Book Oven pal Mark Bertils writes about Cloud Publishing on indexmb, focusing mostly on the reader-side, with services like Shortcovers and the more forwardlooking expectation of booky-APIs, Kindle’s or big cloud-based catalog initiatives. The stuff that’s happening and going to happen on the finished product/reader side is exciting, but it pales, I think, in comparison to the changes that will come on the creation side. I posted the following comment on Mark’s site: For obvious reasons, I think the cloud looks most promising as a publishing enabler, rather than as a reading enabler. Cloud-publishing for me means: a) a text can be instantaneously published at zero-cost to the world b) a text can be worked on by an editorial team distributed across the globe, yet the text will still be in “one place” in the cloud The implications are huge for the structures of the publishing business (or at least, we at Book Oven are betting they are). The two things that have given shape to the “modern” publishing industry are: a) the cost of distribution of books b) the need for centralization of workers-on-books But a) goes to zero, and, as you suggest, b) has been going towards decentralization for some time now. But b) is going to fragment massively now. So really the two main forces that have shaped the book business have essentially disappeared – or at least, should disappear within the next 5 years. The changes on the production side will, I think, be far more significant than the changes for readers.
Publishers Must Change The Way Authors Get Paid
This editorial, from novelist M.J. Rose, originally appeared on Publishing Perspectives on 8/28/09. While the piece deals with mainstream author compensation schemes (advances and royalties), it points up the fact that the line between mainstream and indie authors continues to blur day by day now that mainstream authors are expected to act much like indie authors when it comes to promoting their books.
Shout it from the rooftops, or better yet, hashtag it on Twitter. It’s time to turn the page on how authors get paid.
Times have changed, and with them, every aspect of the publishing landscape is morphing. And from my vantage point, nowhere is it changing more than in marketing. Authors aren’t waiting and watching to see what publishers aren’t doing for their books — they are jumping in feet first and months ahead of their houses to make sure there’s a serious marketing and publicity effort.
And publishers aren’t gnashing their teeth over the author’s involvement anymore — they are encouraging it. Co-op is more costly than ever and eating up marketing dollars. In almost all cases, publishers are making it clear that they expect authors to supplement their marketing/PR effort in various ways and, in some cases, even soliciting the author’s help with both time and yes, money.
As a result, today the author’s marketing/PR effort is often equal to or even greater than what the house is doing.
The good news is it works. No wonder really — people do buy more of something when they know it exists, and in general, book marketing is so low-key that people don’t know what books are even out there. I have dozens of case histories of authors who have pushed their sales into reprints when none were expected, created enough velocity to generate free co-op when none was anticipated, and achieve bestseller listings when none were dreamed of.
But whenever there’s good news…
We now have a situation where publishers are financially benefiting from the author’s efforts but the author is still getting paid the old way, without regard to how much we personally invest.
There’s just no consideration for the checks we’re writing out of our own pockets for marketing or PR services.
Accordingly, it’s blatantly and patently unfair for us to invest in our own books and then wait for our advances to earn out based on the same royalties rates we’ve always gotten.
Be it $2,000 or $20,000, the money we invest should be discounted from the advances we’re paid, allowing us to earn royalties faster based on an honest up-front expenditure by the publisher.
And, it goes without saying, we should be be getting a higher royalty rate. After all, we’re doing more than writing our books, we’re business partners as well.
Read the rest of the article on Publishing Perspectives.
People's Reactions When You Say, "I'm Writing A Book"
When you say “I’m writing a book” or “I’m an author”, people have a number of different reactions. You can get support and enthusiasm or you can get negativity…and anything in between!
Sometimes it hurts, as this may be a lifetime goal and something you feel vulnerable talking about.
You expect your partner or your family to be infinitely supportive but sometimes they just don’t get it. You may also surprise them by what you write. My Dad and my brother found it “surprising” that I wrote a self-help book. They were expecting fiction. But why – when I have never written any?
“Writing is an act of ego, and you might as well admit it.”
William Zinsser, “On Writing Well”
You will put a great deal of yourself into your book. Even if it is non-fiction, you will find it an expression of who you are. After all, what you choose to write about reflects on the person you are. People will judge you by the material (but then they judge you anyway!).
The problem is worse when you only have one book, as this is your only child. Your sole expression of yourself in book form. It then becomes the only thing for people to judge you on and the main thing for people to attack. Once you have some more books, you can start to relax as there are different facets of you on show. Your confidence will also grow – you are now an author!
Everyone will have an opinion about you writing a book. At the beginning you might not tell anyone you are writing for fear of what they think, or might say – after all, lots of people talk about writing a book, but few actually finish one. When you tell people you are writing a book, the comments are a mixed bag. In my experience it went like the following graph of criticism and praise.
Initially, there was criticism, negativity and judgement – or at least that is what it felt like. This is also directly related to the editing process. The criticism I got at the beginning of the project was justified based on the quality of the writing. However, the criticism started to die off as the editing process continued and as I showed I was actually going to achieve this. As I then started to tell more people, the praise started to come in. The criticism also dies away (unless you have a controversial book!)
This is also related to your confidence as you may often start out sounding apologetic about writing a book, but this changes over time and you become proud of what you have done.
SOME PEOPLE WILL NOT LIKE YOUR BOOK.
This is inevitable and something you have to face. This will be difficult especially when you are still a new author and emotionally involved with your book. I remember bawling my eyes out when challenged on why people would buy it. I felt that a rejection of my book was a rejection of me.
I have learnt that this isn’t so – perhaps the message was not for them at that time.
How can you deal with this difficult time?
- Understand that how you feel is not unusual. You are out of your comfort zone. You are not an expert in writing books, so you need to get used to it. Be gentle on yourself, and accepting that you have some lessons to learn before you make it.
- When someone says something that you consider hurtful, take a deep breath and reassess their comment. It is useful feedback that you can try to incorporate to improve your book? If yes, note it down and use it. Is it jealousy, or a comment that does not help? If yes, try not to think about it again and don’t share your book plans with that person again.
- Talk yourself up and say positive affirmations. You have permission to write your book. Your opinion is valid. You can be an author. You are creative. These phrases are affirmations that you might need to repeat and say over to yourself. Fake it until you make it!
- You can achieve this goal. Writing and publishing a book is an achievable goal. It does, however, take some persistence. Think of it as a longer term experience and enjoy the ride!
So when people comment on your book, or on your dream of writing a book, just take a deep breath, note the comments and move on. You are fulfilling your own dream.
This is a cross-posting of an article that originally appeared on The Creative Penn site on 12/29/08.
My Children Are More Precious Than Gold
My children’s book "My Children Are More Precious Than Gold" ISBN 1438240953 sold on amazon and buy sell community or by me.
This was my inspiration.
I had a grandmother that I grew up respecting and loving. Though Veder Bright had to be prompted to talk about her early years, she did tell me as much as she wanted me to know. While in school, had an assignment to do a family tree. I’ll always be grateful that I talked to Grandma and got all the information she knew. Now communication with second and third cousins on the Internet has helped me fill in more of that family tree. I’m proud that younger relatives ask me for a copy of our tree for their homework. Backgrounds are very important. Trouble is, most people don’t start questioning who was related to who until the elders in their family has passed away. You can find most of the names and dates on the internet, but that’s not nearly as interesting to me as my grandmother’s stories that went along with those names and dates.
My grandmother, my mother’s mother, died in the late seventies about three years after my grandfather. When many of her nine children cleaned out their parents last home in Belle Plaine, they found the family bible. Under the names and dates of all her children, including the two infants that died, was the sentence in Grandma’s scrawling hand, " My children are more precious than gold".
My grandparents struggled to keep food on the table for their large family during the twenties and thirties. Through all the tough times, those children knew they were loved. They did their best to look after each other. My mother and an uncle have passed away, but to this day though the siblings are scattered between Missouri where they were born and Iowa, they are very close, because family is still important to them.
In the late eighties after the writers workshop in the library, I was thinking at trying my hand to write a book. Hadn’t clue what the story would be. Once day, my mother was looking for something in the antique sideboard in the kitchen. The Great Depression had trained my mother, the eldest of that large family, to never throw anything away. That day, she was rifling through the tablecloths and napkins when a legal size paper slipped out from the pile. She glanced at the paper and handed it to me, wondering if I might be interested in some family history her mother had given her a decade before.
One of Grandma’s sisters had been interviewed by a granddaughter as a 4 H project about their early life and submitted the story to a newspaper. My grandmother and her 11 siblings were born in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Riner, Virginia. At the turn of the twentieth century in that area conditions were rough, and families were poor. I found it interesting to read how the Bishop family lived and what they had to do to survive. That was the start of my book project, but I needed to know more so I went to the Keystone Library and checked out a book on Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains and the customs of the people. I made extensive notes from that book.
By then I had bought a word processor which had some memory. I don’t remember how long it took me to write the book but at least a year. The title is "My Children Are More Precious Than Gold". Befitting I thought since I assumed my grandmother got her mothering instincts from her mother. Finally, I took a copy in a notebook to my retired teacher mentor. She read and edited the story. Her review was – This book is good reading for anyone and especially a good story for junior readers – sad, funny and dramatic.
I sent out queries and chapters to several publishers but the era the story was written in wasn’t what has been popular with children was my reasoning. That being my first book, down deep I was pretty sure I needed more experience to write a book worth publishing. After months of waiting, I got the rejections slips, gave up and hid the notebook away for over a decade.
My next attempt at writing a book didn’t happen for ten years – 1999
Punk Rock Ethos & Self-Publishing
This post, from Daniel "Dust" Werneck (aka Daniel Poeira), originally appeared on his Empire of Dust site on 9/4/09. The majority of it is reprinted here with his permission.
“If you want something done right, do it yourself.”
– Old proverb
I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to cover this subject for a while. Now, thanks to April Hamilton – a.k.a. @indieauthor – and a link she just posted on Twitter, I think it’s the right time to talk about punk rock and self-publishing.
Since I halted my career as an independent animator and started to focus on my writing, I’ve been reading everything I can find about the current state of affairs in the world of book publishing. One of the ugliest feuds right now is between the publishing companies and professionals, and the self-publishing companies like lulu.com that print and sell books without editing.
The link Mrs. Hamilton twitted pointed to an article by Rose Fox, a professional reader and book analyst, criticizing people who self-published books. Her article, entitled “I Don’t Want To Hate Self-Publishers”, starts with two quotes; phrases she hears all the time coming from people who publish their own books. One of the sentences read:
“I’d love to see self-publishing have a similar vibe to it as punk rock – anyone can do it.”
And then she adds her view of that statement:
I know next to nothing about punk rock and I’m still pretty sure that that “anyone can do it” line is not only wrong but offensively wrong to people who do know anything about punk rock.
I also can’t see how it promotes self-publishing in any way at all, as the idea of “anyone” attempting to play punk rock only makes me want to cringe and cover my ears, much like the idea of “anyone” attempting to publish a book.
There’s plenty to criticize in both the recording industry and the publishing industry, but there’s also a lot of value in putting your raw creative endeavors in the hands of people who do things like produce albums and edit books for a living.
I am glad that she started her comment by confirming she knows ‘next to nothing’ about punk rock. Being born and raised in punk rock, I feel in the position to enlighten her shadowy views on that remark about ‘anyone’ being able to do it.
This assertion is not by any means offensive to punk rockers. Quite au contraire, it is one of the pillars of the entire punk rock experience.
When punk rock first appeared with this name, in mid-1970s New York city, it was basically a bunch of amateur unsigned rock bands who wanted to make music. Back then, Disco music was the norm, and studio execs didn’t care much about rock, unless it was something gigantic and popular like Peter Frampton, or elaborate and complex like progressive rock. If you were just an average lower-middle-class bored kid with close-to-none access to musical education, making music was not a realistic option for you.
But even so, punk rock was born. It didn’t start like an organized movement, but more like a philosophy of how to do things. Bands like the Ramones, the Dead Boys and the Talking Heads had to play in an almost abandoned music venue called CBGB (an acronym for Country, Blue Grass and Blues) simply because no other place would accept them. But they did, anyway, and a lot of people loved them.
After the Ramones toured the USA and the UK in 1977, hordes of bored kids who wanted to rock bought or stole whatever instruments they could grab and started making their own rock music. They had no musical education, no media training and no producing values–but they sure had a lot of fun, and ended up creating timeless and enduring pieces of music.
The trick behind the success of punk rock back in the late 1970s and 1980s was simple: besides it being fun, thought-provoking and stimulating, you didn’t have to spend a lot of money or a lot of time to become a punk rocker. Clubs, tapes, instruments, magazines, records–everything was cheap, and felt very true to the soul. And also, at least in the beginning, on those long lost days of punk rock Alcion, you didn’t have to follow any rulebooks, or please the masses. It was a raw and free art form, and no matter what you were looking for (artistic expression, free beer, making new friends) you could get it out of punk rock.
*.*.*
What does all this has to do with self-publishing books? Well, first of all, the very name of this thing called ‘punk rock’ came out of a self-published magazine. “Punk” was created by a cartoonist, a publisher and a journalist in 1975. All of them were independent, self-employed, eager and curious. Their fanzine went on to become one of the most important artistic statements of the late XX century, and is still imitated, revered and plagiarized.
Fanzines in general have also become a staple (no pun intended!) of the punk rock subculture, and thousands of them have been printed since then. I have been personally involved in many a punk zine, and my entire career as an artist [was] spawned from my amateur experiments with self-publishing those little pieces of folded A4 paper I gave out for free or sold cheaply at concerts, clubs and gatherings. I am not an exception, and have met dozens of people who [followed] the same path as I did, not to mention the literally hundreds of visual artists I’ve heard or read about who first became interested in graphic design and printing through punk or geek fanzines.
The thrill of it all? Exactly the same as with the punk rock bands. We did everything by ourselves, for ourselves, with no restraints other than the financial and technological. This led to extremely experimental solutions that became part of modern design language, xerox art, etc.
Read the rest of the post at Empire of Dust.
7 Tips For Starting A Writer's Group
This post, from Laurie Pawlik-Kienlen, originally appeared on her Quips and Tips for Successful Writers site on 5/14/09.
Starting your own writer’s group will be a breeze with these tips from my own experience! Whether you’re a freelance writer, aspiring novelist, or published poet – a writer’s group can keep you motivated, disciplined, productive…and published!
I mentioned my writing group on Twitter, and received several “I wish I belonged to a writer’s group, but there’s none in my area” or “My writing group disbanded – and I really miss it!” responses. So, here are my tips for starting a writer’s group.
Before the tips, a quip:
“If you don’t feel that you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then probably what you are doing isn’t very vital.” – John Irving.
Fellow scribes, a writer’s group will help you stay grounded as you teeter on the edge of losing control and possibly humiliating yourself! For more info about writer’s groups, click on Writing Alone, Writing Together: A Guide for Writers and Writing Groups by Judy Reeves. And, here are my tips for starting your own writer’s group…
But first – the benefits of a writer’s group:
- Information-sharing, which leads to growth
- Inspiration from successful experiences
- Support for rejections and feelings of failure
- Encouragement to keep going
- Feelings of solidarity and connectedness
- Feedback for your writing, article ideas, or plans
- Accountability for your writing goals
7 Tips for Starting a Writer’s Group
1. Decide on the best place to meet. My writer’s group started in a classroom at our local elementary school and moved to our homes (we rotate through the members’ houses). We’ve also met in the pub, which wasn’t as comfortable as a home. Other great places for writer’s groups to meet include the library, an uncrowded coffee shop, or a spare room in your local community center.
2. Be clear from the beginning about the structure of your meetings. Will you read your writing out loud, and will everyone give feedback? Will you email your story, article pitch, or book proposal before the meeting? Will you write during your meetings (that wouldn’t work for me – but it may be appealing to writers who struggle with motivation or time to write)? Will you brainstorm story ideas or wrestle with plot problems?
Read the rest of the post, including tips #3 -7, on Quips and Tips for Successful Writers.
What Are Your Goals For Writing?
Goals are important. They sustain you through the difficult times when you feel like you can’t write another word. They will also show you what you have achieved when you get there. Life flies by – what goals will you achieve in your lifetime?
You need a huge dream-sized goal to aim for with lots of mini-goals on the way. Maybe your main dream goal is to speak about your book on Oprah, or to become a full-time writer.
Write down what your big goals are for writing, and then write down the mini goals you need to achieve along the way. For example,
– Publish an article in a certain magazine
– Complete a book
– Make a new stream of income by publishing an e-book
– See your book on Amazon.com
– Change career and become a full-time writer
– Build an author website
Make sure you are congruent with your goals and that your behavior is also consistent with them. So if you set a goal to write 2500 words per week, then make sure you try to write 500 per day rather than leaving it to the last minute. If you want to write a book, set the goal and start moving towards it.
Your energy must go in the same direction as your goals. If you focus on what you want to achieve, you will get there.
“People with clear written goals accomplish far more in a shorter period of time than people without them could ever imagine”
Brian Tracy
This piece originally appeared on The Creative Penn site on 12/5/08.
How To Lose Fans and Alienate Visitors
Hi, Joe or Jane Author. My name is…well, it doesn’t really matter what my name is, all that matters is I’ve just signed up for your newsletter, or started visiting your site or blog, or registered for membership on your site, or started following you on Twitter, or friended you on Facebook or MySpace or FriendFeed or Goodreads or LibraryThing or something similar. This should be the start of a wonderful relationship, in which you share useful and amusing information with me and I sing your praises to everyone I know, buy your books, register for your webinars and show up to your speaking engagements. So far, so good.
Now here’s how to f**k it up.
Bombard me with emails. When I signed up for your newsletter, Helpful Tips or the like, unless you specified otherwise at the time I signed up, I’m expecting to hear from you no more frequently than once a week. And in all honesty, if your messages take longer than about five minutes to read, I won’t. Between my job, my family commitments, my social commitments, my own reading and writing, and the fall TV schedule ramping up again, I don’t have time to wade through your too-frequent or too-lengthy missives.
Bait and switch me. It might surprise you to learn that when I signed up for your newsletter or Helpful Tips I was expecting to receive…wait for it…news or Helpful Tips, NOT advertising messages. It’s fine to have a one- or two-line sales pitch at the end of your email, or to send out the occasional message about your upcoming book or speaking engagement, but the rest of your content better be worth my time and attention. Look at it this way: would you read a magazine that had nothing but full-page ads in it? If your favorite TV show suddenly started consisting of 80% ads and 20% show, would you keep watching it?
Son of bait and switch me. If you’ve promoted your free webinar, ebook, members-only site, newsletter or whatever else you’ve got as Twenty Surefire Strategies to accomplish some goal, and I sign up, I’m expecting to receive…you guessed it: Twenty Surefire Strategies. When you give me a series of sales pitches for twenty fee-based products or services from you and your affiliates instead, I tend to conclude you’re a lying liar.
Return of the son of bait and switch me. Goodreads, LibraryThing, Shelfari and other reader community sites are places where people share their reactions to books they’ve read and engage in discussions about all things book-related, generally from a reader’s perspective. If the only books on your virtual shelf are those you’ve written yourself, or if you’ve got a variety of books on display but reserve your gushiest reviews for your own work, it’s obvious you’re using the site as a marketing outlet. Way to give new authors everywhere a bad name.
Bait and switch me, the revenge. It’s great that you’re branching out into new areas, or already operating in multiple areas, but don’t assume I want to branch out with you. I signed up for your Sci Fi Wonks site because I enjoy science fiction in general, and yours in particular. Imagine my surprise (and annoyance) when I also started receiving emails from your Gory Horrors site. And your Renaissance Romance N’ Ribaldry site. And your [insert religious affiliation here] Inspiration Of The Day site. And your eBay store. Bonus question: how angry do you think I was to find there were no “unsubscribe” links in any of the unwanted emails?
Bait and switch me, the final chapter. I understand I may need to provide my email address when posting a comment on your blog or site, because it protects you from spammers and hackers. And of course, if I’ve used the Contact form to send you a remark or question off-site, you need my email address to respond to me. But neither of these actions gives you the right to add me to your mailing list. Even if you’ve added some verbiage to your site pages to indicate that’s what you’ll do anytime someone enters his or her email address anywhere on your site, since that’s not how upstanding and honest most sites operate, if you want to avoid any appearance of bait-and-switchery you need to have a separate page just for mailing list signups.
Bait and switch me, the remake. Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, MySpace and other social networking sites are intended for…seriously, do I have to say it? Social networking. Not marketing or sales pitches. If most (or worse, all!) of your tweets, status updates or blog entries are only there to promote yourself or your work, you’re wasting my time. Just like I said about signing up for your newsletter or Helpful Tips, I wasn’t expecting to get a steady stream of advertising.
Are you beginning to sense a common thread? When I’m getting a lot of quality content from you, I don’t mind getting a modicum of advertising and promotion too. Sometimes I’m truly glad to hear about your new book, service or product, especially if I’m getting a special discount, premium edition or access to material or events not made available to the general public. But the moment the balance between content and advertising tips in the direction of advertising, I’m out. The moment I start thinking you’ve abused my trust, I’m out AND spreading the word. So please, don’t make me tweet angry.
April L. Hamilton is the founder and Editor in Chief of Publetariat. This is a cross-posting from her Indie Author blog.
Written In BLOOD Postponed
Written In BLOOD, the 8th book in the SF/vampire series Children of The Dragon by Theresa M. Moore, has had its publication date postponed to sometime in Spring 2010. Citing family issues and other technical delays, the author is taking a hiatus to clear the little grey cells and deal with the health of relatives. "It’s something like writer’s block, but there are too many things in the way which have more priority," the author said. "Once I get the niggling little problems sorted and stored properly I’ll resume the work." Other works in the hopper have been rescheduled according to timeliness and will be finished without further announcements. The imposition of a deadline sometimes interferes with the free flow of ideas.
Imagination Meets Life
Good Morning,
Today I realize how totally out of shape I must be. The only parts of me that don’t ache are my fingers. That’s what walking for hours on rough ground and rocks did for me yesterday, but I wouldn’t have traded the beautiful day or experiences for anything.
We spent yesterday at the Old Thrasher’s Reunion in Mt. Pleasant, Iowa and throughly enjoyed it. I highly recommend going if you like to go back in time to see how hard it was for farmers before all the modern equipment. It’s on through Monday. Hay making, corn shelling and wood cutting demonstrations abound. Two trains, trolley cars and tractor pulled carts haul people. On the hour, three lawmen have a shoot out with bank robbers or train robbers. Saloon girls put on a show. Two schools are in session through the day. We were invited to join a spelling bee, but I declined. I told the woman I didn’t spell a word without spell check on my computer.
For me, the adventure was like research from studying people to taking pictures of antiques that I might use in a story. The highlight for me was a young woman I watched weaving a rug in a log cabin in the settlers village. I talked to her about helping my mother weave rugs on Mom’s three looms. One of those looms was of 1900 vintage and steel. Took four men to get the loom into Mom’s house and that was in pieces.
Next we talked quilting and I told her I had been to Kalona in April to see the Amish quilt show. The woman mentioned she was in Home Health Care in Kalona and had a client that was Amish – Mennonite. She had visited on a day there was a quilting bee in session which thrilled her. What thrilled me about the story was how close my imagination came to real life in my latest book – A Promise Is A Promise ISBN 0982459505 . This is the story of a Home Health Nurse working in Amish country. I had every intention of telling the woman about my book but we were interrupted so I moved on. So much to see and so little time.
Of course, we had to sample as much food as we could consume and not much of it met the food pyramid. Funnel cakes about two inches high that filled a paper plate, homemade ice cream (close to a pint in that cup), a hamburger, popcorn in a sack larger than a microwave sack and a quart of homemade ice tea. By the time we got home, we weren’t hungry.
We stopped in the theater and walked through all the memorabilia from early stage productions complete with letters on the wall from some famous actors. Suddenly, we were joined by a greeter. She wanted to tell us the story of her family’s stage career in the twenties to forties. She was one of 8 siblings who performed with their parents in juggling and acrobat and actors hired by her father did plays. They lived in hotels and later a grayhound bus and performed out of tents as well as theaters. The scrapbook, she complied of their travels, had been put together from Internet research and newspaper archives. Proudly, she showed us her family history. Finally, she said humbly she hoped we didn’t mind her butting in on our tour. I told her I was delighted. Without her, I would have walked on by that scrapbook and showcase full of memorabilia. It was a thrill to meet her. I hope she continues to suddenly appear for others that come in to look around. The event program says the theater is air conditioned. That might persuade people to venture in just to cool off. Boy, are they in for a treat.
God, Living Is Enormous
This essay, from Benjamin Anastas, originally appeared in the Sept/Oct/Nov 2009 issue of bookforum.com, as well as in the print edition of the same issue of Bookforum magazine.
It’s typical of God’s vanity that, after creating the heavens and the earth and all that goes with them, he had to go ahead and claim the word for his son’s business. “In the beginning was the Word,” the opening lines of the Gospel of John instruct, “and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Ever since, the power to capitalize the w has been the prize that nearly every writer would kill for—or die trying.
If the poem is a salvo at the skies and the play a pincer movement, then the novel is a full-blown putsch. It creates its own firmament between two covers, divides light from darkness, fills the waters with odd life-forms, and chokes the earth with abundance. The novelist’s word is almost the Word. One problem: What about the God who invented it? He must be killed, captured, or paid off handsomely and sent into exile. He must be dealt with.
The first volume of Susan Sontag’s journals, edited by her son, David Rieff, and published last year under the title Reborn, begins with an entry dated November 23, 1947—Sontag was fourteen—listing the precocious Californian’s core beliefs. At the very top, marked “(a),” is “That there is no personal God or life after death.” Before Sontag has ever published a word, she has written God’s death sentence.
This small matter settled, she follows up with her second belief: “The most desirable thing in the world is freedom to be true to oneself, i.e., Honesty.” Sontag is free to think her own way into understanding. Like the apostle Paul, she has learned to “put away childish things.” She has turned to literature for guidance. The rest of Reborn—if not the rest of Sontag’s life—is a testament to this. Sontag exhorts herself to read Stephen Spender’s translation of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, immerses herself in the work of the principled French libertine André Gide, judges Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain to be “a book for all of one’s life.” She compiles laundry lists of novels, plays, stories, and books of poetry that she aspires to read like a mystic seeking out new and ever more demanding spiritual disciplines. In 1949, when Sontag joined some friends for an audience with Mann at his home in Pacific Palisades, her journal entry describes the encounter this way: “E, F and I interrogated God this evening at six.”
Reborn, just as much as it provides a glimpse into a cultural celebrity’s fiercely guarded private life (and we don’t have many left that hold such fascination), gives us a record of how Sontag gained the visionary powers that every fiction writer covets. She approaches the novel with a certainty so fervent that it is clearly on par with religious belief—not even Gide, or Mann, would question the affinity. Sontag acknowledges this fact in one remarkable line from Reborn that could be adopted as the novelist’s credo: “God, living is enormous!”
God, living is enormous. As a pure sentence, it is almost perfect. There is no end to its reverberations or bottom to its mystery. There is murder in the “God” but also reverence; fiction may be “the slayer of religions, the scrutineer of falsity,” as James Wood writes in The Broken Estate, but what novelist can dream of competing on the playing field of the printed page with a Maker whose every word arrives as truth, whose every idea is fact, and whose pride of authorship extends to all creation? Despite the long odds, one of the novel’s chief concerns from its beginning has been to try and steal a little thunder from the Divine— or at least his home office on earth, the church—through satire, mockery, and, at times, outright sacrilege. The trope had already been well established by medieval literature (see The Canterbury Tales); Cervantes, then Fielding, continued the ritual undressing. It wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that Victor Hugo would stop the action of Les Misérables for a polemic against the institution of the convent, although his broadside makes a crucial distinction: “We are for religion, against the religions.”
This stance, with its haughty backhand to the church for its hypocrisy and all-purpose endorsement of religious mystery—no matter what form it takes—kept the belief necessary for the novel’s survival alive, while preserving a place for the novel as a kind of opposition party to scripture. Perhaps no novelist’s work has embodied this paradox more than Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s—and he managed it by virtue of an imagination so all-encompassing that it might have been a gift from God himself. He even offered his readers a prophetic taste of modernism in a speech the Grand Inquisitor gives to the returned Jesus in The Brothers Karamazov:
How many among those chosen ones, the strong ones who might have become chosen ones, have finally grown tired of waiting for you, and have brought and will yet bring the powers of their spirit and the ardor of their hearts to another field, and will end by raising their free banner against you!
Read the rest of the essay on bookforum.com.
Freemium For Writers Is Two Debates
This post, from Dan Holloway, originally appeared as a guest post on Guy LeCharles Gonzales‘ Loud Poet site on 9/3/09.
The battle isn’t getting people to pay; it’s getting people to read. If they do read, they might not pay. If they don’t read, they’ll never pay.
Writers who use the “freemium” model face two distinct challenges, and the harder one isn’t always the one you think.
What a delightful piece of coincidence that I should be asked to write this blog the day before I headed off to the Reading Festival. My wife and I were going for the headline set by the most important band of the 1990s, Radiohead (sorry, Kurt), who propelled the issue of providing content for free into the public consciousness (sorry, Trent) when they released their album In Rainbows on a set-your-own-price basis; 60% of people chose, in the event, to pay nothing.
A delightful coincidence, but not actually that significant. Radiohead are still the most important band in the world; Trent Reznor is one of the most important figures in [re]shaping the music industry; Stephen King is about the most long-term successful writer on the planet. And Chris Anderson is, well, Chris Anderson. But these are the names that come up again and again in the freemium debate – “look how great they are; see what they did!” on the one hand; “it wasn’t a success, it was a disaster; and the free wasn’t properly free!” on the other.
I want to make two points. First, the exploits of established megastars have nothing to do with the relevance of the freemium debate to new writers. Second, they actually skew the debate rather dangerously, because they focus attention on the wrong challenge, not the one that’s most important to new writers.
New writers who want to make a living (or to supplement their living) through their writing need readers who will pay for their work. They always have done and always will. What the freemium model does is claim new writers can get readers by providing content for free, and that enough of those readers will buy their content in alternative formats, or with added extras, to provide them with an income.
For the average newbie writer (or musician*), what matters most is getting any audience at all. So I want to come back to the first point, but I want start by exposing a couple of bits of faulty logic in typical objections to the second point.
*NOTE: I really don’t want to go into the shambles the UK government has made with proposed anti-file-sharing legislation, but I’ll say for the record that as a content producer struggling for an audience, I don’t want any boundaries put up between me and my audience. It’s something authors don’t talk about much, but I’ve yet to meet a musician who disagrees.
Read the rest of the post on Loud Poet, and also check out Dan Holloway’s Year Zero Writers Collective.
Awkward. Again.
Recently submitted short essay dealing with getting older — younger folks need read it if only to find out what to expect….
The awkward years. Again.
by Richard Sutton 8/30/2009
All Right Reserved
Remember how uncomfortable you felt most of the time when you were between, say 12 and 18? Someone once called these the awkward years, and I readily agree. I remember. I’ve watched it happen as our daughter grew through the transition of her teen years, and I’m beginning to notice it with my older grandson. Making the transition from childhood into adulthood is awkward.
On the plus side, eventually it’s over, and you leave it behind you.
Or do you?
My book site ….. also, my commercial site. Welcome!
My own book site, filled with the usual suspects: recent press, biographical notes, notes on writing, is up and running (a little creaky right now) for any with an interest.
Our commercial site, which attempts to actually pay our bills, running aince 1995, is…
Free Web Savvy For The Book Industry
Social media expert Mark Blevis is offering a series of free webcasts aimed at helping authors and publishing professionals get up to speed with using social media. From his site:
After three years of working with publishers, editors, publicists, authors and illustrators, and following my experience at BookCamp Toronto this past June, I decided it was time to offer the book industry the support it needs and the training it doesn’t have the budget for.
I’m teaming up with Greg Pincus to deliver a series of FREE webcasts that will give book publishers, publicists, authors, illustrators and enthusiasts social media savvy for outreach and promotion. The series is titled How social media can help you sell books: Guidance for the book publishing industry and its stakeholders and each installment will seek to answer the question: How does this help me sell books?
Don’t miss the first four free sessions.
SEP 10 – Finding the Conversation: Who’s talking about you and what they are saying
Understanding search and alerts to monitor the digital conversation. This session will focus on effective use of Google with references to Technorati, Twitter and IceRocket. (REGISTER)
SEP 17 – Twitter: More than “What are you doing?”
Why use Twitter, how to engage and craft your message, using hash tags and a few Twitter stories. (REGISTER)
SEP 24 – Bloggers/Podcasters are People, Too: Engaging with the social media community
Recommendations for meeting, relating to and collaborating with the social media community. (REGISTER)
OCT 01 – Remarkable Use of the Internet to Promote Books and the People Behind Them
Storytelling and interesting examples of effective book promotion in the digital age. (REGISTER)