THE LITBLOG CO-OP

More Thoughts on the Marketing Machine

Since the Co-Op started, I've been thinking a lot about marketing and publicity for books. I am astounded by the sheer number of titles unleashed on the public every year. M.J. Rose estimates there are 1000 to 1200 books published every month. Not even October gets time off for good behavior.

According to Edward Champion, official New York Times Book Review watchdog, the number of novels reviewed in the Review came to a grand total of 11. The previous week, there were eight. By taking some liberties with math, let's say the NYTBR focuses its bright spotlight of love on an average of ten books a week. That's, hmmm, about 40 novels a month. If half of 1000 or so books published each month just happen to be fiction, approximately 460 of those are left without a mention in a major paper with a really big circulation.

Of course I'm oversimplifying. Some months, the number could be as high as sixty. Whoo hoo!

So what happens to the other books? The ones that took years to write, months to edit, days to print, money to ship? Those books live or die by word-of-mouth. At Booksquare, I suggested that publishers need to do a better job of getting ARCs into the hands of folks I'm helpfully calling "big mouths" (even though I'm not entirely sure that word-of-mouth is the most effective marketing strategy from a business perspective). Just like there are only so many pages in book review sections and literary journals, there are only so many books the big mouths can read and promote.

Other traditional ways of promoting new authors doesn't seem to work well. While established authors with solid fan bases might benefit from a book tour, it doesn't appear to be the best vehicle for most authors. BookAngst 101 has compiled the results of an exhaustive survey of authors and, not surprisingly,

...these authors came to the conclusion that the book tour, on virtually any scale, is not simply a waste of time & energy but, in fact, an exercise in public humiliation...

So what seems to be working? Blogs. Virtual book tours. Live book tours done in groups, especially when non-traditional venues are selected. Oprah -- you know, there's something seriously wrong with the system when authors have to beg a television host to reinstate her bookclub. Authors interacting with the public.

That last one is really critical. Sending an author to a bookstore in a mall teaches him or her to answer the question, "Where are the restrooms?", but it doesn't necessarily reach readers. Sending an author to a blog to talk about their work is going to reach a wider, more receptive audience -- readers of Sarah Weinman's blog aren't looking for books on curing depression. They're looking for interesting authors and titles, particularly those with a crime fiction bent.

If you're an publisher, agent, or author, you need to take another look at your promotion plan. If you're one of the lucky ones, the New York Times will notice your title. If you're not, it's time to start thinking outside the promotional box.

Fish Out of Water

What book would I nominate if I could?  That's like asking a fish what part of the ocean he loves best.  He doesn't swim because he likes it, he swims because that's what he does.  If you're wondering what the hell I am talking about, I am getting to my point, I swear.  What I am trying inarticulately to say, is that I read because that what's I do, like the fish.  There is no question of me not reading.  So to pick one book out of the huge list I've read in the past year is difficult.  Several good ones came to mind immediately: The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers, but that came out several years ago.  Divided Kingdom by Rupert Thomson was one of the best books I've read in a long while, but it won't be out for a few months yet. 

But there is one book that I think about often---The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer.  One of the reasons I love this book (and this may seem strange) is how I even came across it in the first place.  I think it was Mark or Ed who kept talking about it.  And I know it was popular amongst other bloggers as well.  Suffice it to say, I read the book and loved it. 

This is what I wrote when I first read The Confessions:

It's not until I reread the first line of this enchanting novel that I really understood it.  'We are each the love of someone's life.'  The entire novel seems to revolve around missed chances and wrong times.  Max Tivoli is born an old grizzled man in 1871.  He appears wrinkled and white at birth, but ages backwards, appearing younger and younger as time passes.  The story is told in 3 parts but with the twist---youth, middle age, and old age are each 'confessed' to us.  And we realize as we read, that Max is writing this in his old age, but living as a young boy.  'Be what you are' is what his mother tells him.  Max does just that, playing whatever role his physical appearance imposes on him.

What is remarkable about this book is not the twist, but the melancholic and observant tone.  Max is not completely sympathetic----he does some remarkably selfish things.  But so much of Max's life is observed rather than experienced, since he never feels like a part of the world due to his condition.  The one thing Max truly experiences is love.  He meets Alice when she is 14 and he is 17, but of course he is living as an older man.  In fact, his mother has told the neighbors that he is her brother-in-law.   He spends his life loving Alice and writing about Alice.  The other character you keep reading about is his lifelong friend Hughie, who plays a major role in Max's life as well. 

The whole thing sounds gimmicky, but Greer makes it work with his wonderful writing.  He has a real feel for the period (there are echoes of Proust).  This isn't to say that the novel does not have its problems.  I wish Max's sister was more than briefly mentioned.  But all in all the problems fall away with the very human story of a man who loves a woman but doesn't know how to fit himself into her life.

Maybe this book won't appeal to everyone.  But I hope at least some will give it a chance.  It's really worth it, I swear. 

 

Like a box of chocolates

As Scott's post below details, there are a number of different and viable ways to hear about a particular book. All are effective to varying degrees, but sometimes there's a mysterious X factor that pops up where, almost at random, one can hear or come across or pick up a book with no real idea why it might suit -- and then it not only suits, but becomes a favorite.

A few years ago, I was in a bookshop in Montreal doing what I usually do: browsing the stacks. I went through alphabetical order and found a few books I liked but nothing that really leaped out at me. Then, near the very end of the alphabet, I found a book I'd never heard of but a title that absolutely grabbed me: FIVE PUBS, TWO BARS AND A FUNERAL. I read mostly crime fiction, and that just seemed perfect to me: drinking and noir and nihilism. So I bought it and took it home, and whipped through the short stories in record time.

In short, I'd just discovered a new author named John Williams. I tracked down everything else he wrote and even went so far as to interview him. I now eagerly await anything he writes. All because of a random shopping trip.

It's like that sometimes. And that's what makes reading an ever-surprising adventure.

Where do the books come from, Mommy?

A few days ago, it hit me that in the near future I may have to nominate a book for my fellow 20 LBCers to read. When I realized that, I thought that if I should be so fortunate to be a nominator, I'll need to come with a great, really deserving pick, which means that I'll need to start considering recent releases right now.

That got me thinking: Where do I hear about new books? How do I find out about all of these new releases?

I figured a few answers.

#1. -- Publicists. Many presses have figured out about Conversational Reading's existance, and they've been very forthcoming in promoting their new releases to me.

#2. -- Radio. I like to listen to Michael Krasny's Forum on NPR because he often does shows with interesting authors, and his callers recommend good books. This is a local San Francisco show, but you can stream it online.

#3. -- Powell's/Amazon. These sites do a pretty good job of listing upcoming releases by category and making it easy for me to browse around and see what's coming up.

#4. -- Blogs. Of course, many of the litblogs I regularly read talk up good new releases.

That's it. Those are most of the ways I can think of that news of good new books makes its way from the publisher to me.

The thing is, though, I know there must be more ways to find out about new releases. Anyone got some suggestions of where to go to get the lowdown on new books?

Promoting Translated Literature

Someone passed this link from Publisher's Weekly on to me:

Found in Translation

"In an innovative effort to raise the visibility of literature in translation, two nonprofit literary presses and a small indie house have formed an alliance with two corporate imprints to coordinate a special promotional display called Reading the World, which launches May 1 at about 80 independent bookstores..."

Publishers include (Madinkbeard favorite) Dalkey Archive, Archipelago (who just put out a translation of Peter Altenberg that sounds interesting), New Directions, FSG, and Knopf/Pantheon (the latter having put out some translated graphic novels, even).

I think all of us at the LBC can get behind the idea of promoting literature in translation and I know translations are included in our first round of nominees.

Call Me Prospero

A post at CultureSpace (picking up where a popular blog/LiveJournal meme left off) meditates on the idea of favorite books for a person stuck on a desert island, and this idea is one I'm quite fond of -- and not just because I recently played Caliban in a production of The Tempest.

Of course, the best answer to "What book would you want to be stuck with on a desert island?" is "A book about how to build a raft, survive in the tropics, and find food in unlikely places." But this isn't a reality show, it's an intellectual game, and, maligned as they are by haters of postmodern trickery, I like intellectual games.

There are lots of challenges hidden in the question. Define "book", after all. Does all of Remembrance of Things Past count? Because if all of it does, that's a lot of reading for one title. I'm certainly never going to get to it without being stuck on a desert island...

And are they any five books, or should there limits? Five books of fiction, for instance. That certainly makes choosing things slightly less difficult, although it unfortunately excludes Shakespeare. Nonetheless, it would make one choice easier: I wouldn't have to choose between Samuel Beckett's fiction and plays, which I love equally and differently -- I'd be forced to choose the fiction, and would probably go with the trilogy, because I love the last pages of The Unnamable, and the three books together have lots of pages, a useful fact if, on a cold night, I need fuel for the fire.

Reading Samuel Beckett on a desert island. That's an amusing image.

I first encountered the idea of desert island books when I was in high school and my favorite English teacher told me he thought that, were he stuck on a desert island and could only have one book with him, he'd choose Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. I agreed, until I got to college and discovered Faulkner, and decided that my choice would be Absalom, Absalom!, a book I threw across the room three times when I first read it, and then, having finished it, returned to read again, this time compulsively, seldom letting it out of my hands or sight.

Being limited to one book, though, seems uncharitable. Especially since I don't much care for the ocean or sun. A tropical island would be absolute torture for me. Therefore, I think I'd need to have a whole trunk of books wash ashore, or else I'd just die quickly from literary withdrawal and too much exposure to things that are supposed to be good for you, like beaches.

Tempted as I am to list a trunkload of books rather than five, that loses some of the fun of this exercise. The fun is in the impossibility, the difficulty, the straining. Therefore, I will limit myself to no more than ten books of any sort, with five places specifically reserved for fiction, because the LitBlog Co-Op is all about fiction. I will also limit myself to books that actually exist in one volume (proved with a Powells link), so no cheating with Proust.

Fiction
Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme
The Chekhov Omnibus by Anton Chekhov
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff VanderMeer

Other Than Fiction
Georg Buchner: Complete Plays and Prose (although I just got the new edition of Buchner's Lenz from Archipelago Books, and I'm not sure I would ever want to live without this particular edition, but "Lenz" is fiction, and I do so love the plays, and...)
Paul Celan: Selections translated and edited by Pierre Joris
Complete Works (Arden Edition) by William Shakespeare
Collected Poems by Stevie Smith
Walden, etc. by Henry David Thoreau

There's so much missing! What if I get to the island and suddenly realize that I really don't like Stevie Smith's poems as much as I think I do today?! Today I think they're funny and strange and amusing and clever and unpretentious, but by the time I get to the island I might think they're kind of dumb and I really should have put Frank O'Hara there instead. And no art books? No Van Gogh or Picasso or Max Ernst or "Far Side" or "Calvin & Hobbes"? Will FedEx deliver to a desert island?

Strangely, the fiction was easier to choose. While certainly I would miss hundreds of authors I wasn't able to include, I do think I could survive quite happily for the rest of my life if I only had those five books of fiction to sustain me. Barthelme's stories are some of the most purely delightful I know, Chekhov's are the most perfect, Absalom and Mrs. Dalloway are both books I've read multiple times and felt I could read again and again and again, and City of Saints and Madmen is not only written by a friend whom I would want to remember, but is vastly entertaining, thought-provoking, and beautiful.

When I get to the end of exercises like this, I'm left with one overwhelming feeling: I am immensely grateful that I do not have to choose to live the rest of my life with only five or ten books. Let the publishers publish more, let the writers write more -- I'm all in favor of an endless supply!

Why LitBlogs Matter

When a major studio releases a movie, it's accompanied by a multi-million dollar advertising budget. Even titles guaranteed to be dead on arrival have major promotional bucks ushering them to their doom. This is mostly because that first release, the theater, is only the beginning of life for a movie. If the studio makes back its production, print, and advertising costs on the theatrical run, everyone is ecstatic. Huge multi-page ads appear in the trade journals. The major money comes from pay-per-view, video/DVD, pay television, network television, endless syndication, more video/DVD. Repeat in every country around the world, and you have yourself a thriving industry.

Books don't have endless windows opening for them. You have your hardback and your paperback, with the trade paperback filling gaps as necessary. The titles showered with advertising dollars are the titles needing the least help. Nora Roberts, Stephen King, and James Patterson don't need full-page ads in the New York Times; it's not even clear that such advertisements have any effect on readers. Their new titles will occupy front tables and endcaps and grocery store slots.

I've never fully understood why publishers spend money buying and producing books without following through with promotion. It is up to authors, surely the least likely of marketers, to push their works. Sure, ARCs are distributed far and wide, but if you follow Michael Cader's weekly analysis of reviews, it's pretty obvious that the majority of column inches is devoted to a minority of books.

Maybe it's because I'm blessed, but my local newspaper doesn't seem to follow the national trends. Then again, my local paper is the Los Angeles Times. I'm not sure who the reviews are targeted toward, but all my friends are readers, and not one of them relies upon the LAT for information about new books. If you've paid any attention at all to the various comments and coverage surrounding this weekend's Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, you know that the review section does a serious disservice to its community.

It's interesting to me that readers are leading the charge to discover and promote new, often overlooked fiction. Tradtional avenues of literary coverage are necessarily limited in scope, even with the Internet. We're experiencing a paradigm shift in this country:

A new generation of technology-savvy young people are getting their news in ways that threaten the very viability of newspapers and other traditional news media, according to a study commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Twenty blogs talking about one book may not seem earth-shattering. Unless you realize that traditional media is just now understanding that they're playing catch-up. Earlier this week, Rupert Murdoch acknowledged that he'd misjudged the Internet. He was speaking from the perspective of a man who owns news sources, but maybe he should have expanded his vision a little -- he also publishes books.

If I ruled the world...

...everyone would be forced to read Air, or Have Not Have by Geoff Ryman. People who say they hate science fiction would have to read it, people who say they love science fiction would have to read it. The illiterate would have to learn to read just to read this book.

If I'd been a nominator, this is the book I'd have put up for consideration. I would have cried and said, "I was robbed!" if it lost. There's not a novel out there that I'm more disappointed by the lack of conversation about. This novel should be winning awards like nobody's business (not that awards necessarily count for much, but some books deserve them--and in fairness, Air was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award this year). Of course, it took ten years to get published and has only been out in the United States since late 2004, which means this book could still find an audience. If you're incredibly smart and lucky, you'll be in it. So, maybe I should tell you a little bit about the book, huh?

I first wrote about Air over on my own site Shaken & Stirred in January (and that's a lengthier reaction, so check it out). To steal a bit of plot synopsis from the Publisher's Weekly review:

One day, the citizens of Kizuldah and the rest of the world are subjected to the testing of Air, a highly experimental communications system that uses quantum technology to implant an equivalent of the Internet in everyone's mind. During the brief test, Mae is accidentally trapped in the system, her mind meshed with that of a dying woman. Left half insane, she now has the ability to see through the quantum realm into both the past and the future. Mae soon sets out on a desperate quest to prepare her village for the impending, potentially disastrous establishment of the Air network.

I half-wonder if the inexplicable lack of readers of this book has to do with the fact that it concerns itself with so many things that most science fiction novels don't: namely how the third world interfaces with first world technology on a personal level and the strictures on poor women in patriarchal cultures, especially in small villages. To cast how change comes to societies, in both good and bad ways, through the story of a poor "fashion expert" in a non-Western culture is a pretty radical tactic for any novel looking to find an audience. But this book has important things to say. We should listen. It will make you laugh, it will draw you in, it will break your heart, it will leave you pleasantly flabbergasted and with substantial things to consider. The book never feels forced. The female characters are some of the richest I've ever encountered, starting with Mae herself.

Do yourself a favor. Read this book while you're waiting for the first Read This! selection on May 15. You won't be sorry. And I'll be happy.

A Friendly Reference

Philip Martin has a very nice article on reading and books in, of all places, the "Northwest Arkansas Edition" of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. Somehow his words seem relevant to what the LBC is about:

A couple of weeks before it won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead arrived on my desk, along with a short letter of recommendation from a friend. "Hope you enjoy this book," it read. "I think it’s beautifully written."

This sort of thing doesn’t happen much anymore. When books come unbidden they are usually sent by publicists or authors on the make, people whose interest in the book is other than platonic. Thousands of books are published every year and it’s not always the best ones that wind up on the lists and in the shop windows. A friendly reference is the best credential a book by an unknown author can obtain.

Yet there are dangers inherent in recommending books, the most obvious being that when you submit anything for anyone else’s approval, that approval could be withheld. Your friend may not like the book; as a result he might question your taste or your sense. In the worst case, he may take your suggestion as a hostile act — not all endomorphs appreciate receiving a copy of the latest fad diet best seller.

With novels, it becomes dicier. There is a risk in admitting you are moved by a bunch of words made up by someone you (probably) don’t even know. It is specious to pretend that novels, even those that win Pulitzer Prizes, occupy more than a minor place in American culture — novels are generally rough drafts of movies that are never realized, or the hobbies of academics, or the fever dreams of less-than-serious people.

The LBC would like to give a "friendly reference" to a few of those thousands of books that aren't likely to "wind up on the lists." It is indeed possible that some readers who agree to "Read This" will be disappointed by it. You might question our tastes. But we're friends of books who assume there are many other mutual friends out there who might appreciate our recommendations. We don't pretend that novels (or short stories) occupy the central position in American culture we'd like them to, but we will be on the lookout for those precious works of fiction that are far from "rough drafts of movies" or the fever dreams of frivolous people.

Our recommendations will be as simple as the note sent by Martin's friend: "Try this book. We thinks it's beautifully written (or challenging or original or compelling in some other way) and well worth your time."

Ed Champion provided me with this link.

Woulda Coulda Nominate a Book

Following the bandwagon (which by the way was literally a wagon to hold the whole band), I've been thinking about books I might have nominated for this round of the LBC. I'm by the no means a prolific reader of current fiction. I tend to reach back a little further in time with my reading. The first book that comes to mind doesn't fit into the twelve month window we've adopted, though only by a few months: David Markson's Vanishing Point. If someone asked me to list my favorite writers, I might haw and hem over it, but I've no doubt that Markson would be in the top three. For me, he encompasses so much of what I want out of a book: intelligence, humor, emotion, knowledge, and, best of all, formal inventiveness. His books even maintain a kind of formal/thematic progression through time. The voracious reader can follow his progression from one book to the next as he refines his style. Starting out as an interesting high modernist (Faulkner and Joyce) with his Going Down (1970) he has become a wholly original author of books that are small pieces of brilliance. Vanishing Point in this regard is like a summing up.

Early on the book describes itself as: "Non-linear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage... A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel". The premise is that of "Author" organizing his notecards in preparation to write. The majority of the book consists of a collage of biographical and historical facts, mostly about artists, writers, musicians, and philosophers, though occasionally other figures make appearances. Within this collage "Author" makes the occasional appearance. It seems like a rather banal factbook, but these collaged facts are mostly small tragedies and the weight of their build-up along with "Authors" story leads to a very powerfully emotional ending. The parts interact with each other, sometimes explicitly, sometimes in ways that after a few readings I am still trying to figure out.

Here's a small passage from the book:

"Mr. Eliot's work is no doubt brilliant, but it is not exactly the kind of material we care to add to our list.

Said the British publisher John Lane of a submission--after Eliot had published Prufrock

The publisher did not care to add brilliant material to his list."

For more on Markson see my site page on him.

For a brief look at Vanishing Point, you can view some of it at Google Print (Hint: try searching for a name in the book, then you can see a few pages of the text.)