This article, by Hirsh Sawhney, originally appeared on The Guardian UK Books Blog on 3/11/09.

While the majors are in terrified thrall to the bottom line, the shoestring passions of the small presses will carry on regardless

It’s not a good time for New York’s books world, or so they tell me. I’ve just returned to this legendary literary capital to earn a living as a hack, and the tales of publishing pessimism are already suffocating me.

Book sales are flagging, to put it mildly; some predict 2009 will be the worst year the industry has seen in decades. As a result, senior editors are being axed, and others have been told to stop acquiring new books and having Martini lunches on the company tab.

More serious still, the books sections of several major newspapers have shut down; reduced coverage of books will likely translate into even fewer sales. Publishers, they say, will have no choice but to sink their resources into safer investments – we should probably look forward to a rash of ghost-written celebrity novels. According to some, the only thing left to read in a few years will be raunchy, simplistic e-books.

Could literary culture really be breathing its last? Should readers and writers be running for cover? Of course not. But what, then, will save literature from economic disaster? Simple: independent publishing. Yes, independents – the ones who struggle to sell enough books to make payroll – will ensure that engaging, challenging books continue to be produced and consumed. It’s they who’ll safeguard literature through the dark economic days ahead.

I’m biased, of course. My own book – yes, here comes some shameless self-promotion – is being published by one of New York’s most exciting small publishers, Akashic. After working closely with this boutique house for more than two years – and hearing rumblings from friends and colleagues who work with bigger houses – I’m convinced that the services small and mid-sized independent publishers provide are truly unique.

First of all, there’s the personal care that a writer receives from an indie house. I send an email with an idea or a doubt; two minutes later, my very busy publisher writes me back. I have an issue with some changes to my manuscript or concerns about a foreign licensing deal; we discuss it over orange juice on a Sunday morning.

But this touchy-feeliness is just the icing on the cake. The real virtue of working with an independent publisher is the artistic experimentation they not only allow, but encourage. Akashic’s proclivity for edginess and iconoclasm was apparent every step of the way while I was editing Delhi Noir, an anthology of urban Indian fiction for them, and this tendency is apparent in most of the titles they put out.

Read the rest of the article on The Guardian UK Books Blog.

My name is Bobby Ozuna, author of the literary fiction novel: PROUD SOULS, public speaker, ghost-writer and host of a new Internet Radio (Talk) Show called "The Soul of Humanity" My show was designed to offer a platform for independent artists–from musicians to authors–and promote their efforts to create success within their passions. I have also begun featuring industry experts, such as a lecture agent, a marketing agent (coming soon) and industry leaders pertinent to the world of indie arts.

"The Soul of Humanity" streams LIVE every Wednesday night @ 7PM CST via the Artist First (World) Radio Network and reaches a world wide listening audience of over 7,000 listeners with an archive feature, so your fans and followers can catch re-broadcasts of your show at any time and any date.

To help indie artists who are not ready for an interview, I offer a "plug" feature where for a simple $10 USD contribution via PayPal, you can have your book or CD title, your name and a brief description of your product plugged LIVE to my listening audience at $10 per show/week.

If you are interested in sponsoring the show or being a guest, or simply having your work plugged LIVE to my world-wide listening audience, please contact me here: bobby@ozunapub.com.

 
…supporting the independent arts…

~Bobby Ozuna  | www.OzunaPub.com  | "Drawing Stories…With Words"

This piece, by Graham Storrs, originally appeared on his site on 4/10/09.

The first I heard about punk rock was in about 1975 when some kid handed me a pamphlet on the street. It was a manifesto of sorts. It had the chord diagrams for C, F and G drawn on it and, underneath, the words, “That’s all you need to know. Now go and form a rock band.”

There was some other stuff too about taking popular music back out of the hands of the elitist establishment. I was 20 at the time and already too old to get excited about wearing bin bags and big boots but the message resonated with me all the same. Music didn’t have to be handed down from above. It was time ordinary people took control of their own artistic expression.

This memory came back to me today when I read a blog post by Nicola Morgan. Now I think Nicola is great, and full of sound edvice about how to get published. As someone who wants to be published, I read Nicola’s blog –  along with several other excellent blogs offering similar advice from other credible professionals and industry insiders – and I try to learn the lessons they contain. I accept completely that, if being published is your goal, you should definitely pay close attention to people like Nicola. She has certainly earned the right to give advice. Check out her website to see some of the many books she has published.

Yet what she wrote today left me feeling unsettled and uneasy. In particular, this paragraph (emphases are Nicola’s.)

And here’s the thing: all the agents and publishers who rejected me during my now well-documented and shameful 21 years of failing, were RIGHT. And I am even grateful to them. …See, I believed I was good enough a writer – which we have to believe, in order to keep going, don’t we? And yet at the same time, we also need to recognise that there’s something about what we’re doing that isn’t yet good enough. That’s the dilemma, the razor-edge we have to walk along. And all that is why I’m deeply grateful (and not even through gritted teeth) to all of them for not publishing my substandard stuff.”

What disturbs me so much about this is the way Nicola seems to have rejected her own assessment of the quality of her writing completely, in favour of the assessments made by agents and publishers. On the one hand, I can see that it is absolutely necessary to do this in order to be published (since agents and publishers are the gatekeepers.) On the other, the disturbing thing is the degree to which she seems to have internalised the industry’s judgement of what quality means.

The quibblers among you might think I’m exaggerating the case and that all Nicola is saying is, “do what publishers want and you’ll get published.” But she’s not. Look at that bit right at the centre of her paragraph, “we also need to recognise that there’s something about what we’re doing that isn’t yet good enough.” She could have said it was not yet “to their taste”, for example, but she used the words “good enough”.

Read the rest of the article on Graham Storr’s site.

This essay, by Ted Striphas, originally appeared on his The Late Age Of Print blog.

This is the first in a multi-part series called, “what the publishing industry can learn.”  Each post will focus on a specific — and specifically instructional — facet of contemporary book culture.  The goal is to help those of us invested in books to imagine how the publishing industry might connect better with readers and thus remain relevant (and these days, solvent!) in an increasingly dense media landscape.

The series is prompted in part by Gideon Lewis-Kraus’ recent essay in Harpers, “The Last Book Party” (March 2009), which intimates that the 2008 Frankfurt Book Fair will be the industry’s last happy occasion — at least for the foreseeable future.

You can expect to see more installments of “what the publishing industry can learn” appearing here over the next few weeks.  Check back for more.

I.  What can the publishing industry learn from The Da Vinci Code?

With tens-of-millions of copies sold, to say that Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is a bestseller’s bestseller would be an understatement.  How can we account for its astronomical success?  A gripping story full of mystery, code breaking, and religious heresies definitely is a good place to start.  I’d also suspect that there’s a Doubleday marketing agent out there somewhere who’s convinced that she or he made all the right moves in getting the book into exactly the right hands at exactly the right moment, thereby creating this runaway literary blockbuster.  A major motion picture directed by Ron Howard, starring Tom Hanks, can’t hurt, either.

I don’t dispute the accuracy of story, advertising, or spin-offs in explaining The Da Vinci Code’s astronomical book sales.  But as Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point shows, the success of nearly anything can result from banal — often overlooked — circumstances.  I want to focus on one such circumstance in thinking about what publishing might learn from The Da Vinci Code: chapter length.

Several years ago my sister asked me to buy her a copy of The Da Vinci Code for Christmas.  I obliged, despite her fears that I would judge her negatively for indulging in literary pap.  (I read popular literature all the time, I assured her.)  She was especially concerned that I would scoff at the length of the chapters, many of which are just a handful of pages each.  “The chapters are so short, they’re almost like scenes out of a movie,” I recall my sister saying, embarrassedly — this a year or two before the film adaptation was released.

She was on to something.  The chapters were remarkably brief, and in their brevity, I later realized, lie important lessons about The Da Vinci Code’s success.  My sister described the chapters as “cinematic.”  Perhaps that’s true, but having watched her read the book over the next couple of days, I couldn’t help but think that they were even more televisual in nature.  She could sit down and read for five or ten minutes at a clip, non-commitally, and even manage to finish a chapter or two in the process.  She could read distractedly, as the text didn’t demand that she sustain her attention for very long.  What’s remarkable is that the book, despite being more than 400 pages, hardly behaves like a substantial (as in long) work of fiction.

The Da Vinci Code isn’t the first book to be composed or read in this way.  Anyone who’s ever consumed or even simply thumbed through Marshall McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) or Understanding Media (1964) will recognize The Da Vinci Code’s distant kin.  The former are academic screeds composed of punchy “snack sized” chapters.  McLuhan understood better, and earlier, than almost anyone how to communicate effectively using the printed word in a time not only of ascendant electronic media but indeed of myriad other everyday distractions.

In saying that The Da Vinci Code’s success is attributable in part to the brevity of its chapters, I should be clear that I am absolutely not suggesting that people’s attention spans are waning, or that we have lost our ability to process long, slowly developing arguments or narratives.  Nevertheless, ours unquestionably is an age of myriad distractions — electronic or otherwise (a crying baby, a loud truck rolling by, the incessant drone of leaf blowers) — that make it more difficult to spend protracted periods of time with protracted amounts of text.

My suggestion that books might be better served with smaller chapters, à la The Da Vinci Code, thus is a pragmatic rather than a moral one.  Essentially I’m asking book publishers and authors to attune their sensitivities better to the fine-grain of everyday life, where reading happens, and to refashion their books accordingly.

More to come….

Read parts two and three of this essay series on The Late Age Of Print blog.

Ted Striphas is Assistant Professor and Director of Film & Media Studies in the Department of Communication & Culture at Indiana University, and the author of The Late Age of Print.

Publetariat continues its series on The Psychology of Writing with the following essay, by author Merrill Joan Gerber. The essay was originally published in the Sewanee Review, and reprinted on The Rumpus on 1/23/09. In it, the reader learns rejection is never far from any writer, even one with a body of work as impressive as Ms. Gerber’s.

Why I Must Give Up Writing

First let me say I’ve been a dedicated writer for half a century. I’ve published twenty-five books, and I’ve even won some prizes. I know a real writer is supposed to write for the art itself, yearning only toward self-expression and the joy of creation, ignoring the fickle heart of the market place.

I know all about papering the office walls with rejections. I’m not a quitter, not a cry-baby (though I have cried a few times and once I crept into bed for a few weeks till a certain violent literary shock wore off). Looking back on my writing life, I see that some warning moments stand out.

In 1967, when my first novel, An Antique Man, was published, Joyce Carol Oates wrote: “I’ll be reviewing your novel for the Detroit news, and I’ll send you a clipping…” Three months later she wrote again: “…it is a most moving and painful novel, beautifully done, and I will retain certain scenes in my mind for a long time. If the long newspaper strike in Detroit ever comes to an end, I will certainly review the novel.”

I don’t know when the strike came to an end, but there was never a review. There were other hints to me about the nature of the writing life. William Shawn, at the New Yorker, read An Antique Man, and wrote to me that he and his staff had tried hard to find a section to stand on its own but they hadn’t succeeded. Two months later, one of his staff wrote me: “Mr. Shawn can’t get your book out of his mind, so please send it back to us so we can try again to find an excerpt that will work.”

Again, I took the trip to the post office with my mss. Some weeks later Mr. Shawn sent back the novel a second time. He was sorry, he had tried very hard, but he just couldn’t find a section to stand alone. The second rejection was much worse than the first —a kind of brutal blow to the delicate strand of hope that had been fluttering in my mind.

Modern psychology tells us that when a relationship feels wrong, we’d do well to focus on a single issue that’s manageable—not to list all the old insults, failings and faults of the beloved. But the list of the failings of my beloved art continues to grow longer. I feel I can no longer live with them.

Recently, I found a letter from a publisher written to me in 1986. “Thank you for sending me your novel. I think you would have to be dead not to think this manuscript is funny and lively. The only problem with it is a certain lack of discipline…”

For four months I worked to insert certain disciplines the editor felt were essential. Then she wrote again. “I think that your revisions are excellent, and that you have successfully integrated the fantastic and the real. However, difficulties arise after our heroine leaves the hospital. So now what? Can I say to you that I think you have aimed your plot in a misguided direction? I don’t know if I can, but I certainly think so. If these very real difficulties can be resolved we can discuss a book.”

What difficulties did she mean? How was I to guess at them? We had no further discussions and my novel was never published.

In 1989, an editor from Little Brown wrote me about my longest novel, a 650 page family saga called The Victory Gardens of Brooklyn: “I found this novel to be wonderfully engrossing, full of the marvelously realized characters whose personalities propel them into their individual predicaments. But midway though the mss, I felt that the chronological sequence precluded the sort of definable story line that would give each character’s subplot satisfying form and substance. If you decide to rework the novel, I would very much like to read it again.”

Rework 650 pages? On speculation? With no contract? All the while trying to guess what the editor’s vision might be? I wrote, asking if she could be more specific. Well, she could not really point the way for me. I’d have to figure it out for myself. But I had already figured out the way the book should be constructed, that’s what had taken me several years of work. I put the book in the closet where one day I listened in to be sure its heart had stopped beating.

Read the rest of the essay on The Rumpus.

Merrill Joan Gerber’s most recent novel is The Victory Gardens of Brooklyn. She teaches fiction writing at the California Institute of Technology.