spent her entire lunch hour immersed in mass market paperback books.

What was she reading? I couldn’t know, not exactly, because the covers remained hidden beneath a fabric sleeve with a fringe bookmark that she transferred from volume to volume like a talisman. When I inquired after what she was reading she invariably blushed and refused to tell me. They turned out — yes, I peeked — to be conventional romances.

Anatomy of a Writer's Rant

This morning I read a blog rant from an acquaintance named Aaron Patterson, an author and the publisher of StoneHouse Ink. I met Aaron last summer at the International Thriller Writers conference. His enthusiasm and his business savvy impressed me.

Last month Aaron sold nearly 20,000 copies of his ebooks. In some respects, he is running circles around much bigger publishers, and he’s only been in the business for three years. In his rant, he compares most authors to casino goers: “Authors from everywhere are all on the plane whooping it up, drinking and full of visions of the money filled pools of their future. But on the airplane ride back, sad faces and hung over looks cover the silent air like a wet dream crushing blanket.”

Now, this is a sentence that began with great promise and then devolved into an awkward mixed metaphor. If you’re turned off by the writing of his post (which clearly was just spit out, typos and all, in a fit of frustration bordering on rage), you might be inclined to dismiss Aaron. In that case, you’d be the poorer, because he’s right. Hope is not a strategy. The business point of being published (self or otherwise) is not to acquire a lottery ticket but to build a brand of some kind.