Category Archives: publishing industry

Blurbs, they flatter me so.

Posted on September 28, 2010 | 3 Comments

Not Quite Adults is moving inexorably toward publication date. Every day brings another decision about the cover, or a list of magazines to reach out to, or another lovely blurb.

Yesterday brought two. This one in particular warmed my heart:

“There are three huge strengths that set this book apart from anything else available on the transition to adulthood. First, it is written in a lively and jargon-free style by two rare social scientists who are familiar with the English language. Second, its scope is stunning, including challenges to becoming an adult created by dramatic changes in education, relations between young adults and parents, marriage and its precursors, civic life, and the world of work. Third, the tone is relentlessly upbeat about the advantages these changes are opening up for young people. This book proves that it is possible to write an interesting book about a big social problem that reflects research knowledge while nonetheless being accessible to the American public.” Ron Haskins –co-director of the Brookings Institute’s Center on Children and Families

Writers toil away with rarely any applause, so a small clap like the above, and we’re in love. Yes my friends, flattery gets you everywhere. Blurbs for me are like the praise of a coach or trainer– it’s not the only reason you put yourself through the grief, but it does momentarily make it all worth it.

And in this climate of publishing, we need all the props we can get. As Steinbeck, who way back in 1962 said of the publishing game: “The profession of book writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.” He should see it now. It’s a tad brutal.

I like to pride myself on a grounded pragmatism that safeguards me from becoming unhinged, but publishing a book amid the meltdown of the printed word unfortunately gives “unhinged” a little more stage time. I kept telling myself that being orphaned by three editors as each is marched off into the editorial sunset is a product of the recession, not the quality of our writing. I simply skipped reading the articles about books that went from concept to print in a year, telling myself that three years is not that much longer. I opted for diversionary tactics to keep my spirits up as we were pigeon-holed into the “parenting” spot on the bookshelf and given a cover with an empty nest on it. (Or as “The World in a Phrase” so aptly put it: “In the beginning was the Word, at the end, just the cliche.” Luckily we dodged that bullet in the end).  I bolstered my sagging spirits when we were relegated to “original paperback” instead of hardcover by reminding myself that you sell more copies in paper than hardcover and it is not the equivalent of going straight to video, really truly.  But at some point, in the immortal words of our poet laureate Bob Dylan, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

So I consigned our book to the mental remainder bin, and prepared for my role as the kid who gets the orange ribbon for team spirit.

But then, a funny thing happened. We started to get great pre-reviews by Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus. Our newly assigned publicist got excited about the book after reading it. And the blurbs started rolling in, saying nice things like blurbers are wont to do, but more important for me–they got the message we were trying to convey. They understood it! This was hopeful. The big-picture story we’re telling in the book was coming through–this book is more than parenting advice or yet another book on GenX or Y.  It has a larger, and often surprising message, and that message was getting through. And suddenly, people in-house began to sit up and take notice (at least a modicum of notice, which at this starved phase is all I need). Suddenly there’s talk of a hardcover first release again, and some interest from publications for op-eds and blogs and serialization.

So thank you blurbers, all of you. I needed it.

I’ll leave the post on this high note, from another reader:

“Not Quite Adults is perhaps the most important contribution to date about the strange new life of America’s twentysomethings.  Settersten and Ray are able to combine a deep grasp of the research with common sense advice for “not quite adults” and their parents. The slower path to adulthood is here to stay; thanks to the authors, we are now much wiser about what that means for all of us.” –Kay Hymowitz, author of Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys and contributing editor City Journal

Heart you.

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Posted in getting published, publishing industry

I’ve gone over to the dark side…

Posted on August 30, 2010 | 1 Comment

…I bought an iPad. Here it sits beside me, in all its black Bond-like sleekness, beckoning me with its allure while guilting me that I’ve contributed to the downfall of civilization somehow. I haven’t yet downloaded a book, although I will of course. It is, as Steve Jobs knows all too well, inevitable.

It struck me as I was downloading a bunch of apps that we think nothing of paying $5 for a Facebook iPad app but squall over paying a little more than that for a book of 300 pages of hard-won prose. But that’s another story…. and I’m trying not to be one of those curmudgeons.

My initial explorations have left me a little giddy– it is a very cool gadget. And what do I love the most? The iPad is essentially a a “big type” iPhone–you know, those books with the ginormous typeface you see right next to books on tape, for  “old” people. But shhh, don’t tell my Boomer brethren that.

The guilt still nags, though. I think I’m feeling guilty because I have a front-row seat to the meltdown of the publishing world.  As my faithful readers know, I signed a book deal nigh three years ago (or was it four?) with Random House for “Not Quite Adults” (once upon a time called Slouching Toward Adulthood). One, then two, and then three editors were felled by the axe of layoffs. Our acquiring editor, Toni Burbank, was forced into retirement. Our replacement, Philip, met his doom the next year right before Thanksgiving–”realignment” they called it. And editor number three was with us for such a short time that all I have is a welcome email from her. The irony. Through it all, Philip’s editorial assistant, lovely Angela, has persevered–a twenty-something whose lower wages sadly protect her from the axe.

We listened to first one, then two, and finally three editors weigh in with their opinions of the book, most of them too preoccupied with their own short demise to do no more than go through the motions. Being novices at this game (not to mention people pleasers), we listened. And rewrote. And listened. And rewrote. Sometimes, the edits we made restored the deletions we’d cut on the advice of the last editor.

A year passed since we’d turned in the final draft. My mother quit chatting the book up to her friends, quietly certain that the book was dead and I was just too embarrassed to admit it. My husband’s brother, on hearing me mention the book over dinner a few weeks ago, blurted out,  “that book hasn’t been published YET? I thought that had come and gone.” (He was so busted with that comment–you’d think he would have at least attempted to buy the book?) I suspect many of my friends are tiptoeing around the issue as well, afraid that the book came and went so fast that they missed it in the stores.

But it hadn’t. It was still wending its way through the final copyedits, the first galleys, the cover decisions, the blurb solicitations, the author bios and picture, the flap copy, the proofreading, and finally, a publicist–the first person, I have to say, who truly “gets” the book. Thank gawd. Things were rolling.

But then comes the news of Barnes and Nobel. Suffice it to say, when you put yourself up for sale, you know it’s desperate. The 28% stock-price decline in the last year, coupled with a $62 million revenue loss in the 2d quarter doesn’t help, not to mention an ugly ego/legal battle between a supermarket magnate and a man who thinks of bookstores as supermarkets.

And why should I care? I’ve never been enamored of these big-box booksellers who drive mom and pop out of business. They got their comeuppance if you ask me. Yep, I was feeling no love-loss there– until last week, when it trickled down to little ole me. You see, B&N buys 50% of Random House’s first press runs. Half. Now that’s some kind of leverage. (Don’t get me going on how this leverage influences what we read.)  And so, when their reported earnings slump for the quarter, and when legal fees for the ego fight are smothering the last-gasp of air the bookstore has in it, it starts to affect the orders for books. So our little publishing venture faces yet another hurdle.

In the meantime, though, like little David slaying Goliath (or maybe it’s more like Pangloss), we’re generating great advance praise. The Kirkus Review, who often flays (filets?) books, gave it a thumb’s up, calling it “provocative.”  To be exact: “A provocative look at how a changing reality is transforming the transition to adulthood for a generation of Americans, and the implications of this transformation in today’s competitive world.”  [toot-toot]

Of course, it started out like this:

With the assistance of Ray, the former communications director for the MacArthur Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood, Settersten … draws on an eight-year study, sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation, into the social and financial lives of young Americans …

Assistance?????  Sigh. That, too, is fodder for another blog. Not to toot my own horn here, but I wrote the effin book.  And it’s not Rick’s study. And…  I could go on. Alas, I have to prepare for this treatment from here on in. Rick’s name is first because he has the PhD, end of story–another cold reality of the publishing world: those who can write and produce a book under a deadline are relegated to journeyman status, while those with the credentials get all the glory. Bitter, moi?

But I’m thrilled with the nod from Kirkus. They are one of two highly influential early reviewers who influence bigger buyers. And they’re not an easy audience. As Laura Zigman, a former publicist at Knopf, put it:

“When I was a book publicist, the worst part of my job was having to read a Kirkus review over the phone to an author. 2 cigs before, 2 after.”

So maybe, just maybe we’ll make it out into that cold, cruel world of publishing and have a shelf life a little longer than a mayflie.  An assistant can dream.

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Posted in getting published, publishing industry

Barnes and Noble is on the chopping block –yet another hit to the slow decline of the written word

Posted on August 4, 2010 | 3 Comments

In yet another sign of our declining commitment to the written word, Barnes and Noble is putting itself on the sales block. Borders is on the skids as well. Now granted, these two behemoths aren’t exactly the high point of the literary life. When you’re more likely to find a pez dispenser than “As I Lay Dying” in Borders, you know “the word” is in trouble.  Mom and pop bookstores, where you could find oddball authors and be introduced by quirky, passionate staff to new writing you would have never found otherwise, have long been fighting for survival.

As a twenty-something in the 1980s, I not only witnessed the change, but lived it. Back in the day, I worked in bookstores to pay the rent. (Clearly, rent was cheap.) My first job after moving to Chicago was in the decrepit, cavernous Aspidistra used bookstore on Clark St. I was so green to the literary life that I had to look up the origins of the name–Orwell, by the by.

Aspidistra was run by two quirky, passionate leftists who I suspect had dropped out and tuned in a few too many times. One day, as I waited dutifully at the still-locked front door, I saw a bum with greasy, long stringy gray hair wearing an equally greasy tan corduroy jacket fast approaching. I prepared to avoid him, when I suddenly realized it was my boss!

The interior of the store was no less disheveled–and dishelved. They didn’t believe in organizing the rows upon rows of used books, other than under broad categories like “history,” “fiction” scribbled on faded, yellowed tags. Books were stacked in the aisles, on radiators, and in long-forgotten corners. There were no neat sliding ladders to reach the top shelves, just cheap foot stools. In the far corner behind the counter, near the one slant of light that managed to force its way through the grime on the window, sat Paul, a pinkish, sweaty monument to inertia, charged with fixing the price of each book. From a never-diminishing pile of books on his left, he would pluck a volume, peer at it with his severely far-sighted eyes just inches from the page, and pencil in the price on the inside cover, derived in some arcane calculation of the book’s worth.  The book would then move to my pile, and I would decide where to shelve it. And so it went, the two owners, Paul, and me, day in and day out, in some sort of Bartelby the Scrivener purgatory of old, dead book dust.

But what a treasure trove it was. You could find anything in there, and I mean anything. Of course, you had to spend half a day poking through all the piles and shelves, but that was half the fun. The two owners had committed the stock to memory somehow, so if you were on their “good” list, they might tell you if they had a particular book. If you looked at all like a yuppie, they just barked “don’t know: go and look.” Customers earned their place on the “good” list by honing their quest to worthy books only. If you asked for a copy of say, Rilke or Mann’s “Magic Mountain,” you were in the club. “Confederacy of Dunces”: borderline. Danielle Steele: blank, deadly stare.

I spent hours reading things I had never known existed. It was like browsing in the stacks of a decidedly quirky university library, where sheer happenstance finds you hours later, holed up in a corner reading a new, old author. It was an education on so many levels (including the weight of newly acquired books when you move to yet another third-floor walkup.)

Alas, as much as I adored the book stock, the owners I could not stand. After being asked to tamp down the garbage by jumping on it in dumpster permanently parked out back, I’d had enough. I moved to the shiny new B. Dalton down the street in the equally shiny new vertical Century Mall. Yes, this was the era of  “books cost too much” commercials featuring that annoying business-school upstart at Walden books. It was also the beginning of the end. I had entered the world of efficiency planning, sales goals, and corporate dictates from on high for which books to display, replete with step-by-step instructions for how to unfold and erect the life-sized cutout of Danielle Steele.

Soulless comes to mind. While my little crew over at Aspidistra might have been snobs, they at least knew their books. The people B. Dalton hired were more about business than books. I’ll never forget the time a French woman walked into the store asking for a book about idioms, and my fellow clerk just stared at her blankly and asked her who it was by. I’ll also never forget the time during Christmas rush that we clerks were all subjected to a lie-detector test when we came up a couple hundred dollars short one night.

So it was only a short hop from lie-detector tests and corporate ideas about book-selling that we arrived at the online version of Amazon, and my life as a bookstore clerk–along with all the other truly wonderful independent book store owners– was on its way out the door. (And I’m sorry, but the self-serving “you might also enjoy” tagline that Amazon attaches to every freaking purchase is not the same as a good bookstore clerk–even a snobby one.)

This shift to big business and warehousing books has not surprisingly run alongside the demise of our own literary pursuits. The slow joy of reading a good book, and the patiently accruing benefits of so doing, are dying. And along with it something more important–our ability to think.

As Tony Judt so masterfully put it in a recent essay on words and articulacy, “If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have.” He goes on:

inarticulacy surely suggests a shortcoming of thought. This idea will sound odd to a generation praised for what they are trying to say rather than the thing said. Articulacy itself became an object of suspicion in the 1970s: the retreat from “form” favored uncritical approbation of mere “self-expression,”… [the school of ] “Don’t worry how you say it, it’s the ideas that count.” …

For many centuries in the Western tradition, how well you expressed a position corresponded closely to the credibility of your argument. Rhetorical styles might vary from the spartan to the baroque, but style itself was never a matter of indifference. And “style” was not just a well-turned sentence: poor expression belied poor thought. Confused words suggested confused ideas at best, dissimulation at worst….

And how do we master words? By reading–and not just the latest best-seller you can pick up with the hand sanitizer at Wal-Mart, but those quirky, difficult, dusty books that the likes of Aspidistra specialized in. So the trends go hand in hand. Bookstores got bigger and more chock-a-block of gee-gaws, while publishers (whose own demise would take another blog entirely) pandered to the the efficiency experts at the big chains, and book clerks became interchangeable with pimply-faced 7-11 clerks (and more lately computer algorithm), and our articulacy fell along with them. I’m not exactly sad to see the likes of Borders and Barnes and Noble bite the dust. In fact, maybe it’s time for a resurgence of the independent bookstore. Let’s take a page from the “green” movement playbook. Maybe the slow-food and artisanal movements in cooking and eating can spark the reintroduction of a locally grown, slow-bookstore movement.

So a call to all you readers out there: visit your independent bookstore and start a movement.

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Posted in publishing industry, writer's life

We have a title!

Posted on April 6, 2010 | 3 Comments

It’s been awhile since I’ve revisited the process of writing a book. Let’s just say, it’s a process with a capital P. After the heady experience of walking into Random House, seeing all those great authors in the display cases in the august lobby, and pitching our book proposal as if our life depended on it, Rick and I got down to the business of actually writing the darn book.

Yes, dear reader, we were signed by Random House–woot.  Lest you think we were simply lucky, let me say this. Not. It required months of finessing a proposal, writing the perfect cover letter (thank you Jeff Herman) and seemingly countless hours poring over the A Writer’s Guide to Book Publisher’s…and Literary Agents to get just the right agent, followed by a ton of envelope-licking and SASE postage. And rejections. Did I mention the rejections?  Curt, dismissive dismissals. Ouch.

But shortly, we’d meet with luck, and we signed with an agent. More  rewrites of the proposal would follow (thank you Joelle), capped off by a one-day whirlwind trip of shameless, pressure-cooker salesmanship (tip to authors: polish that elevator speech because it’s all the time you get). Eight hours, eight publishing houses– and a stiff drink at the Algonquin following.

I will say, though, that the punchy, testoterone-soaked day of pitching the book in NYC, and then the heady bidding war that followed, was enough adrenaline to carry me for several months. Until the drudgery hit of putting word after word on the page and hoping it makes sense.

Ok, drudgery might seem like a pretty strong word. Most people envy the life of a writer. Sleep late, work in your sweats, put in a few hours at the computer composing brilliant prose, cash the royalty check and head out to the local pub at night to live up to the stereotype of a writer, get in a fight or two, slay a lion– oh wait, that’s Papa Hemingway.

Mostly it’s this: wake up, read a boring research paper, realize that you’ve left out a very important point that boring research paper raises, try to figure out how it will fit in your airtight framework, realize said airtight framework is falling apart, and you’re a complete fraud who has no clue what you’re doing. Breathe. Feed cats. Decide to cling desperately to the framework because it’s all you have. In the meantime, read the New York Review of Books for inspiration. Hate yourself even more. In fact, you now despise all books, and fantasize about a 9-5 job as a hotel concierge.  Berate poor unsuspecting husband for not folding the socks just so. …

Day 2.

And so it goes, until you have 100,000 words on the page. Nothing to it. (and did I mention you’re expected to do all the other work of your “real” job on top of it?)

So, after about 6 months of this torture, you have something on the page that resembles a first draft. And then, lucky you, you get feedback. From everyone. There are two things in this world, people and opinions. Or as the old joke goes, opinions are like  *–holes, everyone has one.

Yes, dear reader, it takes a certain ballsy certainty to be an author. Ego I think some call it. At first you welcome the input. (But not really. Who’s kidding whom?) Yet, being the product of a midwestern “don’t get too big for your britches” childrearing policy,  I took those comments to heart. It’s ME who is the failure. It’s MY logic that is faulty.

But at some point, about month 15, when person A has suggested you rearrange the chapter to stress a certain point only to have person B suggest it another way, and person C, or D, or E (you’ve lost count) circles back  to the original point, you begin to suspect that this world of publishing is an arbitrary game of Chinese water torture.  Which it is. So you strap some on, write a chapter that makes sense to you, and move ON.

And eventually, we come to the reward– the final edition. The one you send to copyediting. This is the one that has gone through so many revisions that if it were a pair of jeans through the wash, it’d be threadbare. It’s been pored over so many times that I don’t even know what I’m reading anymore.This is the one that says, make your final changes now because in the next step, galleys, we’ll charge you for them. No pressure.

But you know what, the book is good. It really is. I read it for the last time poolside in Miami, and I have to say, I’m happy. I’ve been pushed far beyond my comfort zone. I’ve been pummeled beyond recognition. I’ve complained and doubted and bolted upright in cold sweats at night (that could, however, be menopause), but in the end, it’s a good book.

And so we leave the editorial side of things and enter the dark world of marketing– with a brand-spanking new title. The title? Drum roll please:

Not Quite Adults: Why 20-Somethings Are Choosing a Slower Path to Adulthood and Why It’s Good for Everyone.

The tearsheet, catalogue copy, blurbs, and cover are to come. And then the marketing onslaught begins in earnest, followed, miraculously, by December 28, when it hits the bookstores. So you all can BUY a copy.

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Posted in book publicity, publishing industry, writer's life, writing nonfiction

Authors are greedy???

Posted on February 11, 2010 | 1 Comment

Ok, my blood pressure shot up this morning reading a Times article about e-readers’ revolt at paying, gasp, $14.99 for an e-book read. Apparently a certain group of tea-party readers is balking at forking over $5 more for their “book,” and in turn they write nasty reviews on the authors’ Amazon pages. (The reader/buyer in this case was a retiree in Florida, who apparently has the money to retire to Florida.)

If you haven’t been following this drama, Wal-Mart (of course) charges only $9.99 for a e-book. Publishers claim that’s not enough. They want to charge $15. Readers fire back that publishers don’t have to cover the cost of printing and distribution anymore so it should be cheaper.

True on the last point, but a hardcover costs $25 roughly. Dropping down to $10 is quite a fall. Printing doesn’t cost THAT much. Wal-Mart just has the power to set a price, which really should give us all pause on many levels, not the least of which Wal-Mart is determining the price of the arts in this country.  But I digress.

But more to the point– somehow in all this, the author is getting blamed, calling us greedy! Ahem, see my post yesterday on chumps.

“It gives me pause” [said an author] “when I get 50 e-mails saying ‘I’m never buying one of your books ever again. I’m moving on, you greedy, greedy author.”‘

Believe me dear readers, authors (and editors) are the caboose on this supposed gravy train. Sure some authors are rock stars when they shouldn’t be (their fat advances vacuum the money away from the rest of us). But the vast, vast majority of us are getting piddling advances that publishers pay out over one to two years. You get one-fourth when you sign, one-fourth when you deliver the manuscript (in accepted form), one when it’s published hardcover, and finally, when it’s published in paperback. You do the math. Ok, I’ll do it for you–it works out to poverty level wages.

Our poor editors are making just a little more.

So amen to this point:

“There are people who don’t always understand what goes into an author writing and an editor editing and a publishing house with hundreds of men and women working on these books,” said Mark Gompertz, executive vice president of digital publishing at Simon & Schuster.

I don’t hear people rushing the gates with complaints about the cost of their $100 a month iphone habit, or their $40 a month Verizon mobile phone bill. Why pick on us lowly  authors? There are bigger fights to pick! Fork over $15 for your e-read, save an author.

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A business model for chumps?

Posted on February 9, 2010 | 2 Comments

Author Dani Shapiro had a depressing article in the LA Times on Sunday.

The subtitle says it all:

Authors used to expect to struggle as they gained experience. But now it is sell — or else.

oy, ain’t that the truth. The gist was that not that long ago, authors could cultivate their talent over time, growing and learning with each book. Now, it’s sell or die. To wit:

The emphasis is on publishing, not on creating. On being a writer, not on writing itself. The publishing industry — always the nerdy distant cousin of the rest of media — has the same blockbuster-or-bust mentality of television networks and movie studios. There now exist only two possibilities: immediate and large-scale success, or none at all. There is no time to write in the cold, much less for 10 years.

The result– and here’s where it gets depressing:

In the last several years, I’ve watched friends and colleagues suddenly find themselves without publishers after having brought out many books. Writers now use words like “track” and “mid-list” and “brand” and “platform.” They tweet and blog and make Facebook friends in the time they used to spend writing. Authors who stumble can find themselves quickly in dire straits. How, under these conditions, can a writer take the risks required to create something original and resonant and true?

Egads, why do I do this again? Shapiro tries to end on a positive note, but seriously, it feels a little forced.

Let’s review: toil to get a book deal (lots of rejection), get an advance that is paid out in installments over, in my case, 4 years. Do the math–that’s poverty level wages. Write the book, revise and write again. Then do your own marketing and publicity (not enough to just write the book). And now, first-time authors must arrive with a built-in platform, a guaranteed audience or no deal. And then, apparently, even if you’ve jumped through all those hoops and have gotten used to rice and beans, you’re still on thin ice unless your book sells. Isn’t that a business model for a chump?

And yet, I want to do it, most days.

The question is, why don’t authors balk? They hold the power after all. They might not think they do (ever negotiated a publishing contract?), but come on, they’re producing the material. They’re writing the books. THE PRODUCT. And yet they get the crumbs? (james patterson excepted).

I’m not a kumbaya kind of gal. I like the symmetry and concreteness of supply and demand. I don’t think a business should survive if it’s not viable.  And lord knows, the publishing business model is a bit iffy.

The question is, how to reform it?

This much we know. We need the key parts:

  • the authors!
  • The editors–they still are the gatekeepers, and would gladly I suspect return to the role of tenders of the written word if they didn’t have to do all that other crap. Editors impart some form of quality control that is so desperately needed. (alas, it’s not always evident, but it could come back)
  • The  marketers to get the books notices. If we didn’t publish so darn many crappy books every year, they wouldn’t be stretched so thin and underdog books might see the light of day.
  • Printers–not so much, thank you Kindle.
  • Bookstores, online and off (aka distributors)

After that, I’m in over my head.  I will say, though, that publishers have to figure out a better system of determining advances. Put Steve Levitt of Freakonomics fame on it for pete’s sake.  Get some science behind it. After that, things should fall in line. No more outrageous advances to the likes of Sarah Palin, which suck the money away from real writers.

And here’s a suggestion:   abolish bookseller returns! Book returns are no different than subsidizing farmers to produce too much corn. If booksellers couldn’t return the books, they wouldn’t order crap that doesn’t sell. What other business allows its vendors to return products for a refund? Woops, my stupid gamble didn’t pay off, but no harm no foul. I’ll just return 3,000 copies of Queens on Ice. geesh.

But I’m descending into rant territory… but really, sometimes Occam’s Razor is apt: the simplest strategy tends to be the best one.

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Posted in getting published, publishing industry, writing nonfiction

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Can the novel survive in an ADD world?

Posted on February 1, 2010 | Leave a comment

Over at the site where I now spend most of my energies, Spotlight on Digital Media & Learning, we ran a series on whether digital media is making us worse writers. It’s a good series–not the knee-jerk, woe-is-me approach, but a look at how “writing” is changing.  The series raises the prospect that writing is no longer just words on the page, but the ability to tell stories with sound, music, image, and words. We’re digital thinkers now after all.

I’m not yet convinced, to be honest, that writing should include all that other media, but I’m open to thinking about it. I’d love to know what you think. Read the stories and leave some comments.

Anyway, in researching that story, I ran across this  interview last year with Tina Brown and novelist Philip Roth. Roth thinks the novel will become cultic in less than 25 years, with a small devoted group of readers, “maybe more than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range.”

He pinpoints the problem with the form—“the print, the book. It’s the object itself.” Reading a novel requires focus and time that are in short supply today. The novel, he says, can’t compete with so many screens.

One thing he said struck me, mainly because I’m guilty of it. He said that no one can really read and absorb a novel if you have to spread the reading out over 2 weeks or more. He argues that you have to sit with a novel and devour it in a couple sittings, max. Spreading the reading out any longer and you lose the essence of the novel, its beauty, its thread, the author’s rhythm and use of language (I’m inferring that result from the edited clip).

And with that, a lightbulb goes on. So that’s why, a year later, I couldn’t tell you what happened in 97% of all the books I have read (Oh, who’s kidding whom, I couldn’t tell you the plot of a book I read 2 months ago). I used to chalk it up to bad memory, or age, or whatever. I’d work at it–making some notes in the margins or underlining some beautiful passages. Nope, still not sticking. I’d read slowly. I’d skim. Nothing worked. If you quizzed me today on what happened in Roth’s “The People Against America,” I couldn’t tell you. I liked it. I remember that.

But you know, I read the Zuckerman trilogy in a pretty condensed period of time over a vacation once, and I can indeed recall the plot lines, and I can vividly recall Zuckerman in all his stages of outrage and angst. (I can actually always call up the characters in a novel come to think of it. I may not remember their names, but I remember their personalities).

So maybe he’s right. Maybe the novel is indeed doomed in our sound-bit, clipped, bombarded world. We express ourselves a lot more, but we don’t absorb–really take in–any more. All output, no input.

Well, so what? In many ways, the novel has always been a bit cultic. Only a relative handful of Americans today (or ever) read “serious” novels (my agent and editors say those people all live on the coasts. ouch). Even today, there are the cultic few who still sit in a quiet room without television on, without email pinging, without the dumb-phone buzzing for attention, and read uninterrupted for hours, lost in the other world that has been created for them.

All true. But the real worry for me is this: seepage. Even though serious fiction, and serious nonfiction readers for that matter have always been rather few and far between, we at least didn’t admit it. We still as a culture strove to be better readers, more highbrow. We faked it when we hadn’t read War and Peace. But we tried. I remember my parents’ book shelves stuffed with the Readers Digest condensed editions of the books of the day (both now-classics and the junk). My small-town Iowa parents had Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” on the shelves (quite a shocking find for a ten-year-old). They had “To Kill a Mockingbird.” And my parents were not highbrow, in the least.

Today, though, we don’t even fake it any longer. In fact, we revel in the fact that we’re not “elite.” We’re embracing this new “just in time” knowledge as a badge of honor, shedding the guilt of not reading anything deeply, of dismissing newspapers as “old media,” not because the news is irrelevant or novels are too obscure, but because we’re too lazy to sit and read them. Oh wait, I mean too busy to sit and read them.

Seepage. From “oh I’ll get around to that” to “why read, it’s all biased anyway.” Justification? Rationalization? I don’t know.

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So a writer walks into Random House…

Posted on January 29, 2010 | Leave a comment

Punchy I believe is where I left off. We were indeed that. Rick’s achilles tendon was bloody. My mind was mush. And we needed to turn it “on” one more time, for the big guns.

I’m not a salesperson. Never was. I tried it–twice. Once selling car stereos, and once selling the new-fangled video advertising (circa 1981). The car stereos was a hoot, albeit dreadful. My counterpart in sales danced circles around me. I just could not bring myself to sell an overpriced woofer to a guy and his pregnant girlfriend who were barely scraping by. Sales was not for me.The video advertising ended tragically.

But here I was, late in the day in the capital of high-pitched sales, New York City, and boy I was fried. I’d also felt a little one-upped all day by my coauthor, who was on a roll in the schmoozing dept. I tend to feel a little persecuted when no one notices my brilliance sight unseen. Yes, it’s a problem. I felt like sulking a couple times, but then my good old boxing coach, Chupi, popped into my head: “Gringa, what are you doing letting him beat you? Throw a punch, just don’t stand there!!!!!” (Chupi was a very animated Puerto Rican– in my corner to the end).

So I rallied. We walked into RH, got our passes from the security guard, and packed into yet another elevator. Ding. We were on the vaulted floors of the editorial offices of the big guys.

It was pretty underwhelming to be honest. Cubicles. (!) Say it ain’t so Joe. Dilbert, really?

We were ushered into a glass-encased room that always reminds me of those scary psychological experiments where white lab-coated people with clipboards nod and check off lists as the people behind the glass talk.

Anyway, there we were, encased. It was actually a small group for a change– just two editors, an editorial assistant, and us. Toni Burbank. She’d been at Random House for most of her career, which was going on 30 years I believe. Unheard of in this pell-mell “right-sizing” world of buyouts and mergers that publishing was enduring. We’d heard so much about her from Joelle, I was already nearly in awe.

All I could think at time, as I looked around at the young editorial assistants, was What if? What if I’d known enough to leave Iowa and move directly to NYC, with nothing but a willingness to work hard and learn the ropes? Would I have been sitting in Toni’s seat? Or would I have been cast aside because I hadn’t even known that you have to go to Bryn Mawr or Brown to even get a foot in the door (at least today)?

That’s one lesson I learned in writing this book. Today is a high-stakes world for young people. No one can just walk into a publisher today and hope to start from the bottom and work up–without credentials stacked high already. The game begins early, with elite parents understanding very clearly how the game is played, while another group of parents still believes in the school of hard knocks and paying dues. Yet dues are paid today in internships–internships that require a benefactor to support you while you intern yourself (or perhaps “inter” yourself). The rest of us, without those deep pockets, end up at Starbucks.

But I digress…  And I’m tiring. I promise I’ll get to the part where it all melts down. But not today.

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How I got to Random House

Posted on January 28, 2010 | Leave a comment

I had a photo shoot yesterday for the book jacket cover photo. Wince. That has to be one of the most cringe-worthy ways to spend an afternoon, at least for me.  The last thing I want is to PRESERVE my image so I can run across it ten years later and think, what was I thinking wearing that?

It’s not just that, though. I cringe because it’s so, well, self-involved. I grew up in a stoic Iowa family in an era whose slogan might as well have been “what makes you think you can do that?” Don’t show off, don’t toot your own horn, don’t brag, and above all, don’t get hung up on yourself.

So finding myself on a Friday afternoon sitting in front of a makeup artist in a loft in Uke Village in Chicago was a bit surreal. Actually, the entire episode of getting this book off the ground, and landing with Random House to boot, has been surreal.

Little did I know that I happened to land my first book deal (at age 48) amid one of the biggest meltdowns in publishing history. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Three years back–yes, that long–I was finishing a stint with a research group funded by MacArthur Foundation here in Chicago. The group– 12 academics from different disciplines–was studying why young people were suddenly slowing everything down and slouching toward adulthood instead of racing, as my generation and others before it had done.

I have a weird relationship with academia–I’m not an academic, I just play one on tv. My day job is to help them make their research more approachable to a wider audience. So I was part of this network to help them take the findings and do something with them. Natch, i thought of a book. But not until the end. Eight years after they started. So in 2007, as the Network on Transitions to Adulthood was winding down, one of the members, Rick, and I decided to write a mainstream book that would bring all this interesting research together in a package that was lively, entertaining, and insightful. Easy peasy.

Ha.

I wrote a proposal, Rick and I revised it a million times, and sent it out to 10-15 agents at the end of August. (tip: don’t send it out at the end of August–everyone’s on vacation). Except, that is, my lovely agent Joelle. She called up within a few days. (that’s the kind of midwestern work ethic I know and love).

You can’t imagine how exciting that is to answer the phone one afternoon with a NJ phone number showing up, thinking it’s a new client calling, and instead it’s this wonderful woman with a thick East Coast accent saying, Barbara, (think Jersey here), I read your proposal and I really think there’s something here.

From there it was a whirlwind. Several agents bit, and we ended up interviewing them! Not how it usually goes, believe me. But we had what few others have– a platform. Rick, my coauthor, has a PhD, but the real driver was the MacArthur Foundation and the research it backed. We were golden.

Before you know it we were in NYC doing a whirlwind tour of the big name houses. It was a thrill beyond thrills to walk into Simon & Schuster, Little,Brown, and Random with the likes of Hemingway, Faulkner and Philip Roth on the shelves and in the lobbies.

It was a wild day– we went in and pitched and pitched and pitched. We’d race down the street to the subway with Joelle in the lead, hop on a train to another house uptown, then whiz in a cab to another one downtown. 45 minutes in each place. A coffee and chocolate in between for refueling. A conference room full of editors and publicity in each place. Questions fired at us. Who’s the audience?  In real estate, it’s location, location, location. In publishing, it’s audience, audience, audience.

We actually hadn’t thought of that question believe it or not. Well, we kinda had an idea, but these guys were grilling us with specifics. We were trying our damnest to be charming AND prepared.

By 3:00 we were punchy. Rick’s new shoes had carved out a wedge of flesh in his ankle. I was glassy-eyed. We had one more to go… Random House. …

But alas, I’ve taxed the blogger’s attention span at this point. To be continued…

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