In Between

My friends who are business people consider me an intellectual.

My intellectual friends consider me a businessman.

My conservative friends think I’m a liberal.

My liberal friends think I’m a conservative.

My Brooklyn friends find my writing commercial.

My Hollywood friends may find my writing literary.

My shy friends think that I’m outgoing.

My outgoing friends think that I’m shy.

I’m none of these things. I’m all of these things.

I read the description of the artistic personality type, abbreviated as ISFP (Introverted Sensing Feeling Perceiving), and I find myself in half of it. Not so much the other half.

On a Caribbean vacation a few years ago, I was playing in a pickup tennis game when the guy across the net asked, “What do you do? You some kind of writer?”

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?

Seven Aspects of the Novelist's Dilemma (3)

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 (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.