Closing tabs

Twin talk.

Building the fictional bridges on Euro notes in the Netherlands.

Henry Blodget interviews Jeff Bezos.

An interview with my high-school classmate (and scriptwriter for The Interview) Dan Sterling about the response the film provoked from North Korea (and the Washington Post on the Sony hack).

What are MOOCs good for?

Amazonia

More coverage of Ed Park's departure from Amazon:

Bezos’s last line of defense against the ire of the literati had been Park, the lone survivor of Amazon’s initial push into publishing of the big-time, hardcover variety. Three other promising hires out of “legacy” publishing, including former Time Warner Book Group CEO Larry Kirshbaum, all preceded him out the revolving door. In the intervening five years, genre books have done well — sometimes very well — over at Amazon’s West Coast operation, while big fiction and nonfiction have floundered, partly due to the bookstore boycott. Genres sell briskly as e-books, while the literary mid-list is still largely hand-sold in physical bookstores, so the Amazon authors hurt most of all by the lit world’s hostility are those it might like the most. Out of the earshot of the hosts, one agent at the party told me that for his kind of work, “Amazon is the publisher of last resort.”

When I signed a contract with Amazon for my last novel (Ed was my editor, and he was the most amazing person to work with obviously - he really should have been credited as a full-on collaborator, the book changed so much for the better as I worked for him!), a friend in publishing asked me, "But won't it be strange not to see your book in bookstores?" I had to say that it would not be much different from my previous experience with traditional publishers! My YA books, though they were published by HarperTeen, were not ordered by B&N and other chains, and had truly abysmal sales (the first one didn't clear the limit for republication in paper, so the sequel was released as if in all appearances it was a standalone, hardly surprising that readers found that frustrating). If you are a small midlist book at a traditional publisher and don't catch the world's attention particularly, it is not as though your book really will be in stores in any systematic way.

In general, I am really moving away from novel-writing: in any line of work, you will need to spend a good bit of time publicizing your own stuff and being out on the road, and it is really bad enough having to do that for ONE writing career let alone two. Increasingly sure, and happy about it, that I am a scholar and nonfiction writer in my heart of hearts - that said, future projects will include more crossover work a-la-Geoff Dyer (it is easier for me to force convergence between roles as professor of eighteenth-century British literature and author of literary nonfiction than to shoehorn in the novel-writing thing)....

In defense of the corporate behemoth

Neal Pollack in defense of Amazon:

When Amazon picked me up off the slush pile in 2011, my decade-long, five-book career was effectively dead. I had a modest contract with a legacy publisher for a pseudo-self-help book, but I didn’t want to write it, they no longer wanted put it out, and I’m pretty certain nobody would have wanted to read it. My antiquated dream was to write novels, but my previous and only novel had sold so poorly that I wouldn’t have been able to give away the next one for free, to any publisher.

Instead, through Amazon, I’ve published three full-length novels—a historical action comedy set in the very specific world of 1930s Jewish basketball and two detective stories set in the L.A. yoga scene, originally written in serialized form—as well as three 10,000-word novellas, including an extended piece of Kurt Vonnegut “fan fiction,” all in the last 30 months. I have another novel, a time-travel romantic comedy, coming out next March and I’m under contract to write still another novel, subject yet to be determined. It’s been the most enjoyable creative burst of my career, a gleeful hack’s sprint toward nowhere in particular.

As a reader, I have to say that Amazon has been an incredible boon to me. And what Pollack says seems to me very true - for what was formerly known as a mid-list author (and for readers who want to have access to books that are written to "commercial" standards of excellence but are not sufficiently commercial/mainstream in their appeal to hit the buttons for the big publishers - I am thinking of Neil Smith, Charlie Williams, et al. - often these books are just too demented and violent for, say, readers of conventional police procedurals, but they are absolutely brilliant!), Amazon's publishing wing - and what it can do in terms of making backlist titles easily available to ordinary readers - has been a force for good....

Twitter tabs

Twitter isn't so much a closed space as Facebook, but I've been trying to be a little more active there (book promotional purposes) and I find myself too often just retweeting a good link instead of more usefully for my own purposes sharing and archiving it here! One great thing about blogging is that it makes for such a consistent archive - these other more tailored proprietary formats (especially Facebook) are much less suited to that purpose....

Anyway, some funny bits I've had on my Twitter feed:

Cat paws have an uncanny resemblance to tiny little bears. pic.twitter.com/bUfk1KfXH5

— Faces in Things (@FacesPics) July 8, 2014

Long-lost section of the Bayeux Tapestry shows what happened when Pooh met the Normans (artist: E. H. Shepard)... pic.twitter.com/cW8I8XEfCO

— Britannia PR (@Britanniacomms) July 16, 2014

"Ghostbusters is a movie about 3 scrappy technologists who build disruptive tech to do supernatural defense." - @TimHwang #Transition2014

— Percolate (@percolate) July 16, 2014

Also: Will Amazon provide a Netflix-type service for books? (Via Sarah W. NB this will do me no good if a lot of books are excluded....)

"I made my husband try a sex robot."

Book recommendations from Stephen King.

Orange soda

Out of all Mimi Lipson's stories, this is one of my very favorites. (Mimi's book has a page on Amazon and an ISBN! Such is the grandeur of modern-day publishing - but truly, the day I saw my first ISBN online was one of the greatest days of my entire life....)

The short list

For every author who ever lost a moment's peace of mind over an Amazon review!

The post-Christian Grey world

A few weeks ago I ran into a very dear old friend of mine at a party.  It was good to catch up, but it was great to learn that she'd just published a pseudonymous erotic novel!  I devoured The Heartwood Box: A Fairy Tale
a day later; it's a great read, highly immersive and extremely well-written.  "Lilia Ford" was kind enough to answer some interview questions....

JMD: When I wrote The Explosionist, it was partly because I’d read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy and Garth Nix’s Abhorsen books; I found myself haunting the Bank Street Bookstore and looking in vain for more books exactly like those, and when I realized there weren’t any I thought I had better write one myself.  What were your models, in that sense, for The Heartwood Box?

LF: I wrote the book I wanted to read but couldn’t find.  When you talk about erotica, it’s probably most helpful to distinguish between brows—high, low, middle.  We’ll forget high-brow—no one is going to read my book and think “it’s just like Anaïs Nin!”  Low-brow is porn or so incompetently edited that I feel like I’m grading an expos paper when I read it.  

That leaves the middle, where I’d place my own book.  Critics keep bashing Fifty Shades of Grey, but E. L. James might as well be the Henry James of this genre.  The number one book on the Kindle erotica list as I write this is Training Tessa: Hot Texas Bosses BDSM Erotica, about two brothers who try to one up each other spanking and humiliating their secretary—I highly recommend checking out the cover.  The brothers are billionaires, and Tessa desperately needs money to keep her mother in a special-care facility.  Over the course of the story, she starts to have feelings for one of the brothers, who also falls in love with her.  I read it in less than an hour and for the genre it’s not terrible—the author has a sense of humor, it’s properly edited, it only costs $.99. 

Romance is different: I think in some ways we’re going through the golden age of the romance and paranormal romance genres, with some very talented people working in it.  But those writers (or their publishers) adhere to some pretty hard limits on what they’ll depict.  They’ll dip a toe in the BDSM waters—it’s next to impossible to find a hero who is not portrayed as an “Alpha”—but it’s no more than a toe.  I’m interested in how differences in actual power, whether social, physical, financial, magical, play out in a relationship.  I think those conflicts are very erotically charged, and that’s what I want to read about (as opposed to things like nipple clamps).  But I also want characters who are not completely clichéd, a plot largely free of inane rom-com contrivances, clever dialogue, and a strong sense of the connection between the lovers—why they truly belong together, why their lives would be empty apart.  That’s the book I tried to write.

JMD: The Heartwood Box is such a striking and appealing title.  Did you have the title and/or the concept early, or did it come late in the game?

LF: They were both part of the original idea.  Every piece of fiction I’ve written has started the same way: I have a sudden idea which starts playing out in my head almost like a movie.  Either I type as fast as I can or I sketch it out as an outline, but either way, I have about fifteen pages of material that forms the core of the story.  The seed of Heartwood was the idea of a young woman who has desires that she is unaware of and wouldn’t accept if she were; then the idea of a magical box which could somehow sense and then expose those desires; and most disturbingly, a male who was very happy to take advantage.   

 

JMD: You’ve published this book under a pseudonym.  I like the novel very much and wonder how you can resist the temptation to get more glory from and for it!  I know it’s erotica, but do you see yourself in future integrating your private persona and the Lilia Ford author-persona, or do you guess you will prefer to keep them separate?

LF: I have two parts to this answer, which I’ll call before and after Christian Grey. 

There is nothing simple, mentally speaking, about writing under a pseudonym, and I have no doubt this issue alone will end up making my psychiatrist a lot of money over the next few years.  I initially chose to use a pseudonym because I have a YA novel that I spent years writing and I have been trying to get published.  I’d just had a set back, so I threw myself into Heartwood as a kind of escape.  Next thing I knew, I had an almost finished novel that I could publish myself, in a genre where that is not a disadvantage.  It just made sense to publish it.

But erotica is a tricky genre.  I read a lot of it, so the sex in my book doesn’t seem particularly extreme to me, but it shocked the first people I gave it to who never read that genre.  I’m proud of the book: I wrote the best book I could, but it’s still about a woman with three partners, with spanking and bondage and a lot of power play that does not necessarily reach a politically correct settlement.  As I got closer to publishing, I talked to my husband and teenaged son about it.  My whole family has been extremely supportive of my writing, and I felt like I owed it to them to take their views into account.  We all agreed about the benefits of publishing under a pseudonym. 

And all of this was before Fifty Shades of Grey.  The bottom line is that nothing will ever be the same with the genre.  I’m still glad I went with the pseudonym, but I quickly became much more lax about it. 

JMD: It’s inevitable, I fear, and probably a question you will grow very tired of: but what do you think of the Fifty Shades of Grey books?   Many of the usual literary pundits have read very little erotica and don’t have much context for the whole phenomenon.  Do you have any insights or observations on the basis of having read pretty widely in the field of contemporary American erotic fiction?

I have no problem at all talking about Fifty Shades of Grey—I only wish that someone close to me had read the damn book.  I find the punditry a lot more painful and stupefying than the book itself.  From what I can tell, it is impossible for a critic for The New York Times to write about a book like this without the most insufferable condescension to the book and the people who liked it.  You don’t have to admire or enjoy Fifty Shades of Grey, but talking down to people who do, privately or openly pitying their lack of taste or education, bemoaning whatever you think this says about American culture—all of that to me feels like a failure of imagination on the part of the critic.  It would be the same if I tried to write about NASCAR: I don’t get it, so I probably shouldn’t write about it. 

You work on the 18^th century novel, so you are very aware that there is a long history of cultural leaders attempting to police popular writing through ideas of taste or morality—and excoriating the (usually female) readers who consume it.  I don’t want to make some kind of fancy academic point here—or even argue that I think the novel is “good.”  But when 20 million people love a book, I think critics need to stretch themselves to understand why. 

In purely selfish terms, I think the book is the best thing that could have happened to writers in this genre.  It’s more than just the attempts to coattail on its success.  The closet door on this kind of reading hasn’t just cracked opened—it’s been ripped off altogether.  E. L. James finished the job the Kindle started.  Arguments that the novel is politically regressive are beside the point: this is fantasy.  People should be able to indulge without feeling like they’re guilty of unmaking civilization.

JMD: What advice do you have for novelists considering digital self-publishing?  Is there a site or two that you’ve found especially useful?

I’ll probably be better able to answer that question when I figure out if I can make this work: self-publish a novel that finds its readers—those who like this genre. There is no question the publishing landscape is changing at a dizzying speed.  I wouldn’t put any weight on my own predictions of where it will be in ten years, except to say that those people who wax nostalgic about paper books sound a little like my husband when he talks about his vinyl collection.  I’ll throw out three things that I think are key. 

1.      Understand the genre you want to publish in.  Read a lot in it, buy a lot of books in it, read the reader reviews, have a sense of the upper and lower ranges of both success and quality (which in erotica are not necessarily the same).  Pay attention to how you make your buying decisions, why you think a book succeeds or fails, and what the general expectations of the readers are.

2.      The single most important thing will always be the quality of the book you write.  The great thing about digital self-publishing is that time is not the same issue that it was.  Your book will stay available—you’re not dependent on Barnes and Noble giving you some of their precious shelf space.  You will have the chance to find and grow your audience if that audience is out there.  But that will only work if you have a good book to begin with.

3.      For God’s sake edit it properly and hire a proofreader—please. 

As far as resources go, I’ll single out Lindsay Buroker’s blog.  She self-published a fantasy series called the Emperor’s Edge and blogs with remarkable candor about her experiences: advertizing, sales numbers, proofreading, kindle, Goodreads—you name it.  She’s extremely generous with her hard-won knowledge, and we can profit from it—and she wrote a great series also, which gives her opinions a lot more weight for me. 

As the world turns

At the Nation, Steve Wasserman on Amazon's rise to dominance.

Cat cafe curfew?  (Via Sharyn N.)

Face down

Dwight Garner on Kindle Singles.

Also: "They were not two watches."  (Courtesy of L. Lee Lowe.)

Pitches, splits

This is more immediately interesting from a writer's than a reader's standpoint, but I was interested by Emily Witt's Observer piece on the rise of the short non-fiction ebook.

Mystery cheats anonymous

Quota seemed as though it might fall victim to the false sense of accomplishment that comes from doing a ninety-minute treadmill run, but in the end it did get produced: c. 1,100 words, for a total of 15,234 words....

A good link: Music Machinery on what the Kindle might tell Amazon about how we're reading!

Kindling

I did something this evening that made me feel very guilty: namely, I went to my favorite New York bookstore and surreptitiously noted down the names of books that I have now purchased from Amazon for Kindle. I did buy about $50 worth of merchandise at the real bookstore (Lydia Davis's new Madame Bovary translation, a 2011 weekly Moleskin planner - and yes, those two together totaled $47.80 with sales tax!), but I am now hunched over my computer at Starbucks guiltily gloating over my new acquisitions...

(I had eleven things on my list, with a twelfth added as I thought of it while looking at things on Amazon; perhaps it is worth noting that about two-thirds of the list was procurable via Kindle - I am too lazy to put in the links, but that includes Tom McCarthy's new novel, Joseph O'Neill's memoir, new novels by Jennifer Egan and Sigrid Nunez - but that four I particularly coveted were not: Martin Millar's Curse of the Wolf Girl, Thomas Disch's The Businessman, several British thrillers that are not available to U.S. Kindle-owners.)

Yesterday I read a spectacularly good book that is much more my dream Kindle reading experience than anything else I've had so far, not least because it was free: it is Lewis Shiner's Black & White. All of his fiction is downloadable at that link, as PDF files and in several other formats; the PDF worked out really well for me, I like being able to keep the original page formatting, and the transfer to Kindle was easy as pie.

(Here's where Shiner explains why he's making all this good stuff available for free.)

I have been recommending Glimpses enthusiastically for many years now - I picked up a copy from the fellow who sells used paperbacks in front of Milano Market, and read it in absolute shock that I had never heard of it before, it is so much exactly the kind of book I most like. I think about it all the time, it's definitely one of those novels that has really affected my sense of the world as well as of what's out there in terms of fiction (I must say that it was partial inspiration for my Clarkesworld story "The Other Amazon").

Black & White is a quite different novel, more ambitious in certain ways but surely equally gripping (I missed my stop on the subway, I was so immersed!). (Amazon needs to fix the blurb glitch on that page, by the way.) Maybe the most striking thing about it is the analysis of how the father of the present-day story's protagonist could have been at once in the grip of the dreams of the Civil Rights Movement and completely consumed by the notion of building an interstate that decimated Durham, NC's hitherto thriving black neighborhoods (I should have this passage, but have not quite figured out how to mark such things for subsequent retrieval - there is no true equivalent of the post-it in this context); anyway, it was such a good book, I am going to go right now and download the other couple novels of Shiner's I haven't yet read....

I think that The Explosionist and Invisible Things will be difficult as yet for me to make available for free online, but that I must really pursue the situation with Heredity and see if I could get it up as a PDF or in some other format that people can use with the common e-reader apps - not sure about logistics, but it really would be good....

Amazon wars

Amazon gives in to Macmillan (not before dismaying many authors and readers by its choice to stop selling all Macmillan books on its site on Friday); worthwhile earlier analysis by Caleb Crain and Charlie Stross.

On a sadder note: more on Tony Judt and ALS in the Chronicle of Higher Education and the Guardian.