The State of Publishing

I don't follow the publishing industry that closely, since I don't really feel part of it yet. I've read, however, that even unpublished authors should avidly become acquainted with the industry since it should in some way help them in their marketing efforts. 

I don't necessarily believe that, but I did do some catch-up in this very interesting NY Times article, that does a good job of providing an overview of how the industry is faring during the Covid-19 crisis. It's told from the point of view of the world's largest publisher, Penguin Random House as it profiles its current leader. Here are some of my take-aways from the article.

• After a steep drop at the start of the pandemic, book sales not only recovered but surged. Unit sales of print books are up nearly 6 percent over last year, according to NPD BookScan, and e-book and digital audiobook sales have risen by double digits. Reading, it turns out, is an ideal experience in quarantine. It seems that people are looking to take a break from Netflix.
• Like Hollywood, which pours resources into universe-scale superhero franchises that are nearly guaranteed to get an audience, publishing has become increasingly reliant on blockbusters — a development that has left beginner and midlist authors struggling. (Deep sigh.)
• The virus has pushed most book-buying online, a marketplace driven by algorithmic formulas that serves up mostly the hits, driving a cycle so self-fulfilling it’s nearly tautological: Best sellers sell the best because they are best sellers.
• Random House is printing 3 million copies of Barak Obama's upcoming memoir (for which he received a $65 million advance!!!). This is exacerbating a current paper shortage in the book publishing industry. Many publishers have had to hold off or reduce print runs of upcoming books because printers have been going out of business, and those still printing books have had their supply chains disrupted.

As a writer, it's nice to know that people are reading more than ever. It's not nice to know that they're mostly reading the same books by the same authors because of the subtle positioning and hype bestowed by Amazon.

The Terror of the Blank Page

All writers have faced the daunting situation of sitting down to write and having nothing to say. It's the terror of the blank page. It happens to writers of all kinds: poets, novelists, journalists, bloggers, screenwriters, marketing writers (though I doubt it's ever happened to Joyce Carol Oates). The most recent time it's happened to me was this morning.

But as you can see, I've managed to jostle my empty brain and come up with an idea for a post. I think the way to break through what some call "writer's block" is to tailor the solution to the type of writing that you're doing. For this post, I forced myself to list some blog-specific categories like agents, editors, publishers, writing tips, complaints, etc. But nothing really emerged from that. So I took that "nothing" and ran with it.

Hence, today's topic is Nothing, specifically how to break through that Nothing. Last time I had nothing, I wrote about gardening, which turned out to be one of my most popular posts. (As an update, my gardening venture was a bust--one good cucumber and four stunted radishes. Appears that benign neglect in gardening is not a good approach.)

The worst kind of writer's block is when you're a few chapters into a novel and can't figure out where to go next. I believe that many many many more novels are started and never finished because the author can't get through her writer's block and gives up as a result. (I'm glad they give up; I don't need any more competition in the ultra-competitive publishing market!)

I agree with David Mitchell, the writer whom I currently admire most, who said that novelists who get stuck don't understand their characters well enough. He suggests that they write a couple of personal letters between two characters in the story insert pieces of their back story. That exercise can deepen the authors' understanding of their characters and perhaps guide them out of their creative ditch. 

I've been fortunate in the books I've written that I usually understand the story structures and my characters very well before the drafting begins. When I do get stuck, it's usually because my mind is on other things or I get hung up on how to present various plot twists. 

The sad thing is, bourbon doesn't seem to alleviate the terror of the blank page. 

  

Trump Will Win a Second Term

When I started submitting Come the Harpies to agents and publishers, I was hoping that the novel would be picked up quickly. That's because many of its themes are relevant to the social and political situation we find ourselves in today, largely as an outcome of Trump's horrific performance as president. I figured that my dystopian effort would be far more compelling to an audience while Trump was in office, assuming that America would wise up and kick him out on November 3. 

Now, I'm not so sure that we will be swearing in a new president in 2021. 

Come the Harpies projects what things will be like 50 years from now based on what's happening in America today. It's a nation where all citizens are required to carry guns; where laws regulating the environment, food processing, worker safety, oil production and much more are wiped off the books. It's a country where a small group of business plutocrats hold absolute power and where immigration is banned and non-white people have been sent into exile or conscripted into slavery. 

Needless to say, it's a nasty, smelly, violent place on the verge of environmental apocalypse.

In other words, it's what the nation would be like after 50 years of Trump-like, white supremacist rule.  The most terrifying thing is since I finished the manuscript, the nation is taking on more and more of the aspects depicted in its pages. It's playing less as a satire and more like a prophecy.

Trump is following the same playbook that others like Putin, Xi, Orben, Erdogen, Hitler, and Mussolini employed to install authoritarian rule. And it seems to be working. Trump has finally latched on to a winning strategy--at least a strategy that won him his first term. And that strategy is fear.

Fear is the strongest human emotion. Nothing stokes human response more than fear. And Trump knows how to push those buttons. 

So much to fear:

• Fear that growing numbers of brown and black people will overwhelm white privilege. 
• Fear that the Dems will take your guns away. 
• Fear that the Dems will take away your religion, your unborn babies, your right to use incandescent light bulbs. 
• Fear that "those people" will take away your job and suck up all your government benefits. 
• Fear that the Dems will make you drive electric cars, take away your oil and coal, and close down the country just because of some stupid flu virus. 
• Fear that your business will have to serve diverse-gender people. 
• And the biggest fear of all: that Dems will make the government spend much less on military stuff and much more on healthcare, college tuition, infrastructure, childcare and other non-essential things. 

While the basis for most of these fears is unfounded, ridiculous, and completely ginned up by the extreme right, the feeling of fear across vast swaths of America is quite authentic. This can be attributed to the blunt force of Trump's American Carnage messaging supported by his incredibly effective propaganda machine embodied by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and various websites. 

It's sad, but logic, truth, facts, empathy, love, and competence are all ground under the boot heel of fear. We've evolved to make fear the paramount emotion because human survival depends on our ability to react to danger--and to Trump, that danger is Democrats. 

So for all the decency and effective leadership that Biden represents, I can't help thinking that Trump has a winning formula for a large portion of the vote--just scare the bejesus out of people! Between that, voter suppression and the absurd Electoral College, I fear November 3 could be a very long night.

Of course a Trump victory would be good for my book, which lays out in detail what to expect after another four years of Trump, and beyond. On the other hand, I truly hope that November 3 is not a good day for my book.

America could use some good news.

Why I Won't Self-Publish Come the Harpies

It's been said that every person has a book in him/her. In the past, however, few people bothered to actually sit at a typewriter and crank out the masterpiece within them. Today, it's so easy to write a book, that everyone seems to be writing, even those who don't have much of anything to say.

In the days when books were written on yellow pads and typewriters (like my first novel), you had to be highly motivated to grind out drafts and then deal with the dense cross-outs, marginal scrawls, Wite Out spillage, and flaking correction tape that comprised the editing process. 

Then came the personal computer and the ease of producing draft after draft with minimal mechanical effort. Now you can even dictate a draft into a computer without your fingers even touching a keyboard. So easy, in fact, everybody got into the book-writing game. 

The rub, however, is most people do not understand the massive effort it takes to write a marketable book and tend to overrate their own efforts. Worst of all, they try to publish before they've produced a polished manuscript. They haven't rewritten enough, enlisted professional editorial assistance, or subjected their drafts to a thorough proofread. They submit their masterpieces to agents and publishers anyway and get rejected and dejected.

Then we come to today, where it's even easier to write and submit books to publishers and agents. Everything is done through email, which means submitting is cheap and easy. Also it means agents who used to deal with a few dozen submissions a week a couple decades ago, are now bombarded with hundreds a week. That's the reality I'm facing with my book, in which I've invested countless hours and many dollars to make as commercially viable as possible. Only to see it rejected by agents who don't have the time to read it.

There's always self-publishing, which is also easier than ever. There are a slew of vendors who can design covers, format ebooks, and, if you choose, print as many copies as you want on demand. But the problem with many self-published books is they're poorly written and, as a result, don't sell very well. Indie writers who have skimped on the editorial process and published books with typos and grammatical errors tend to discourage readers and cast an overall bad light on the indie market.

Of course success can be found in this market. According to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos,  almost 1,000 self-published authors earned at least $100,000 on the Amazon platform in 2019. But that kind of success is rare. According to Bowker, the number of self-published books grew to more 1.6 million(!) in 2018 (the most recent year available).  So the odds of making a decent amount of money in self-publishing don't sound very good to me. 

I've dabbled in self-publishing, and the thing you quickly learn is that you end up spending as much energy marketing, networking, and otherwise promoting your books as you do writing them. And marketing books remains a puzzle to me, even after a long career selling investment products. Book promotion is hit or miss and can waste a lot of time and money.

But, look, if you write romance and erotica, crime and mystery, religious, or science fiction books, there's a chance you could find self-published success, since these are the hottest categories for indie authors.

But the main reason I will not self-publish Come the Harpies is because I don't wanna. I'm retired and I just want to write good books. If my novel does get picked up by a publisher, I'll be more than happy to take an active role to promote it. That's the deal.

Why Do People Read Novels?

I had a long and successful career as a marketing communications writer in the financial services industry. I learned early on that successful marketing requires an ability to make an emotional connection with the customer. In other words, your brochure, website, tweets, video, emailer must show how your product can make your prospects feel smarter, lovelier, sexier, more popular, or cooler. 

Doesn't matter what you're selling, every customer is a human and every human has certain desires. Keeping those needs uppermost in mind, my brochures sold a lot of sexy mutual funds and annuities! 

It appears the same thing is true when seeking success as a novelist. Know your audience. Start with the question: Why do people read fiction?  I think people read for the same reason they watch movies, stream Netflix, go to plays, attend ball games, art galleries, concerts, etc. They seek escape. They want to leave their troubled world for a while and immerse themselves in someone else's.

Writers eagerly embrace the demand--purple romances for the love-obsessed, mysteries for those who like to solve puzzles, fantasy for those who want to leave this world entirely, high-brow literary tomes for those who never stop being English majors. Authors who are successful in any of these genres have a sophisticated understanding of their audience and know how to push their buttons.

Unfortunately, I don't write fiction that way.  You see, marketing communications was my job and I was good at it. But I didn't find it rewarding. I wrote novels in my spare time, which I did find very rewarding-- and fun. It was my escape from my troubled world. It freed me from having to write with a single-minded focus on a commercial audience. 

My books are written for an audience of one: me! I write the kind of books that I like to read. I never get tired of reading my books--maybe it's the voice, the characters, the style, the themes, my narcissism. 

But the risk of writing for an audience of one is that such a bespoke approach will never appeal to a mass audience, which is required to win a publisher's interest.

While that is frustrating, to say the least, I don't envy successful authors of romance, mystery, fantasy, YA, and other standard genres. Because they are locked into writing a certain kind of book, otherwise their audiences will abandon them. Thus, writing book after book becomes a job and they are required to churn out the same thing year after year. 

Not much different than being a marketing communications writer in the financial services industry. 

I've Won Lots of Medals

It's important when producing a blog that you constantly refresh it with frequent posts, at least once a week and the oftener the better. The problem with that imperative is the necessity of having  something compelling to say. It makes it much more interesting to the reader (to paraphrase Steve Martin in PLANES, TRAINS, AND AUTOMOBILES).

Unfortunately, I sometimes find myself blanking out when it comes to conjuring intriguing topics for my horde of readers. After exhausting the most obvious topics about 15 posts ago, I've found myself staring at an empty screen more often than not. But I've found an answer:

I ask my wife!

She may not be a professional writer, but she has lots of good ideas for stories...and blog topics. In fact, one of my most successful posts was one of her ideas: starting a garden. Pretty damn good! And so I went to her again and she inspired this post, which cuts to the heart of my modest success as a writer.

As a competitive runner for the past three decades, I've amassed an enormous collection of medals. I display these tokens by looping them around a gas pipe in the basement and in front of the table where I do my writing so that they're never out of my line of sight.

These medals point up similarities with my writing. They show that, like writing, I've been running a long time. They show the wide variety of races in which I've competed, like the various media in which I've written over the past 40 years. What the medals don't show, however, are specific victories.

The medals handed out at races are called "finisher medals." It means you finished the race--that's all. And I do finish races. Of the hundreds of races in which I've competed, there was only one that I didn't finish, which was more than 20 years ago.

The same holds true with my writing. I have started and finished six books, and am working on a seventh that I will certainly finish. I don't get a medal for finishing a book, but a do get a hefty Word file and plenty of rejection notes to mark the existence of my work.

Finishing is good. I know plenty of people who have started writing books and never finish them. And many fine writers who are afraid of even starting a book. There's satisfaction in finishing a long complex project like a novel, just like there's a certain elation to training, competing and finishing a marathon.

Sure, it's not the same thing as winning a race or signing a publishing contract, but it is something special. You've accomplished something difficult that few people would even consider undertaking. There's a certain consolation in that.

And it's something I think about when I look up at my gas pipe and its jam-packed row of finisher medals.

The Annoying Sound of Crickets

In the stillness of the night, not a sound to be heard but the stridulation of crickets. So relaxing, such a peaceful song with which to end your day. Nature's lullaby.

I'm so not talking about that!

This is about the slangy usage of the term "crickets." As in a non-reaction to a given stimulus. Such as a riotously funny joke that evokes not even a titter from the audience. Such as the dead silence that overtakes a staff meeting when the boss insists on a brainstorming session. Such as why did you think I wanted a vacuum cleaner for my birthday?

I've sent out dozens of query letters and samples for my novel, COME THE HARPIES. What do you think has been the predominant response from my target agents? That's right. Crickets!

Years of honing the manuscript and draft after draft of query letters and plot summaries only to be met with a wall of indifference. What to do? This video helps explain why writers do not often hear back from agents.

According to the video hosts, the number one reason agents do not respond to queries is because they haven't read them! Other reasons include the possibility that your query is not compelling, the recipient isn't interested in your book, or he or she may be on the fence about whether to request more material from you.

For my own sanity, I will assume that my book is worthy and my query letter stellar, thus making myself believe that my queries are simply not being read. That being the case, I'll take the video host's advice and send out follow-ups to all my non-responders. Many follow-ups. I mean MANY MANY FOLLOW-UPS! I will be heard! Email is free! I dare them to spam me!

Crickets is the ugliest non-sound in the world for us writers.