But in the streaming video era, with the publishing industry under relentless threat, the trailer is fast becoming an essential component of online marketing. Asked to draw on often nonexistent acting skills, authors are holding forth for anything from 30 seconds to 6 minutes, frequently to the tune of stock guitar strumming, soulful violin or klezmer music. And now, those who once worried about no one reading their books can worry about no one watching their trailers. (A mother still nursing her 8-year-old: 25,864,943 views; recent best-selling maternal memoirist: 5,124 views.)

The article goes on to examine several ways that book trailers function, from art piece to reassuring the reader that the author is relatively normal to meta-commentary on the nature of book trailers.

Moreover, the article points out that book trailers may play a bigger role in book sales in the future: one recent survey found that only 0.2% of readers discovered their last book through a book trailer, while another found that among teens, nearly 45 percent bought a book after watching the trailer.

All the more reason for authors to overcome their stage fright, perhaps…

But conveying actual information is beside the point. The trailer uses the shorthand of Shteyngart blithely jogging down the street with his dog to lure the reader. Beyond providing a commentary on the very idea of a book trailer, Shteyngart capitalizes on his potential reader’s sensibility to set up a syllogism. If you share a sense of humor with a writer, then you’ll probably like his book. You share a sense of humor with Shteyngart. You’ll probably like his book. It’s an interesting end-run around the usual mode of “now we’re going to tell you what this is about.” It worked on me, I spent time investigating his new book, and now the pub date is seared onto my brain. Does it work for you? Check out the trailer below, and let us know. Also you can find several examples of trailers on the FWR site, including some that play it a bit more straight – Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, par exemple.

Now Mediabistro—an expert if ever there was one—offers a new series of how-to videos, answering just those questions. Their series “I Just Wrote A Book… What Do I Do Now?” gives an overview of the process, including “The Writing and Editing Process,” “Finding an Agent,” and “Social Networking, Promotion, and More.”

Viewing is free, but only for a limited time, so if you’re approaching the end of a book, check them out now.

But the less commercially viable fiction became, the less it seemed to concern itself with its audience, which in turn made it less commercial, until, like a dying star, it seems on the verge of implosion. Indeed, most American writers seem to have forgotten how to write about big issues—as if giving two shits about the world has gotten crushed under the boot sole of postmodernism.

Now, Jay Baron Nicorvo takes on Genoways in Guernica, defending writing programs:

If fiction is indeed faltering, the university system isn’t at fault, nor are the navel-gazing writers who come out of it. [...] What MFA programs do graduate are people who have mastered some of the uses of written English. And while this mastery might not be the most lucrative skill set, I would argue that it is the skill most widely applicable to making an honest living. Words are everywhere. If you can manage them well, chances are there’s a job for you, even in this economy.

The real culprits, Nicorvo argues, are quite different:

[Editors] attempt to herd the mob because they no longer know how to reach the reader. [...] New media is the internet, and publicity and marketing departments have little central control over the flow of information. Amateur reviews of a book on Amazon are as important if not more so than the professional assessments in Publishers Weekly. And so what do editors do? They cling to what’s working, if not working well—blockbusters. The dominant, dysfunctional business model for movies has been adapted for books. [...]

If there’s anything that’s killing American fiction, it’s not MFA degrees and the institutions that bestow them. It is this: the third degree.

Editors at large houses, like investment bankers at big banks, have for some time been acquiring from the third degree. They no longer acquire according to their tastes—they’re lucky if they can even distinguish their tastes from what their bosses and the bottom line demand. Because editors can’t know which books average opinion genuinely thinks are the best, not until said books climb the bestseller lists or make the shortlist for one of the few major awards, editors are left to anticipate anticipations.

Genoways isn’t totally wrong—there is plenty of self-centered fiction out there. But Nicorvo’s right, too: it’s hard for good work to get out there if editors won’t take a risk on it. Writers may need to “stop being so damned dainty and polite” and “treat writing like [their] lifeblood instead of [their] livelihood,” as Genoways puts it. But so do editors.

At least we know the fight over what’s killing fiction is alive and well.

After reviewing The Good Thief for FWR, I continued to think about it a lot. In fact, I decided to teach it in one of my classes at the University of Michigan this winter, partly so I could think about it further. So when Hannah Tinti visited campus this spring, on the tail end of what sounded like a mammoth trip through Europe and back, I jumped at the chance to sit down with her to talk.

From the author’s website: Hannah Tinti grew up in Salem, Massachusetts, and is co-founder and editor-in-chief of One Story magazine. Her short story collection, Animal Crackers, has sold in sixteen countries and was a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway award. Her first novel, The Good Thief, is published by The Dial Press and Headline. The Good Thief is a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, recipient of the American Library Association’s Alex Award and winner of the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize. Hannah also recently won the 2009 PEN/Nora Magid award for her editorial work at One Story.

Interview:

Charlotte Boulay: I’m so happy to meet you because I love The Good Thief so much and I just taught it in a class on writing about visual art.

Hannah Tinti: I have photos of visual art I’m going to use in my talk later.

Oh, great! Well, in this class we talked a lot about all the great descriptions in the book, and how you represent things visually. Were you inspired by visual art?

Work by Lee Bontecou: Image from the artist's Facebook page

When I’m working on something like this—something that has a certain time or place or mood—I have a bulletin board over my desk, and as I come across things that are in that vein, I start tacking them up. I had a couple of photos from The Gangs of New York that I had up for visuals on describing some of the places the characters went; I had photos by Edward Curtis, a photographer who took pictures of native Americans in the 1800s; I had stuff by Lee Bontecou. I love her work.

Oh, I don’t think I know her.

Her stuff is sort of steampunky. She builds out from the canvases and there are these giant weird holes.

Were you thinking of the mousetrap factory?

Work by Lee Bontecou: Image from the artist's Facebook page

For the mousetrap factory I actually had an image from a children’s book. Bontecou does giant mobiles and these kinds of canvases that are almost mechanical looking. She also makes weird giant crazy fish out of plastic. She’s a pioneering female abstract artist. And she’s still alive. I had gone to an exhibit of hers, and then I just became a little obsessed with her dark vision, and her interesting take on something that’s abstract but makes you feel a lot of emotion, particularly when you stand in front of it and it comes out at you. It almost envelops and sucks you in. It’s really cool. So I used photographs of her work, and also Edward Gorey. Then, when I was writing about the dentist, I had this photograph of someone selling teeth on the street—I think in India—and also images of early dentures. I had photographs of early mousetrap patents, and all sorts of weird images to help create that dark, slightly scientific mood.

So even if the particular reference didn’t make it into the novel they all contributed to the ethos?

Yeah, it’s generating a feeling; when you look at them, you think. That’s the kind of feeling I’m trying to capture. I have no idea how to articulate it that well, but something about those images was doing it for me.

Well, perhaps this darkness is connected to my next question. I found most of the characters in the book to be extremely sympathetic—the main characters, that is, not the hat boys. How do you make yourself inflict violence on characters that you care so much about?

I knew from the start that I wanted to have a happy or a somewhat happy ending for Ren. I wanted to end in a positive place, because it was the only way I could drive myself to put him through all of that. I am drawn to that sort of darkness, I think, from growing up in Salem, Massachusetts, and being around that Halloween stuff all the time. That Gothic world is very normal and natural to me. I’ll show some pictures in my talk tonight of graveyards, which were my playground.

Was there a point in your evolution as a writer when you realized that what was natural to you was actually really interesting material for readers?

I think I realized that I always tended a little toward the dark in things. That’s where I started to really find my voice as a writer, and I started to figure that out in grad school at NYU. I took a class with A. M. Homes, and she’s very dark. She made us do a lot of writing exercises, which had never really worked for me. But she pushed us in a lot of different directions and she challenged us to try new things. One exercise I’ll never forget was this time she gave out photographs and asked us to write something from an unusual point of view. For me it was this photograph of a kid holding a giant rabbit. He was in a sort of British, shared backyard with all this laundry, and he had a towel tied around his neck. So I had this idea that I was going to write from the mother’s point of view, and that the kid had been taken away from her by child services, so she was having to defend herself as an abusive mom by telling her side of the story. But she’s telling it without realizing what she’s revealing to this social worker. And I remember when I turned in the story, A. M. Homes wrote, “Oh, my God, this is disgusting,” and I was proud because I had grossed out A. M. Homes.

I also think it was the first time I had captured something. I think for every writer there’s one story where you make a breakthrough, where you move from the mediocre—not quite clicking into place, not knowing what’s pushing a story—into telling something that’s really exciting, or something that people are really going to want to read. That was the first time I’d ever touched that, and for me it was by going to this dark place, and then investigating it, and realizing, Why is this working for me? and Why is this working well for the readers?

And it was the first time in a workshop that people were really excited about what I had read. Every time before that was really dull and terrible. This was the first time people thought, “This is kind of cool.” And so I thought, They are reacting to something; what is it? And I think that’s partly how you find your subject. Then you just keep trying to hit it from different places, and to understand it, because often it has something to do with you inside, and you’re trying to get at that something.

It’s fascinating that you remember the photograph of the boy and the rabbit in such vivid detail.

Oh, yeah, for me it was really a changing moment in writing.

Did you pick the photograph, or did Homes give it to you?

No, she gave it to me.

So that’s a good teacher, too, to pick out something that would maybe resonate with you.

She’s a good teacher. She’s a tough teacher. She was the kind of teacher who didn’t coddle her students, and I got her at just the right time—when I was really ready for someone who wouldn’t let me get away with anything. By contrast, a lot of teachers only talk about the good stuff, or are only encouraging. But she would just say, “You did not do this. This is terrible. You are not accomplishing this POV. You are not accomplishing these characters.”

Do you feel like all writers should be able to, or develop the capacity to, take that kind of criticism?

I think that the ability to take criticism and thoughtfully implement it in your work is key to building your skills as a writer. I see this a lot from the editorial side of One Story. There are certain writers I work with who I try to show how something is not quite tracking or not quite coming across. Then I’ll give examples of how I think they can fix it, and discuss challenges and ways they can work it through. When you’re working as an editor, your relationship with a writer is a companionship, working side by side, versus the teacher telling the student, “Go this way” or “Go that way.” So, I think that there are some writers who are able to take the criticism I give them and make it their own and really turn a story toward a wonderful new direction, and there are some who I really have to handhold and lead every step of the way because they’ll do a rewrite and start taking steps backward instead of moving forward, which is a terrible thing to see as an editor. When I get a new draft of a story and I realize that they’ve just taken two steps back instead of moving the story in the direction it needs to go, then I’m just like, “Oh, God, now we’ve got to start all over again.”

Wow, that’s an enormous amount of work.

It is an enormous amount of work. The writers I see who are light on their feet and able to incorporate changes and really make them their own in this way—it’s magical when that comes together. There’s a story that I worked on with Rob McCarthy called “Stag” that we published about a year ago. Something about the ending was not quite coming together, and we kept talking about it and trying to get at what was going on in this last scene with the father and daughter. And I’ll never forget—when he finally sent me this revision, all he had added were about two sentences. Yet it suddenly made the whole story make sense. That was so exciting for me. We just talked about it; I didn’t tell him what to write. I just said, “There’s something here that’s not quite working. I don’t fully get what you’re trying to say.” And he just isolated it and it was magnificent.

So that makes it worth it.

Oh, yeah.

I get One Story on my Kindle.

Oh, cool.

How did you work out that deal with them, because I don’t know of many other literary journals that you can even get on the Kindle?

Maribeth Batcha, my business partner, pushed that; I didn’t have that much to do with it. Now the next thing is getting on the other platforms like the iPad, which all have their own delivery systems. I know we had to jump through a lot of hoops to get on the Kindle because I don’t think they saw the market for One Story, or the way it would work. But we had a contact somewhere on the high end who helped us actually get our phone calls returned, and we hooked it up. We’ve gotten a lot of new subscribers from Kindle.

It’s interesting to me because it seems in some ways that the One Story format fits the Kindle so well—I don’t know if you see One Story’s format as a response or a pushback to the amount of information we have in our lives otherwise. It’s very nice to sit there and just focus on this one thing, instead of a thousand things at once, but then I’m getting it digitally, which is traditionally a realm of over-information, so there’s a little paradox there…

I don’t read it digitally, but Maribeth does. I think that’s definitely something we were thinking about with One Story, but mainly we were just looking at the mistakes that all these other literary magazines were making, and thinking about how we could come up with a business plan for a magazine that would succeed in these places where they were failing. This is the way literature is going: you have to be leaner, meaner, and smarter. And the small presses, large presses, and literary magazines that are doing this are really finding audiences, whereas the ones that are doing things the old way are losing audiences.

So the organizations that succeed are the ones that aren’t trying to do too much?

Yes. Our thing was that the biggest problem with literary magazines is that they don’t come out frequently, so you forget that you even subscribe to them. I mean, the Kenyon Review is a great magazine, but when I get it, I’ve always forgotten that I actually subscribe to it. Whereas, when you miss a New Yorker, you’re like, “Where’s my New Yorker?” So we went to every three weeks. Originally we wanted to do every two weeks, but it was too much work. Still, when people miss an issue of One Story, they call or email us. Publishing so frequently develops a relationship with your subscribers. Our subscribers are very loyal because they’re constantly getting the magazine and feeling like they’re getting in touch with us, that they have a stake in the magazine. Also, these large journals–which are basically like publishing a book–are very expensive to print and mail and get carried in bookstores. We do subscription only. We only print as many as we’ve sold. We do print on demand.

Another aspect of our model is that we made a rule never to publish an author more than once. So, 135 issues so far and135 different writers. There’s always going to be a fresh voice, and that’s something we’re giving to the subscribers as well. Publishing One Story as we do allows the writer to take the spotlight in a way that they do not in an anthology, which normally someone would buy, flip through, read the writers they know, and skip the ones they don’t. So even though the magazine might have 5,000 subscribers, only 500 of them are actually reading your story. Everybody reads the whole issue of One Story.

The other thing is that the format is light, easy, unintimidating. The envelope is like a little gift in the mail, at a time when most people’s mailboxes are full of bills, not real letters anymore.

To change tack, my students wanted to ask you some questions. We talked a lot about how certain images and symbols in The Good Thief keep circling back; just when you’d forgotten about the wishing stone, for example, it appears again. Caitlin wanted to know at what point during the writing process you thought about which objects would have repeating roles. Did you have that plan before you started, or did that evolve?

I don’t plan or plot; I just sort of go and see what happens. It’s like using a divining rod—I try to find the scene and write it, and whatever I spit out I try to make sense of later. I think the most important thing to do is to trust your subconscious, that it is actually tying things together even though you don’t think it is. For example, the scene where Ren is in the kitchen and the dwarf comes down the chimney—I had no idea what was going on. I just had him filling his hot water bottle, and then I was bored, so I thought, What’s something that could happen right now? What if somebody comes down the chimney? Originally I thought it would be an animal, because I grew up in an old house and that used to happen all the time to us. But I figured a man, perhaps coming to rob them, would be more interesting. Then I thought, A man wouldn’t fit. It would either have to be a child or a dwarf, and I already had a kid in the book, so I made it a dwarf.

So he crawled out, and then what was he going to do? Well, I had him take a bath. I had him eat food. Then I made him go back up the chimney. I didn’t know who he was or why he was there. It took me many, many drafts until I figured out that he was Mrs. Sands’ brother, and that this was paralleling the relationship between McGinty and Margaret—brothers and sisters—and the theme of caring for each other this way.

He was also an example for Ren of a different way to lead your life. Do you withdraw from society the way the dwarf does? Do you cut off your emotions the way Dolly does, and just murder everybody and not care and not connect to people? Do you become an alcoholic like Tom? Do you lie your way through life like Benjamin?  How do you deal with not quite fitting in and not quite being who people think you should be? I didn’t know why he was there, but I knew he was important, and I just trusted that I would figure it out.

The wishing stones came in later because I originally wrote the middle of the book in the first draft, and then I wrote the beginning and the end.  So the very first scene I wrote was when they dig up the bodies and Dolly comes back to life. Right after that, I wrote the scene where Dolly and Ren become friends. Then I thought, Who is this kid, and how did he get here? Next, I wrote the chapter where Benjamin comes to pick Ren up from the school, and the chapter where he meets Tom.

When I showed it to my editor, she said I had to write more about the school and more about the lives of these kids before Benjamin arrives, to get to know the character before taking Ren on this adventure. So I went back in a fleshed out that world. That’s when the wishing stones came in, and they started coming back in different ways. Same thing with the river and the hand. Now I give one wishing stone away at every reading!

Jessica described the book as being almost cinematic. We’ve talked about the images, but she wondered whether you were inspired by any films?

Jean Simmons (young Estella) with Martita Hunt (Miss Havisham) in David Lean's 1946 film adaptation of Great Expectations

I do love movies, and I watch them a lot, but I don’t know if there was any one movie I was thinking of. I definitely visualized the book; I did see things in my head, particularly in the first chapter I wrote. I had a vision of a graveyard scene, and it was almost like a camera shot: a boy holding the reins of a horse, night, big iron fence, grave robbers, what’s the situation? So in terms of movies, I probably drew from the original Great Expectations with Alex Guinness. It’s beautifully done in black and white, and Jean Simmons plays Estella. She was probably only twelve or thirteen, and she was perfect. Another movie I thought about a lot, because it works, is Pirates of the Caribbean. I know that sounds crazy, but I think the reason that movie works so well—the first one, the other ones weren’t so good—is that it is extremely clear what each character wants. Johnny Depp wanted his boat back. Geoffrey Rush wanted to be alive again. Orlando Bloom wanted the girl. The girl wanted adventure. It was so clear. So how did the desires of each of those characters intertwine? I thought that if I could do the same thing, I could really track my characters through the book.

And the last question from my students is: Why are there so few named strong female characters in the book, the exception possibly being Mrs. Sands?

That’s one thing people ask a lot: Why is this a boy’s book? It started that way because of the circumstances. I had this scene in the graveyard, and it made sense to me that the lookout would be a boy in that situation, not a girl. A girl raises so many sexual issues and a lot of other things that I really didn’t want to deal with. I really wanted the book to be an homage to the classic boy’s adventure tales that I read when I was growing up: Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist—the young boy falling in with dangerous characters, having adventures, finding his way in the end. The female characters actually make everything happen in the book. Mrs. Sands provides Ren with what he’s always wanted, which is a home and someone to love him; Sister Agnes provides Ren with what he was missing, which is what happened to him and his origins; and Jenny, the Harelip girl who only gets a name at the very end of the book, kills the bad guy and saves Ren and Benjamin. So even though their roles are smaller, they are actually making everything happen. They are powerful but minimized, and my plan for the next book is to write more of a girl’s book with more female characters, so we’ll see what happens.

Well, I don’t think of it as a boy’s book at all…and not that the larger number of male characters is a fault. I read all those classic novels as a kid and never thought about them being boy’s books.

Neither did I. I think people ask me because I’m female. If I was a male writer, I wouldn’t get asked that question as much. The same thing is true of questions about violence in the book—I think if I was a man people wouldn’t ask about that either

I read a lot of different genres, as many people do, and I read a fair amount of “YA” literature, which I think is a kind of useless category because it encompasses so much stuff, but this novel seems to be solidly placed in the literary fiction genre because it successfully combines aspects of horror, mystery, and adventure. I worry sometimes that fabulous books are getting stuck in genre cracks. Do you think about that at all? Or that sometimes because of a marketing decision by a publisher something gets categorized as “YA” when it very well could be literary fiction if some other publisher had picked it up.

Well, we did wonder whether this book was going to cross over to YA. There was never really a question that it should be published as YA, although my editor brought the galleys down to Random House’s YA area, and she made schools aware of the book. My editor’s feeling was that it would be easier for it to cross from adult to YA than from YA to adult. And it naturally found its way into YA because it won an Alex Award, which is given by the American Library Association for books that are written for adults but can be recommended to younger readers twelve and up. So as soon as that happened, which was right before the paperback came out, it started getting pushed in that direction and I started doing events at many more schools, particularly junior high and high schools. That’s been fun. I knew it would work for that market because I had been doing a lot of book clubs and I did one that was a club of mothers and sons. It was a group of friends who all have sons around the same age, and they’ve been meeting for five or six years. They all read the same book, and then they get together and cook a themed dinner with food from the book. So they got in touch with me.

What was the dinner for The Good Thief?

Oh, it was hilarious. They made the Mother Jones Elixir for Misbehaving Children. It was actually root beer or something. And they had a hilarious graveyard cake with R.I.P. written in icing and stones made of Nilla wafers. It was so much fun, and I called in and they sent me pictures, and the book really did appeal to both the mothers and the sons, and they could talk about it. When I was writing, I was not thinking about the audience. I was just trying to write the book. I knew the kind of book I wanted to write, and that I wanted to do classic, old-fashioned storytelling. I think that’s the best thing you can do. If I’m going to work on something for six years, which is how long it took me to write The Good Thief, I want to write a book that I want to read. And I wanted to read the kind of book that made me fall in love with reading, that made me really excited to read books, that made me want to stay up late at night and not put the book down, and at the same time explore issues that I’m interested in. I did try to give each story an arc that would keep the reader reading.

The book is dedicated to your sisters, and you thank your mother in the acknowledgements. We’re in an age of memoir that bashes family, or maybe I’ve just read several of those kinds of books lately. Did you have a lot of family support while writing this book? Is family support different for fiction writers than for essayists?

I think it depends on the writer. I was lucky that my family valued books. My mother was a librarian at Brookline Public Library in Massachusetts in the 60s. And my mother and father are first generation Americans—their families were immigrants, and they were each the first to go to college in their families, and it mattered a great deal to them that we love books in the same way they did. I don’t think my extended family has read my work; this is not their world. For me, growing up in that kind of environment was invaluable. I was reading above my level at a very young age because there was so much reading in the house. A special night was when we got to bring our books to the table. Instead of some families who watch TV while eating dinner as a special treat, our treat was that we got to read while we ate. That made a difference. My family has been supportive of me, although there were many times when I got the talk: what are you doing with your life? You’re wasting your time. Because it takes so long to make any money from your writing and so many people never do, really. So they definitely sat me down with concern a few times.

What are you reading lately?

I just read Other Rooms, Other Wonders, by Daniyal Mueenuddin. It was really good, particularly the first story, which kind of blew my mind.

Is he someone you knew before? That collection has been getting a lot of attention recently.

Well, it just won the Story Prize, so I was there that night and heard him interviewed. The book had been on my radar, but I hadn’t picked it up. His interview with Larry Dark that night was really interesting. I think the Story Prize is definitely helping to raise the profile of story collections, which is great. I also read a lot of books that haven’t come out yet, for blurbs and things. There’s a great book coming out called The Wake of Forgiveness that’s going to be out this fall from Bruce Machart, who we published in One Story the first or second year we started. He’s been working on this novel for a long time, and it’s a sort of epic: a sons and fathers in 1890s Texas story about horse wrangling. It’s awesome. I read so much for One Story—we have a great story coming out by a guy named Cheston Knapp. Is the first story he’s ever published, and it’s called “A Minor Momentousness in the History of Love.” It’s about an actual tennis match from Wimbeldon in 2001 between Sampras and Federer, but the story is really about the ball boys and girls and the weird love triangle going on during that very famous match. We’re really excited for that to come out in our next issue.

My last question is about the end of The Good Thief. And maybe I won’t spoil the ending for people by quoting the final line in the interview—

I always read the end of books before I read the beginnings, so I don’t care.

I think it’s just one of the most beautiful last paragraphs. I’ve thought a lot about the ending, and especially the last sentence. Teaching it was a bit hard; I’m a poet and I teach a lot of poetry in this class about visual art, and you can only go so far in explaining what something means before you ruin it. But my question is: how did you know that the final word needed to be repeated four times, not two or three or five?

I think this again goes back to writing with intuition and gut versus the technical place, which you hopefully go to later when you’re editing. Writing that last chapter I tried to go to that intuitive place. Figuring out how to end the book was hard. Originally I ended on the image of the Harelip’s shawl draped over the grave, and the idea of the grave and the person who was dead and forgotten, with the shawl giving it some connection to life again. There was the idea that this grave was chosen. I was trying to get at something there yet I wasn’t, and I realized it was because the moment was too far away from Ren. I had to go to where he was. Ren had been through these events and had these physical and emotional missing parts of himself. And even though he had found the physical part and had, in many ways, closed the emotional gap by finding a person who loved him, he was never going to be 100%. There was always going to be a part of him that was missing, and missing Benjamin, because Benjamin might reappear, but he might not. There’s no 100% happy ending. Ending in that emotional place felt right when I read it. Repeating the last word four times is better than three times because it just feels right. Normally I have a rule of threes. I give this structure lecture about the magic number three—this is the trinity: a priest, a rabbi, and a minister. When you have something happen, the first time is setting it up, the second time repeats it exactly the same way to create a pattern, and the third time something different happens and you break the pattern. That’s the classic form of writing a short story.  But there are a few stories that use four. “Reunion,” by Cheever, is a very simple one page story where he makes something happen four times and it’s amazing the fourth time it happens. It’s a great teaching story because it’s so short you can read it in class in five minutes and then you can break it apart and teach it. Doing something four times slams it home. You’re taking a risk, but for me it felt right at the end of this book.

Further Links and Reading:

A group of publishing professionals, Do the Write Thing for Nashville, is working to raise money for flood victims by auctioning off signed copies of books, manuscript critiques by agents and editors, writing retreats, and other lit-related swag. So far, the group has raised $5,000, with many more auctions still to come.

Want to help? Items up for bids are listed on the group’s webpage, and bidding is open for three days. See the full rules for details. You can also follow the group’s auctions on Facebook. And, of course, you can donate directly to help the city of Nashville; here’s a list of organizations accepting money, clothes and food, and time.

My transition from thesis to published book started out pretty well, I thought, but ended up taking eight solid years. My MFA thesis at the University of Michigan was a collection of short stories that I, for one, really liked. They’d received thrilling praise from the mentors I adored, they’d been published in good journals and won some awards, and they’d brought me a phone call from agent. A pretty good agent. In the heady rush of thinking “Wow, someone actually wants me,” like a lot of young thunderstruck writers, I signed on with her before even meeting her in person. Some of you may be tempted to do this; others may already have done this, and to you I say: Good luck. Jumping into a contract with the first agent who asks is like marrying the first person you kiss. It could work.

(Incidentally, if you anticipate from here a juicy story about how this agent did me wrong, that’s not on menu. I have a different story.)

So this agent. She said she loved my story collection—it was fabulous, who wouldn’t want to buy it?—and yet…. her feeling was that, just to be safe, the publishing market being a market and all, it might be easier to sell a story collection (which is code for: “will never make money”) with the promise of a novel (which is code for: “might, if hit by lightning, make money”). I had heard this theory before. It was going around. The two-book deal was the famous swindle whereby crafty writers duped otherwise intelligent publishers into printing their silly and unmarketable story collections that they knew nobody would buy. Incidentally, when people ask me what they can do to get a story collection published, I say this: Buy story collections. Buy every little unmarketed, swindling story collection you see. Let’s change the market.

Well, OK, a novel. As luck would have it, I did sort of have an idea for a novel rattling around in my head – a very fledgling, inchoate, imperfect idea: grandiose, baggy, impossible to accomplish, completely beyond my skill set – and when I described it to my new agent, she said, Oooooh in a way that seemed to mean, “Ooh, I could sell that.” (Or maybe I imagined that.) “Just write the first hundred pages,” she said, “and we’ll go out with it.”

“Go out with” is an expression agents use more than middle schoolers. (It’s not at all surprising to me, by the way, that agents and editors should adopt so much language from the dating world. The customs aren’t that different, in the end.) As thrilling and anxiety-inducing as it is to learn, at age thirteen, that you are “going out with” someone, it is ten times better to hear that your agent is “going out with” your book. (I like to imagine them walking hand in hand in the moonlight, slipping behind the bleachers.) When an agent says they’re going with your book it means, ideally, they are on the hunt; they approve of the state of your manuscript enough that they are ready to stake their name on it by sending it out to some carefully-selected editors who they believe will love it. Hold your breath. Hold your breath for a week, three weeks, three months, six. The longer it takes, the less hope you and your agent will have, though he or she will, ideally, still soldier on, trying every last option.

But I wasn’t there yet. I still had my one hundred pages to write.

I spent the summer after graduation sketching out my plan, trying out different starting points, verb tenses, voices, points of view; doing ridiculous, excessive amounts of research; studying novels and books about writing novels – doing just about anything except actually writing. For someone who’s only ever written stories, only ever taken workshops about stories, for someone – that rare bird — who even prefers reading stories to reading novels, writing even 100 pages of a novel is a damned daunting thing.

A year passed. I had ninety two pages. I increased the margins and sent them to my agent.

“Hmmmmmm,” I heard her say over the phone, which was code for: I’m not going out with this, which she proceeded to say out loud.

I tried again. And again. I rewrote those magical, dreadful 100 pages at least six or seven times. It took three years. And still, I had no idea whatsoever what would come on page 101, or 301. And still my agent was saying, “Oh, yeah, I love your stories, they’re amazing… but I’m not going out with these 100 pages.”

Around this point, three and a half years after graduation, I had reached that dreadful stage you may go through where I no longer wanted to live on this planet if I couldn’t publish just one book. The waiting was going to kill me. And I was seriously starting to doubt the wisdom of polishing the hell out of 100 pages without knowing what they were leading to. And in the meantime my beloved stories were growing old. The characters were listening to Walkmans, for God’s sake, talking about George Bush the first.

Spring 2004 issue of The Missouri Review, featuring Valerie Laken's story "Family Planning"

I decided that I had to go out on a limb for these stories – and for myself, my sanity, my books, and my career. I worked up the nerve to call my agent and say, in exceptionally polite terms, “Either you go out with these dreadful 100 pages and their unwanted step-child, my amazing yet valueless collection of stories, or… or… I’m going to have to find somebody else.”

So we broke up. Amicably, though I was wounded. And I did the thing I should’ve done from the start: I started doing research on agents. I found out who represented my writing heroes, big and small; I found out who represented young writers—story writers—who had just achieved the things I wanted to achieve. I made a list, I wrote up queries, and just as I was about to send these out… an agent called me.

A good agent. Poised, intelligent, energetic, kind. Exactly my age, a former writer herself, with a degree from Iowa, who had sold two or three beautiful story collections to major houses in the past year. I’ll admit it: I threw all my research and query letters out the window and jumped into bed with her. But this time, at least, I had the good sense to go meet with her first in New York. She was even better in person. (Beautiful, funny, nice office.) And, unlike my first agent, she didn’t terrify me at all. When I called her, she answered, or called back right away. She read my work promptly, called me back within days, with sharp, insightful, rigorous suggestions – the kind of feedback that makes you want to run to your computer, not hide under your bed. This was important to me.

Best of all, within three weeks, she went out with my manuscripts. And those very same dreadful, unsellable hundred pages sold, within 24 hours.

Spring/Summer 2005 issue of Alaska Quarterly Review, featuring Laken's story "Separate Kingdoms"

This is a lesson in trusting your instincts. Also, a lesson in publishing. A book, unlike a hundred dollar bill, is not universally, objectively desirable or undesirable, worthy or unworthy of publication. Those decisions are made through a horrifying number of shifting variables: taste, luck, timing, budgets, relationships, hunches, trends… lightning. Talent and hard work play a role, absolutely, but this process will test your determination more than your talent. You have to decide you will publish a book before you will.

Anyway, I had a contract finally, and a good one, but there was a hitch. My editor wanted to bring out the novel first, the story collection second. Some sort of marketing plan, I guess: if they could somehow get a few poor saps to notice the novel, maybe the story collection wouldn’t fulfill its story collection destiny of becoming a total flop that wastes hundreds of trees and sells only 100 copies.

I was afraid. And excited. I said OK. I didn’t want to, and my instincts rebelled, but I said OK. You’ll be surprised what you’ll say OK to when somebody offers you a book deal.

In any case, now I had to finish that awful novel. I felt about that novel the way first-time pregnant women seem to feel about the prospect of giving birth: Terrified, totally unprepared, and in denial about what exactly it will entail.

It took three more years. I can’t tell you how many family gatherings consisted of sweet, then confused, then snide people saying, “Wait, I thought you said you were supposed to be publishing a novel.” I’m pretty sure they thought the whole deal was made up.

Eventually things fell into place. I learned how to write a novel, more or less – on my own, without my trusty MFA mentors – and I finished it, and gave it a name, Dream House, and rewrote it, and rewrote it, and rewrote it. And finally my editor said, “Let’s bring it out.” She gave it a publication date. (Again, with the dating language.) It came out last year, and was worth all the effort, and even after living with it for seven years I was still scribbling changes in the margins up to the very last minute of my very last deadline. I make changes still, in fact, every time I open the book. As Ben Marcus said, “It’s not entirely clear to me why publishing this book means I should stop working on it.”

Maybe we’re slow to finish our books because we can’t part with them. Truman Capote said, “Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.”

And what happened to those stories that started this process in motion? Oh, they got old. They got so old, and I got old too. I’m not the same person who wrote them, who needed them. I’ve changed so many of my ideas about writing, about what I want to do in my writing. So I’ve spent the past year revising and revising them, throwing some out entirely, replacing them with brand new stories that I like today but don’t know if I’ll like in ten years – or ten months. I am well aware that publishing a story collection might, nowadays, be a once-in-a-lifetime chance, and I’m determined to make the most of it. I’m determined to stand behind this runty looking undesirable stepchild and force it upon the world. What else can I do? It’s been inside me for nine years. It’s called Separate Kingdoms, and it’ll come out in a year or two. I finished it and sent it off to my editor on Monday. There were no kids in my back yard to shoot, so I came here instead.

Further Resources:



• For more about Valerie Laken and her work, including links to interviews, Q&As, book club information, and events, please visit the author’s website: valerielaken.com.
• Read Valerie Laken’s story “Family Planning,” from the Spring 2004 issue of The Missouri Review.
• You can also read a brief essay that Valerie wrote for 1st Books that talks about the genesis of her novel. In particular, how the story from a neighbor that a homicide had taken place in the home she and her husband had recently bought to fix up planted the seed for the book in her imagination.
• And here is Marilyn Stasio’s glowing review of Dream House for the New York Times.
  
• Finally, in case you missed Peggy Adler’s March 2009 FWR interview with Valerie, here it is again.

The online version (along with a slideshow of images from the store) is available at no cost on P&W’s website…but if you want a print copy, Poets & Writers‘ special offer to Fiction Writers Review readers (only $12 for a year-long subscription) is still up for grabs; if you order through this page before May 15, you’ll get the current issue featuring Women & Children First. Regardless of when you order, a subscription will show support for independent bookstores everywhere.

Here’s an excerpt from Jeremiah’s Women & Children First profile:

photo by Jeremiah Chamberlin

When I walked into Women & Children First, the feminist bookstore that Linda Bubon and her business partner, Ann Christophersen, founded more than thirty years ago, the overriding feeling I experienced was one of warmth. And it wasn’t because Chicago was having a late-winter snowstorm that afternoon. From the eclectic array of books stacked on tables, to the casualness of the blond wood bookcases, to the handwritten recommendations from staff below favorite books on the shelves, everything feels personalized; an atmosphere of welcome permeates the place.

In the back of the store, a painted sign showing an open book with a child peering over the top hangs from the ceiling, indicating the children’s section. Not far away, a similar sign, this one of a rainbow with an arrow below it, points toward the GLBTQ section. Despite these signs—not to mention the name of the store itself—Women & Children First carries more than books for women and, well, children.

And here’s Linda Bubon, on her (and the bookstore’s) future:

Linda Bubon / photo by Jeremiah Chamberlin

I’m a bookseller, but I’m a feminist bookseller. Would I be a bookseller if I were going to run a general bookstore? I’m not sure. Sometimes I think, “What will I do if the store is no longer viable?” And I think that rather than going into publishing or going to work for a general bookstore, I would rather try to figure out how to have a feminist reading series and run a feminist not-for-profit. Because the real purpose of my life is getting women’s voices out, and getting women to tell the truth about their lives, and selling literature that reflects the truths of girls’ and women’s lives. Sometimes we’re abused; we have to talk about that. Sometimes we take the bad road in relationships; we have to talk about that. Sometimes we’re discriminated against in the workplace; we have to talk about these things. Violence against women in the United States and worldwide has not stopped. We don’t have a feminist army to go rescue women in Afghanistan—would that we did.

The goal of my life has been to get the word out, to understand women’s lives. We have to continue to evolve and change if we’re to have a full share, and if our daughters are to have a full share of the world.

Books will die. They must. They’ll die like languages die. Like cultures die.

Nobody knows this better than the U.S. Office of Nuclear Waste Management, who in 1984 hired linguist Thomas Sebeok to figure out a way to warn future generations—we’re talking thousands of years into the future—that nuclear waste is buried in the vicinity, and to take heed. Sebeok concluded that the waste, to be buried deep beneath the Yucca Mountains in Nevada, could never be warned with language. Radioactivity will last 10,000+ years—there is no permanent tongue, written or verbal, that will retain its meaning over that length of time. Words are too abstract, too based on contemporary knowledge. Electrical systems were ruled out—they need power—as were ideograms—they are as abstract as words. Sebeok’s answer was the formation of an “Atomic Priesthood,” a folkloric relay system by which knowledge could be passed on, generation to generation, in whatever language ruled the day.

We know from religion and the Bible that this type of telephone game can lead to differences in meaning and interpretation, but the lesson here still applies: language and the books they compose may die, but storytelling never will. Like song and dance, stories are eternal to how we humans communicate and express ourselves. People will always write because they will always have something to say. Or teach. Or discover. For a long time, this has been accomplished with bound books, with paper and ink. And for a long time, it will continue to be.

The book is going nowhere.

Allow me to repeat that: the book is going nowhere.

bookbinding / photo by Nate Steiner

Electronic readers need a massive install-base spike simply to step on the printed-word’s playing field; just look at Reader’s Digest, whose 9,000 digital subscribers comprise a mere .16% of its 5.5 million print readership.

Unfortunately, going nowhere applies not only to the printed book’s short-term security, but also its long-term plans for product innovation. As Richard Howorth, owner of famed Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, recently told Poets & Writers magazine, “Digital technology will go on, on its own path, no matter what. But in terms of books, I maintain that a book is like a sailboat or a bicycle, in that it’s a perfect invention.”

True. But not everyone wants to be a sailor or to ride a bike. At least not all the time. So should we scold wind surfers and wake boarders for not wanting to steer a rudder or hoist a sail? Or tell motorcycle enthusiasts and Vespa owners to give up their rides in favor of 10-speeds? Yes, we might end up with fewer skippers and cyclists in the long run, but these new sports have no more led to the demise of their predecessors than e-readers will destroy the book.

image by ramblinworker

Why? Because e-publishing isn’t a replacement for classic print, it’s a new offering; less an evolution than the birth of an entirely new species. Mobile, on-demand, and increasingly interactive, storytelling in today’s electronic-age may well end up looking Jurassic compared to the ways many of us devour narratives hundreds of years from now—it may appear damn well folkloric. But this essay’s e-age will be remembered; littered with the fossils of failed e-readers and fiction experiments, it shall live on, a layer of sediment for future storytellers curious when narrative took that binary flip from the 0 of print to the 1 of touchscreen.

Forget e-books—they are a question of format, not content. These devices, similar to online literary journals like this one, are simply the first primordial steps in a specialization that will change how the written word tells stories for future generations. As the capabilities of electronic narrative expand and specialize, they guarantee that e-books available today will look nothing like the e-stories of tomorrow; not so much the broadside becoming newspaper as the comic strip becoming Pixar, a literary leap in scope and function that won’t just create new forms and audiences, but complement our classic ones.

In the same way that the modern art movement called into question what it meant to call something “art,” this will be an era that both challenges our static definition of “writing” and redefines the relationship between “writer” and “reader.” It will change who publishes, how they publish, and what form they publish in. Today’s technological delights are well on their way to becoming tomorrow’s demands, entrenching themselves in ways that will do more than force bookbinding as a business model to adapt, but allow writing, as an art form, to expand and thrive. These are good things.

Welcome to the age of Binary Bookmaking.

photo by RyAwesome

Even with the speed, safety, convenience and affordability of microwave ovens, people still use and love their gas ovens. Foods just taste better from a real oven—they are less soggy, more textured. Like the microwave oven, the rise of the e-reader provides audiences with speed and convenience and, in the long run, affordability. Of course there will still be the folks who prefer the taste, the experience, of old-fashioned paper and ink; and for them, the industry will live on, albeit in a slightly smaller form. But these will be increasingly older folks, and several generations from now, they’ll be all but replaced by generations as intimate with computers as crayons.

Today we have some intriguing early players vying to lead that charge. Some, like Barnes and Noble’s Nook, are cannibalizing their own bricks-and-mortar stores. Others, like Amazon’s Kindle, are operating at a loss in hopes of future market dominance. The latest, Apple’s iPad, looks to revolutionize book selling with iBooks like it did music with iTunes, offering publishers a new magnitude of interactivity with which to connect audience to content. With the exception of the iPad, these e-readers and their pixilated pages are simply new ways of consuming an old form. Content convergence like this comes when technology fuels convenience, a cycle as inevitable as the seasons, and worth our attention for just as fleeting a moment, for what lies ahead is far less about format than content—less baking or microwaving than molecular gastronomy.

Kindle vs. iPad / photo from http://www.engadget.com/

These initial e-book entrants vie for our eyes, boasting their own batch of competitive advantages, but how they will affect the health of reader-nation is less important than how they will completely repopulate it.

For those wondering whether electronic reading will truly add new readers or simply fracture existing ones into multiple distribution channels, your answer is: it doesn’t matter. For those curious if people will read more when their readers are not merely books but supercomputers capable of messaging, surfing, and gaming, your answer is: it doesn’t matter. The e-reader movement is less remarkable for its advances in technology than how that technology will create new needs, new sustenance. After plopping down a considerable introductory cost for a peek at the future, these consumers will be hungry for what represents it. Concerns over fracturing and cannibalization give little pause when weighed against the long-term significance of this, the birth of a new species of reader.

The publisher that embraces the differences between print and electronic reading for what they are—opportunities to break form, innovate and market more effectively—will be at the forefront of a new generation of readers who have happily replaced “active” reading with “shared” reading. The rise of social media has conditioned these young audiences into transparency. Today’s readers share their consumptions online via Twitter, Facebook, and Google Buzz. All this has resulted in the migration of dialogue; conversations that once dominated water-coolers and book clubs still take place, but on billions of wi-fi enabled soapboxes, and these conversations are themselves sharable. Specific to the literary arena, issues are openly debated on sites like HTMLGiant, while at Fictionaut, an entire writing community has been built to share, critique and support one another’s work. The act in active reading will continue to become the act of sharing, and this holds tremendous promise for how reading and writing will evolve on e-reader devices.

E-reader technology allows the original tent-poles of active reading to continue their migration into the social-networking space; rather than annotate and underline a book’s text for oneself, rather than pass it on to a friend or sibling, saying, “You’ve got to read this,” tomorrow’s active readers will annotate and underline properties by sharing the author’s words along with their own responses online. These readers will do so not just to select folks installed into their network, but their entire network—hundreds of people that swell into thousands on wildfires of sharing. The clouds above us have long been stared at amidst moments of reflection, for illumination of meaning; tomorrow, the cloud will help store and share these things. Active readers’ reactions and interpretations will be shared publicly and willingly so; not just great quotations or moving passages, but critiques and questions. Imagine a book club of, well, infinite size. For it contains not just members, but any Internet pedestrian scrolling by. These browsing passersby already stumble across more content and opinions than ever before, and through this process refine their preferences and expand their experiences. This same benefit will apply to e-reader audiences. This new species of reader will be exposed to more literary content than ever before—not in place of sustained reading but rather in addition to it.

a book club discussing *The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao* / photo by Paul Lowry

Again, these are good things. The question to this essayist is less how publishers can keep bound-book reading relevant or reading itself relevant than how one capitalizes on the way today’s readers read and tomorrow’s readers share—how do we use these e-reader technologies to our advantage, not simply as stewards of the written word but storytellers in search of audience? And, most importantly, how will it make us better writers? How will it challenge our notion of form, of structure, of content? How will it create a more symbiotic relationship between teller and told, between vision and envisioner?

Similarly, e-reading should be seen less as competition than opportunity; not the microwave replacing its gas patriarch but a whole new kind of fire. E-lit can take what today’s audiences do best and tailor its storytelling to let them do just that: to share and boast, to nibble nimbly. To do so, Binary Bookmaking will require a new kind of author writing a new kind of story that will ultimately demand a new kind of publishing. The variables in this formula will grow and fluctuate as the technologies that govern them do. From here forth, authors will not just work to engage their readers but engage the devices that deliver them.

Empire Theatre, Sydney 1927 / photo by Sam Hood, from State Library of New South Wales on Flickr

Binary Bookmaking can be difficult to conceptualize because we already know what books are. We grew up holding them, dream of writing them. This makes conceptualizing what e-“books” might look like in the future such a polarizing act. We have no problems with books in their current form—they’ve done us absolutely no wrong. Calling this new form an e-anything, let alone an e-“book” feels downright treasonous; not only are we beheading our benevolent queen, we are giving her successor the same name plus prefix. The e-book can’t be called an e-book because it won’t end up looking or reading or smelling anything like a book-book. The book: covers binding pages slathered in ink, a printed permanence. The e-book: a backlit screen pretending to be whatever it is you’ve clicked, a digital shape-shifter.

While today’s e-books are predominantly translations into digital code, tomorrow’s might as well be written in a whole new language. Though, frankly, this isn’t particularly revolutionary. At the turn of the twentieth century, Modernist authors such as Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Ford Maddox Ford, and Malcolm Lowry re-fashioned and manipulated language to re-vision what writing could be. How stories were told. How the lived life felt. These writers came of age in a changed and increasingly technological world, one whose influence we can see in the fragmentary and multi-perspective nature of their work. Sound familiar?

Similarly, the inner-reading of literature will branch into social-reading. The work readers do to visualize and imagine will be augmented—if not outright replaced—by embedded videos, infographics, maps, and more. At this point, e-books won’t be books because we won’t just be reading them. We’ll be reading but we’ll also be watching, touching, exploring, choosing, micro-transacting, listening, dragging, playing. So much of the internal work a paper-and-ink novel demands from its reader will no longer be necessary, but in its place, wholly new kinds of work will be born. This doesn’t replace reading so much as invite in a new type of reader. Doesn’t replace writing so much as provide authors with a new outlet and form. It’s not a revolution in language so much as a new type of communication—one predicated on how the audience encounters (and, now, participates in) the artist’s vision of the world. So what the hell do you call something like this? Besides, of course, monumental?

photo by sidewalk flying

photo by goXunuReviews

For all the connections one might make with products that have replaced their predecessors in the past—the automobile and horseless carriage—forms of art are different: they deal in audience, not consumers; depth of thought, not convenience of hand. Though motion pictures originated as filmed theatre, the two forms co-exist today, which is precisely why the question of book and e-book always comes back to audience. Though many folks will stick to the book and its pages, to the shared intimacy that comes with reading another’s words and bridging the gap with one’s own imagination in a sustained and immersive way, this fact has as much to do with taste as it does upbringing. These are the same folks who grew up using bound encyclopedias in schools, not online computer-labs. Atlases and phonebooks, not Google Earth and Facebook. Like their audience, the artists raised in this digital period will craft content in line with their own tastes and expectations and experiences: while the book is indeed going nowhere, electronic storytelling will gradually become storytelling driven by words, not dictated by them.

The specialization of this future “other” e-book will add new kinds of work at the price of old kinds of joy. The isolated experience fundamental to author and reader, that incredible sensation that a novel was written for you, its author speaking directly to you, will not exist for readers of the e-page. No matter how badly savvy publishers will try to keep the sensation on life-support behind veiled preference settings, the social conversations that occur below or within future e-book texts will become another pleasure of reading, complimentary to the splendor of entering a world by oneself. This shouldn’t alarm because print isn’t going away.

photo by oddsock

That splendor won’t wither and withdraw into some kind of non-digital dormancy, a passé sensation appreciated by the literary faithful—it will continue to exist, not waiting to be rediscovered by a future generation of hipsters who dust it off like leg warmers and flannels and start blogging about how awesome “ real” books are, but, like theatre and film, beside print, in tandem with it. Electronic and print and their respective work and joys, their strengths and weaknesses, will co-exist because they aren’t a zero-sum game so much as complimentary, additive—a positive-sum game in which we all gain a new storytelling medium. I’m no mathematician but it may in fact be an infinite-sum game. The opportunities are just that boundless.

photo by accent on eclectic

Besides its effect on literary intimacy, the flip side of inserting social media into art is why the internet was invented in the first place: it shall foster sharing. Not merely the sharing of active e-readers’ favorite excerpts but their thoughts and questions, and more importantly, not just amidst e-readers, but with the authors themselves. Consider the open dialogues that will occur between writer and reader below the work that has brought them together. No longer one-way, this level of interaction will only strengthen ties (and, ahem, accountability) between authors and their audiences. The resulting literary community will expand geographically but contract socially, our global interconnectedness condensing with every conversation until publishers and authors are less city hall and mayor than a reader’s neighbors in the village; dialogues opened not through votes and ballots but communal town halls and front-yard wave-hello’s. All this will make marketing future works more effective—not by geo-targeting or viral network effects but honest-to-goodness feedback. The brilliant hermit author will always be a sexy enigma but the social e-author will be a perfect counterpart: temptingly close.

Those future works have intriguing destinies, depending on who you ask. Penguin Books CEO John Makinsonis recently told the press that “the definition of the book itself is up for grabs” and his company is betting big, crafting multiple tiers of interactivity for a variety of age groups and imprints. Readers will be treated to games, 3D graphics, audio, and video on books so robust they can’t be listed in the iBookstore but require their own standalone applications. Book designer Craig Mod recently told the New York Times that “[t]he metaphor of flipping pages already feels boring and forced on the iPhone. I suspect it will feel even more so on the iPad. The flow of content no longer has to be chunked into ‘page’ sized bites.”

photo by Jenny Downing

So beyond redefining how readers share and work and interact with narratives, e-books won’t end there, not just redefining but reconstructing. With horizontal page-flipping a thing of the past, the navigation of narrative is free to experiment broadly—a vertical tower to scale, a user-controlled ‘quilt’ to traverse, a coiling helix to scroll, a 3D world to explore.

Of course, with all these possibilities, publishers will need to juggle the creation and exploration of their new medium against the continued demands of its print-based forefather. With Barnes & Noble already reshuffling its leadership team and rebranding itself a “digital and technology company,” writers and readers are right to worry that publishers might push their money, time and resources into this new species of narrative at the expense of paper and ink. But to do so would be a mistake, for these two forms will live on, side by side, complimenting each other, expanding on one another’s narratives, and, ultimately, providing its shared audience with the option of not just one or the other, but both. Vespa owner or cyclist, wind surfer or sailor—like electronic or print, these are choices that will fluctuate over time, and not just for consumers and creators, but the businesses that connect them. Binary Bookmaking will never require binary business strategies. There will always be choice.

photo by LIS-Corner

E-readers, if executed properly, will be about just that: choice. The choices of pure text or rich; multimedia color or e-ink black-and-white; interactive or linear; isolated or social. E-readers, if executed properly, will be the premiere platform for a new form that will have less in common with the novel than with the web-narrative. The film industry that once began as recorded theatre now boasts special effects and narrative devices never dreamed of by its inventors. E-reading will evolve just as elegantly; not for itself, but for a new generation of audience that demands more than simply immersion, but interactive immersion. Open immersion.

Rio Player / photo by nrkbeta

In the early 1990s there was a music file format called .bit. You might remember .bit because it hung around for just that, eventually giving way to another format we know a little more intimately: MP3. Listening to these early music files required the program WinPlay3, a program you might also remember for it was the MP3-playing predecessor to Winamp (1997) and, eventually, iTunes (2001). The music industry ignored .bit. They ignored WinPlay3. They ignored all these developments for the better part of a decade until a little company called Diamond Multimedia came along and built the Rio, a first-generation portable MP3 player that paved the way for the iPod. Only then, once MP3s had literally changed the landscape upon which their art was consumed, did the record companies make their demands for a piracy-free solution. A demand for protection of their bottom-line, not exploration in how that bottom-line might prosper under the ecosystem installing itself into their industry. Not fortification, not treaty, but a demand for protection.

The e-book’s future lies in the hands of publishers who at one point would have liked nothing but to abort it. For a variety of reasons but most of them monetary, such as the economy of e-books in relation to bound, and what that trade-off might do to the costs of maintaining pricey bricks-and-mortar stores, not to mention compensation for the authors and poets that fill them with such wonderful words. All fatalism aside, there was and never will be an aborting of this e-movement, and success—not just survival—awaits the players who embrace it versus those who protect themselves.

The transition from bricks-and-mortar to e-commerce shouldn’t scare, as it doesn’t complicate matters so much as open them up. The New York Times recently reported that the e-book is in ways more profitable for publishers and writers than print, but the article was more a snapshot of today’s competitive landscape and economics than a look forward to what lies ahead. Not the gradual tectonic shift of print into electronic, but, as argued here, a whole new continent born from the water, built to satisfy the needs of artists and audiences growing up in a digital world. This ecosystem’s birth will be less erosion than explosion, giving articles like the Times’s all the long-term significance of a ballgame’s box-score. Because Binary Bookmaking affects more than simply margins. It impacts art. It impacts audience. Hard things to quantify with dollars, but as the music industry has shown, anything less than full-on engagement will be far more costly in the long run.

This isn’t happening overnight—we find ourselves in the .bit stage, not the MP3. There is plenty of time for publishers to adapt, to reorient their personnel, to reevaluate prior investments and strategies. More than simply prudent, these decisions can be lucrative. Whole new business models and promotional tools lie at publishers’ disposal; incredible targeting and profiling capabilities now exist for intra-device advertising; fresh pricing structures, not just for books, but for stories, can now entice a broader array of demographics. Simply put: there will exist as many business opportunities for the creative publisher as storytelling opportunities for the creative author.

iBookstore / photo by nrkbeta on flickr

Of course, there are still economic negotiations to iron out. Amazon, hoping not just for new content but a new price ceiling, has rolled out its 70% royalty program for authors interested in self-publishing, allowing them a huge spike in revenue earning-power but against unit sales priced 20% below the lowest physical list-price—a maximum of $9.99. We’ve all heard about Macmillan’s stand and the resulting blacklist and backlash. The iPad’s pricing structure only fans the flame of this price war. But these are the first moves in a marathon chess match—a few pawns placed long before the game’s true tactics illuminate themselves. As it always has, the market will dictate demand. Prices will fluctuate until consumers are content with the value an e-book provides against the price they are paying for it. Don’t forget: e-readers are already offering totally free content, and this is how many authors are grooming readerships and promoting future releases. Few authors can write for free forever but their decision to do so even temporarily ensures that the $15 e-book can’t last forever—the market will adjust and solely-text based e-books simply won’t be worth that much anymore. Richer offerings will be worth their riches. Just look at the current iPhone App Store, which already has more Book applications than any other genre, including Games.

The rise of e-literature introduces a new art form that will require a new way of doing business just as it will require a new marketplace in which to do this business. Rather than plunk down one payment, revenue can now be obtained piecemeal by publishers who price functionalities like social reading, interactivity, and multimedia into tiers. Unlike the MP3 and its DRM tiers, these would be content-based, not quality-based. For those emerging authors looking to develop a fanbase with free text offerings, the value of free text might transition from author awareness to author engagement as readers look to pay for the kind of immersive extra features that only e-narratives can provide. Beyond those features, e-books will also provide writers with new ways of building buzz for their creations with tactics like personal interviews, complimentary stories or poems, playlists to accompany text, video trailers, access to real-time bookclub conversations, embedded videos, links, and other special content. Needless to say, the costs of doing business in this new marketplace will change. Publishers will still require editors, publicists, marketers, and designers, but will also need a talented team of coders, graphic artists, animators, and programmers. These things will add cost, but the wealth of sales data that circles back will allow publishers to tweak and optimize the formula, particularly in terms of pricing and offerings. This is, in the end, the greatest gift e-readers will provide publishers: instant feedback. What extra features were readers most willing to pay for? What stories or poems or sections of novels were shared and commented on most? This data will result in optimization, a requirement should the commercialization of e-literature match the creativity with which it is constructed.

Now, many authors will see these strategies and commercialization as damaging to their art. Or, if nothing else, feel that it’s a waste of their time. After all, every hour spent collaborating with e-book programmers or video-chatting with book clubs or producing YouTube walking-tours of the place where your book is set (as Colson Whitehead did in 2009 for the release of Sag Harbor) is one less hour spent at the keyboard. These are valid concerns. But the truth is that writers in this next generation may not have the luxury of isolating themselves from a public that has developed a taste for transparency and immersion. In the same way that Mass is no longer delivered in Latin in most churches, this new congregation wants to be included in the process, not held at arm’s length.

And, frankly, perhaps we should immerse ourselves in the culture if we wish to truly understand it. Isn’t that our role as artists? Just as the Modernists captured what it felt like to live in their era by allowing the time to shape their work and words, perhaps twenty-first century authors need to do the same. Because whether or not we like it in our writing toolboxes, interactivity is a major part of life in this new age. Embracing it might not only allow us to reach new readers and push the limits of our writing, but make our writing and stories more relevant. After all, how can we say something about our society if we’re unwilling to engage it?

In more practical terms, however, the e-movement is particularly beneficial to writers due to the expansion of their playing field. The MP3 age may have hurt the bottom line of mammoth music publishers, but it allowed an incredible new generation of experimenting musicians to earn their place in the limelight. Similarly, independent publishers and their authors will find this new open landscape to their liking. Rather than remain in obscurity because they lack the advertising budget of a major house, public awareness of an author’s work is more likely to be determined by what should have been most important in the first place: his or her art. This digital age of sharing and social networking ensures “word of mouth” can stand tall against big budgets. Instead of being bound—pun intended—by the constrictions of traditional publishing, the work of talented independent authors will be accessible in a variety of ways: single story or a whole collection; serialized chapters or an entire novel; multimedia or plain text. The layered, detail-rich stories these teams are already masters at will become more accessible to an e-generation that appreciates exactly what they provide: content for them to share and discuss and discover.

Of course, as in music, the ease of e-publishing may bring with it a fair amount of sub-par work. It may stretch editors already stretched thin. But this more open marketplace will be inherently more democratic. The best stories will win. They will, at least, breathe. E-publishing won’t change our institution from a public entity to a private one; rather, it will be the digital format’s accessibility and distribution, its ability to be shared and interacted with. In many ways, the Age of Binary Bookmaking just might coincide with the age of a new independent publisher—one that is as nimble and hungry as the new readership that awaits it.

photo by cloudsoup

Everything has begun to change. Reading, sharing. Publishing, distribution. Advertising, pricing. And as all this unfolds, the book, our beloved suffixed book-book, will remain anchored in time. Not trapped inside the e-age sediment but down beneath it, forming a foundation for everything e-storytelling might deliver. A warm crust, nourishing from below, sending up streaks of energy and vitality. The printed book need not be threatened by this new e-specialization because it provides all the nutrients making it possible in the first place—Mother Earth breathing life into new species of writer and reader. Granted there may be fewer printed books in the e-age ahead, but they will be bolder and more assured for allowing a new member into the family.

Further Resources…and Questions

• What of the fractured data formats governing each e-reader—who will hold the e-standard in perpetuity? How does the education system take advantage of these developments? What happens when children who already spend eleven hours a day in front of a screen abandon the pages of a book for an e-reader? And, of course, what will become of our Atomic Priesthood clergy now that the Yucca plan has fallen victim to budget cuts?
• Even as e-reader technologies converge into each other with incestual twists like LCD screens that convert into e-ink displays, can a Kindle/iPad mongrel inspire new readership while keeping its original one engaged?
• Experiments in interactivity are already underway in movie threatres via “Last Call,” a film by 13th Street, who have created a customized multilinear narrative in which the audience calls the shots on their cellular phones via direct dialogue with actresses in peril:
• See more of Craig Mod’s sharp, stylized vision for the future of e-books here.

Michael Rudin holds a BBA from the University of Michigan, where he won a Hopwood Award for his novel The Whispering King. Ever searching for ways to spend even more time looking at computer screens, he recently abandoned his career in the video-game industry to begin writing full-time. He lives in Los Angeles and is at work on short fiction, a second novel, screenplays, and essays (such as “Writing the Great American Novel Video Game,” also on Fiction Writers Review).

]]> http://fictionwritersreview.com/essays/the-age-of-binary-bookmaking/feed 19 http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/the-end-of-publishing-the-video http://fictionwritersreview.com/blog/the-end-of-publishing-the-video#comments Thu, 25 Mar 2010 16:29:24 +0000 Celeste Ng http://fictionwritersreview.com/?p=7534 We’ve had book trailers and vooks and now… a video about the end of publishing. (Or is it?)

DK (Dorling Kindersley) Books put this clever video together for a sales conference:

The Penguin website offers some insight into the creation of the clip:

We asked DK to give us a list of facts and statistics about publishing in 2010, and where they see it going in the future, and then our scriptwriter, Jason LaMotte took this information and wove the facts into the current script.

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