Mark – Page 54

Start Me Up!

October 27, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

We all know there’s a cottage industry in making fun of Sarah Palin. Whatever your political bent, her appearance(s) on Saturday Night Live cemented that fact. Now that she’s written (cough) a book that’s due out shortly, people are trying to get more yuks out of the woman.

We also know that the whole self-publishing movement is saddled with a lot of baggage. If it isn’t the vanity-publishing industry ripping off customers, it’s the pervasive idea that self-publishing of any stripe is an admission of failure. Failure to succeed in publishing, failure to write good (sic!), failure to have been born into the right social circles, etc. I’ve even read snarky comments about use of the term independent author, although I can’t figure out how it’s anything but accurate.

Tonight, however, all that changed. Because of this:

Start-up publisher OR Books has announced plans to publish….

Start-up publisher…?

OMG!!! [Cue gender-neutral thrill-squeal.]

If perception is reality, then marketing speak is the plutonium that fuels cultural mushroom clouds. One day you’re a lowly self-publisher fighting industry scorn, the next you’re a start-up publisher driving technology and innovation to capture market share!

(See also micro-publishing for another marketing-friendly co-opting term.)

— Mark Barrett

May You Live in Interesting Times

October 26, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

Two months ago — two months! — I started digging into the issues facing publishers and authors. Now, eight weeks hence — eight weeks! — I feel like I’m living in another millennium. Or having a dissociative episode.

Back at the dawn of time the Kindle was all that, with Sony trying to chip away at market share. Now, today, the Barnes & Noble reader (called the Nook) seems to have materialized out of thin air and projected itself into the role of New Sensation!

Kindle development time = 197 years. Nook = 2 minutes on High.

Back at the dawn of time Google was getting ready to lock up all written and yet-to-be written knowledge by conspiring with a little-known, self-absorbed bureaucracy that could not pass up the chance to do something important, even if that something was completely and utterly wrong. Now, today, the Internet Archive is doing something just as interesting, without all the lawsuits — and without aspiring to own things they don’t own.

By the way, I found this really interesting:

Brewster took a break from the demonstrations to elaborate a couple of facts, the most significant of which was the fact the books in the worlds libraries fall into 3 categories. The first category is public domain, which accounts for 20% of the total titles out there – these are the titles being scanned by IA. The second category is books that are in print and still commercially viable, these account for 10% of the volumes in the world’s libraries. The last category are books that are “out of print” but still in copyright. These account for 70% of the titles, and Brewster called this massive amount of information the “dead zone” of publishing.

Polarized positions are becoming even more polarized. Analog publishers hate digital anything. Bookstore owners hate volume discounts. Agents hate writers. And everybody hates independent authors ecause they’re not waiting in line to be hand-picked and validated by somebody else: “You’re cutting in line! You suck! You have no talent! You’re only able to find readers because of the internet, not because you survived our rigged system!”

Trying to project the lay of the land on New Years Day only evokes images of supernovae. Oh, and that Yellowstone caldera blowing up.

More here from Kassia Kroszer/Booksquare. And here and here from Nathan Bransford.

— Mark Barrett

Theme as Theory

October 25, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

Wrapping up Theme Week here on Ditchwalk I want to shine a little light on the dark side of theme. The problem, as we’ve discovered, is that theme in any instance can never truly be known except by the person who originally employed it, and in some instances not even then.

Because of our innate human tendency to create narratives out of any and all events, we tend to believe we can determine a person’s motivations by looking at the choices they make. This leads to the unsupported conclusion that mucking around in a literary work will tell us something about the person who wrote it, and why they wrote it.

In those instances where we admit uncertainty we still assume that people understand their own motivations, but even this is not necessarily true. Think of an erratic act or crime, and a fair portion of the unease you feel will be attributable not to the act itself, but to your inability to make sense of what happened, or the even-more-frightening thought that the person who acted has no idea why they did what they did. Human beings do not like things that do not make sense, at times to such an extent that a theoretical answer (even a wrong one) is better than no answer at all.

As we’ve seen this week, theme is really only useful when it’s employed during the creative process. As an analytical tool it is terrible, and does considerable damage to students who are forced to use it. But even if we posit a master storyteller using theme to maximum artistic benefit, and even if that author reliably expresses the theme employed and the way in which it was used to shape the resulting work, we have no way to say for certain that the author’s testimony is factually true and complete.

I’m not saying the author would be lying, and I’m not advocating that we dismiss what authors tell us about their choices. I’m simply making the point that it would be difficult for a writer to fully and exhaustively document the causal connections that led them to make any one thematic decision, let alone a novel’s worth. [ Read more ]

Theme as Technique

October 21, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

On Monday I introduced you to Thomas McCormack and his devastating critique of the way theme is taught. On Tuesday I talked about how emphasizing theme and ‘important’ literary works actually discourages some (if not many) students from reading and learning. A helpful reader provided more ammunition in the comments.

The consistent theme in these arguments is that theme should not be deployed as an analytical tool. Readers, students and teachers have more insightful measures by which to judge literature and writing — a sampling of which awaits you in the conclusion of Mr. McCormack’s document. Too, at the highest levels of academia criticism is always in flux, meaning determinations of theme are not simply potentially speculative but inherently transitory.

In short, using theme to reveal meaning in a story is like using divining rods to discover water underground. Many people swear by it, but it has no basis in fact. Theme as a creative technique, however, can be a powerful means of organizing and expressing ideas. By understanding theme in this context we not only learn how to use it appropriately, but also gain insight into why theme is poorly taught, and how theme can be so easily turned to nefarious purposes. (A subject I’ll tackle tomorrow.) [ Read more ]

Thinking Theme for Fun and Profit

October 20, 2009 By Mark 4 Comments

Yesterday I posted an important excerpt from Thomas McCormack’s book, The Fiction Editor, the Novel, and the Novelist. In the excerpt, Mr. McCormack dismantled the way theme is commonly taught in schools and colleges, and I urged readers to forward his essay to others so that we might collectively stop this abuse.

Today I’m going to explain why this is not simply a goofy idea but actually important. By which I of course mean that it involves making money.

If you remember my post referencing the 90-9-1 Principle, you’ll recall that 90% of the people interested in anything are passive about their interest. They want to watch movies, not make them. They want to watch cooking shows, not cook anything. They want to read books, not write them.

In the publishing business, this 90% is variously known as The Audience or Our Customers. Yes, writers read other writers’ books, and editors read books other than the one’s they’re editing. But when it comes to the people who buy and read books and generally provide the medium with a return on investment, that’s the 90% who are not interested in writing books or even in analyzing books. They just want to read.

So it stands to reason that booksellers and book writers would want as many such readers as they can get, and they would want those readers predisposed to enjoy the process of reading, as opposed to, say, hating it. Which is why the way theme is often taught to students is a serious question, and one that deserves addressing. [ Read more ]

Axing Theme

October 18, 2009 By Mark 2 Comments

You were right not to trust theme. You knew it in your gut, but you couldn’t prove it.

Today I am going to give you the proof. If you are liberated by it, as I was when I first came across it two decades ago, I ask you to join me in putting a stop to this fraud. I did not have the internet available to me then but I do now. And I have the generous permission of the author to spread this dismantling of theme far and wide.

Thomas McCormack is a playwright. He is also the former CEO of St. Martin’s Press — a position he rose to in little more than a decade after entering the publishing industry as an editor. While at St. Martin’s Mr. McCormack wrote a book titled The Fiction Editor, drawing on his long experience in that capacity. Composed of an essay and supporting chapters, The Fiction Editor addressed storytelling not from the point of view of criticism or marketing, but solely as craft.

Included in the book (later revised in a second edition and reissued as The Fiction Editor, The Novel and the Novelist), was a chapter called Axing Theme. Which did exactly that:

Let’s start calmly: Each appearance of the word ‘theme’ in a literature appreciation textbook should be marked with that yellow crime-scene tape. Samples of the way ‘theme’ is taught should be sent to Atlanta so the Centers for Disease Control can get on it.

Is your heart leaping? Is your mind saying, “Yes!” If so, read on:

I seriously pursue this crusade here, albeit in condensed, almost outline, form, because I believe that what’s being done in classrooms stunts, and even kills, the ability and appetite of many of the best students. This deprives our globe of much talent that would otherwise find itself in writing, teaching, reading . . . and editing.

My relief at being liberated from theme by Mr. McCormack has never left me. As a writer and storyteller it is one of the most important events in the development of my craft. After searching in vain recently for the text of Axing Theme, I changed keywords and sought out Mr. McCormack himself. Finding him on his playwriting website I wrote to ask if I might post the contents of Axing Theme in order to further his crusade.

His response was immediate and unequivocal:

I have no objection to your posting the piece wherever you will — the primary motivation behind my writing that book was not to get rich but to promulgate some helpful things I’d learned in many years of association with storytelling.

The version Mr. McCormack sent me is from the Second Edition. It was retitled as ‘Theme’ and Its Dire Effects, but it is still the weighty axe I remember, honed to a razor’s edge and swung with might.

When you have finished reading it, if you agree it is the proof you always sought, I would like to enlist you. Please take a moment, today — right now — to forward a link to this post, a link to Mr. McCormack’s doc, or both, to anyone who is:

I mean this assault to be viral. I want every student and teacher on planet Earth to get this document. Enough is enough.

Swing the axe.

— Mark Barrett

Reviewing Fiction

October 16, 2009 By Mark 4 Comments

Aspiring to Art
The question of reviewing fiction is a complicated one, in part because of the complexity of the task, and in part because the task is often supplanted by the blood sport of judging merit as opposed to execution. In my own life as a writer and storyteller I wrestled with these issues at a relatively young age (in college), while coming to terms with how I might be able to judge my own work in-process and upon completion. This need was precipitated by the realization that it was frighteningly easy (here you should see white knuckles crushing the armrests of a wildly-buffeting airliner) to lose one’s way while working on a story.

An obvious and eternal reference point for any storyteller is the beacon of art. To write for art, to aspire to art, and someday to become art is a road rutted with famous followers. Like many (if not most) storytellers, I would like my work — at least my non-commercial work, but maybe even that as well — to be accepted and seen as art.

But therein lies the flaw. To write for art is to grant others the right to determine the merit of your work at a moment in time, which exposes you to the fads of that moment. Even the most delinquent student of history quickly learns that artistic movements come and go like fashion lines, and that the arbiters of such movements often have more interest in their own personal, social and business agendas than in the value, merit or accomplishment of the works on display. [ Read more ]

The Writer and the Reviewer

October 15, 2009 By Mark 9 Comments

A couple of weeks ago, in a post touching on the question of reviews, I said this:

Turning a static review into a debate strikes me as a good thing, particularly as regards putting the reviewer on notice that they will also have to defend the merits of their words.

Today, Self-Publishing Review provides us a perfect illustration of the benefits and pitfalls of this kind of conversation in the review of Nathan Charlton’s Terra Nova: The Search, by Levi Montgomery.

I will not directly address the story, which I haven’t read, or the review, which I cannot judge because I haven’t read the story. In this case, the reviewer looked unfavorably on the author’s work. But in responding to the review, the author uncovered the fact that the reviewer had failed to read the entire story:

I’m actually curious if you read the whole thing, because everything you mentioned happens in the first 50 pages (and most of it in the first 30).

The reviewer’s defense of this novel approach to reviewing was weak:

I actually read the Prologue and Part One, which would be something over seventy pages, and I neither stated not implied otherwise.

Which prompted the site’s editor, Henry Baum, to weigh in:

I didn’t know Levi Montgomery hadn’t read the whole book. And didn’t assume I had to include the criteria – “in order to review the book you have to read it.”

That it did not occur to the reviewer that he was both required by ethics to read the entire work, or at the very least disclose that he had not read the entire work, seriously undermines his credibility in every other regard. Charlton’s book may be just as Montgomery describes. But having deceived the reader with a lie of omission, and having defended that lie of omission by blaming the victims (readers) for assuming that Montgomery was required to read the entire work before shooting it full of indignant holes, is probably not the right way to go about establishing your credentials as a reviewer.

If the internet is about trust, and in particular about building trust with individual readers, then that cuts both ways. It’s not only the case that authors have a test to meet, but reviewers as well, and in both instances I think readers profit by this kind of interaction. Even if the conversation devolves, as it did in this case, more information is better. Precisely because this existed we now know more about Nathan Charlton and Levi Montgomery and Henry Baum, and we can use that information to make more informed decisions about our content choices.

— Mark Barrett

Control Your Copyrights

October 14, 2009 By Mark 5 Comments

Regular readers know that I harp from time to time on the idea of authors retaining their copyrights. I’ve been doing this because there’s no clear metric other than raw dollars by which an author can calculate the value of a publishing deal compared with the value of retaining and exploiting copyright ownership themselves. And raw-dollar comparisons are hard to come by.

Which is why this post from Joe Konrath should be the first thing you read today, and tomorrow, and any day a publisher comes calling:

My five Hyperion ebooks (the sixth one came out in July so no royalties yet) each earn an average of $803 per year on Kindle.

My four self-pubbed Kindle novels each earn an average of $3430 per year.

If I had the rights to all six of my Hyperion books, and sold them on Kindle for $1.99, I’d be making $20,580 per year off of them, total, rather than $4818 a year off of them, total.

So, in other words, because Hyperion has my ebook rights, I’m losing $15,762 per year.

It’s only one example. And this author is profiting indirectly from having had his books published by a publisher — including any editing, design work, previous marketing, etc., which helped attract attention to his name and stories. But he’s also being very clear: controlling his copyrights would be putting more money in his bank account. [ Read more ]

Fiction is Truth

October 14, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

I’ve been reading The Good Soldiers by David Finkel. It’s a factual recounting of the deployment of the U.S. Army’s 2-16 Battalion during the surge in Iraq.

Something about the book struck me as both familiar and true, despite the fact that I haven’t been in the army and I haven’t been to Iraq. Then I ran across this passage and the lightbulb came on:

On June 20, Kauzlarich was boack on the air on PEACE 106 FM.

“Sir, there is talk that security is bad and getting worse. What is the way ahead to improve security?” Mohammed, whose name was not really Mohammed, asked in Arabic, which was translated into English by an interpreter named Izzzy, whose name was not really Izzy and who had replaced Mark, who had been arrested and jailed for extorting money from other Iraqis working on the FOB, all with fake names as well.

Frankel’s book and the story of the 2-16 remind me of this:

“And the people you sell the eggs to at four and a quarter cents apiece make a profit of two and three quarter cents apiece when they sell them back to you at seven cents apiece. Is that right? Why don’t you sell the eggs directly to you and eliminate the people you buy them from?”

“Because I’m the people I buy them from,” Milo explained.

That’s from Joseph Heller’s novel, Catch-22. I could have pulled a hundred different passages from that book that would have said the same thing. Reality is insanity. Fiction is reality. [ Read more ]