Birth of a Book from Glen Milner on Vimeo.

A short vignette of a book being created using traditional printing methods.

For the Daily Telegraph. Shot at Smith-Settle Printers, Leeds, England. The book being printed is Suzanne St Albans’ ‘Mango and Mimosa’ published as part of the Slightly Foxed series.

Shot, Directed & Edited by Glen Milner

Back home, heard from James Peltz at SUNY Press. He liked the manuscript! Enough to publish it! But SUNY, like everyone, was feeling the financial collapse, and he couldn’t commit. Corresponded like frustrated lovers for the better part of two years, he a perfect gentleman, saying he wanted to publish the book, but still couldn’t give me a contract, and advising I send it elsewhere in the meantime.

Which I did. But it came back, again. And again. And again!

2010, Denver. Still no contract from SUNY, too despondent to attend AWP. Considered going into another field. Stopped writing altogether, knowing, with certainty, this book was dead in the water.

I CONSIDERED OTHER PROFESSIONS

2011, Washington DC. Infused my seriously anemic self-esteem with the encouragement of my friends and went to DC. Trolled the bookfair again, an exercise even more depressing this time, with all those publishers there who’d already turned me down. Process therefore quicker.

SEARCH FOR A PUBLISHER SOMEWHAT DELAYED BY DESPAIR

Last day of the bookfair, made one last slog to the tables in the further reaches of the basement. And saw it: SUNY Press. Looked down at the carpet. I wouldn’t embarrass nice James Peltz and myself by saying hello, making him tell me again that he loved my book but couldn’t publish it. Couldn’t help but glance furtively at the SUNY table, a little like looking to see your ex kissing his new girlfriend. James Peltz looked up at just that moment. “Sarah!” he said, happily, not in the voice of an editor ducking an author.

“Hi,” I said, as casually as I could.

“We just found out yesterday,” he said. “We can publish your book! The money has been approved!”

CUE THE DISNEY BIRDS. CUE THE HARPS. CUE MY FRIENDS BUYING ME DRINKS IN THE BAR.

2012, Chicago. With a pub date of April, press rushed to get the book ready for AWP, sent my first ten copies directly to the hotel. The text messages flew among my friends, and one by one they showed up to meet me at the hotel mailroom.

There was a problem finding the box. My books were missing! It would never happen!

And then, there it was, carried down the hall by one Mr. Preachly, the hotel mail room clerk, who ceremoniously opened the box, and then I was holding it in my hands: Grand Isle, a novel.

• More by Sarah Van Arsdale—including the prequel to this story from AWP 2009:
  

  “The book fair at AWP didn’t only encourage me in my own small endeavors; it made me believe that exciting, carefully crafted work will be brought to appreciative readers, no matter how far the mainstream publishers fall.”

• What do do when you feel like scrapping your novel
• Visit Sarah’s author blog at http://sarahvanarsdale.blogspot.com

Anyway. Thanks to his underdog-made-good story, Jeremy Lin has thoroughly saturated pop culture—everything from serious discussions of immigration to discount airfares. And now, Linsanity has entered the literary world. In the fortnight since Lin shot to fame, multiple authors have penned ebooks about him for the Kindle. Reports Fast Company:

Several of the e-books repurpose publicly available biographical information on Lin or interviews conducted before he hit the big time. Lin didn’t sit for For Linsanity: The Improbable Rise of Jeremy Lin by ESPN: The Magazine contributor Alan Goldsher. But that didn’t stop Goldsher from writing a 15,000-word manuscript in 72 hours.

Goldsher goes on to detail the fast turnaround—and I mean fast—as well as why he wanted to write the ebook:

Hold onto your hats, kids: 72 hours to write a 15,000-plus-word manuscript, 36 hours for the fine folks at Vook to build the e-book, and then another 24 hours for them to arrange the distribution. So from conception to availability, we’re talking just under a week. [...]

As a novelist and avid fiction reader, I have a healthy appreciation for a good story, and by story, I mean something with a beginning, middle, and end, and character development, and conflict, and obstacles to be overcome. Jeremy’s path to the NBA has all that, and then some.

Stop and think about that. 72 hours of writing, plus two and a half days until the book is in print. Much of all of the Lin ebooks were based on publicly available knowledge, but… still.

Could this kind of instant-publishing model *ever* be feasible for fiction writing? And the $20,000 question: what’s the tradeoff in quality?

It won’t surprise regular readers of this site, which routinely suggests buying from independent bookstores and which links to Powell’s most often, rather than Amazon (though we get no kickback from Powell’s, we just like them), to learn that I agree more with Russo than with Manjoo. But I found them both ranty, and therefore not the most useful frame for this debate, not only because they’re not really listening to or considering this situation–they’re just responding–but also because they pose the choice as an either/or. Either never buy from Amazon because if you do you’re a heartless capitalist who is destroying “real-life” literary culture, or always buy from Amazon because it’s more “efficient” and authors need lots of people to buy lots of books. Both positions seem really out of touch.

What is “real-life” literary culture? Digital life is real life for lots of people, in lots of meaningful and important ways. There is no bookstore, independent or otherwise, in my neighborhood, or anywhere close to it. This is true for the vast majority of Americans. I engage, instead, in the literary culture found on this site, and on Goodreads, and countless other online venues. Russo also doesn’t consider the enormous boost that good Amazon reviews can give a first-time author. In his piece he asks people like Ann Patchett and Anita Shreve for their opinions on Amazon, and they are dutifully castigating. But Anita Shreve doesn’t have to worry about how her next book is going to sell, on Amazon or otherwise–she’s going to do just fine. I’d much rather hear from emerging writers, people for whom Amazon pre-orders dictate print runs. Their relationship with this dilemma must be much more complex.

Meanwhile, Manjoo’s argument that small bookstores are “inefficient” is as reductive as it is insulting. Buying a book is an act of intellectual and often emotional engagement that cannot be measured merely by the book’s purchase price. To point out, as he does with complete and completely annoying arrogance, that one can buy two books for the price of one on Amazon misses all of Russo’s points, and is unapologetically (and therefore very stupidly) a purely capitalist argument. Haven’t we learned where pure capitalism gets us? He also writes, “Amazon suggests books based on others you’ve read; your local store recommends what the employees like. If you don’t choose your movies based on what the guy at the box office recommends, why would you choose your books that way?” This is, to borrow Manjoo’s opening, totally boneheaded. Why wouldn’t you choose a movie based on what the guy at the box office recommends? He’s probably seen a thousand more movies than you, and he wants you to come back to his movie theater–he’s not going to recommend Saw XV when he knows you came in for tickets to Paris Je T’Aime the week before.

I could go on and counter lots of points made by both authors (and almost all of Manjoo’s, some of which are truly absurd–Amazon’s recommendations are often shitty; I have never had a “frustrating” experience shopping in an independent bookstore) but instead what I want to say is this: let’s all buy lots of books from lots of different retailers. Independent bookstores have their issues–I can’t always afford to shop at them, for one, though I do my best–and Amazon isn’t the devil incarnate, or rather, not incarnate. Their recent promotional move, because it’s occasioned such a backlash, and because it’s a slimy thing to do generally, certainly seems boneheaded, but they’ve also done a lot of good for book sales. Book sales, however, are not the bottom line. There is no bottom line here, and that’s what writers of complex fiction and poetry ought to recognize, and be talking about. Because continuing to have that conversation, which is more than a rant, is the only way we’re only going to save independent bookstores AND make books available to the masses as well.

(I’ve illustrated this post with four recent titles by emerging writers we’ve recently reviewed. The covers are linked to four different retailers, including Amazon. ‘Tis the season. Go forth, savvy book-buyers, and enjoy.)

The traditional model of publishing–for books, at least–has become a large(ish) upfront advance, followed by royalties: a small percent of the book’s sale, once the book has earned enough to pay off the advance. Here’s a counteroffer: as an author, would you trade a larger advance for a smaller payment upfront PLUS a bigger slice of the proceeds?

That’s the new model of payment companies like Byliner and The Atavist are trying out. Reports The New York Observer:

Like most magazines, The Atavist pays a fee up front when a story arrives in decent shape. Mr. Dobbs called The Atavist’s fee “modest” when compared to the top-tier magazines. “It’s less than you would get either by word rate or total fee rate – unless you’re Michael Lewis,” he said. The big difference is that when the issue comes out, the writer gets roughly half the revenue the story generates. Which means a runaway hit by a mid-level writer, or even a run-of-the-mill piece by a marquee author, has the potential to rack up thousands, or in an extreme case, hundreds of thousands, in revenue for both the publication and the author.

“We give basically an even split with our authors,” said Evan Ratliff, co-founder and editor at The Atavist. “It’s not always that but give or take it’s usually around 50 percent.” Writers take on greater risk if the story fails, but also reap greater awards if it succeeds.

And many of those pieces have been succeeding. The Columbia Journalism Review notes:

While Kindle is strict about disclosing sales figures or letting publishers like Byliner disclose figures, plenty of Singles have been doing well. The Krakauer Single—a best-seller for all of Amazon, digital and print, was downloaded for free seventy thousand times in the seventy-two hours after it was first released, before Kindle started charging for downloads, and Bryant says they sold a number comparable to that immediately thereafter. Sarah Gelman, an Amazon spokeswoman, says seven Kindle Singles titles—including Krakauer’s— have broken into the top twenty bestselling titles in the Kindle store, which includes all Kindle books. Twenty-one of the seventy-five Kindle Singles published so far have been in the top one hundred Kindle best-sellers.

So far, this model has been applied mostly to long-form nonfiction pieces. Could this model work for novels or short story collections? Would you make the smaller-advance/larger-royalty tradeoff, and why (or why not)?

Further Reading:

• The problem with Audrey Niffenegger’s $5 million advance for Her Fearful Symmetry
• How do writers typically get paid? Here’s one breakdown.
• Author Lynn Viehl analyzes her royalty statement for her New York Times bestseller–and comes to a sobering conclusion.
]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/a-new-model-for-advances/feed 0 http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/the-end-of-borders-a-daily-show-perspective http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/the-end-of-borders-a-daily-show-perspective#comments Mon, 29 Aug 2011 13:00:54 +0000 Celeste Ng http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=25674 I admit it: when current events become a bit too much to handle, I turn to the Daily Show for some much-needed comedic perspective. Usually it’s politics that’s making me tear my hear out, but here’s Jon Stewart and John Hodgman (a fiction writer himself) finding the humor in the Borders closing.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Borders Goes Out of Business
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

Happy Monday. As John Hodgman would put it, “You’re welcome.”

---

Further Reading:
• Does the end of Borders mean the bookselling industry is dying? FWR contributing editor Joshua Bodwell offers a different perspective.
• MobyLives suggests the real take-home message of the Borders story isn’t what everyone thinks it is.
]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/the-end-of-borders-a-daily-show-perspective/feed 0 http://fictionwritersreview.com/interviews/a-more-interesting-period-of-time-an-interview-with-donald-lystra http://fictionwritersreview.com/interviews/a-more-interesting-period-of-time-an-interview-with-donald-lystra#comments Mon, 22 Aug 2011 13:00:02 +0000 Danielle LaVaque-Manty http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=24807 Season of Water and Ice after retiring from a career as an engineer, talks about making the transition from engineering to writing, publishing with a small press, winning a Midwest Book Award, and what people get wrong about the 1950s.]]>

Image courtesy author's website

For Donald Lystra, the nineteen-fifties wasn’t all Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver. Instead, it was an era of bubbling change, depicted poignantly in his novel, Season of Water and Ice, through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old boy named Danny. The year is 1957. Danny’s father has given up a good job with General Motors to become a salesman and moved his family from Grand Rapids to a cabin by a lake in northern Michigan. Danny’s mother, accustomed to a more comfortable lifestyle, has returned to her parents’ home in the suburbs of Chicago because, she tells Danny, “The country’s a wonderful place for men and boys but it’s not a place for a woman.” Danny strikes up a friendship with his seventeen-year-old neighbor Amber, who is pregnant, unmarried, and facing difficult choices. As Danny tries to understand the relationship between his parents and attempts to intervene in Amber’s relationship with her abusive boyfriend, he learns how different love can be from the what standard fifties images have lead him to expect.

Like his protagonist, Donald Lystra grew up in Michigan in the fifties, and he rejects oversimplified portrayals of a decade he experienced as rich in complication. Season of Water and Ice, Lystra’s first novel, offers a wonderfully character-driven corrective. The book won a 2009 Midwest Book Award for fiction and was named a Michigan Notable Book by the Library of Michigan in 2010. While writing it, Lystra received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the MacDowell Colony. His short fiction has appeared in many literary journals, including Other Voices, The North American Review, Passages North, and The Greensboro Review. A story called “Family Way,” which eventually grew into Season of Water and Ice, appeared in Cimarron Review in 2006, and an excerpt from the novel appeared in Natural Bridge in 2009.

This interview was conducted in August, 2010.

Danielle Lavaque-Manty: You had a career as an engineer before you started writing. Had you always wanted to write?

Donald Lystra: Yes, I did. Or at least for a long, long time I did. As you say, I became an engineer in my workaday life, and I enjoyed it. I had some successful projects over my career. But I always had the idea—like many other people—that some time I would like to try my hand at writing. And I carried that idea around in the back of my mind for a long, long time.

Then, about the mid-nineties, there were some things that opened up some time for me. My kids were off to college right about then for one thing, so I had fewer family demands. I started scribbling, and just doing things on my own. I would give myself an assignment to describe something, trying to find the best words to do it, and then I would look at it the next day and critique it. Or I would try to write a vivid sentence, and then I would look at it a day or two later and compare it to sentences that I saw in books by authors I really admired, trying to find out why mine wasn’t as good as theirs. I did that for two or three years, that sort of self-education. And I wrote some stories that I sort of liked. But I didn’t think they were perfect by any means.

Then, in 1997, I saw a flyer on [The University of Michigan] campus by someone who was conducting a writing workshop—not under the auspices of the university, but as a separate thing he was doing on his own.

Who was that writer?

His name was Josh Henkin. He’d graduated from the Michigan MFA program, and he’s since published two novels [Swimming Across the Hudson (1997) and Matrimony (2007)]. A wonderful writing teacher, just a brilliant writing teacher in terms of the insights he was able to give me about what a story is, and how to control a story to create an effect of some kind.

The other good thing about that was it brought me in contact with other people who were aspiring writers, some of them very good. So I began to have a network of people. In fact, after Josh finally left town—I took two or three workshops from him over a period of a year and a half—a group of his students got together and had our own irregular workshop every week or two. Three of the five have gone on to publish books, and two of them have gone on to their own academic careers in writing: Valerie Laken is in Milwaukee, [teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee], and the other one, Nick Arvin, is out in Denver, [teaching at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop]. They were all much younger than me. That was part of the fun of it too, frankly—to get together with people who are much, much younger than you, and to have them take what you’re doing seriously, to sort of span years that way.

Are you still in touch with any of them?

They’re not in Ann Arbor anymore, but we email and we go to each other for advice. It’s very hard to write in a totally solitary way, I found out. When I started out I was thinking, “Well, it’s a solitary pursuit, and you ought to be able to figure it out all on your own.” That’s somewhat true, but it’s certainly not entirely true. You need to have a certain amount of instruction, and getting feedback from other people is an immense help. So it went from being a solitary pursuit to a slightly more social activity.

The book itself started with a short story.

It did. As I said, I’d written a bunch of short stories, and some of them had been published. Then I got to where I thought, “Well, okay, I want to try a longer project.” I tried to think of what that would be, what would be a big enough subject or theme to warrant two or three hundred pages of treatment. I worked on a project for several months, and it wasn’t going very well and I got frustrated and I said, “Let’s go back to the basics here. Let me go back and look at the short stories I’ve written and see if in one of them maybe there’s a germ of an idea that can be expanded.”

I found one short story in particular that I thought might work. It was a story I had published in the Cimarron Review. I liked the characters I had created, and I liked the situation that I had created. The other thing about it, when I looked at it again—it was a short story that ended with a lot of loose ends still unresolved. There was one thread that ran through it and came to a conclusion, you might say, to make it a short story, but there were a lot of other issues that were not concluded. I thought, “Let’s see what would happen if I tried to move these characters forward through time.”

I already had fifteen pages of text, which was very encouraging—to have a running start that way. And I already had a pretty good grasp of who the characters were, and the setting, and the situation. The first draft went pretty fast. It was a rough first draft, but I think I finished it in only about three months. Then I went back and I spent another four months revising it before I got it to the point where I wanted to show it to anybody—to an agent who would want to represent it.

That is fast.

I keep trying to find that groove again. I think part of the problem of knowing more about writing—maybe even part of the problem of having published a book—is that you always know too much, and you are too quick to critique what you do when you sit down to write, and that inhibits the process. I want to go back to that innocent state that I had when I started that last project, when I had no particular expectations, just doing it more or less for the fun of it. I think that’s the best frame of mind to do it in.

Place is really important in this novel—the northern Michigan setting—and one thing I was wondering about is the move from the city to the really small town. How important do you think the past in the big city is to the rest of the novel? It opens after they’ve moved, but we do hear about the move.

When I was growing up, my family moved several times. We moved to different sorts of places—cites, suburbs, the country, small towns. I wanted the story to unfold in a relatively isolated place, creating that kind of crucible where things were going to happen removed from society or many other people. The idea of a family moving was an easy way to implement that. The young boy, the narrator, is new to the area, so he’s socially isolated. He hasn’t been there long enough to make friends. He’s physically isolated, too, because of the decision his father made of locating them out in the country on the shore of a lake, which he thought would be a good place to be, but turns out not to be so great, at least after the seasons begin to turn.



One thing that really struck me when I was reading your book—and this might be more about my own preoccupations than your intentions—was the gender constraints that the characters operate under. So I was wondering if you were thinking about that as you were writing. Not in the sense that you meant it as a social critique, but were you thinking about gender issues consciously?

I was, yes, I was. Particularly for the women characters in the book. And I’ve thought of this too with respect to my own family and my own mother. My mother was a typical post-war housewife. She didn’t have any kind of a career at any point in her life. She raised a family of four children. But as I grew up and began to understand her a little bit as a person, other than just as my mother, I can see where she—well, she’s passed away now, she’s been dead for fifteen years—I could see where she was an intelligent woman who had some very definite talents. She always said that if she’d had the chance, she would have loved to have gone into architecture. She had an artistic sense combined with a practical builder’s sense, you might say, that drew her that way. And I thought about a woman like that being constrained in this very tight role that was prescribed for many women back then, and how difficult that probably was.

The male characters, too, operated within a pretty narrowly prescribed role—the sense of being the breadwinner and having to shoulder that responsibility. That comes into play a little bit in this book because the father is pretty much failing at this new career that he’s taken for himself, and he feels the weight of that pretty heavily.

I think the relationship between Danny and Amber is really interesting, too, because he’s younger, and yet sometimes there’s this burden of wanting to be the protector, which he’s not really in a position to do.

That relationship turns a lot of things on their heads, in a way. She’s older than he is, more experienced in the world, and certainly more sexually experienced. Yet he, coming from the city, knows things she doesn’t know and sees into certain situations more deeply than she does. Maybe that’s why I liked that relationship; it did confound a lot of the stereotypes about boy meets girl. And because it was different, you couldn’t assume anything—you had to work through the issues one by one, based on this rather unusual situation.



And you’re right, as a boy he does feel this sense of responsibility. It goes towards Amber, and even towards his father. There are a couple of instances where his father shows weakness, so to speak, and Danny feels a sense of responsibility to help him out, to give him a little support, even if it’s just for a moment. So he’s being indoctrinated, you might say, into this sense of responsibility that boys were expected to assume when they grew up and became men. I think that is the reason that a lot of that is in there, that he’s aware of this burden that’s waiting out there for him to assume, and he’s not altogether comfortable about taking it on.

Before the book had found a home—when you had an agent but not yet a publisher—you were encouraged to revise the book to make it a young adult novel, which you resisted. I’m wondering how you thought about your audience when you were writing Season of Water and Ice.

When I was writing, I didn’t really think of an audience. But I guess I thought I was writing for an adult audience. I might not even have known there was such a thing as a young adult category of fiction, at that time. But when I found an agent, he was curious about considering it as a young adult novel because, I’ve since learned, this is a category of fiction that’s quite active and quite profitable.

So in the first round of submissions he sent it out to six editors who were adult fiction editors and six who were young adult editors. None of the six adult editors were willing to take it. They liked the book, many of them, and some of them seemed to like it quite a lot, but it just didn’t fit into their lineup of books or something. But a couple of the young adult editors indicated that they would take it if it was revised and made more clearly a young adult book, which would have required, oh, simplifying some of the language, and trying to make it more of an in-the-moment narrative style. The way I had written it the first time, there was quite a lot of reflection and thoughtfulness on the part of the character. Maybe to a fault. That can be tedious to a reader even in an adult book, but I guess it’s not appropriate for a young adult book, at least not to the degree that I was doing it. So they wanted that taken out, or greatly simplified.

And I tried to do it. I remember spending a good month because I wanted to sell the book. I was a little disappointed that my agent now was talking more about trying to sell it as a young adult book, but I figured, well, that’s all right, I’ll write other books. So I spent a month trying to make the changes, and at some point I just didn’t like the changes I was making, or the way it was turning out. I remember writing my agent an email and probably spending two or three days composing it, because I thought it was probably going to be the end of our relationship. I basically told him that I’d thought about it and I’d concluded that I didn’t want to do it. I gave him the reasons why, and tried to make as good a case as I could. Somewhat to my surprise, he said, “Well, that’s all right. We’ll go ahead and see if we can sell it as an adult work.” We made some changes to it still before we sent it out the second time, but they weren’t for the purpose of turning it into a young adult book.

I’m glad you didn’t lose the richness of Danny’s thoughts. I think that’s one of the real strengths of the book.

I’m glad, too. I was at the McDowell Colony a year and a half ago or so, and one of the other colonists there was a fellow in his thirties or forties, who I think graduated from the MFA program at Iowa. He’d written a novel and had gone through the same experience I had, where the agent, when he looked at it, thought it should be a young adult novel. And he actually did go through and make the changes, and they sold the book as a young adult novel. After he told me the story, I said, “Well, how did you feel about that?” And he looked at me and said, “I felt terrible.” Which is a heartbreaking thing to hear. This person has gone on to publish another book that has had quite a bit of critical success, so his career wasn’t over, and it wasn’t a blow that he wasn’t able to recover from, but that particular experience left a bitter taste in his mouth.

Am I remembering right that when Switchgrass took it, yours was one of the first works of fiction they’d published?

Yes.  Northern Illinois University Press, which is the main press, is a scholarly publisher. They got a new director two or three years ago who had the idea of starting a fiction imprint and having it focus on Midwest themes and writers. The first two books they published in 2009 under the Switchgrass imprint were mine and another novel called Beautiful Piece.

What has it been like working with Switchgrass?

The editorial process was good, in the sense that they gave a lot of suggestions but let me have the final word in each and every case. And some of the things we had fairly sharp differences about. I don’t know if a larger publisher would have done that or not. They might have insisted on calling more of the shots.

The thing about a small press, or a university press—and you know this going into it—is that they don’t have the marketing resources that the New York publishers have. And yet, you sort of wish you could be sent on a round-the-country tour, or have ads taken in different places. But I can’t really fault them. With the constraints they had, they did a good job, and the book is finding its way to an audience.

One thing that is very good about a university press, or small presses in general, I think, is that they do stick with a book. Mine has not had great sales, but it has been steady, and it has been steadily increasing. In fact, just a few days ago, I was talking to the publisher and found out that they’re going to do a second printing. I mean, we’re not talking about huge numbers here, you understand, but still, it’s a nice milestone.

What have they been able to do, publicity-wise?



They introduced the book at a bookseller’s conference, The Midwest Independent Booksellers Association. They had me set up to do a signing, which was kind of ridiculous, I thought, because nobody knew me or the book at that point. But still, quite a few booksellers came by and got to know about the novel. And they sent around press releases, and a certain amount of publicity to newspapers and magazines, mostly in the Midwest. The idea was that it would get a foothold in the Midwest and maybe spread farther, but the first emphasis was in the Midwest.

And I threw myself into the marketing to some extent. I found out that that’s not uncommon even for authors who are published by New York houses. The expectation now is that authors will do things to promote their books with their own time and their own resources. Which is kind of crazy, I think, because their time ought to be better spent writing another book. But that’s starting to be the norm. You know, they want an author to have a web site, and if they can have a blog that’s even better. I don’t have a blog. I drew the line there. But I did put together a web site last summer.

Probably the best thing we did, though—and this was a joint decision—is that we submitted the book for award competitions. One was in the state of Michigan, what they call the Michigan Notable Books program, something the Library of Michigan has been doing for twenty or twenty-five years. They designate twenty books as being “notable books” from the standpoint of Michigan and Michigan history. Season of Water and Ice was selected, which was a nice accolade. A few months later we submitted for another program, which was the Midwest Book Awards, a program run by an organization of independent publishers in the Midwest. Season of Water and Ice was selected as the winner in the general fiction category, which was another nice round of publicity and attention.

What has the experience of having the book come out been like? You said it hasn’t been exactly energizing for your current work.

It’s the accomplishment of a long-term goal, and all the satisfaction that comes out of that. It is different in some ways than you expect. And I’ve talked to other writers, other first-time authors, and there’s a degree of anxiety you experience, particularly in the early days, because all of a sudden this thing that has been so private is out there in the big wide world, and anybody who wants to can pick it up and read it. Or, if they don’t want to, they don’t have to pick it up and read it. And if they do read it they’re free to like it or not like it, or think it’s stupid, or find some glaring error that you’ve overlooked. That was the initial fear, in spite of the fact that I’ve been very careful in writing it myself, and have gotten feedback from other writers, as well as the editor who I worked with. Yet I had this gnawing fear that took a while to go away that there was just something terribly wrong with it that had not yet been discovered. It’s crazy, it’s kind of irrational, I guess, because the book had been carefully handled by me and by other readers and by the publisher. But that went away after a month or two, that anxiety.

I think the reason I haven’t been productive with new writing is because of what we were talking about a few minutes ago. I did get caught up in the marketing of it. It’s surprising. It didn’t seem like it was a great effort, but it did seem like every day there were a few emails I had to send out or answer, or I was coordinating going to some event maybe, or maybe just thinking about what I could do to help my book along, what I could do that I hadn’t thought of yet. And all of that ate into my day, and maybe ate into my energy, to the point where I didn’t really have a lot left over to work on new writing.

So you’ve been going to all these readings and having all these people ask you so many questions. Is there a question you wish they would ask you that they haven’t yet?

I don’t know that there is. People ask you all sorts of things: How you work, what time of day you write, whether you use a notepad or a computer, where your ideas come from. At Nicola’s Books, the owner told me ahead of time that there are two things people always want to know about a writer. One is, “Where did you get the idea for this book?” And the other is, “How do you write?” Which are kind of the two extremes. A lot of people want to know whether it’s an autobiographical novel, and it’s not. But there are parts of it that I’ve drawn from things that I know, obviously. I had the experience when I was growing up of living in a lakeside cottage during the fall and winter. I remember that it turns into a fairly forbidding place as the season turns and all the cottagers go home for their winter months. Most of those places are summer-only communities. So that idea probably came out of that experience I had when I was young.



I don’t know. No one has ever asked me, I guess, “What did you think you were going to accomplish?” Or, “What do you want to have accomplished with this book?” And I’m not sure I can answer that. I mean, in the larger sense, why write a book, why put it out there, what do you think is going to happen as a result of it? You hope that people who connect with it will take away some insights they might not otherwise have had. Does an author want them to be better people after they’ve read his or her book? I guess maybe one thing I did hope—this is more mundane than that, and I’ve said this several times already whether I’ve been asked it or not—I did think that the period of the nineteen-fifties has kind of been relegated to a notch, a little place in history, and as someone who lived through it, I saw it as a more interesting period of time. It led to all the things that came ten years later—the big societal changes that broke things apart in the late sixties. The origins of all the things that were going to happen later were starting in the fifties. The conflicts, and the confusions, and the cross currents that people were caught in and trying to work their way through, I think, started in the fifties and people started to try to deal with them then. So I guess one thing—though maybe I thought this afterwards—I was hoping that people would think it was a more interesting time than what you see on Leave it to Beaver or Father Knows Best. That there were families that were caught in difficult situations that they didn’t quite know how to deal with and feeling pressures that were new to them.

I suppose everybody hopes they grew up in a time that was interesting, or significant, but whenever I hear somebody refer to the fifties disdainfully, it makes me react, because I was there and I thought it was more complicated than that.

Is there anything else you want to say?

Gosh, I don’t know. We covered the ground pretty well. You know, one thing we talked about early on—and it’s true—is that transition I made from being a solitary writer to being a more sociable writer, which was an important step. It’s hard to say how much I appreciate that and do it justice—the little things you get, and big things, insights into what you’ve done. I have a sense of gratitude to all the people I’ve worked with.

---

Further Links and Resources:
• Visit Don’s website for more on his work
• Learn more about Switchgrass Books
• Read Lydia Fitzpatrick and Kate Levin’s FWR interview with Donald Ray Pollock, another author who began writing later in life, as a second career
• Read Valerie Laken’s essay, “The Magical, Dreadful First Hundred Pages,” right here on FWR
]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/interviews/a-more-interesting-period-of-time-an-interview-with-donald-lystra/feed 2 http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/columbia-publishing-course-takes-on-digital-publishing http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/columbia-publishing-course-takes-on-digital-publishing#comments Wed, 03 Aug 2011 13:00:48 +0000 The FWR Interns http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=24894 We’re delighted to present another post by our awesome FWR editorial intern, Nicole Aber.  Enjoy!



Going into the publishing industry now requires a whole new skill set from the days when American classics like East of Eden and The Great Gatsby were released in the early and mid-twentieth century. Now, those interested in the publishing field are faced not only with print media, but also questions of how to keep publishing in pace with the ever-increasing digital world — questions of the utmost importance for those enrolled in a course all about publishing.

Students attending the Columbia Publishing Course this summer are tasked with answering these queries during their six-week graduate program before they’re thrown into the rapidly changing field. For the first time, the course is focusing on electronic publishing. Explains the New York Times:

So the summer session began with a focus on “The Digital Future.” Students were schooled in “Reinventing the Reading Experience: From Print to Digital” by Nicholas Callaway, the chairman of a company that produces book apps for children. Managers from Penguin Group USA explained how to master “e-marketing,” and a panel of digital experts talked about short-form electronic publishing — not quite a magazine article, not quite a book — which is so new, the genre doesn’t really have a name.

According to the article, over the last year, electronic sales outpaced print sales in some books’ first week of release. But despite print mediums’ apparent disappearing act, the Columbia Publishing Course isn’t going away anytime soon. From the New York Times again:

Lindy Hess, the director of the course for 24 years, said she designed it to evolve with the business. “The industry has changed,” Ms. Hess said. “My philosophy is for the course to reflect the industry as it is, so students graduate and they know exactly what’s happening. Students have to learn all the old stuff and get a grasp on the digital world.”

The shift to digital publishing is apparently not scaring off the students either. Instead, they’re incorporating these new dimensions into their course projects, which include conceiving ideas for their own publishing companies. As she reviewed one group’s project, Sarah Crichton, of Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s Sarah Crichton Books, praised the students’ work:

“This is extremely impressive,” Ms. Crichton said, peering around the table. “You’re grappling with a lot of the same things we’re grappling with, which is the impact of e-books. You’re taking it into account and thinking about it, and that’s very impressive and difficult. It’s something that we wrestle with on an hourly basis.”

So perhaps these up-and-coming publishers have what it takes to transform the publishing industry so that it continues to thrive in the digital age. What do you think of the Columbia Publishing Course’s changing model? Do you think it has the potential to shape the future of publishing in a positive way? Or is it just another telling sign that the printed form is on its way out?

---

Further reading:
• Don’t miss Michael Rudin’s fantastic essay “The Age of Binary Bookmaking.”
• Here on the FWR blog, check out the possible future of e-reading, how one reader learned to love her Kindle, how ebook and print books might co-exist, and much more on digital publishing and e-readers.
• Does all this talk of THE FUTURE have you craving some nostalgia? Take a deep breath and watch this video on how a book was made in 1947.
]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/columbia-publishing-course-takes-on-digital-publishing/feed 0 http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/readings-as-patronage-events http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/readings-as-patronage-events#comments Wed, 27 Jul 2011 13:00:02 +0000 Celeste Ng http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=24034

Should author readings be free?

That’s what the New York Times wondered recently in a story about indie bookstores that charge admission for author events.

Bookstores, including some of the most prominent around the country, have begun selling tickets or requiring a book purchase of customers who attend author readings and signings, a practice once considered unthinkable.

“There’s no one right now who’s not considering it,” said Sarah McNally, the owner of McNally Jackson Books in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan. “The entire independent bookstore model is based on selling books, but that model is changing because so many book sales are going online.”

The Boulder Book Store in Colorado caused a stir in April when it announced it would charge $5 a person to attend store events. In April, Kepler’s Books, an independent in Menlo Park, Calif., began charging customers a $10 gift card, which admits two people to each author appearance. (They also have the option of buying the book in exchange for admission.)

Now, there’s always been a tacit rule—at least among the writer-reader-teacher set I know—that if you attend a book reading, you should buy a copy of the book to support the author. (At the very least, you should NOT do what one woman at a recent reading did: say “I haven’t read your book—I’m sure I’ll get it out of the library at some point, though.”)

But charging admission? Or requiring a book purchase? On the one hand, I see the point: where else, besides a reading, would you expect to go and be entertained and enlightened for free? On the other hand, though, it just seems… crass. Forcing someone to buy a copy of a book feels like an intrusion: if there’s such a thing as Tea-Party literati, I can see them waving “Don’t Tread on Me” flags as we speak. (And yet, demanding payment for a service rendered—in this case, the author’s and bookstore’s time and effort—is capitalism at its best.)

Maybe more people would be willing to pay if authors took this Millions essay about the (lost) art of the literary reading to heart.

What do you think? Are you less (or more) likely to attend a reading if you’ll be forced to pay admission or buy a copy of the book?

]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/readings-as-patronage-events/feed 0