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

Please Join Me

I’m not a big joiner. Oh, I can be social if need be — can talk my head off at a cocktail party with a glass of wine (or two) in my hand. But even when I’m at the dance I feel like the guy looking in the window. (See Mann, Thomas.) It’s the novelist’s plight, perhaps, to be more inclined to observe than to participate.

So a few years ago, when my old friend Jane Dystel (to whom I’d sold my literary agency in 2000), recommended that I join International Thriller Writers, I fretted and resisted. Last year, however, I took the plunge, and although my participation in the organization has been gentle rather than gung-ho, I have found it rewarding.

At the ITW conference in New York, I sat in on some lectures in craft, picking up a thing or two. I spoke on a panel, reacquainted myself with some old colleagues and started some new relationships. The overarching theme of ITW is that times are tough (and changing) in a difficult profession. If we authors stick together, we can help one another, better satisfy readers, and grow the genre.

One of the things that makes ITW unique is that it doesn’t charge dues to its members. It only charges for its conference and it sells ads on its website. And one of the biggest ways it raises funds is by selling an annual collection of short stories.

I’m here today to plug that collection, Love is Murder, edited by Sandra Brown.

Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review.

Booklist called it "wonderfully diverse and exciting."

If you need to watch television to get inspired to buy it (something I don’t really understand, dinosaur that I am), visit the trailer through Facebook.

There are some big names in this collection, but it’s largely about assisting the rest of us, the ones still striving to “make it.” By buying this book, you’re not only helping authors in a popular genre. You’re helping authors get better at what they do.

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.

Narrative Friction

I recently learned (maybe I’m the last to know) that Ben Zimmer of The Boston Globe has been tracking anachronistic language in the PBS hit show Downton Abbey for a project called Visual Thesaurus. The anachronisms are also the subject of a YouTube video.

The examples (“I couldn’t care less”) have not struck me while I watched the series, so I can’t claim they took this viewer out of the fiction. It could be that I’m just a sucker for an English accent, lapsing into instant credulousness at the first seemingly erudite syllable. Then again, some of these “mistakes” seem like a great deal of hairsplitting. For instance, the word “floozy” — which Zimmerman flags — is said only to have begun in American (not British) slang in the earlier part of the decade in which Downton takes place. I don’t know — I’m not a linguist — but the first written citation in the Dictionary of American Slang dates to 1902. Wouldn’t the oral slang precede the written? Doesn’t at least sixteen years seem like enough time for that usage to have crossed the pond, especially with a world war on? And isn’t it possible that the character who speaks this word was at least exposed to an American in England who introduced her to the usage?

Well, never mind the pilpul; it’s all in good fun. But this exercise does bring to my mind the issue of narrative voice in fiction.