The Influence of Publishers

Posted 31 August, 2007 in Publishing | 1 comment

Writing in the Huffington Post, Lissa Warren questions whether the general public knows or even cares about who publishes what when they are choosing books:

I don’t think the general consumer cares very much who is published by whom. I don’t even think most people notice. Tell me the last time you walked into a Borders, or a B&N, or your local independent and said, “Hmm, wonder what Simon & Schuster has been up to this week?” The companies just don’t matter.

Untrue, Ms. Warren. So very, very untrue.

It may be the case that the average reader is unable to name the publisher of their favourite book off the top of their heads,* or to name the publisher of the book they’re currently reading,** but that doesn’t mean that these things don’t matter to them, or that they have no impact on the choices readers make.

The most obvious example of how a publisher or an imprint drives readers involves genre books. A lover of mysteries will likely be well acquainted with The Mysterious Press or Castle Street Mysteries, and a sci-fi aficionado will be similarly well acquainted with TOR and Del Rey. These are publishers who specialize in catering to a particular market and the audience for these books will come to recognize the authors who are published under these respective imprints, whether or not they (the readers) are conscious of the imprints themselves.

Other houses have built their reputations on literary fare, and often have storied histories. Anansi is the house that first published Ondaatjee and Atwood; it is currently known as a publisher of quality literary fiction and poetry. And not just within the publishing industry either: two Giller nominations and eight Governor General’s Award nominations in 2006 increased their visibility among general book-buyers who were looking for quality fiction or award nominees.

And I’d bet that you’d be hard pressed to find a Canadian reader who is unaware of McClelland & Stewart’s reputation as “the Canadian publisher,” even if (s)he could not name a single author on M&S’s fall list. Similarly, Penguin Classics and the New Canadian Library are instantly recognizable to any reader looking for classic fiction, or to any university student.

This year’s Toronto International Film Festival is screening a documentary called Obscene, about Barney Rosset, the publisher of Grove Press in the States, who was responsible for publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Naked Lunch, and Waiting for Godot, among others. While general readers may not know or care about who Barney Rosset is, most will be instantly familiar with the books his company published.

Then there is the behind-the-scenes influence that publishers wield, which is less obvious, but no less important. The bigger houses have access to larger marketing budgets, can pay for co-op and placement in stores, and thus have a better chance of getting their books into the hands of readers. Those readers may not know Knopf from Doubleday (as though there’s all that much difference to begin with — Baa-zing!), but they are influenced by the publishing decisions these houses make nonetheless. When Michael Winter leaves Anansi to go to Penguin, or Russell Smith abandons Porcupine’s Quill for Doubleday, it is significant, in large part because of the expanded readership that the larger houses can tap into. The increased visibility will bring these authors to the attention of more people than would otherwise be the case; this in turn drives reading patterns and habits.

Moreover, it is often the larger houses that get their books reviewed in major newspapers and magazines. Review editors who have a limited amount of space to work with will want to devote much of that space to the most significant books in a given season. Who determines what is significant? The publishers, by what they choose to highlight as frontlist material, versus what they choose to bury in the wasteland of the midlist. Again, readers may not be aware that this is going on; that in no way means that they are not affected by it.

Readers may not care who publishes whom, but to say that “[t]he companies don’t matter” is just plain wrong.

P.S. re: Daniel Green’s assertion that “eventually, whether a book is published on paper between covers by a ‘publishing company’ or on paper between covers by the author through a ‘publishing service’ won’t matter either.” Quick, name the last self-published book you read. Gotcha, didn’t I?

*And, by the way, in answer to Warren’s questions in her article’s lede: Wise Blood, The Noonday Press. And no, I didn’t have to go to the shelf to look this up.

**On the Road, Penguin Modern Classics. Ditto.

Back-to-School, Desperately-Trying-to-Stay-Hip-with-the-Kids-Well-into-My-Thirties Jottings

Posted 30 August, 2007 in Jottings | 7 comments

• It’s Frosh Week at Ryerson University, and the campus environs have been descended upon by marauding bands of freshly scrubbed, rosy cheeked young men and women who not only don’t look old enough to drink (or, in the men’s case, to shave), but look as though they’ve only recently graduated from high chairs and sippy cups, which makes me feel the encroaching tendrils of old age and decrepitude profoundly, if somewhat unnecessarily. So, in an attempt to stave off incipient feelings of irrelevance and obsolescence, I give you TSR’s first — and likely only — MTV-oriented roundup.
• The New York Times is reporting that MtvU, an MTV affiliate broadcast exclusively into college campuses, has chosen a poet laureate, and it’s not Justin Timberlake or Avril Lavigne. Instead, the poet who will be bringing iambic pentameter sexyback is eighty-year-old John Ashbery, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. I wonder if this means Lauren and Heidi will start carting around volumes of modernist poetry on The Hills, or is that just too much to ask?
• Writing in something called The Daily Toreador, Britney Drumm suggests that Miss South Carolina’s recent botched attempt to answer a question at the Miss Teen U.S.A. beauty pageant is emblematic of the ills of such competitions. If you haven’t seen the clip (which I won’t link to: it’s easily found, if you’re so inclined), Miss South Carolina is asked why she thinks that one fifth of American teenagers are unable to locate the United States on a map, which precipitates a rambling and incoherent response about “U.S. Americans,” “the Iraq,” and South Africa. According to MSNBC, Miss South Carolina, whose real name is Caitlin Upton, later claimed that “she was so overwhelmed by the moment she barely heard any of the question.” I have a certain amount of sympathy for this, and for the unfortunate fact that, thanks to the Internet, her embarrassing moment is being kept alive for mockery online. Obviously one would have wished for a more coherent response to what seems like a fairly straightforward question, but the continued delight over her evident discomfort has a vicious and mean-spirited aspect to it that is upsetting, to say the least.
• Talib Kweli, one of the most articulate, politically aware, and intelligent hip-hop artists currently working, has been denied the brass ring once again. His new, career-best release, Eardrum, which (among other things) quotes Langston Hughes in its opening track, has been kept out of Billboard’s number-one chart position — by the soundtrack to High School Musical 2. And the world slouches one step closer to the Apocalypse.
• R.I.P. Hilly Kristal, founder of legendary New York punk rock club CBGB’s, dead of complications from lung cancer. He was seventy-five years old.
• The Killer’s frontman Brandon Flowers made one of the most arrogant and hubristic comments by a rock star since John Lennon claimed that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus when he said that Sam’s Town is “one of the best albums of the past 20 years” (for the record: it’s not). But that hasn’t seemed to hurt the band any. According to bassist Mark Stoermer, they’ve managed to land some heavy help on at least one of their new tracks. One of the songs the band is currently working on is a duet — with Lou Reed. What was I saying about the Apocalypse?

The Duty of Harsh Criticism, Part MCLXXVIII

Posted 29 August, 2007 in Literary Criticism | 3 comments

Shane Neilson, writing in the Northern Poetry Review, lends his voice to those calling for more honest criticism in Canada:

Like Orwell, inundated with books, with books on the floor, on the desk, as doorstoppers, on the back of the toilet, I’m disinclined to praise because there is very little to praise; and so I’m left with the hard road, the one leading off into the wilderness inhabited by a “crank” and a “goon” and a “jealous wanker,” all of which I’ve been called. It’s understandable; the Canadian literary community is small, and if one is honest one inevitably insults someone, and if the insult is cutting enough it raises the ire of the reviewee’s friends, and, as I’ve come to learn, names are about the only thing these people are good at. Thankfully, their insults are as pedestrian as the book under review.

Neilson bemoans an environment in which editors refuse to run negative reviews and the recipients of criticism circle the wagons to blackball the writer responsible. This, he rightly suggests, leads to a kind of “auto-asphyxiation by the Canlit world. The conversation about a book is the fortune of a book, and in current Canada, the conversation isn’t just uninformed, it’s irresponsible.”

It may be small comfort, but Neilson can console himself that Canada isn’t the only place this kind of thing happens. In one of the most bizarre and deluded letters to the editor I’ve read recently, American author Richard Kluger takes the New York Times Book Review to task for its recent negative review of his book Seizing Destiny:

Suddenly I understood how mistaken the Book Review’s critic had been about my last book, “Ashes to Ashes,” in his highly laudatory review — and how besotted the jurors were who voted it the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, not usually awarded to wretched writers (I being the fortunate exception). How foolish, I thought, the Times columnist Bob Herbert had been for referring to my “Simple Justice” as a “brilliant and powerful book.” And how blind the former Times reporter Anthony Lukas, a garlanded book author, had been for stating that my book “The Paper: The Life and Death of The New York Herald Tribune” was “probably the best book ever written about an American newspaper … a brilliant piece of social history.” And how insensitive to hideous prose were the judges who placed both those books among the five finalists for the National Book Award in history for the years in which they were issued.

This is a masterpiece of faulty logic: people praised my earlier works, Kluger’s argument goes, ergo it’s impossible that the new book could be less than brilliant. QED, my good man.

Is it any wonder, given this kind of asinine response, that reviewers are hesitant to dispense negative criticism in their reviews?

Frantic, Scattered, Edge-of-Panic Jottings

Posted 28 August, 2007 in Jottings | No comments

• It’s the last week of August, and I’m staring down the first week of September with the kind of foreboding that T.S. Eliot reserved for “the cruellest month,” which he for some reason located at the beginning of spring. See, every year I attend the Toronto International Film Festival, where I engage in the relatively preposterous endeavour of attempting to view twenty-five (or more) films over the course of ten days. This is a peculiar strain of insanity that only dedicated cinephiles could possibly comprehend, but it also means that there’s always a frantic rush in the lead-up to TIFF to clear off my desk all the accumulated detritus of the summer. Which frantic rush begins … now.
• David Halberstam, author and journalist, is unable to tour in support of his new book, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, because he’s, ahem, dead. So, a group of authors, including Joan Didion, Bob Woodward, and Seymour Hersh, are doing his tour for him. I can’t decide whether this is a touching tribute to a departed and much-loved writer, or the apogee of cynical marketing (according to the New York Times article the idea originated with Hyperion, the book’s publisher). In any event, it may symbolize the Boomers’ ultimate conquest: in their quest to remain vital and young, now apparently even death doesn’t stand in their way. I can’t wait for Margaret Atwood to get wind of this. Coming soon: The Really LongPen, which allows authors to sign books from the great beyond. George A. Romero is said to have already optioned the film rights.
• How do you organize your books? Alphabetically? By subject? By height? If all else fails, you could try organizing them the way Callie Miller has: by colour. I’ve been meaning to link to this brilliantly eccentric (read: slightly mad, but nonetheless hilariously attractive) idea for a while now, but it’s somehow slipped through the cracks. Check out the photos on her site: they’re spectacular, in a kind of how-did-she-manage-to-pull-that-off? way. Apparently she received some antagonistic e-mails in response to this project, and she herself admits that it might not have been the most functional way of arranging her library, but man does it look cool!*
• Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, already the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize and an Oprah endorsement, has won Britain’s James Tait Black memorial prize.
• The Big Bad Book Blog offers writers six tips on how to conduct a good interview. It’s sad that authors these days are judged more on the cut of their suit than the quality of their writing; it’s even sadder that this observation has been made so frequently that it’s taken on the mantle of a cliché and yet nobody seems to care, presumably because they’re too busy watching E! True Hollywood Story.
• I’m going to go now. I appear to be cranky and stressed.

*[UPDATE: It has just come to my attention that the second linked photo of rainbow books, although appearing on Callie Miller’s site, does not picture Callie Miller’s library. It’s a shot from a Flickr user named chotda. TSR regrets any confusion caused by this error. Appropriate wrists have been slapped.]

A Literary Mash-up

Posted 27 August, 2007 in Book Reviews | 2 comments

The Raw Shark Texts, by Steven Hall. HarperCollins, $34.95 cloth, 440 pp., ISBN: 978-0-00-200840-2.

Mash-up (a.k.a Bastard Pop): Bastard pop is a musical genre which, in its purest form, consists of the combination (usually by digital means) of the music from one song with the acapella from another. Typically, the music and vocals belong to completely different genres. At their best, bastard pop songs strive for musical epiphanies that add up to considerably more than the sum of their parts.

– Source: Google definitions

In the seventy-three years since Ezra Pound published his collection of essays urging poets to “make it new,” writers have been struggling mightily to adhere to his directive. Their labours have produced, among other things, the self-reflexiveness of modernism, the hyper-self-reflexiveness of postmodernism, and the über-self-reflexiveness metafiction. At their best (think: David Foster Wallace), these attempts have revivified a genre (novels) that has often seemed in danger of becoming almost irredeemably moribund. At their worst (think: Douglas Coupland), they have resulted in fiction that is so solipsistic and self-involved that their authors are at constant risk of actually physically disappearing into their own navels.

Thirty-two-year-old novelist Steven Hall cleaves closer to the first group than the second with his debut effort, The Raw Shark Texts, which is a strange and frequently beguiling mixture of genres and literary influences. Its story opens with a man waking up on his living room floor, unable to remember who or where he is. He discovers a note he has left for himself telling him that his name is Eric Sanderson and advising him to seek out a therapist named Dr. Randle, who informs him that he suffers from a condition known as “dissociative amnesia,” and that this is his eleventh relapse.

Eric responds to this news by hiding himself away in his house and rifling through old journals and letters left behind by “the First Eric Sanderson.” Perusing these materials, he learns that the woman he loved, Clio Aames, has died, and that he is being pursued by a Ludovician, a conceptual shark that feeds on thoughts and memories: “A Ludovician might select an individual human being as its prey animal and pursue and feed on that individual over the course of years, until that victim’s memory and identity have been completely consumed.”

Sanderson’s attempts to outrun the Ludovician lead him on a journey through un-space, which is hidden behind and beneath parking lots, derelict buildings, abandoned factories and warehouses. On his journey he meets Scout, who bears a striking resemblance to the departed Clio (they both have the same tattoo on their toes), and Dr. Trey Fidorous, who offers Sanderson a way of defeating the Ludovician by tricking it into consuming the persona of Mycroft Ward, who has found a way to cheat death by reproducing his essential self endlessly over the Internet.

Any précis of the novel’s plot is going to make it sound bizarre and unwieldy; it is a testament to Hall’s storytelling abilities that the plot elements never overwhelm the reader. Hall exerts complete control over his narrative and his story reads more like a breezy thriller than a dense piece of postmodern experimental fiction.

This has to do in large part with the inherent familiarity of the materials with which Hall is working in the novel.

Much has been made of The Raw Shark Texts’ originality. The review in the Independent (U.K.) said that it is “a novel that genuinely isn’t like anything you have ever read before.” The Irish Independent compared it to Ulysses, A Clockwork Orange, and Neuromancer: “those shockingly original works that make the reader look at the whole notion of the novel in a new way.” And Gerry Donaghy, writing on Powells.com, states, “I defy anybody out there to find a more original and audacious novel this year.”

But these fawning reviews largely miss the point, in my estimation. The Raw Shark Texts is only original in the sense that a musical mash-up is original: what it does is take various literary references and textual elements, tosses them together in a kind of literary Yahtzee shaker, and dumps them out again. The elements themselves have all been used before: the amnesiac protagonist is a familiar thriller trope, one employed notably in Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity; the notion of identity existing simultaneously in a bifurcated way across individuals is reminiscent of Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World; the collision of objective and subjective identity is a recurring theme in the work of Paul Auster; and the final chase in the novel — complete with a conceptual shark cage and a boat whose name, the Orpheus, is euphonically resonant of its literary predecessor — is virtually a scene-for-scene rewrite of the climactic sequence in Jaws.

Even the idiosyncratic text design is not sui generis: Mark Z. Danielewski used visual textual elements to much the same effect in his novel House of Leaves, and the flip-book that provides a graphic depiction of the final shark attack resembles the flip-book at the end of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

The cleverness of The Raw Shark Texts lies not in the originality of its materials, but in the way that Hall has arranged these materials into a satisfying narrative. If Hall is blazing a trail, he is doing so by showing how familiar materials can be juxtaposed in a creative and interesting way. Donald Barthelme said that collage is the art form of the twentieth century. Steven Hall, himself a visual artist, proves with his debut novel that it is alive and well at the beginning of the twenty-first.

Up in Smoke

Posted 25 August, 2007 in Writing Life | 1 comment

Not according to A. N. Wilson. It’s England’s ban on public smoking.

After “racking [his] brains” to think of a single great writer of the 17th, 18th, 19th, or 20th century who didn’t smoke, Wilson attacks the British government’s capitulation to “health fanatics” who forced the passage of a “bossy and un-English law” prohibiting lighting up in pubs and restaurants.

Tennyson, who only stopped smoking in order to eat and sleep, describes in one of his letters sitting in a pub with a friend and doing very little except “staring smokey babies” at one another.

Nowadays, this harmless experience would cost the publican £1,200, and Tennyson himself £600, while appallingly self-righteous non-smokers at neighbouring tables, rather than being pleased that they had enjoyed a glimpse of the greatest Victorian poet, would be complaining about the fumes which they chose to believe were causing them some kind of damage.

Wilson calls Beryl Bainbridge “heroic” for continuing to light up, but suspects that the anti-smoking legislation may sound the death knell of literature.

My own feeling is that so long as writers are allowed to drink, we’ll be fine. Having said that, I haven’t completed a piece of fiction since I quit the demon weed. Not that there’s a connection there, but …

(Hat tip to Panic for the link.)

Clearly I Was Born in the Wrong Century, Part Deux

Posted 24 August, 2007 in Book News | 2 comments

So far, ebook technology has failed to catch on, largely because the market for this technology — dedicated readers — remains wedded to books. Not just as information storage-and-retrieval devices, but as physical objects that can be held, flipped through, underlined, and annotated. One of the great joys of books is their sensuous aspect, their tactility and the smell of the ink on the pages.

Before you assume that I’ve gone right off the deep end for mentioning the smell of books, consider this recent post from Engadget, which reports that “ebook content provider CafeScribe is going pretty low-tech to give your laptop screen the same scent as a textbook: the company is shipping ‘musty-smelling’ scratch-and-sniff stickers with every ebook order.”

To me, this idea is, well, nutty. Not only does it take the one advantage ebooks boast — their technological innovation — and marry it to something self-consciously retro, but it begs the question, if readers enjoy the smell of books so much, why would they not just, you know, read actual books?

Just wondering.

(via The Shifted Librarian)

R.I.P. Grace Paley

Posted 23 August, 2007 in Obituaries | 1 comment

Sad news: Grace Paley, the great American short-story writer, has died at age 84.

The obituaries and tributes are starting to come in. Everyone who ever met Paley, even in passing, seems to have a story about her, which is understandable because, in addition to being one of the finest writers of short fiction of her (or any) era, she was also one of the warmest, most generous people imaginable.

I had the privilege of meeting her once, at Toronto’s Harbourfront International Festival of Authors, in 1995. During an on-stage interview and Q&A, I asked her why she wrote exclusively short stories, given the fact that very few people read short-story collections as compared to novels. She gave a polite answer to a question she’d clearly heard many times before and moved on.

When I went up to get my book signed after the event, I introduced myself and she recognized me as the person who asked the question about short stories. She asked me if I was a writer, and I said that I was. At the time I was working on an as-yet unfinished collection of stories. She pulled me aside and fixed me with one of the most intense stares I’ve ever experienced.

She told me that when she started writing her publisher advised her to change her subject matter, since there was no market for Jewish fiction in America. She then said that the year she published her first collection (1959), Philip Roth published his first book. Bernard Malamud and Isaac Bashevis Singer were already publishing. Ten years later, Leonard Michaels would burst onto the scene with his first book. She said to me, “So what I have to tell you is this: you do what you have to do, and don’t listen to them, because they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

Paley also gave me what is perhaps the best advice about writing fiction I’ve ever heard: “Don’t write what you know. Write what you don’t know about what you know.”

She was a remarkable woman, and a consummate artist. She will be sorely missed.

Grace Paley: I would say that stories are closer to poetry than they are to the novel because first they are shorter, and second they are more concentrated, more economical, and that kind of economy, the pulling together of all the information and making leaps across the information, is really close to poetry. By leaps I mean thought leaps and feeling leaps. Also, when short stories are working right, you pay more attention to language than most novelists do.

Addendum to the Previous Post

Posted 22 August, 2007 in Uncategorized | No comments

Item, from today’s Guardian:

A quarter of US adults say they read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll. The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year and, excluding those who had not read any books at all, the usual number of books read was seven.

I realize that this is comparing apples to oranges (Americans above vs. Britons in the YouGov poll), but if we could make all those people who want so desperately to write books want equally desperately to read books, then we might be getting somewhere.

On Stifling Writers

Posted 22 August, 2007 in Flannery O'Connor, Writing Life | 2 comments

“Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers,” said Flannery O’Connor. “My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.”

Good thing O’Connor isn’t around to read a recent YouGov poll reported in the Guardian, which suggested that more Britons — nearly ten percent of those polled — dream of being writers than they do of pursuing any other job or avocation.

In a follow-up blog post on the Guardian’s site, John Crace wonders why:

It’s not even as if writing is that glamorous. You sit alone for hours on end honing your deathless prose, go days without really talking to anyone and, if you’re very lucky, within a year or so you will have a manuscript that almost no one will want to read. Your friends and family will come to dread requests for constructive feedback - which they know really means just saying, “This is far better than Amis or McEwan” - and if, by some small chance, you do land a book deal you will spend the week of publication wondering why your book isn’t piled up at the front of Waterstones and why you haven’t even picked up a single, measly review in the local paper.

Crace suggests that because writing is something that anyone with a basic literacy can do, it’s the one area of creative endeavour that the average person feels (s)he has a shot at breaking into. On the level of individual sentences, Crace posits, it’s often difficult to distinguish between an unpublished amateur and Margaret Forster (Crace’s example, not mine). It’s only with an agglomeration of sentences and paragraphs that a dearth of creativity begins to make itself apparent. Having read slush-pile submissions for a Canadian publisher, and having written manuscript evaluations for dozens of unpublished aspiring novelists, I can fairly safely attest that many of them don’t reach the level of minimum proficiency even on a sentence-by-sentence basis.

Regardless, the seemingly unquenchable desire of John/Jane Q. Public to write the next great forgotten or ignored novel has led to a veritable cottage industry of creative writing classes and writers’ workshops, many of them taught by working writers who need the money to live.

There are always a few people in these classes who have genuine talent. Unfortunately, the net result of the encounter with a creative writing workshop is usually to have whatever spark of originality or vibrancy that exists in their writing systematically beaten out of them; they emerge on the other side as cookie-cutter replicas of existing writers. To quote O’Connor once again: “[S]o many people can now write competent stories that the short story as a medium is in danger of dying of competence.”

And then there are those others: the retirees with time on their hands, the doctors and lawyers and police officers and high-school teachers who feel that their rich life experiences have provided them with the perfect fodder for great fiction, by which one presumes they mean bestselling fiction. Crace’s advice to these people is not to quit their day jobs. O’Connor puts it more vigorously, if less compassionately:

Now in every writing class you find people who care nothing about writing, because they think they are already writers by virtue of some experience they’ve had. It is a fact that if, either by nature or training, these people can learn to write badly enough, they can make a great deal of money, and in a way it seems a shame to deny them this opportunity; but then, unless the college is a trade school, it still has its responsibility to truth, and I believe myself that these people should be stifled with all deliberate speed.