Month: August 2012

Gillian Polack is a fine writer, a fine person and a good friend of mine. You may remember that I reviewed her novel, Life Through Cellophane, a while back. Sadly, the publisher of that book, Eneit Press, fell victim to the Red Group/Borders debacle and went under. It seemed that Gillian’s book went with it. But, a literary phoenix from the ashes of corporate foolishness, it has found new life with the Pan Macmillan ebook imprint, Momentum. Now called Ms Cellophane and with a cool new cover, the book is back.

I got to talking with Gillian about the book recently. She was particularly pleased with my original review when I said:

I must admit that I felt a bit weird reading it. It was like I was hiding out during a secret women’s business meeting, hearing about things I shouldn’t know.

On hearing this, Gillian said, “It’s a good reaction. You read lots, and this is the only book that gives you that sense. I get a lot of female readers saying to me, “This is my life, I read this and am looking into a mirror.” It makes me wonder why you haven’t encountered other books that give you the same sense. What sort of boundaries are out there and what sorts of restrictions do they put on us without us knowing?”

Alan: I think it’s largely to do with the types of books I read. It’s not that I don’t read books by women. In fact, on checking Goodreads, recently I’ve read:

Felicity Dowker’s Bread & Circuses
Jo Anderton’s Debris and Suited
Kirstyn McDermott’s Madigan Mine
Margo Lanagan’s Sea Hearts
Joanna Penn’s Prophecy
Lisa L Hannett’s Bluegrass Symphony

That’s just this year, which is a year where I haven’t read nearly as much as I usually do. But while these are excellent books by women, all with strong female protagonists and/or supporting characters, they’re not as much books about being a woman as yours is. So I wonder if I just don’t choose to read other books more like yours.

Gillian: My book was all about the type of invisibility that many women feel so yes, it wasn’t about a strong protagonist so much as about a very particular aspect of life. Can you pinpoint some of the things that made you feel as if you were entering a foreign universe – and maybe talk about how they differ from the approach you take to your own female characters?

Alan: I have a very simple, perhaps overly so, approach to writing female characters. I basically approach all characters as neither male or female, but simply as people. Of course, I will try to get inside my character’s heads and they’re all very individual people, but gender is only ever a small part of that, never a primary consideration.

Reading Cellophane, I felt as though I was getting an insight into the day-to-day miniutiae of being a woman. You do a good job of putting the reader in Elizabeth’s mind and it almost feels, to me at least, as though we shouldn’t be there. Of course, that’s a sign of great writing – feeling like we’re inside a character rather than simply watching from outside. And, equally, my male-ness is showing, simply because the process of reading your book came as such a surprise to me.

The best thing about it is that none of it was uncomfortable in any way – it was simply fascinating.

To go back to my own writing, I deliberately don’t try to make my female characters “feminine”. I use quotes there to indicate the insufficiency of the word. I don’t know what it’s like to be feminine. I know what it’s like to be around women. I’ve been married a long time and have many great female friends. I know what it’s like to interact with women and I know how they might respond to various situations. My author’s eye is always studying people and scenarios, subconsciously filing it away for later story use. All writers have to be great observers of the world around them. But I can never observe what it’s like to be a woman. Until reading Cellophane, that is. Because that’s something which gave me an insight I couldn’t get on my own. And while I read a lot of female authors – in fact, my favourite Australian spec-fic writers are all women! – I guess I don’t read very much stuff about women. So perhaps I need to know what I could read that would help me with that.

Of course, that also leads to a small problem. I hate “chick flicks”. I have little to no interest in reading books aimed at a purely female market. But Cellophane seemed to transcend that issue, so I guess I need advice on more books like yours!

Gillian: I don’t know where there are more books precisely like mine! There must be. Cellophane can’t be sui generis. I wrote it though, because I wanted to read books like it and I wanted the books to be speculative fiction. One of my publishers suggests that I’m like Anne Tyler, someone else suggests that the female-ness of my world is a bit like Alice Hoffmann, while Sophie Masson suggested that my first novel reminded her of A.S. Byatt. They’re all women writers who often put women in the centre of the story and are capable of working quite inwardly (though don’t always), so I’d start from them, I think, and work out. Ursula le Guin does the same inwards-out approach in Always Coming Home, but she’s more concerned with place and culture and change than with domestica.

There’s a lot of literary fiction written in a character’s head, where the internal view is key to the novel. There’s not, however, much speculative fiction that both takes this approach and focuses on the mundane. Kaaron Warren’s Slights does that, of course, but in such a different way! She wrote about someone quite terrifying and had me accepting, as a reader, that this was quite normal until we realised that this person we had accepted into our headspace was someone we wouldn’t ever want to meet. I really wanted to communicate the everydayness of lives and that these lives can be wonderful, and that magic doesn’t have to be the stuff of adventures and quests.

Alan: Slights is a great example of character, but you’re right, certainly not a particular example of womankind. More an example of arsehole-kind.

I think you hit it on the head when you say that you “wanted to communicate the everydayness of lives and that these lives can be wonderful, and that magic doesn’t have to be the stuff of adventures and quests.”

Is that something you’ll be exploring more? The street-level magic of the everyday wonder rather than the “big story” wonder? Will you write about Elizabeth again?

Gillian: I won’t write about Elizabeth again, but I will definitely be exploring the everyday wonder. In fact, I have a novel out there… It’s one of those hard-to-categorise novels, like Cellophane. Publishers are both loving it and not willing to publish it. This is a problem I face regularly, for there is no general sub-category for what I do, and so it’s hard to fit into a schedule. Personally, I can’t see what’s hard to categorise about a magic-wielding feminist divorced Jewish Sydneysider who is not speaking to her father. In fact, the short story that’s set after the time of the novel was published years ago (in ASIM), for short story markets are more flexible. It was listed as recommended on an international Year’s Best, and I have a recording of actor Bob Kuhn reading it, just waiting for the right moment to appear. People ask me about Judith, and I have to say, “Still no home.”

The cursed novel (The Art of Effective Dreaming – due to appear some time ago) is about dealing with the mundane world, how to escape it and what the implications are of such an escape, but of course, the novel is cursed (and contains dead morris dancers). It was supposed to appear several years ago, but the most extraordinary life events (hurricanes, earthquakes, computer failure, near death experiences) keep getting in the way. I find it rather ironic that a novel about an ordinary person should be doomed to adventures and not be seen, but right now, the story of the The Art of Effective Dreaming’s delays would make a rather good disaster novel.

Alan: Sounds like you need just the right small press for the Judith novel. I’m sure it’ll find a home eventually. I hope it does, because it sounds very cool.

And The Art Of Effective Dreaming will eventually see the light of day, right?

Gillian: From your mouth to God’s ear (to use a Jewish expression I did not in fact grow up with!). You want to read about the dead morris dancers… Actually, The Art of Effective Dreaming also gently takes the mickey out of quest novels, so I rather suspect you might like it. I hope you get to read it soon!

Alan: As far as I’m concerned, the only good Morris Dancer is a dead one, so yes, I’d love to read it.

As Gillian once said to me in an email: “One of the messages I wanted to get out there about my writing is that it’s not bad despite not fitting categories. So many people look for categories and assume that a novel is not readable, simply because they haven’t encountered its like before… for there is a public perception that there’s a gender divide and that women read men’s books but that men don’t read women’s. I’m beginning to think that it’s being reinforced through being assumed and would love to break it down.”

So get out there and have a read of Ms Cellophane. It might change your perceptions a little bit. It’s available now from Momentum.

This is a cross-posting from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.

This post, by Mike Shatzkin, originally appeared on his The Shatzkin Files.

My eye was caught at the end of last week by a story in The Bookseller that acknowledged that ebooks just haven’t worked for illustrated books. It appears that the publishers of illustrated books they spoke to for the piece think that situation is temporary. The Managing Director of Thames & Hudson, Jamie Camplin, is quoted as saying “you have to make a very clear distinction between the situation now and the situation in five years time.” And Dorling Kindersley CEO John Duhigg emphasized that his team is being kept up to date with digital workflows and innovations, so they can “be there with the right product at the right time.”

But maybe, except for an opportunity that will arise here and there, for illustrated book publishers trying to exploit the same creative development across both print and digital, there won’t ever be a “right time”. There certainly is no guarantee there will be.

Duhigg characterized what he called “the black and white digital business” (but which I think would more accurately be described as “the immersive reading digital business”) as “flowing along” while admitting it is “very different” for the companies with “fully-illustrated lists”.

That’s accurate. Expecting that to change could well be wishful thinking.

Illustrated books in printed form depend on bookstores more than novels and biographies do. If the value in a book is in its visual presentation, then you might want to look at it before buying it, and the view you’d get of it online might not be doing justice to what you’d see if you held the book in your hands.

Camplin sees that optimistically. He has an aggressively modernist view of what will happen with novels. “I don’t see why print should survive at all for fiction, beyond the odd bibliophile” which he apparently believes could open up more bookstore display space for illustrated books.

But if the buyers of Patterson and Evanovich and 50 Shades of Gray aren’t visiting bookstores to make those purchases anymore, will there be any traffic to look at the illustrated books, however prominently they are displayed?

This problem has been nagging at me for a while. Books are illustrated for two reasons: beauty or explanatory purpose, more the latter than the former. When they’re illustrated to better explain, such as showing you how to knit a stitch or make a candle or a piece of jewelry, wouldn’t a video be a better option most of the time? If the illustration is a map, isn’t it likely that being able to manage overlays digitally (for the movement of the weather or the troops on the battlefield or the adjustment of borders over time) will deliver more clarity than whatever stills were in the book?

Of course, these things can be done by book publishers for the digital versions. But they require creating or licensing and then integrating new content assets and rethinking and redesigning the presentation. And that’s not even accounting for the work involved in adjusting the content to multiple screen sizes, a problem that just keeps getting more challenging as more different tablet and phone screen sizes are introduced.

One major publisher I know really endeavors to make ebooks of all their new title output, which includes some imprints that do a lot of illustrated books. Like everybody else, they frequently see ebook sales of 50% and more of their fiction, and 25% or more on immersive-reading non-fiction. But the illustrated books are in the single-digit percentages most of the time, with some of the more successful categories in the very low double-digits.

Read the rest of the post on The Shatzkin Files.

This post, by Moira Rogers, originally appeared on her site on 8/10/12.

Most of my corners of the internet have been ablaze over the piracy witch-hunt that shut down legal lending website LendInk.  I have seen pitchfork-wielding mobs gather many times in the past, but this one was fast, vicious and amplified by careless RTing and a lot of authors who seem to know nothing about ebooks or how they actually work.  This is terrifying to me on so many levels: that people agreed to the Amazon ToS without understanding them, that people jumped to the worst assumptions without taking time for research, and then that they went and made “legal” threats based on those assumptions.

But that’s not what this post is about.  This post is about a misconception so common I’ve seen it on both sides.  I think Amazon is to blame in some ways for not giving two completely different functions slightly more distinctive names.  There are two types of “lending” on Amazon–one that is Amazon-to-Prime-Customer and one that is Paying-Customer-To-Non-Paying-Customer, and people seem really confused over what they both mean.

Kindle Lending

How it Works

Kindle lending (like Nook lending) is a customer-to-customer transaction.  Someone who has legally purchased an eligible kindle title can lend that title to anyone else with a kindle account.  The option shows up on eligible books:

Ebook lending is meant to mirror the act of physical lending–the book “disappears” from the lender’s account and “appears” in the lendee’s account. The lending period is restricted to two weeks, and a book can only be lent once.  In many ways, it’s far more restrictive than its physical counterpart, even if the internet allows you to easily use your one lend on people outside your immediate geographic area.

Which books are eligible?  For larger publishers, that’s their call.  Lots of the Big Six books are not eligible. Anyone using KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing), however, is automatically opted in to this lending service if they select the 70% royalty option.  (Note: this is NOT related to KDP Select. This is just about 35% vs 70%.  To receive the 70% royalty, you have to do many things that make your book more useful to Amazon, including opting in to lending and agreeing to stay within a set price range.)

This is the option LendInk was using to arrange book lending.  User A would say, “I have a copy of Cipher by Moira Rogers that I am willing to lend” and User B would say, “I’d like to read that book!”  LendInk would give User B’s e-mail address to User A, and User A would go to Amazon, click the “Loan this book” link and the standard (legal) transaction would occur.  If User C wanted to borrow Cipher, too, they would be out of luck. User A can only loan that book once.  However, User C might click on the “Buy this Book” link and purchase the book.  That would give the author royalties and give LendInk a small referrer fee.  That was the business model in play.

Royalties

Read the rest of the post, which also explains the Amazon Prime Lending Library and author lend compensation, on Moira Rogers’ site.