Bookselling :: Behind the Publishing Curtain

How a book with potential becomes something more than just another tree sandwich:

Genre Jungle redux

The conventional wisdom states that you should read widely in your genre or you won't know the conventions and won't be able to hit the mark for the market.  But Genre is a tricky thing and 'Thriller' is less well defined than most.  I like to read thrillers -- or at least what I consider to be thrillers -- and yet I spend precious little time reading the clock-tickers and time-racers that get 'Thriller" stamped on the spine by New York.  Rarely does my "heart race like a meat hammer pounding against a blood anvil*." 

Someone once told me that the difference between suspense and thriller is that in the suspense novel, consequences are personal and in the thriller, the consequences are global.  I disagree.  For a political or military thriller ala Tom Clancy, perhaps that's true, but I think that puts too much emphasis on plot and for my money, it's about engaging in thrilling storytelling.  For heaven's sake, tell me a story.  Give it an air of menace, convince me that there are consequences for the protagonists should they fail, consequences that make me own their peril and take it into myself.  The world doesn't have to be jeopardy; making me worry about the characters is quite enough.  Impending nuclear Armageddon is just icing on the cake if I care about the characters making it through the next scene.

I mentioned Joseph Finder yesterday.  In his address to the PNWA last year, he defined dramatic tension in a thriller as "Characters in peril".  Not necessarily "The World in Peril", the characters.  I have to give a crap about the characters and their arc or I won't care that the world is going to hell behind them.


The recent NPR poll of audience favorites from the thriller genre showed me very few books that New York would plop into that genre. When was the last time you heard Stephen King referred to as a thriller writer? He was the most nominated writerof the bunch, above Lee Child, Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton.  How surprised are you to find Truman Capote? Conan Doyle? Bram Stoker?

For the most part, the takeaway from this is that no one knows what a thriller is except the person reading it.  But I can tell you that it has everything to do with writing and style and little to do with the stamp on the cover.  And I stand relieved to see how little the audience seems to care what section of the store their 'thrillers' are sold in -- they're looking for a good story that thrills them.  And quite frankly, everything else is marketing.

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* Yes, that's an actual line from a "Thriller" handed to me by an excited publisher's rep long ago with the assurance that it would be "The Next Big Thing".  It was less than thrilling and sold less than well.

Language Unleashed :: Words in the Radiolab

Words, words, words.  What are they?  We know that they are slippery things, as Shakespeare reminds us.  Their power to confound is as great as their power to shape beauty and feeling.  With words we can encapsulate the quintessence of man and capture the conscience of a king... or we can fritter them away and let meaning slip our fingers. 

But is society possible without them?

Nowhere (outside of Shakespeare) is this discussion more artfully encompassed (at least in my opinion) than on a recent show called Radiolab.  And in fact, no discussion of language - least of all the English language - can be undertaken without delving into Shakespeare, so much of our modern language and idiom owes much of its existence to his prolific pen.  Ranging from the deaf learning their way in a world of noises they cannot hear to the scribblings of the Bard of Avon, the Radiolab guys trace what words are, what they mean and how the connect with meaning in our brains.

How much human society is possible without words?  How much has language formed us rather than the other way around?

I should point out that when I first encountered this story, I came in toward the end.  And I didn't like what I heard.  I got in the car, turned on the engine and got only the end of the story.  Lacking any of the necessary context to understand the discussion already underway, I found it difficult to catch up.  From what I was able to glean, I couldn't really grok what they were on about. 


The show regularly paints word pictures and challenges the bounds of radio, stretching the possibilities of the spoken word.  Their give & take format and conversational progression intercut with interviews and soundbytes is an artful way to present stories, but this is both blessing and curse because as I discovered, it makes it difficult to come in late.

I couldn't catch up.  So I did what I always do -- I went looking for the answers and found the podcast and listened to the end, astounded that what had seemed unsupported assumptions about the nature of language were - of course - much more than that.  In fact, many of my own assumptions about words and the structure of language and thought were at fault.  Whether or not any of that is true, the story is just as amazing and beautiful as I knew it had to be.  It is a journey and to jump in in the middle is to do a disservice to your storyteller and your fellow travelers.

At this point you would be well-served to take an hour and listen to the original and moving episode "Words" HERE.

When I took the time to listen to the full show, my mind was blown.  Thoughts were provoked, gobs were smacked, and the relationship between words and symbolism and the physical objects they refer to took on new depth and meaning.

I'm still assimilating it all.  I'm not entirely sure I agree with every conclusion, but it is nonetheless a fascinating story, artfully told and it's a darn fine way to spend an hour of your life.  Take it from me, I'm parsimonious with my hours and this is one I don't want back.

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc'd it to you,
trippingly on the tongue...

Hamlet

As a bonus, below is a followup video to the show, further exploring the topic.  Two Radiolab contributors bring us out of the radio and into a visual style of wordplay in "an exploration of how language connects our inner thoughts to the outside world." 

Beautifully done!

Free

This morning my wife called me into the room to hear this story on NPR.  A press giving away their new books in return for a charity donation.  Publicity for their authors and their causes... an interesting idea.  Wonder if they'll still exist three years from now...

"The Kindle, the iPad and e-books are all part of a revolution that's shaking up the publishing business. The big question is how to ensure the book industry can remain profitable?  There's at least one publisher, however, that doesn't care about profits. For the past two years, the Concord Free Press, has been publishing books and giving them away for free..."

via National Public Radio

Does the iPad Free Us from the Tyranny of Creation?

or: Is the iPad Really the Evolution of the Personal Computer or Is It the Advent of a More Interactive TV Set?

As you all know by now, I'm sort of a tech guy.  Not in the sense that I have to own every new wireless widget to come down the pike.  Far from it, in fact. But I make it my business to know what's going on so I can have an informed opinion on exactly how it's sucking the souls out of our lives...

Of course, I'm just kidding.  (Sort of.)

So over the weekend, the age of the iPad dawned . . . on the 150th anniversary of the Pony Express.  (I don't know that this is significant, but it's worth noting all the same.)  And as usual, I think the press surrounding the thing missed the real story.

This morning's story on NPR made the iPad sound like the death knell of the free internet.  The spark that sets alight a million free-content websites.  As the masses swarm to the "gated community" afforded by Apple's restrictive content controls and the industry adopts its usual posture of chasing Apple... where does that leave us?

That depends upon how you view media.  In other words, are you a creator or a consumer?  Let's face it, Lev Grossman's assessment of the iPad in this Time Magazine article is pretty dead-on: the iPad is purpose-built for consumption of media, not the creation of media.

I take exception to all the many articles and news stories (seriously, could there be more hype?) that call it the evolution of the laptop computer, or even the "end" of the laptop.  This is just a platform for delivery, as many people describe it it's basically just an enormous iPod Touch.  In my view it's the newest incarnation of the television or radio, not the latest evolution of the laptop.  You've spent your entire life with such devices and Apple's new device just makes the things interactive.  I don't know a single author, blogger or other sort of "content creator" (as we are now called) that is ditching his or her Macbook or PC in favor of the iPad.

Why?  Because typing on a big sheet of glass that won't or can't multitask sucks.

But I think that's just fine.  Seriously, there's not a darn thing wrong with that.  Why?  Because without consumers, what are we creating content for?  Whether it's a more interactive e-reader or a delivery system for cleaner HD NetFlix downloads or just a way to read the digital newspaper, this device isn't a disruptive technology.  Far from it.  NPR is right, this is a device that harkens back to the era of hardcopy, a chance to preserve the old paradigm of "We create, you read" that has seen us through the centuries since before Gutenberg went out and MacGyvered a winepress and started printing Bibles.

I know a lot of people see the wild and woolly, freewheeling internet as the height of human social development.  Those are generally the same people who complain about all the "clueless n00bs" clogging the pipeline and generally getting in their way.  The wild west is great as long as you're one of the gunslingers, but all those pesky civilians just get in the way.

The simple fact is, there are too many content creators already.   Andre Codrescue once warned that we are a nation of exhibitionists that is running desperately short of voyeurs.  The iPad is tailor-made for voyeurs.  (As long as the exhibitionist isn't using Flash) and I say more power to it.  The iPad gives content creators the chance to create content and it relieves those who would rather consume than create relief from the tyranny of that keyboard that seems to haunt far too many with the imaginary onus to do something with it.

I posit that there are those in the world who shouldn't have a keyboard handy.  I'm sorry if that sounds elitest or not at all the PC thing to say (pun intended) but there are simply too many people who feel that they HAVE to tell their story and get out there only to find that they don't actually have a story to tell.  These are the people who Tweet their every bowel movement.

The iPad is a gated community.  It takes away the keyboard, along with its implicit exhortation to type something even if you don't have anything to type, and it restricts what you can view to Apple-approved content.  With all the constraints that Apple puts on their devices, don't be surprised if the Federal Trace Commission eventually tells them to knock it off.  The things they got away with when their market share was too small to create waves that way will eventually get them in trouble just as it did Microsoft.

But in the meantime, I think this device is going to ultimately clear the pipeline of a lot of people who would rather not have the QWERTY keyboard staring them in the face, tempting them with all the banality they can Tweet about.  The iPad creates audiences and if you're one of the exhibitionists... more voyeurs is good.

Anyway, this sense of the iPad as either the beginning or end of something new and frightening is nonsensical.  We've had gated communities on the internet before or have we forgotten AOL?

Feeding Our Pet Peeves

This NPR op/ed is fantastic! 
But for the record, it's a different Scott.  Honest.

3-Minute Fiction - NPR

The ultimate challenge of brevity and wit.  NPR announced this past weekend that they are breathing new life into their "Three Minute Fiction" contest...

How E-Books Will Change Reading And Writing

I would have titled this "How E-Books Might Change Reading & Writing". Mainly because I don't think you could have looked at the early output of Gutenberg's presses (Bibles, indulgences and religious tracts) and seen an accurate view of what would be happening once writers stopped playing with the new toy and really started to create. Of course in that time, artists labored in relative isolation, without a mass media culture to feed them lines. For better or worse, it took almost three hundred years for the presses to move from what they began doing (religious works) to printing the endless Do it Yourself books of the Elizabethan era (yes, really) and eventually the surrealist adventures of Gargantua and Pantagruel, Machiavelli's political advice column and eventually the exploits of Don Quixote and the printing of the Shakespearean canon. Even though we will undoubtedly move the same relative distance a hundred times as quickly as the renaissance writers did, I sincerely doubt we're out of the early stages of curiousity and exploration that meet a new medium. And I'm not sure anyone can say with any assurance that we've achieved any level of sophistication or seen more than the leading edge of what e-Books will really mean for the writer and the reader... not to mention their medium.

The smoke of digital battle...

Season's Readings - Some excellent gift suggestions from Indie Booksellers

Neil Gaiman discusses Audio Books with David Sedaris

From NPR's Morning Edition - 30 November 2009

Custos Librarium

By now you know that I'm a big fan of librarians. The are the guardians at the gates of our world culture, they fight for the inclusion of all and the exclusion of none. Librarians will (and have) go to court and even jail to protect the privacy of their patrons. When the USA PATRIOT Act extended the writ of the federal government's surveillance efforts into the nation's libraries, the librarians and the ALA fought (semi-successfully) the legislation in the name of their library patrons. Internet search providers have a long and troubled history when it comes to privacy concerns. This is most notable in China where dissidents have been turned-over or exposed by their internet email providers. They have proven time and again their focus isn't on the privacy of their users, but on the aggregation and sale of their site-views. These are businesses and must pursue profit. Libraries are not businesses, they are a public service where free public access to information is protected. This morning, NPR asked: If Google is allowed to become the world's librarian, how will they match up to the librarians they will be replacing? (listen) (read)