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An Author’s Guide to Publishing in 2012 – A Guest Post by Amy Rogers

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Last September, I wrote an enthusiastic review of Petroplague by Amy Rogers http://wp.me/pYql4-1ep. With a PHD in microbiology, Dr. Rogers is uniquely qualified to bring her considerable writing skills to bear on a thriller in which an oil-eating bacteria ravages Los Angeles.  Airplanes fall from the sky.  Millions of cars stall on the streets and freeways.  No food deliveries.  No ambulance, police, or fire service as a greedy corporate criminal and deluded eco-terrorists strive to suppress a solution.

On two occasions, New York agents represented Amy Rogers’ work but were unable to sell it.  With a keen understanding of the turmoil in traditional publishing, Amy decided to take matters into her own hands.  After I posted my review, I invited her to write a summary of her experience for us.

Last week I received an email saying she’d finished a “5,000 word treatise” on current publishing options for writers.  This will form the basis for her presentation at the June meeting of the Sacramento California Writer’s Club branch.  She graciously sent a 1500 word, abridged version, for thefirstgates.  I am delighted to be able to share her account, for I think her observations and experiences can serve as as Ariadne’s thread as we work our way through the current publishing maze.

Because of the length, I am going post this article in two parts.  Meanwhile, I invite everyone to visit Amy’s blog, Science Thrillers.com (listed on my blogroll), and to follow her on Twitter at, @ScienceThriller.  Also, check out her Facebook fan page, where you’ll see that she has been invited to participate in the New Author’s Breakfast at the Left Coast Crime 2012 conference in Sacramento at the end of the month. http://www.facebook.com/pages/Amy-Rogers/202428959777274

And now, without further delay…

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An author’s guide to publishing in 2012 by Dr. Amy Rogers

Part 1: What’s going on with publishing today?

Book publishing is undergoing a revolution unlike anything seen since the invention of moveable type, an explosion of diversity in the paths leading to publication.  After centuries in a desert of limited choices, writers now have a rainforest of options to get their work in front of readers.

But the changes are so profound and happening so rapidly, many writers can’t keep up with the business.  We’re writers, so we write, but what then?  The simple formula—write book, sell rights to a print publisher, collect royalties—doesn’t apply to the majority of published books today.  Is this a bad thing?

The big changes in publishing are both challenge and opportunity.  Whether the changes are “good” or “bad” depends on where you stand.  In this series, I’ll first summarize some of the major trends in the book business that are affecting the way books get published and sold.  In the second, I’ll discuss how writers seeking “publication” of their work can navigate the path that’s right for them.

So why does the publishing business feel like a Kansas farmhouse in a tornado?  Simple: technology.  Digital disruption devastated the music industry; now it’s rolling over publishing.  The end results for various stakeholders (authors, publishers, readers, retailers) are far from certain.

1.  Ebooks

Top of the list of disruptive technologies: e-books.  Amazon’s Kindle e-reader is now in its third or fourth generation.  The critical $100 price point has been breached (a Kindle now costs as little as $79).  Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader and tremendous numbers of Apple’s iPad plus various smartphones (which can also be used as e-readers) give millions of Americans easy access to e-books.  (Not to mention ubiquitous laptop and desktop computers, which can be used to read e-books, though uncomfortably.)

How rapid is the rise of the e-book?  The Economist reports that in the first five months of 2011, “sales of consumer e-books in America overtook those from adult hardback books” and “amazon now sells more copies of e-books than paper books”. http://www.economist.com/node/21528611 Granted, Amazon’s experience does not represent the entire bookselling business, but it is significant.  In my own genre—thrillers—over half the books sold are now in digital formats.

2.  Distribution

Digital technology is changing the way books are distributed.  Obviously, e-books can be sold online—from anywhere in the world, to anywhere in the world, no neighborhood bookstore required.

But it’s not only e-book sales that are affected by digital tech.  The emergence of amazon as a global book retailer with no physical presence in communities has also changed how paper books are sold.  People are shopping for paper books over the Internet and getting them shipped.  Neighborhood and mall bookstores are struggling.  Browsing is nice, taking your book home with you on the spot is nice too.  But amazon’s price advantage is killing these stores.  The giant online retailer subsidizes much of its bookselling business, has smaller fixed costs, and still dodges sales tax in most states.

3.  Publicity

The best way to get a person to buy a book is word of mouth: a trusted source, whether a friend or a reviewer, mentioned the book.  Digital technology—the Internet and “social networking”—is truly revolutionizing word of “mouth”.  Successful book marketing is increasingly based in this virtual world.  Book bloggers, readers’ collectives like GoodReads and LibraryThing, Facebook, Twitter, book trailers on YouTube—this is what sells books.  Reviews remain critical, but the traditional venue—newspaper sections devoted to in-house book reviews—is vanishing.  Only a few papers still publish their own book reviews, and generally these reviews are few in number.  So authors and publishers must go online to get reviews and build “buzz” around a title.

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Section two of Dr. Amy Rogers, A Writer’s Guide to Publishing in 2012 will be featured in my next post.

Life: The Movie by Neal Gabler – A Book Review

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In his final movie, Being There, 1979, Peter Sellers plays Chance, a gardener with a low IQ, who becomes an advisor to the president and business tycoons. In one iconic scene, Chance is accosted by a knife wielding youth in Washington, DC.  He pulls out his TV remote control and clicks it to change the channel.  He is puzzled when the assailant doesn’t vanish.

Peter Sellers as Chance in “Being There”

This might be the perfect illustration for Neal Gabler’s, Life, The Movie:  How Entertainment Conquered Reality, (2000).  Gabler quotes historian, Daniel Boorstin, who wrote in the early 60’s that, “We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so ‘realistic’ that they can live in them.”  Done deal, according to Gabler, who calls us, not just a “post-modern culture,” but a “post-reality culture.”

At times I had to keep my own assumptions in check:  subjects like reality and imagination open onto psychological and spiritual vistas beyond the scope of this or any other single book.  But when Gabler cited concrete examples, I found myself nodding my head on almost every page.

“You know how to brood because you have seen Rebel Without a Cause,” Gabler says, quoting cultural analyst, Louis Menand.  “What better model does the world offer?”

Gabler charts the ascendency of entertainment in America from the early 19th century, where the split between high and low culture was fueled by our democratic suspicion of all elites.  Calling someone “aristocratic” was a serious insult.  During the 1840 presidential campaign, when a man called Daniel Webster an aristocrat, he thundered back that he’d grown up in a log cabin, and anyone calling him an aristocrat was “a coward and a liar.”  ( Sound familiar? )

Nathaniel Hawthorn despaired of the fate of serious writers amid the flood of “trash” being published.  One publisher sold four million dime novels in five years, at a time when the US population was only 25 million.

In 1850, 1% of the population owned 50% of the nation’s wealth and held almost all public offices.  Upward mobility was a myth, since 98% of that wealth had been inherited.  While the one-percent held the power, then as now, culture wars raged, sometimes with a violence that we (thankfully) haven’t seen yet.  One night in New York, rival Shakespearean actors, one British and one American, were both scheduled to perform, the former in an uptown theater, the latter downtown.  Police ejected the rabble who had bought tickets solely to heckle the British actor.  A much larger crowd gathered across the street to throw rocks as the “aristocratic” crowd tried to leave.  The militia was called, a riot ensued, and before the night was over, 22 lay dead and more than a hundred wounded.

In the end, it was movies that won the day for popular culture.  The 1% stayed away from the early nickelodeons, which tended to be crowded and crass.  Later, with middle-class patronage, refined behavior became the norm, but the elite have never fared well in the movies, from the Marx Brothers  Night at the Opera, to the present, where a too-expensive suit is always the mark of a villain.

Three Stooges + high society + pies = disaster

As he charts the history of high vs. popular culture, Gabler makes a telling point.  It isn’t just about high brow and low brow – it’s about the ascendency of entertainment.  Being entertained is easy, and the corollary is that when the goal is entertainment, grabbing and holding audience attention is the supreme value, and “things that do not conform – for example, serious literature, serious political debate, serious ideas, serious anything – are more likely to be compromised or marginalized than ever before.”

Life: the Movie is a complex and disturbing book.  Gabler says in the introduction, it is diagnostic and not prescriptive.  To offer easy answers, he says, would be like the movie illusion where we meet the monster in act one and see it vanquished in act three.  Writing 12 years ago, Gabler said:

“One is almost compelled to admit that turning life into escapist entertainment is a perversely ingenious adaptation to the turbulence and tumult of modern existence.  Why worry about the seemingly intractable problems of society when you can simply declare ‘It’s morning in America,” as President Reagan did in his 1984 reelection campaign, and have yourself a long-running Frank Capra movie right down to the aw-shucks hero?”

I read this book after watching Neal Gabler speak on the fictions that lace the current election campaign on Moyers & Company, as I described in the preceding post. Because of it’s scope, I would recommend Life: the Movie only to those who want to delve into this issue in some depth.

But  I would recommend that everyone watch the ongoing conversation this year between Gabler and Moyers.  The confusions and illusions surrounding the political process are more convoluted than when the book was written, but Neal Gabler remains a reliable guide to pulling back the curtains and helping us draw closer to the truth.

Little Free Libraries

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Todd Bol and Rick Brooks, with their Little Library

Todd Bol’s mother, a book lover, died a decade ago. Two years ago, to honor her memory, Bol built a miniature library, filled it with books, and set it in his front yard in Huron, Wis.  He and his friend, Rick Brooks, an outreach program manager at the University of Wisconsin, thought the idea could grow.  It has.  Bol and Brooks estimate there are 300 to 400 little libraries in 24 states and 8 countries.  Their website, http://www.littlefreelibrary.org/, has plans for people who want to build their own, places to purchase the small structures, and a map to track their locations.

“Take a book, leave a book,” is the operating principle.  Right now, a group of Wisconsin prison inmates is building libraries for new communities.  In New Orleans, Bol plans to make libraries out of debris left by Hurricane Katrina.  In El Paso, Texas, an elementary school where illiteracy was a problem now has two Little Libraries.  Lisa Lopez, the school librarian, says books are circulating “like crazy.”

“People tell us over and over, there’s something about the physical feel about the book in your hands,” Bol says. “It has meaning. There’s a spirit that can’t be found electronically.”

from an article in USA Today: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-02-21/little-libraries-lawn-boxes-books/53260328/1

A Great Community Bookstore

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Last week I wrote about Ann Patchett, a bestselling author who opened a bookstore after experiencing life in a city without one (http://wp.me/pYql4-1Kn).  A few days later, on a drive into the gold country, Mary and I were reminded of what a treasure a community bookstore can be.

The Book Seller has been a fixture in Grass Valley, CA since 1977.  For whatever reason, we hadn’t stopped by since the days when every small town had a bookshop.  In the days before anyone said, “brick and mortar,” because there was nothing else.

Kit Cole Hattem, The Book Seller owner

We didn’t set out with this or any other destination in mind, but stopped to look in the window and then walked in.  Several customers chatting with the salesclerk and carefully arranged displays in the front suggested the store was thriving.  With Ann Patchett’s words in my mind and Joni Mitchell’s too – “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone” – I looked around to see what made this bookstore work.

Unique books for one thing, stacked from floor to ceiling.  I leafed through a few biographies I hadn’t seen before.  The selections had clearly been made by readers, not corporate marketing groups.

Lots of books of regional interest – fiction, history, natural history, and travel guides for the gold country and the Sierra foothills were well represented.

And ebook fans were not left out.  Notes on every shelf invited readers to order Google format books from the Book Seller’s website.  You can read these ebooks on pcs, macs, smartphones, tablets including the kindle fire, and all dedicated readers except the kindle.

Kit Hattem, owner of the Book Seller since 1985, said the store functions as a hub of a vibrant local writing community.  As if to emphasize her words, Steve Sanfield, a nationally known poet, author, and storyteller strolled in to chat with the sales clerk and browse for a few minutes.  Sanfield founded a popular summer event, the Sierra Storytelling Festival, 26 years ago.

To top off the great vibe in the store, conversation stopped when someone came in with a dog, for The Book Seller is pet friendly.  You can’t do that at Barnes&Noble…

I think you’ll enjoy The Book Seller’s website,  http://www.thebookseller.biz/.  If you read ebooks, think about ordering your next one from them.  And look around your own area.  What gems like this are waiting to be discovered and win your support?

The Shape-Changer’s Wife by Sharon Shinn: A Book Review

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I’ve enjoyed several young adult fantasies by Sharon Shinn and reviewed one of them here http://wp.me/pYql4-iQ.  Before she published her first YA book, Summers at Castle Auburn, in 2001, Shinn had a solid reputation as an adult fantasy writer.  I recently finished her first novel, The Shape-Changer’s Wife, which won the Locus award for Best First Fantasy Novel in 1995. Shinn was nominated for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer that year.  On top of these honors – all well deserved – long time readers of this blog will know I am fascinated by stories of shape shifters (check out three posts I wrote on the theme in Feb., 2011).

At the start of The Shape-Changer’s Wife we meet Aubrey, a young man with a sunny disposition who is already on his way to becoming a skilled magician. His master sends him to study with Glyrenden, highly skilled in the art of shape-changing:

“Learn everything he teaches you so well you can cast his own spells back at him,” the old wizard had said. “Glyrenden respects only those stronger than he is, and those he hates. If you cannot beat him, he will destroy you.”

With the optimism of youth, Aubrey brushes the warning aside and sets out. Even when local villagers react to Aubrey’s request for directions with narrowed eyes and cold responses, his hunger to learn drives him on.

Shinn is masterful in building a sense of menace, which begins the moment Aubrey steps into the 3″ of dust that cake the entry way of the shape-changer’s house.  It builds when he meet the uncanny servants – Orion, covered with hair except for his eyes and nose, and Arachne, a woman who fights a loosing battle against the dust, while muttering curses and shooting everyone hostile glances.  Above all, Aubrey is fascinated by Lilith, the shape-changer’s wife, whose emerald eyes seem to see right through him, who is silent and self-contained, and doesn’t react to anything like any other woman he’s ever met.

Shinn’s presents magic as matter-of-fact.  Shape-changing sounds dramatic to Aubrey, so he is dismayed when Glyrenden hands him piles of books on anatomy and science and makes him practice hours of concentration exercises.  “How can you change into something you don’t understand in all of it’s details,” the shape-changer asks.  In Shinn’s books, magic is seldom dramatic.  More often, it forms an atmosphere like the felt danger offstage in a Hitchcock movie.

By the middle of the tale, Aubrey is hopelessly in love with Lilith, even as he perceives that “She seemed to be fashioned from the idea of a woman, and not to be a woman at all.”  This and other related perceptions lead him to pierce the secret of Glyrenden’s house – why the townspeople fear him, and why no bird or animal will come anywhere near the wizard’s dwelling.  Aubrey learns that the only way to undo Glyrenden’s “barbaric spells” is to kill him or become a better wizard, and even if he succeeds, the spells may prove too strong to break.

“I came to magic with joy.” Aubrey says.  “I thought it was a splendid thing to take the well of power that I found within me and shape it to marvelous uses…But magic, I have discovered…is not inherently good in itself.  And some of it – yes, some of it is inherently evil.  There are wicked spells, savage spells, enchantments that are so black that even to know them withers the heart just a little, taints the soul.  And yet to be a great magician, to be a sorcerer of any ability or renown, those spells must be learned as well.  For if a magician does not know them, they can be used against him.”

With measured pace, Shinn has brings us through her imagined world to one of our oldest stories, that of tasting the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.  The Shape-Changer’s Wife is also a love story, but told with a kind of restraint that is rare in the fantasy genre.

You seldom see titles by Sharon Shinn on the shelves of Barnes&Noble, and never her YA titles.  At first glance, her books are not the stuff of blockbuster series and lucrative movie deals, though I can see them as moody, gothic dramas.

Shinn is a wizard in her own right.  Beyond the pleasure I’ve gained from six of her novels, I return to them often to study the masterful way she can weave character and atmosphere into stories I cannot forget.

Sharon Shinn

Ann Patchett Interviewed on the Colbert Report

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By a happy coincidence, I was channel surfing Monday night at just the right moment to catch author and indie bookstore owner, Ann Patchett, on the Colbert Report.  In an earlier post, I discussed Ms Patchett’s bookstore venture. http://wp.me/pYql4-1qW.

Author and owner of Parnassus Books, Ann Patchett

Colbert played devil’s advocate, arguing that brick and mortar bookstores are obsolete, and besides, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is no one to mess around with – didn’t he bludgeon the owner of Borders to death with a tire iron?

Patchett said, fine, stay indoors, never talk to anyone, live your life online, “But you’ll wake up one day and find you’ve become the unibomber.”

“A strong argument,” Colbert conceded.

From the sound of it, Patchett’s Parnassus Books has become a community gathering place – not just a bookstore, but a literary salon, a poets corner, a venue for local musicians, and a place where the staff is composed of avid readers who can make suggestions for every taste.  If I were an independent bookstore owner, I’d be tempted to travel to Nashville to look at this model of success.

The full episode is available online: http://www.colbertnation.com/full-episodes/mon-february-20-2012-ann-patchett.  The Patchett interview is about 2/3 of the way through the show, though with a cup of coffee and a slightly twisted sends of humor, you may enjoy listening to it all.

A Day With Anam Thubten

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Last summer I wrote about a retreat I attended with Anam Thubten. http://wp.me/pYql4-Wp .  Another time I posted about his first book, No Self, No Problem. http://wp.me/pYql4-gg.  Just over a week ago, I join a large group to attend another retreat with this Tibetan master.  The event coincided with the publication of his new book, The Magic of Awareness.

The magic of awareness cover

At first I was not going to write about the day because, in Anam Thubten’s own words, “I don’t have so much to say today.”  After a pause, he added, “I think you already know these things.”  A lot “happened,” that day, but not the sort of things you  can write about.

I thought of the Buddha’s flower sermon.  One day when a group of monks assembled to hear Sakyamuni Buddha, he simply held up a white flower someone had given him as he climbed onto the teaching dais.  One monk, Mahākāśyapa, smiled in understanding, and we date the practice of Zen from that moment.  A lot happened that day too – we remember it 2600 years later – but there is also not much to write about.  What are you going to “say” about holding up a flower?

That’s sort of the point.  And the point of this post.

For some reason, I was wide awake at 5:00am this morning.  I got up, made coffee, and dug into the Sunday paper – for some other unfathomable reason, I was really looking forward to catching up on all the news (what are they putting in the water these days?).  It only took one article on the presidential campaign to cure that delusion and cause me to trash a political post I almost had ready for Monday.  No way I wanted to add my $0.02 to the chatter.  There in the pre-dawn quiet, I thought again of Anam Thubten, the wisdom of silence, and the Buddha’s flower.

At the retreat, Anam Thubten gave few instructions on meditation beyond this: “The essence of meditation is doing nothing.” He elaborates in his first book:

“to rest means to pause, to pause from working very hard, to pause from continuously constructing this world of illusions, the dualistic world, the world that is based on the separation between self and other, you and me, good and bad.  When you completely take away the egoic mind, the creator of this illusory world, then realization is already there and truth is automatically realized.  Therefore, the heart of Buddhist meditation practice is to relax and to rest.”

When you think about it, those are really quite enough words for a lifetime…

King of Morning, Queen of Day by Ian McDonald: An Appreciation

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My recent discussion of unlikely mentors and guardians http://wp.me/pYql4-1J8 reminded me of Tireseas and Gonzaga, two “mystical vagabonds” (book jacket description) in one of the best fantasy novels I’ve ever read.

Ian McDonald, a visionary author who lives in Belfast, published  King of Morning, Queen of Day in 1991.  I still pick it up to read certain passages or a random chapter, to study and enjoy the ideas, the writing, and characters.

The narrative follows three women of three generations who are alternately attracted and attacked by creatures of the Mygmus, a technical name for the infinitely overlapping worlds of Faerie.

“The Mygmus may be viewed not so much as a place, a spatio-temporal relationship, a quasi-Euclidean geometrical domain, but as a state.  The concept is a familiar one in modern quantum physics, in which time is not considered a dynamic process, but a succession of recurring states eternally coexistent.  Such thinking liberates us from our essentially linear concepts of time, with past, present, and future.”  So reads a manuscript given to one of the women by a strange group of deformed, “Midnight Children.”

The first of the women, romantic, Edwardian Emily, dreams of a faerie lover and seeks him out.  First her rapes her, and then she disappears.

Gonzaga and Tireseas help Emily’s daughter, Jessica, battle free of the otherworld threat, which is personified by her mother, who has become a demonic force.

Jessica’s daughter, Enye, modern young woman in Dublin, battles Otherworld manifestations at night with martial arts swords.  Gonzaga and Tireseas charge her blades with high tech wizardry as well as ancient charms that allows her to win her way into Faerie, redeem her grandmother, Emily, and return to modern day Dublin.  The author gives the ending a contemporary twist that I won’t reveal here.

McDonald’s characters are among the most vivid in any novel I can remember, painted with a sure touch both in broad stroke and detail.  Every December, for instance, I reread “Enye’s soliloquy” – my name for it, with a nod to Molly Bloom.  It’s her internal monologue, in response to the question, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have Christmas all year long?”  It’s a long single sentence paragraph – not quite as long as the one that ends Joyce’s Ulysses, but then Joyce doesn’t make me laugh out loud.  I’ll quote the whole thing next December.

With his first book, Desolation Road, 1988, Ian McDonald won critical acclaim, and an Arthur C. Clarke award nomination.  Like other cyberpunk authors at the time, his vision of the impact of  technology at the birth of the internet age continues to amaze.  As a quick aside in King of Morning, Queen of Day, McDonald throws out a challenge to fantasy writers that has largely remained unanswered in the 21 years since it was written.  In the same manuscript that defined the Mygmus, Enye reads:

“I have this dread that…somehow we have lost the power to generate new mythologies for a technological age.  We are withdrawing into another age’s mythotypes, an age when the issues were so much simpler…and could be solved with one stroke of a sword called something like Durththane.  We have created a comfortable, sanitized pseudo feudal world of trolls and orcs and mages and swords and sorcery, big-breasted women in scanty armor and dungeon masters; a world where evil is a host of angry goblins threatening to take over Hobbitland and not starvation in the Horn of Africa, child slavery in Filipino sweatshops, Colombian drug squirarchs, unbridled free market forces, secret police, the destruction of the ozone layer, child pornography, snuff videos, the death of whales, and the desecration of the rain forests.

Where is the mythic archetype who will save us from ecological catastrophe, or credit card debt…where are the Translators who can shape our dreams and dreads, our hopes and fears, into the heroes and villains of the Oil Age?”

Ian McDonald

I haven’t kept up with the work of Ian McDonald in the two decades since I first read King of Morning but returning to the book via the characters of Tireseas and Gonzaga reminded me to do so. McDonald published Planesrunner, his first YA fantasy, in December, 2011. Here’s the blurb:

“When Everett Singh’s scientist father is kidnapped from the streets of London, he leaves young Everett a mysterious app on his computer. Suddenly, this teenager has become the owner of the most valuable object in the multiverse—the Infundibulum—the map of all the parallel earths, and there are dark forces in the Ten Known Worlds who will stop at nothing to get it.”

I don’t know about anyone else, but this is my very next read.