Search Results for: celebrity

Platform Evolution

March 30, 2011 By Mark 15 Comments

Here’s a graph from my Twitter Quitter post:

A basic premise of independent authorship is that authors should establish their own platform in order to reach out to readers and potential customers. I believe in that premise. What constitutes a platform, however, remains undefined.

Implicit in the idea of an author’s platform is the creation of an online presence. Because the internet has become commonplace it’s easy to forget that an independent platform for individual artists would be impossible without it. (Prior to the internet an artist’s platform was limited by geography. Bands were limited not by their music but by their touring range.) While the advantages and opportunities provided by the internet are astounding relative to the pre-internet age, the internet is still a communications medium devised by human beings, with inherent strengths and weaknesses.

Understanding how the internet works in a business context is an ongoing process. Two days ago the New York Times put up a paywall, attempting for the second time to derive revenue from its own online platform. (The first attempt failed.) That one of the most prominent newspapers in the world is still struggling to monetize content despite almost unparalleled visibility and economic muscle is a reminder to everyone that the platform question has not been answered.

Depending on your perspective, the tendency of the human mind to cherry pick information can be seen as either a bug or a feature. In the context of online platforms, it’s easy to see successes like iTunes as indicative of potential and promise when it’s actually the result of a unique set of circumstances. Finding gold in a stream may spark a gold rush, but only a few people will stake claims that literally pan out. The internet is no different. As I noted in a post about the future of publishing:

In return for making distribution almost effortless and almost free, the internet promises nothing. No revenue. No readers. Nothing.

Possibilities are not promises. Possibilities are chances, which is why I always say that writing for profit is gambling — and gambling against terrible odds. Determining what your online platform should be, and how much time you should devote to that platform, is an important part of nudging the odds in your favor. [ Read more ]

Publishing is for Professionals

November 18, 2011 By Mark 3 Comments

When we last checked in on the tattered integrity of the publishing industry, Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Review of Books, was reminding us that good writers will never need to self-publish:

Our thinking, which may be old-fashioned, is that with so great a volume of books being published each year by traditional publishers, and with so many imprints available, every book of merit is almost certain to find a home at one or another of those presses.

It would be a fallacy to suggest that all books published by mainstream publishers are works of merit, and someone with Sam Tanenhaus’s privileged industry access would never suggest otherwise. Rather, he’s simply asserting that there are no self-published works of merit anywhere in the known universe, and never will be.

I was reminded of this bit of expert analysis recently while reading about the first novel written by the Kardashian sisters, apparently in tag-team fashion:

“As wild as our real lives may seem on TV, just wait to read what we’ve dreamed up to deliver between the covers of our first novel,” Kourtney, Kim and Khloé said in a statement last week, announcing that William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, would publish a novel they had written.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking it’s unlikely anyone who wrote a train-wreck sentence like that is capable of writing an entire book. But you might also be thinking it’s a bit unfair that the Kardashian sisters have a book deal with HarperCollins, while Sam Tanenhaus is crapping all over your writing life by summarily defining you as a failure because your mother didn’t pimp you out for a TV series. [ Read more ]

Self-Publishing is For Closers

April 19, 2013 By Mark 4 Comments

Until recently it was easy for the traditional publishing industry to puff its condescending chest out and hide behind pretense and bluster, but the staunch gatekeeping the industry practiced was always a shell game. Works and authors deemed unprofitable were labeled not good enough, while works and authors that could be packaged, edited or ghostwritten for profit were granted admission into the literary sphere.

As I’ve noted numerous times, the claim that the publishing industry provides cultural stewardship has always been a lie. The very fact that screams are now emanating from corporate publishing offices tells you that self-publishing is not inflicting cultural carnage, but merely decreasing revenue and decentralizing power in the industry. Many of the people who make their living in those offices continue to toe the party line despite the obvious shifting landscape, but at best that has been a delaying tactic and at worse complete delusion.

There will never be any shortage of celebrity-driven bilge in the literary world, but as many celebrities have discovered to their horror, having a bankable name doesn’t guarantee you’ll get what you want in any business. If you’re a movie star the studios will jump at the chance to produce your next genre blockbuster, but if you’re trying to fund a small-budget art film you’re going to have as much trouble raising studio money as an unknown actor with dream. The only difference is that the studio can slam the door in the unknown’s face, while they have to go out of their way to shower you with sincere and deeply felt sweet nothings. Likewise, if you’re a literary fixture or a rising star the publishing world will be happy to take another volume of whatever you’re famous for, but if you want to wander into the short-fiction weeds or publish an experimental work you’ll probably find few takers. Unless of course you’re willing to give them more of the good stuff in the bargain, in which case they’ll begrudgingly kick your pet project out the door and support it with marketing that meets the bare minimum of their impossible-to-enforce legal commitment. [ Read more ]

Site Seeing: Daniel Menaker

April 26, 2015 By Mark Leave a Comment

One additional nugget I managed to recover while fixing broken links was a post on the Barnes & Noble site, written by Daniel Menaker. Who is Daniel Menaker? Well, at the time I knew almost nothing about him, to the point that I described him — hilariously in retrospect — as “another dirt-dishing voice” in the publishing industry. (Saving me somewhat, I also noted that he was a former Editor-in-Chief at Random House and Fiction Editor at The New Yorker.)

Re-reading the B&N post after five years, however, I found myself more curious about Mr. Menaker than about publishing. A quick search led me to a memoir he’d written, titled My Mistake, which was published in 2013. Interestingly, in reading that book I found that the context of Mr. Menaker’s life gave more weight to the views he expressed in the B&N post, as well as those in that book and in other writings I discovered.

Now, it may be that confirmation bias played a part in my reaction because much of what Mr. Menaker had to say jibed with my own conclusions, but I don’t think that’s the case. Not only do I think he would disagree with some of my grousing here on Ditchwalk, but my interest in understanding the publishing industry has decreased so much in the past five years that I now consider such questions moot at best. (For example, five years ago I would have deemed this story important. Today it seems meaningless.)

Still, as an outsider corroboration is useful when you’re assessing any human endeavor, to say nothing of doing so from the relative orbit of, say, Neptune. In reading My Mistake I found a fair bit of corroboration for conclusions I’d previously reached, yet after I finished the book I also decided to see what others had to say as a hedge against my own potential bias. That impetus quickly led to this review in The New York Times, which caused me to stare agape at my screen as I read what seemed to be a bizarro-world take on the same text I’d just digested:

Make no mistake, this is an angry book. Menaker is angry at himself for his character flaws (a flippant one-upmanship that alienates others), and he is thin-skinned, remembering every slight. As a former executive editor in chief of Random House, he is proud to have nurtured writers who went on to win literary acclaim (the Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout, the National Book Award winner Colum McCann). Menaker is understandably upset over being ousted from that job in 2007, but what seems to truly infuriate him is being shunned by the publisher, Gina Centrello, during a transition period.

I honestly don’t know what that reviewer is talking about. My Mistake is not an angry book, unless your definition of anger includes expressing an opinion. And no, Mr. Menaker is not infuriated about being shunned by anyone — or at least not anyone in the publishing biz. If anything, he’s infuriated by his own serial incapacity to connect with other human beings in his life, though over time — and particularly in the writing and structure of My Mistake — I think he belatedly squares things with his departed father.

Then again, that’s the publishing industry in a nutshell. You can spend a year or two writing a book, yet when it’s reviewed — in this case, by no less than the self-anointed consensus cultural steward of commercial literary criticism — you can still end up being cleaved by a reviewer with an axe to grind, or mischaracterized because of a reviewer’s blind spots or personal acidity. (If you also worked in publishing for a time you might even be the recipient of some score settling.)

[ Read more ]

Revisiting Hemingway’s Suicide

August 5, 2015 By Mark 9 Comments

Whatever you think you know about Ernest Hemingway, most of what you know or believe you know — and I mean 99% of it — has to do with his persona or celebrity or some facet of his life other than what he actually wrote. That’s true whether you’re a perspicacious academic, an inveterate reader or a militant blogger with an axe to grind for or against.

This post is not about any of that. It is also not about Ernest Hemingway the writer. It is, instead, a post about Ernest Hemingway as a physical being, and as such broaches a narrative that runs at cross purposes to the exploitation, condemnation or exultation of Hemingway as a consciousness. While this post is thus incidental to the objectives of almost anyone who has ever commented about Hemingway as an artist or entertainer, it may yet be central to understanding Hemingway as a man, as opposed to a man’s man.

Most people know that Ernest Hemingway killed himself. If you did not know that prior to stumbling on this post, you do now by virtue of both the headline and this sentence. Many people know that Hemingway shot himself in the head with a shotgun. Some people know that his father committed suicide with a revolver in the same way. That is all true. Because Ernest Hemingway was a celebrity, however, his suicide triggered an outsized desire — if not a cultural need — to frame that act in the context of his life and work, to say nothing of spawning the usual mindless attempts to ascribe a single motive to his decision.

Having thought about storytelling for a long time I have come of late to conclude that such deliberative efforts are not born of the rational mind, which purports to be the agent of concerns about motive, but the narrative mind. It is the intrinsic storyteller in each of us which seeks — if not needs — to make sense of events, particularly when the weight of evidence makes clear that chaos does exist, and that we, at times, are its embodiment. It is because of this instinct, whether you ever paid much attention to Hemingway or not, that today you still likely hold some belief — some plausible cause and effect in your own mind — which explains why Hemingway did what he did over fifty long years ago. [ Read more ]

Book Tour Dreams

November 6, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

Looking forward to your first book tour? Well, after reading the ravings of Bill Simmons (ESPN’s Sports Guy and all-around humorist), I’m not so sure being a New York Times best-selling author is all it’s cracked up to be:

My body clock is so screwed up that, on consecutive nights, I woke up in the middle of the night and had no idea where I was. My right thumb has swelled to 140 percent the size of my left thumb. My back is crumbling like blue cheese. My immune system might turn me into Patient X of Swine Flu 2.0 before everything’s said and done.

Because Simmons is a celebrity of sorts, I don’t have a lot of sympathy. He may have had to grind it out, but he was grinding out a nation-hopping, flight-plan-driven barnstorming tour with various people in tow. This was not your covered-wagon book tour where the lone author’s nineteen-year-old Isuzu breaks down outside of Grand Forks in the dead of winter. [ Read more ]

The Free Press and Motive

September 14, 2014 By Mark 1 Comment

This post is part of a series exploring the idea that storytelling, gameplay or entertainment of any kind may precipitate acts of violence in the real world. First post here.

Still reeling from the realization that the motive for murder (or any other act) can never be reduced to a predictive certainty, you decide that getting the word out about your discovery is critical to finding solutions that will prevent violence. Because you are well connected you place calls to several prominent reporters and news outlets, all of which express universal disinterest in what you have to say. The reaction is so consistent that at first you think you must not have explained yourself clearly, but after several more not-for-attribution conversations and a good deal of cogitation it becomes abundantly clear that you’re not the problem.

Leveraging Responsibility
When it comes to exploiting the blood of innocent victims you have learned there are two ways to profit from the question of motive. You can plausibly ascribe motives to others because those motives can never be proven false, and, you can plausibly deny motives ascribed to you because those motives can never be proven true. While most parties opt for one strategy or the other given the rhetorical nature of charges and counter-charges, there is one stakeholder perfectly positioned to turn the usual back-and-forth about motive into a salable product itself. In fact, in the United States the right to do so is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution, which reads as follows:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Not only does the First Amendment preclude the government from telling you what you can and cannot say as a citizen, if you are a member of the press it gives you the right to tell the citizenry anything, even when the government would prefer you kept quiet. Whether a noble journalist concerned with truth or tabloid trash trying to make all the money you can by broadcasting insane ideas or outright lies, the First Amendment allows you to claim that you are being responsible and fair and objective and balanced without any fear of contradiction. Even if you are intentionally fomenting righteous indignation, fear and anger in your audience with the intent of converting those emotions into cash through advertising agencies, you have the right to do so. (Such arms-length transactions also allow you to claim that your mercenary editorial practices are entirely separate from your mercenary business practices, as if such a distinction was meaningful.)

Imagining yourself in the role of a money-hungry reporter eager to pervert the protections of the First Amendment, you realize your first objective would be identifying a real-world event that would draw interest — like, say, a mass killing. Assuming you were fortunate enough that such a crime took place, you could then attempt to fuel the story by providing what is euphemistically called coverage. From an entrepreneurial point of view this aggressive reporting would be aimed not at informing the public but at trying to give the story legs so it did not become just another moment in history. While ostensibly the result of consumer demand, such lucrative continuing interest would in fact be largely dependent on your reportorial ability to turn the tragedy into a marketing opportunity for you, your employer, and for the story itself.

If the story did develop legs you could then freely engage in what’s euphemistically called analysis, which is in fact little more than water-cooler-grade speculation if not outright editorial propaganda. If you were fortunate, cunning or both, you could use analysis to tie the real-world tragedy you’re milking for money to a long-running real-world debate that will never be resolved, thereby opening the door to profits in perpetuity. For example, if someone goes berserk and murders a dozen people, while you’re ceaselessly reporting what few facts you know during wall-to-wall, twenty-four-hour, live, multimedia coverage, you can also use the killings as a springboard to raise questions about, say, the easy availability of weapons, the inadequate state of mental health screening and treatment, or any other causal factor you believe to be good for your bottom line. Because you are under no legal obligation to be informative or accurate, you are constitutionally free to shape your analysis in whatever way proves most entertaining, engaging, infuriating or traumatizing to your audience, and most profitable to you. [ Read more ]

A Writer Muses on Marketing and Sales: Finis

March 14, 2011 By Mark Leave a Comment

From the moment of conception until you present your work to the market, every decision you make — whether conscious or not, whether active or passive — is a marketing decision. This relationship is inherent in the process, not an affectation. People who study marketing with seriousness are not attempting to impose a theory on the process of production and sales, they are attempting to reveal how each decision at each step in the production process relates to sales.

The biggest problem with marketing theory and practice is in proving the causality of a particular choice or decision. As with stock prices it’s always easier to draw compelling conclusions from results than it is to make profitable predictions. In publishing such past-performance generalizations are useful to the marketing department and critic, but to the creator they have limited utility.

Why? Because at the molecular level every key press is a marketing decision. Every verb you use (or don’t), every comma you use (or don’t), every paragraph you write (or don’t), has a theoretical impact on the market’s acceptance of your work. At the same time it should be obvious that trying to understand and control these causal relationships can lead only to madness. As a practicing writer you must accept that there’s only so far marketing can take you, even if you devote yourself to it completely. [ Read more ]

Clay Shirky’s Web Presence

April 6, 2010 By Mark 2 Comments

A couple of days ago Clay Shirky put up a blog post on his WordPress blog that got a fair amount of play. I don’t have anything to say about the post itself because I haven’t read it, for reasons that I will explain momentarily. I do have something to say about Clay’s blog, however, and it’s something I first noticed last year, when another of Clay’s posts was being bandied about.

What caught my attention then, as now, is that the man who wrote Here Comes Everybody is making some odd choices in presenting himself and his thoughts to the public. To see what I mean, pop over to Clay’s blog, where you’ll find a minimalist, two-column WordPress template, with one nagging concession to form over function. (And I say this as a decidedly form-follows-function person, which is going to be driven home in embarrassing fashion in the following paragraphs.)

Specifically, Clay’s desire for a streamlined look prompted him to use justified text in his blog formatting — meaning spaces between words are varied on a per-line basis, so each line is the same length, regardless of the words in the line. Like this. [ Read more ]

A Writer Muses on Marketing and Sales: Part IV

February 28, 2011 By Mark 2 Comments

Identifying a profitable market niche says nothing useful about whether you yourself should write for that particular market. Even assuming you have the talent and drive to compete, any number of external factors will probably keep you from making a sale or attracting an audience. If you’re the kind of writer who loves the fruits of your own imagination, all the obstacles and uncertainties inherent in writing for a market may convince you to trust your gut and go your own way. After all, if you’re going to gamble on anything, you might as well gamble on yourself, right?

Playing the Odds
Because you’re such a nice person I’m going to let you in on a little secret. The odds of striking it rich as a writer by writing to a particular market are a million to one. Yes, there are plenty of people who get published, and a few who make a passable living as writers, but the number of writers who really cash in is extremely small. (By writer I mean writer-only. If you’ve exploited your celebrity for economic gain in the publishing industry, congratulations, but that has nothing to do with writing.)

By comparison, the odds of striking it rich doing your own thing are a billion to one — a thousand times worse. If that isn’t depressing enough, note too that success as a rebel doesn’t scale proportionately. You won’t be gambling on billion-to-one odds in order to make a billion, you’ll be gambling on billion-to-one odds to make a million or less.

If you’re the rational sort and determined to be smart about your writing career, you should definitely write for an extant market. On the other hand, if you’re the kind of cocky, self-directed nut who thinks you actually have something worthwhile or entertaining to say outside the well-worn industry ruts, then by all means do your own thing. Just remember that you’re trading million-to-one odds writing for the man for billion-to-one odds writing for yourself. But the choice is still yours. [ Read more ]