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It’s Not Who You Know

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We’ve all heard the old adage:

It’s not what you know but who you know that matters.

Apart from being a conspiracy-theorist’s dream excuse, the adage does have a grain of truth in it. Relationships and networking may matter as much or more in business as your skill set.

I mention this because of a blog post put up by Debbie Stier, Senior V.P. and Associate Publisher at HarperStudio, and Director of Digital Marketing at HarperCollins. It’s a short personal piece about an epiphany in Debbie’s work life, but it also speaks volumes about the book business and how it actually works.

Like many would-be authors I used to think that writers wrote books in little cottages in the woods, bleeding truth onto pages already saturated with tears. When a book was done the author then agonized over query letters, blindly attempting to appease personal idiosyncrasies that each agent somehow believed to be an industry norm. If, against all odds, the author managed to land an agent for his book, the agent went through a similar process trying to generate interest in an editor at a publishing house. If, against these even-longer odds, an editor became interested, that editor then went through a similar process trying to get the support of the person or group that was responsible for pulling the trigger on an actual deal.

Read Debbie’s post about the five new books she’s excited to be working on and you’ll see none of that. In fact, there is no direct mention that Debbie read a single word by any of these authors as a means of discovering them:

I’d heard him speak at the Web 2.0 conference and I wanted desperately to work with him.

…

The next author to sign with HarperStudio was Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg.com. I’m a huge fan — have been following his blog, twitter, videos, etc. for some time…

…

Jill Kargman is a novelist. I saw her on Samantha Ettus’s show Obsessed TV six months ago and knew I wanted to work with her.

…

I’d been thinking a lot about merits and challenges of being a small company within a large corporation, and Bob suggested that there’s a book in that. Nick Bilton from the New York Times lead me to Ryan Tate at Gawker, and he is now writing a book for us called Skunkworks, which I can’t wait to read.

…

One more author who I want to mention who signed with HarperStudio, though it was slightly before that December epiphany, but still very much part of my process of realizing how much I love my job, is Melanie Notkin, the Savvy Auntie. She’s writing her Savvy Auntie’s Guide to Life.

Here’s what Debbie did not say: ‘I read Author X’s novel/manuscript and it knocked me out.’ And yet there’s nothing wrong with that. As noted above, this kind of book-production paradigm may actually be the norm these days.  [ Read more ]

Publishing is for Professionals

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As I’ve noted on several other occasions, and will continue to note in the future, at times there is a disconnect between the publishing industry’s self-aggrandizing rhetoric about protecting the cultural soul of our nation (or any nation for that matter), and its omnipresent and often low-brow efforts to exploit that cultural stewardship for cash. (See also: hypocrisy.)

Here are two quotes from a blog comment I wrote today:

Marketing will always be trying to leverage content for its own ends because it’s in marketing’s best interest to do so.

…

Maybe in a decade (or two months), when you click a button on your e-reader to look at the next page of your novel, you[‘ll] instead get an interstitial commercial which you cannot bypass.

Before you roll your eyes at this bold prediction — and I say now that some e-reader marketing weasel will implement exactly this type of marketing fail — a brief history lesson is in order. Back in the 70’s, when I was just getting into paperback fiction, I happened to run across a novel that had a card of some kind wedged in the middle of it. Thinking that someone had left a substantial bookmark behind I flipped to the card and attempted to remove it, only to discover that it was bound to the book.  [ Read more ]

The Infallible Editor

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Not everyone tells stories, but we all create and embrace narratives as we move through our lives. As human beings we do this for a number of reasons, including making life seem more orderly and secure than it actually is.

For example, it’s commonly said that during a time of war anyone who serves in the military is a hero — in part for risking their life, and in part for doing a job the rest of us don’t want to do. The reality, of course, is much different. People in uniform are no different than people out of uniform. Even during a time of national emergency there are military murderers, pedophiles, psychotics, traitors, and on and on.

But that’s not a narrative that makes us sleep well at night. We need to believe that the people in the military are highly-trained professionals keeping us safe from harm, and we don’t want to feel guilty about not taking that risk ourselves. So we buy into a narrative of dedicated heroes who put our physical safety ahead of their own lives. The military encourages this narrative because it helps maintain their funding, and because it shields them from analysis that might force a change in doctrine or structure.

We embrace such narratives because they allow us to get out of bed and slog through our day without freaking out about existential pointlessness or worries that the people we are forced to rely on are letting us down. It’s ultimately an extension of childhood, where you can’t see your parents as individuals partly because you don’t have the cognitive capacity, but also because you know on a primitive level that you are wholly and completely reliant on them for your survival. No matter how many times a parent hits you or passes out in front of you from drugs or alcohol, you know they’re good people down deep because they have to be.

As someone who tells stories for a living, I see these kinds of narratives in every aspect of life, every endeavor, every organization, every business, every profession. Despite the example above, I also see the utility of these narratives, and the benefit to individuals both within and outside organizations that use narratives to further their cause or justify their existence.

Unfortunately, it’s often the case that such narratives are not a function of genuine personal, societal or cultural need, but rather an attempt to exploit the very idea of a narrative for self-serving reasons. You can see this most clearly in all aspects of politics, where messaging and rhetoric aspire to nothing more than sloganeering and nationalism of one flavor or another. Maddeningly, this kind of narrative marketing usually works, and all the more so when threats of imminent death are churned into the mix.  [ Read more ]

Sex in Authored Products

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The following post is part of an ongoing series about how sex is used to attract and hold customer interest in authored works of all kinds, and particularly in stories. Previous posts include Sex Tells and The Sex Question.

The Question of Sex
Think for a moment about any type of authored end product: movies, songs, books, web sites, stage plays or musicals, fan fiction or zines, newspaper columns, magazine articles, graffiti, paintings, tweets, doodles, t-shirts, sculpture or anything else that someone creates in order to communicate ideas or feelings. If I asked you to come up with a sexual example from any of those product categories, or from any category I failed to mention, it would probably take you less than ten seconds to recall one from memory or locate one via internet search, and less than a second to imagine one.

Sex is everywhere because sex is part of who we are. It’s not all that we are, of course, though if you get your life experiences from television or other advertising-driven mediums you may find that hard to believe. Still, apart from business motives sex is found in the art and ritual of cultures around the world, from phallic symbols to fertility rites to images and descriptions of sexual acts and relationships. Despite the advent of the internet and world-wide, on-demand, in-home pornography, when it comes to sex there is, truly, nothing new under the sun.

It may seem absurd, then, to wonder about the motives for including sex in authored works, but that’s just what I’m about to do. If sex is a known ingredient in authored products — and I have stipulated that it is — then we are as justified in asking whether that ingredient is being used effectively in the authored works we consume as we are in asking whether a chef’s ingredients have been used effectively in the food we are eating.

The question is not: What is this ingredient? The question is: Why is this known ingredient being used?  [ Read more ]

Weekend Reads

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First, an apology to regular readers for the lack of posts this week. There are a number of issues I want to talk about, but none of them lend themselves to short, pithy notes, and I’ve been finding myself short of available hours. It hasn’t helped that my ISP, Verizon, has seen fit to block access to my own website for five, seven, even ten hours at a stretch. I’m now hopeful, however, that my good and programmatically apologetic friends on the other side of the world have taken my issue to heart and escalated it to a level commensurate with actual customer service.

In other news, the mad sound of hammering you hear behind the curtain is indeed a sign of progress. I have some fiction I hope to be able to put up soon, provided I can navigate all the business and technological hurdles required to do so.  [ Read more ]

Your Publishing Platform Defined

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The Road More Traveled
If you’ve looked into the current self-publishing boom at all you’ve undoubtedly heard the advice that you must work on your platform to have any hope of being successful as a self-published writer. If you’re at all like me you probably seized on this mushy advice while also struggling to make sense of it. And struggling. And struggling…

At some point the thought may have occurred to you that while the advice is undoubtedly solid, it’s your ignorance of key terms* that makes it hard for you to seize this golden opportunity. What, exactly, is a platform, and how is it most effectively worked on?

Taking the bull by the horns, while also somehow following conventional wisdom, you equate your platform with your website or blog or personal appearances, and equate work on with writing and saying things for free so as to induce other human beings to care about you. (Over time, as you dedicate yourself to this apparently-but-not-really more robust definition of a platform, this exchange of labor and skill for attention may also convince you that you can profit by giving other things away, including the books or stories you naively intended to sell before you became so much wiser about self-publishing.)

At some much later point, when you’re lying by the side of the self-publishing road with an I.V. in your neck and blisters on your hands from crawling those last long miles, you may marvel that personal determination seems to have so little to do with success in publishing or self-publishing. While it’s certainly true that you can’t win if you don’t enter, it’s more likely the case that even if you enter constantly and do everything you’re supposed to do — including working on your platform, whatever that means — you still won’t win.

At which point, if you’re a good and decent sort, you will simply blame yourself for having failed. You will man-up or woman-up as appropriate and acknowledge that you never really figured out what your platform was, or how you could work on it. Being a decent sort, however, you won’t hesitate to encourage others to crack the code by working on their own platform, which will endear you to the next crop of earnest, hardworking fools determined to make a name for themselves with their writing.  [ Read more ]

Weekend Reads

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Call it the Year In Review edition. We’re nine days into the new year and nothing bad has happened yet. A record for the new millennium.

  • The Year In Self-Publishing
    One writer’s in-the-trenches take on self-publishing, complete with ugly earnings report. I admire the enthusiasm and the realism. I also think the new ability for anyone to cut out the middlepersons (agents, editors) and access readers directly, is a bigger deal than most people realize. I’m not saying it’s a more lucrative deal — just important. There’s also a good lesson here about not bastardizing your content in order to be trendy. The great freedom that is the internet means you do not have to compromise. If you’re willing to bend your work any which way in order to make a sale then you didn’t need the internet in the first place.
  • Dave Barry’s Good (Bad) Year In Review
    Dave Barry. Enough said.
  • Gamasutra’s Top 12 Games of the Decade
    I don’t have much quarrel with the games they chose, which is all the more impressive given the cross-platform nature of the list. I will note that 8 of the 10 are from 2005 or before. Feel free to reach your own conclusions.
  • Opinion: The 99 Best Free Games Of 2009
    If you’re really hoping to waste an entire day then you’ve come to the right link. Play #1 on the list, if only to break free of Nintendo/MicroSony/PC Blockbuster straitjacket.
  • My Favorite Book Covers of 2009
    My here refers to the author of the linked post, not to me. Still, some good choices, and a good selection betraying no detectable stylistic bias. My favorite: The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime. Runner-up: Columbine.
  • The Year’s Most Mesmerizing Mysteries
    I’ve read exactly none of these, but this is exactly the kind of best-of list that will help me catch up with the latest doin’s in the mystery genre. Speaking of which….

    • Note: I had another link on this list that I found on Twitter, but as I was reviewing the page a series of faux virus warnings splashed across my monitor. Should I ever inadvertently pass along a link to a malicious site, please let me know. [Tip: use the Alt-F4 key combination to close windows that you suspect may be used to trigger the downloading of malicious content or files.]

    — Mark Barrett

Judgment

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Does this remind you of anything?

The settlement agreement was reached Monday night. The lawyers sent a letter to the court at 12:23 a.m. Tuesday announcing a settlement. But in the morning, [Judge] Alsup was less than thrilled with the parties’ stipulation as part of the agreement that the court had held the trademark valid.

Growing stern, Alsup told the lawyers, “I will not let you walk out of this courthouse” with a settlement stating that “a judgment was entered” in favor of Autodesk’s mark. Stern and Jacobs scrambled out of the courtroom, and after back-and-forths between clients and lawyers alike, came back with a new agreement. The final draft said that the parties agreed that DWG is a valid trademark (pdf), but emphasized twice that the court did not rule on the issue. The terms of the settlement were confidential aside from the brief stipulation.

Alsup is “being a good guardian of the law in not wanting to be a party to something that may be used beyond an agreement or concessions between parties,” said Neil Smith, an IP lawyer with Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton who was not involved in the case. He said Alsup was wise to head off the danger of the settlement being “waved around as a finding of validity.”

What this reminded me of was the revised (and original) Google Books Settlement, where two parties — Google and the Authors Guild — are trying to reach agreement in a self-generated dispute that undermines copyright law. Not surprisingly, this settlement advantages both parties, while disadvantaging every copyright holder.

My hope, at a minimum, is that the judge overseeing the Google case will prohibit both parties from making claims about their compliance with copyright law if their settlement is approved. Ideally, however, the judge will void the settlement as being against existing law, just as a judge would void my legal agreement with you that we can break into a third person’s house and steal their furniture.

— Mark Barrett

Be Bold

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I was reminded today of this:

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
~ Goethe

It was probably two or three years ago when I came across this bit of pith, and it really hit home. Key to me is the fact that it scales: whatever you consider being bold, that’s your bar. You don’t have to compete with people who have deep pockets, or who were born into a family hard-wired with connections. You just have to try.

I also think it’s true. Or at least it’s been true for me when I’ve been bold in the past. I’ve had my ass kicked, I’ve swung and missed more than once, but in general I’ve come out ahead for being bold. I know that magic.

In a (mostly) amazing coincidence, I visited Goethe’s resting place in Weimar, Germany last year while traveling on business. He didn’t have anything to add.

Update: Maybe because the quote doesn’t actually come from Goethe. As near as I can tell after trying to nail this down, it seems to have originated with this guy.

— Mark Barrett

The Sex Question

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In a recent post I put forward the idea that sex used in the advertising of nonsexual products betrays products of no particular distinction. At root, however, the previous post was not about advertising. Rather, it was the tip of the iceberg in a larger conversation about the decision to use (or, by extension, not use) sex in any kind of authored content.

The question is not why sex is used in commercials or authored works. We know why it’s used. Our animal brains are hard-wired for sex, apart from any additional sociological or psychological interest we may add as we grow and develop in whatever culture we happen to live in. Sex does in fact sell — meaning attract and hold consumer interest — but that’s not what I’m interested in. Rather, I’m interested in what motivates creators to use sex and its sure-fire, brain-simple appeal in any given instance, and particularly in stories.  [ Read more ]