Publishers as gatekeepers

Posted on June 8, 2014 by Richard Bowker

One of the arguments made on behalf of mainstream publishers in the Amazon-Hachette war is that publishers act as gatekeepers — keeping the junk out of the market and using their editorial skills to improve the books they do let into the market. Here’s a writer offering up a paean to these gatekeepers in the the pages of Publishers Weekly:

In a market of unlimited book options, how does an audience make choices? At the moment, most of that burden is carried by the book business. The publicity and marketing campaigns and cover designs and flap copy—the things that publishers do—are not just methods of selling books; they’re also readers’ main tools for discovering books. The same is true of the curating and merchandising in stores, and book coverage in the media. Without reviews, staff recommendations, and endcap displays, unlimited choices aren’t narrowed down—they’re overwhelming.

Second, if all books become cheap or free to readers, then writers are unlikely to earn much (if anything). Who will want to write if writing doesn’t pay?

Third, without the gatekeepers, those who do write will create books that are worse—and not just authors whose dormant genius must be drawn out by patient editors, but all authors. Every book that doesn’t first have to get past a gatekeeper or two, or 10, before being put in front of the public will be worse.

He then goes on to describe how much his manuscript was improved in the process of being submitted to agents and publishers. Well, your mileage may vary; mine certainly did. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this blog, the editorial support and advice I got while I was part of the mainstream publishing world ranged from trivial to nonexistent. Editors didn’t have the time or the interest or the talent to make my novels better.

Two further points. First, the main idea behind being a gatekeeper is to keep out the bad stuff. But of course fallible human beings are making judgments that could well be wrong. The most poignant case of this was John Kennedy Toole’s amazing A Confederacy of Dunces, shunned by mainstream publishers and only published by an obscure university press years after his suicide at the age of 31.

Less poignant, but of more immediate interest to me, is my novel The Portal, which my agent several years ago declined to market, deeming it unpublishable. So now it’s out there in the self-published universe, and the rave customer reviews are starting to pile up. Here’s one of many:

A Terrific Read! I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started reading this. Would the promising story idea deflate once it got past the initial set-up, as so many other books do? It definitely did not, and stayed entertaining all the way through – I could not put it down. I have kids around the same age and I really felt for these boys – they’re lost and are doing whatever they can to stay alive, stay together and hopefully get home. Glad the book was complete in itself, but it would be great to see them have more adventures like this. Overall, two very enthusiastic thumbs up!

(The semi-poignant part of this saga is that in the years after my agent rejected it I managed to lose the final draft — no hard copy, no soft copy. Luckily, my friend Jeff managed to hang on to the final Word file. Apparently he had more faith in it than I did!)

The second point is that gatekeepers are going to let stuff through that they shouldn’t. Not all books that come out from major publishers are worth reading, or are as good as they could possibly be. The two most recent Jack Reacher books could certainly have been improved — one by going through another draft, the other by being tossed into the wastebasket. But apparently the publisher doesn’t care — they just want a Jack Reacher book every year.

I don’t know anything about Emma Donoghue, but her latest novel, Frog Music, is a historical mystery and apparently very different from her previous “worldwide bestseller,” Room. The Boston Globe hated it, the New York Times hated it, and lots of Amazon and (especially) Barnes & Noble customers also hate it. My guess is that her publisher, Little Brown (part of Hachette), was hoping for another Room, but this is what the author delivered to them. So they were stuck publishing something they didn’t much like. (Also, the Kindle version costs $12.99, which suggests that the e-book pricing wars haven’t quite started yet — it’s actually a buck cheaper at B&N. So I’d just like to mention that you can buy pretty much all of my e-books for the price of one Frog Music.)

Now where was I?

Posted on May 26, 2014 by Richard Bowker

I had a great couple of weeks away from my novel. Real life is great! But now what? What are these characters supposed to be doing? Wasn’t there some plot point I wanted to add right around here? Didn’t I note that down somewhere? I have this other note, but what does it mean?

I came across a good piece of writing advice once from Graham Greene (I think). Don’t stop writing when you reach a difficult part; stop when you reach an easy part. That makes it easier for you get rolling the next time you sit down to write. Why don’t I pay more attention to Graham Greene?

Actually, even the easy stuff seems difficult after a couple of weeks. Surfing the Internet certainly seems like a more attractive option than rewriting that sentence. And I really ought to recheck my email — it’s possible someone has written me in the past five minutes.

OK, let’s try again. Blogging is just one more excuse.

Why give away an e-book?

Posted on May 9, 2014 by Richard Bowker

The Portal continues to be free on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The main idea here is to generate customer reviews, because reviews are what stimulate e-book sales. As my publisher says:

The more reviews, the more sales. In other words, “people are interested in buying what other people are interested in reviewing”. This is the basic definition of Social Engagement.

Reviews are hard to come by, actually. I don’t know what percentage of readers leave reviews, but it can’t be very high. Giving the book away for a while increases the pool of readers, which increases your odds of getting reviews.

My publisher is more interested in the number of reviews than how positive the reviews are, but obviously that matters to the author! It also matters to some potential advertisers, who aren’t interested in promoting books unless they have received a certain number of reviews at a certain quality level (e.g., at least 10 reviews, average higher than 4.0).

Here are the first couple of (five-star) reviews that have come in as a result of this promotion. Both readers have a similar reaction — which is exactly the reaction I was hoping for, actually. This one is titled “A Lot of Heart”:

I thought at first this was going to be another YA gimmicky novel with kids complaining about their lives and using the device of dimension travel just to come up with random quirky things, but this book is much more than that. You really get to know and care about the characters, and things move along quite well and not predictably. The really surprising part is the life lessons learned by the characters – they really leave you with something more than just a fun little read. Glad I read it!

And this one is titled “Very Enjoyable”:

Really enjoyed this book. At first I thought it was going to be kind of silly but it didn’t take long till I could hardly put the book down. I found myself identifying with the curiosities of Larry.

Really hope there is a second in the series coming!

So, thanks to these readers, and everyone else who takes the time to leave a review.

“The Portal” is now free on the Nook!

Posted on April 28, 2014 by Richard Bowker

For a limited time only, presumably. Presumably Amazon will follow suit before long and lower its price to zero, but you should probably go ahead and pay real money for it anyway.

Here’s a recent 5-star customer review from Amazon:

In this new entry in the Young Adult fiction category, Richard Bowker explores questions of our relationship to the world we live in by telling the tale of a young adolescent who discovers a portal to an alternate version of that world. By creating that world as one with underdeveloped technology, he is able to paint a vivid picture of what life might have been like in the mid 18th century in colonial New England (even though the portal is not a time-travel device). His characters are well-drawn, and his descriptions of battle scenes between the New Englanders and the Portuguese soldiers are gripping, especially with regard to the angst his protagonist, Larry Barnes, feels about having killed an enemy. In the end, Larry has to make a choice — one that is surprisingly difficult and thought-provoking and which wouldn’t have been anticipated earlier in the story.

World building

Posted on April 26, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Here’s a bland paragraph from the novel I’m working on:

She was sitting on our patched brown Victorian sofa wearing her patched blue robe. Two glasses of cider and a plate of bread and cheese and apple slices sat on a side table. She had lit a fire in the fireplace, so the front parlor wasn’t as cold as it usually was. She patted the sofa next to her, and I sat down gratefully. She snuggled up against me.

What’s wrong with that? But when my writing group was discussing this chapter, it raised a question from Mary: Where did they get the wood?

This is in the post-apocalyptic world of my Last P.I. series, so it’s not an unreasonable question. But it’s one that has never occurred to me.

World building is in some ways straightforward. For the Last P.I. world, the big picture is easy enough. There was a nuclear war a couple of decades ago; Boston is still struggling in the aftermath. People are poor; they’re still salvaging what they can from the past and figuring out how to survive in the present. And it’s also not hard to come up with lots of details to flesh out the world: people wear patched robes and sit on patched furniture. Auto parts are scarce and valuable; most people don’t have central heat or electricity…

What’s tricky is calibrating the level of detail to convey in the actual novels, from sentence to sentence. A few readers have complained that I haven’t given enough back story about the war. That’s a big picture issue. Mary wants to know about firewood; that’s an issue about the details. My goal is to put in enough detail to make the world convincing and vivid, without piling on so much information that the story’s momentum is lost.

I have some ideas about how to handle the firewood question. But you’ll have to buy the book if you really want to know the answer.

Writers in Movies: The Invisible Woman

Posted on April 20, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Another in an occasional series.

Like Young Cassidy, The Invisible Woman is a biopic about a famous writer. Unlike Young Cassidy, it is really really good.

It’s the story of Charles Dickens and his mistress, the actress Ellen Ternan. Ralph Fiennes directed the movie and plays Dickens; Felicity Jones plays Ternan. I like the way the film captures the complexities of the relationship: this wasn’t a love story. Ternan admired Dickens, but above all she needed money and security; Dickens was fond of Ternan, but above all he needed a young, pretty woman to admire him.

Beyond that, I like that they got Dickens right. Dickens was a creep in his personal life: he was awful to his wife, dismissive of his children . . . but he was also haunted by a dreadful childhood that goes a long way toward explaining the mess he made of things. And there was his art and his public, both of which were more important to him than his wife and children. The film captures that: he is constantly writing, and when he isn’t writing, he is performing.

Finally, the emotional climax of the movie is Ternan’s explication of the alternative endings of Great Expectations. How cool is that?

The movie seems to have been kind of a flop, which is too bad. There are plenty of reasons why, I suppose. It’s not especially romantic; there’s no musical soundtrack (which worked for me); Dickens is probably considered old-fashioned and sentimental. But I found it more satisfying than almost every other movie I’ve seen lately.

(By the way, someday I might start an occasional series of Shakespeare on film. The previous movie that Fiennes directed was a modern-day version of Corialanus, with Vanessa Redgrave and Jessica Chastain. That, too, was pretty good. And also kind of a flop. Maybe Fiennes needs to sign on to direct Iron Man 4.)

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Posted on April 19, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Novels just don’t get any better than that. I don’t really have much more to say about it, but I feel like quoting its first sentence, which is one of the best first sentences ever:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

RIP, Gabriel García Márquez.

Let’s try another cover for Summit

Posted on April 9, 2014 by Richard Bowker

In the “every cloud has a silver lining” department, my publisher has decided that the crisis in Ukraine might spark some interest in my cold-war psychic-espionage classical-music novel Summit, which has nothing to do with Ukraine but does include several Russian bad guys and a beautiful Russian heroine. Previously they ditched its original cover because they thought the hammer-and-sickle motif was outdated; now they have decided it’s just fine. So here’s our latest cover:

I should also add that the novel is well worth the measly three bucks we’re charging for it.

Do you write and tell?

Posted on April 6, 2014 by Richard Bowker

The New York Times runs occasional pieces on writing in its Draft feature. They are of variable quality. The latest one, called “Not Telling” is pretty good. The writer, a novelist I’ve never heard of named Alice Mattison, is obsessively secret about her novels while she’s writing them:

If I talk about the book, I believe — I cannot help believing — my characters will be angry, and will no longer confide in me about their embarrassing, troubled lives.

She won’t even talk about the novel with her husband:

Once, I decided I should tell my husband a little about the novel I was writing. I informed him that I was about to do so and he sat up straight and looked eager. He’d been waiting for a while. I said — certain I was revealing something of interest — “It’s in five parts.” Then I sat back and waited for enthusiasm.

I have a lot of sympathy. I share my drafts with my writing group, but no one else. My lovely wife has been informed that I’m writing another one of those Walter Sands private eye novels, but that’s it. In my case, I’m not afraid of my characters getting angry; I’m afraid that talking out loud about the plot will make it sound stupid — to me as well as to the listener — and I’ll lose the hubris I need to keep going. At an early stage of writing, my plot is kind of stupid. Not to mention my prose is scattered and unfocused, as I figure out motivations and settings. But I need to stay confident that things are going to get better. I need to keep the world I’m creating safe from outsiders until I’m sure enough in it to pull back the curtain. Then, if people don’t like what I’ve created, I can figure out what, if anything, I need to change — without deciding the whole damn thing’s no good.

Keep it short, except when it needs to be long

Posted on March 26, 2014 by Richard Bowker

Here’s a New York Times op-ed that spends 800 words or so extolling the virtues of brevity when it comes to writing. Except, of course, the author doesn’t really mean that. It’s only towards the end that he quotes from Strunk and White, who say what he really means:

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

Got it. Now, why did we need the other 700 words?

This comes to mind when reading this listicle from The American Scholar listing the “ten best sentences,” which presumably boils down to “ten sentences that the editors really like.” Many of them are decidedly not short, like this one from Nicholas Nickleby:

There are many pleasant fictions of the law in constant operation, but there is not one so pleasant or practically humorous as that which supposes every man to be of equal value in its impartial eye, and the benefits of all laws to be equally attainable by all men, without the smallest reference to the furniture of their pockets.

But here is a brief beauty from Lolita: