26 March 2009
Click here for a story from NPR’s “All Things Considered” about Digital Rights Management (DRM) issues in the e-book industry.
The question is whether DRM protects authors and publishers, or if it limits potential audiences. In the music industry, some argue, laxness about DRM is what crippled record companies and kept artists from making money. Others argue that the more widely and easily available an artist’s work, the more likely the word will spread and sales will increase.
Everything topsy turvy, the commerce of books in flux.
23 March 2009
My dear editor Alexis Gargagliano is featured in a “Q&A With Four Young Editors” article in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
On the topic of self-promotion, Alexis says this:
I think there’s a stigma that it’s a negative thing. It’s really an extension of that deep involvement we were talking about earlier [in the conversation]. It’s about being really passionate about your book. It’s a way to figure out how to make the world of your book bigger, and to give other people access to it. I think it’s helpful if authors can wrap their heads around looking at it from a different perspective. I have a lot of authors who are afraid to go out there. They think it’s about them. It’s actually about the book. It’s about the writing. It’s not about you personally.
Get yourself out of the way, so that the book can have a life, she seems to be saying. Maybe analogous to parents and their budding teenagers. Except in this case, getting out of the way means that the writer must actually get more involved. Wyatt Mason has it right — a weird little business, indeed.
20 March 20009
In approaching a few writers to read the manuscript of Long For This World and possibly provide blurbs, I’ve been surprised by a more-than-once response, which goes something like: I’d be happy to read it, but you should know that I will only blurb it if I absolutely love it.
My first (inner) response is, Well, of course; why would you praise something falsely? Followed by Hmm, I suppose that response implies that it is not uncommon for writers to praise work falsely.
“Falsely” is too strong. The common practice, I believe, is for writers to praise what they love about the work of writers in whom they believe. In other words, the commitment is personal, rather than work-specific.
Wyatt Mason of Harper’s writes this week in his blog about the role of friendship in the making of literary careers. Quoting T.S. Eliot in a letter to the benefactor John Quinn:
I am sorry to say that I have found it uphill and exasperating work trying to impose [James] Joyce on such “intellectual” people, or people whose opinion carries weight as I know, in London. He is far from being accepted, yet. I only know two or three people, besides my wife and myself, who are really carried away by him.
Mason goes on to comment:
Quality is the key to any serious literary endurance, yes, but friendship is underrated as a critical tool. Anyone can write a blurb extolling, adverbially, the “fearlessly brilliant” and “daringly brave” (?) qualities of some someone’s latest something. But not everyone will write and circulate defenses of under-known works and undervalued artists, try to raise cash for the strapped genius, advocate in public and push in private for the virtues of the great but obscure… We forget, now and again, in the careerist whirl of the weird little business that is made of writing, how much altruism there is among those who do this sort of work.
Of course we’d rather believe in a pure meritocracy, but as Mason points out, it’s not so either/or. As in any field of work or path to success, there’s some element of luck/good fortune that comes into it. And the magic of the altruistic personal touch is still alive and well.
My editor and I will hope for some good fortune, but as far as blurbs go, we may just have to do this the old-fashioned way. In the words of the late John Houseman: we’ll have to earn it.
18 March 2009
Denis Johnson is among the most talented writers alive. He is one of those writers whose prose is so good, reading it often makes me want to quit. But in a good way.
Since I’m currently writing a politician-character (Frederick of my novel-in-progress Sebastian & Frederick), I have my eye out for interesting political fiction. Johnson’s character Mike Reed in The Name of the World once worked for a US Senator. Another character asks Reed about the experience:
In D.C. I experienced what I once heard called ‘the temptation to be good.’ It’s a curse. As soon as it hit me I got confused. I still don’t know if, by quitting, I gave in to a bad temptation, or managed to resist a good one… There’s a perfect stillness at the center of Washington…It’s natural to talk about it in paradoxes…Everything in the world is going on there, but nothing’s happening. It’s all essential, but it’s all completely pointless. The motives are virtuous, but whatever you do just stinks. And then you retire with great praise.
I’m only about halfway through The Name of the World — a slim little book which is my warm-up to Tree of Smoke. But already it has me threatening (to myself) to pack it in.
12 March 2009
I’m stealing this from themillionsblog.com, click here for the originating post.
Click here for my original post on a recent profile of the late David Foster Wallace.
People I trust (men, mostly, though) love both these books. I’ve not read either. One does wonder about the conversation at that marketing meeting, where the Netherland paperback design was decided. Not much of an attempt at all to veil the strategy, it seems to me. Or is this another sausage/laws situation?