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The Erasure of Liu Xiaobo
When the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature was announced in the early morning of October 11, I met the news with worry.
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Keeping It Real
We’ve always had a problem with “fake.” Whether it was a fake Kate Spade handbag or a knockoff clothing line, fake has always been a part of our culture. Most of us can spot fake. Fake, however, is not limited to fashion anymore. Fake and counterfeit have begun to permeate the publishing industry. We’ve seen knockoff titles like 35 Shades of Grey, but now there’s a new wrinkle: fake reviews. Studies have shown that most people used to believe consumer reviews. Not so much anymore, especially when reviews can be bought, or in some cases, simply faked. The message seems to be: if you want to get noticed, you’d better be prepared to “fake it.”
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Bending Over Backwards
On a February evening in 2010, I stood in an oversized, overheated exercise studio in lower Manhattan. From my vantage point near the corner, I gaped as a sea of people—mostly women in their 20s and 30s—balanced exquisitely on the ball of one foot: thigh crossed over thigh, foot wrapped around ankle, arms intertwined before their chests. Suddenly, in unison, they descended into a perfect, unwavering, one-legged squat.
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A Story of Hope
The year I became a literary agent, an independent press published my first children’s book. Now, seven years later, the same press has published my second children’s book. But this is not a column about an agent who is learning how tough it is to be an author. This is about something else.
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Promote, Promote, Promote
When I signed my debut novel, The Angels’ Share, with Winter Goose, a small press, I knew that a healthy share of marketing and promotion would be my responsibility. Not a huge surprise—small houses don’t have a lot of resources to throw at literary fiction. But what was surprising was that when I spoke with others who’d signed with larger publishers, I kept hearing that unless their book was “Big” (and sometimes even if it was), the authors still had to do most of the nitty-gritty publicity themselves.
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How to Wholesale E-books
Although the Apple, Macmillan, and Penguin lawsuit is still pending, now that the court has approved the Department of Justice settlement terms with Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster and the termination of their agency pricing contracts, all publishers will no doubt be revisiting their e-book pricing models.
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Seduction and Serendipity
In 1987, when I was an undergraduate, I was browsing in a bookshop in Cambridge, England, when a book (one copy, spine out, on a shelf in the back of the store) caught my eye: Some Girls, Some Hats and Hitler by Trudi Kanter. It was a self-published memoir which, unusually for such a thing, had made its way into a mainstream bookshop—I can only imagine that the title had caught the buyer’s attention, as it had mine.
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A Novelist In Two Languages
I came to the United States in 1996 on a scholarship that sent me to Buffalo, N.Y. I was eager to take a creative writing class, something that didn’t exist in Germany, and so I started writing fiction and poetry in English. My Austrian roommate and I agreed to stop speaking German to each other. I kept family calls to a minimum, purged all German books and magazines from the house, and read Kafka in English translation. Memories of past conversations came to me translated—my parents admonished and scolded in perfect English.
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Seven at One Blow
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised when something peculiar happened in my seventh year as an editor at Orca Book Publishers. After all, seven is a magical number in fairy tales, and Orca is a children’s book publisher. There are seven continents, seven oceans, seven Harry Potter books. So, Why not a series of kids books about seven cousins? When my publisher, Andrew Wooldridge, asked me to edit “the magnificent seven,” my first question was “How many are we going to publish per season?” His answer: “All seven in October 2012.” I wanted to yell, “Are you insane?” but that’s not the kind of thing you say to your boss.
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Before There Was Grey, There Was Rose
It was 1998, the dark ages in publishing.
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Watch What You Write
As publicity director at three well-known presses and a book industry professional for over 15 years, it perplexes me a bit that topics once exclusive to industry insiders (and still almost exclusively addressed solely by publishers per standardized procedures, mechanisms, and even contractual agreements) are now being bandied about on author blogs, author Twitter feeds, and even via author-written articles on trade news sites. Being an avid reader and a huge admirer of authors—make no mistake about it, they’re a primary reason why I’ve devoted my career to doing what I do—the present online-I-can-say-anything-because-I’m-a-published-author environment we now live in makes me a little disappointed.
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In Search of the Perfect Blurb
It seems marketing books in the 21st century is harder than ever. There are fewer bookstores to reach out to, and so much shopping is done online. How can a publisher help launch a first novel from a promising writer? Like we did way back in the 20th century, we provide advance reading copies to reviewers, sales reps, and key buyers. We use more modern methods—making e-ARCs available, reaching out to bloggers, and using Facebook and Twitter to connect directly with consumers.
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On to Book Two
My first novel, Ten Girls to Watch, comes out July 31. The last few months I worked on it were heavenly. I spent my days fixing sentences and making tiny plot tweaks, swapping thoughts and revisions with my wonderful editor, Sarah Cantin. She seemed to like my every change almost as much as I liked hers, and even the smallest of our adjustments felt like vast improvements. The book got so much better. We reveled in it. But that was then, and now, instead of the end, I’m back at the beginning, starting novel number two. How exciting! How terrible.
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The Art of the Deal
When your publisher puts up the dough to send you on a 20-city national book tour, they’re expecting you to transform yourself from a hermitic wordsmith into a traveling salesman.
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Listening to Your Readers
Listening to your readers is a good thing to do. Trying to please them all is something else entirely.
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Of Decisions and Dream Chasing
After publishing his first book himself, an author wonders if he will do it again.
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Reviewing the Reviews
When my first book was published, I decided not to read the reviews. Why give strangers the power to uplift or shatter my spirits? I’d take the high road, the spiritual path. Actually, I was terrified of the media interviews to come and knew they’d be hard enough to muscle through without someone’s criticisms swirling in my head.
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How The Mysterious Bookshop Competes with Amazon
Like many bookstores aboard the Titanic of independent bookselling, the Mysterious Bookshop hit the Amazon iceberg a few years ago. More accurately, it hit us, and we’ve been doing everything short of throwing women and children out of lifeboats, to avoid drowning in the icy waters of insolvency.
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Making Fair Use More Fair
I miss Ayn Rand. Actually, I miss her voice in my new book. And I blame copyright law.
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The Rise of Daddy-Fic
The stage is set for a daddy-fiction movement. It’s time for dads to say what they need to say about child care, stereotypes, and other dads who won’t change dirty diapers.
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