Category Archives: Miriam

November 21, 2012   Miriam   authors, controversy, creativity, culture, debate, editors, great books, Miriam, opinion, platform, publishers, Publishing  
3

Why some authors hate publishers

A long-time client, who is very dear to our agency, pointed us in the direction of a piece by Michael Levin in the HuffPost that I’d missed when it ran last week.  Our client was distressed by Mr. Levin’s assertions about the nefarious tactics mustache twirling publishers use to victimize authors.  Understandably, since Mr. Levin writes with such passion and seeming authority, she was concerned that the picture he paints is an accurate depiction of the culture of book publishing as 2012 draws to a close and we count down to the  Mayan apocalypse (which, of course, if it comes to pass will make this discussion irrelevant).

After reading the piece Jane and I had basically the same reaction which boiled down to “Why do the people talking trash about our business always seem to be the ones who understand it the least or who have a bag full of sour grapes they’re carrying around with them?”  And, then I got all happy because I didn’t have to scrounge around looking for a blog topic this week.

We promised our client that we’d go through Mr. Levin’s arguments and respond to them from our point of view and this, more or less (with my usual digressions and irritating asides), is what I hope to do here.

Mr. Levin’s argument boils down to four salient points:  (1) Publishers hate authors even though authors and the work they produce are their lifeblood. (2) Publishers are reducing advances and royalties across the board with the added perk of also reducing marketing and promotion for their titles. (3) Publishers’ dependence on BookScan (the tracking system for sales) guarantees that unless an author has a boffo success, their career is over faster than you can say “reserve for returns.”  And (4) by lowering the quality of the product because they refuse to pay what good authors are worth, publishers are ensuring that the public stops buying books and turns to other sources (the Internet) for their information and entertainment kicks.

Alrighty, then!  This should be quick(ish).

(1)   Publishers are the partners and adversaries of agents.  We work with and against them for the good of our authors, who have our first allegiance.  That said, most publishers (and the term includes all the people who make books happen at a publishing house from the CEO to the intern who opens the mail) we deal with daily, sometimes hourly, are incredibly hard working, thoughtful, engaged, and compassionate.  I’ve said this before and it bears repeating, very few people go into our business to achieve their dreams of Trump-like wealth.  Salaries are low in publishing compared to those in other media, and the work is painstaking and, often thankless (Exhibit A: Mr. Levin).  Publishing types do their jobs—which entail long hours after they’ve left the office sitting with a manuscript that needs to be shaped on a granular level—because they LOVE books.  Period.  With all the challenges publishers are faced with in this increasingly digital world, the level of care they bring to the curating of great (and even not so great) books is impressive.

(2)  Not sure which publishers Mr. Levin is talking about but our agency has had its best year ever.  We’ve sold over 100 books this year and have been paid advances, ranging from five to seven figures, on every one of them.  Perhaps there are some tiny houses that are embracing the “no advance” model but we work with the Big Six as well as many, many smaller independent publishers and have not seen this no-advance/lower-royalty model Mr. Levin describes.

(3)  We depend on BookScan too when we are considering signing up an author.  It’s a tremendous tool that lets you know what you’re up against when trying to find a new home for a previously published author whose book didn’t do well.  Has BookScan ever been a deciding factor in not signing up a book?  Probably, but only if we were very much on the fence about it anyway.  I’d venture to say that this is the same process publishers go through because we’ve had numerous authors whose BookScan sales, how to put it delicately?, were in the toilet and we still sold their next book and the book after that.  Bottom line, if your next idea is great or your genius undeniable, or your platform has reached critical mass, BookScan will not destroy your career.

(4)  Really?  Take a look at the best books of the year lists that are cropping up all over the place right now and tell me if you think important, brilliant, exciting fiction and non-fiction isn’t being published any more.  And, given the fact that book sales have risen in the digital age, it seems that a new generation of readers is turning to…books…for their information and their entertainment kicks!

Seems to me that publishers don’t hate authors any more than authors hate publishers.  In this complicated new world we live in, we all (on both sides of the business) need to take responsibility for our own failures and flaws as well as advocate for our strengths and successes rather than succumbing to paranoid fantasies about how much “they” hate us.

October 24, 2012   Miriam   bestsellers, classics, culture, fun, Miriam  
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Words travel

In my desperate search for a blog topic today I came across this piece in the HuffPost that made me sit up and mouth “Shut up!” at my computer.  Gone with the Wind is a huge hit in North Korea?  WT….

But, as I read the article, it started to make sense in the way that the global bestseller phenomenon usually does.  The other day I was sitting with a client and we were talking about Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls.  Our discussion veered into speculation about why that book has been so popular across several generations—the writing is competent but only just, the story one that has been told before and will be told again, and, the characters are not, well, deep.    But the book resonated for millions worldwide, much in the way that E.L. James’ 50 Shades of Grey has four decades later.

While Gone with the Wind boasts more rarefied literary credentials (it did win the Pulitzer Prize in 1937), it’s still pulp fiction in my book.  The melodrama, the heart-stopping suspense, the fashions….  Margaret Mitchell wrote a gripping story that didn’t let politics or morality  get in the way of a good plot (even though there’s plenty of politics and moralizing going on).  GWTW, like the other two books, spoke to many different people by offering archetypal situations, a thoroughly relatable cast of characters, and a keen understanding of heart-wrenching drama—like the overheated telenovelas I grew up on and that seduce millions in the Latin world, GWTW, 50 Shades, and Valley are all just unbelievably effective escapism machines.   Formulaic? Yes?  Over-the-top?  Of course.  Capable of taking you away from your dreary reality for the duration of your reading experience?  Exactly.

What do you all think of this?  Do you find this puzzling or does it make sense?  And  70 years from now will 50 Shades of Grey be all the rage in another freedom-challenged society?

 

October 10, 2012   Miriam   favorites, fun, Miriam  
4

Bookworm=nerd (or does it?)

My son and I were having a conversation about nerds recently.  Another second grader had told him that being a nerd was a bad thing.  I explained that I was a huge nerd growing up and that his father, despite his athletic prowess and popularity with cheerleaders, was also a bit of a nerd.  My kid was intrigued.  “Why were you a nerd?” he asked, and the answer, irrefutable and incontrovertible: “I was obsessed with books.  Still am.”

Of course, plenty of non-nerds love books.  And not every nerd is obsessed with literary pursuits (just think of your friend the techie who has memorized every line from every Star Wars movie).  But, books and nerdiness have a delightfully symbiotic history.

This piece in Flavorwire made me think fondly of the books that I’ve loved in spite of and a little because of their high nerd quotient:  Borge’s Labyrinths, Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night, Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy….you get the idea.   These are not books you discuss with your girlfriends over wine and nachos like you would an episode of CSI: Antarctica.  These are the kinds of titles that cause people to roll their eyes at you in disbelief at your pretentiousness or, in a different setting, that will set off endless tedious deconstructions of literary tropes and themes.   As much as I relish my pulp fiction, my popular nonfiction, and my scandalous bestsellers, I still define myself as a nerd because of those, well, nerdy books I read.

So, what books do you love that mark you as a nerd?

September 26, 2012   Miriam   contracts, controversy, creativity, deadlines, future of publishing, Miriam, publishers, Publishing  
10

Penguin sues authors

When I started working in publishing (roughly 100 years ago) the business was still one of “gentlemen’s agreements,” of editors coddling temperamental authors, and agents selling books based on a persuasive conversation rather than book proposals (look up Swifty Lazar, if you don’t believe me).  Too, it was always a tenet of agenting that despite the terms in a publishing agreement, there were ways around everything, from an onerous option clause to the repayment of an advance for a cancelled book.

This all worked, of course, because publishers have traditionally been unwilling to persecute their authors (very bad p.r.).  Given the conventional wisdom that authors are fragile, creative souls with no real grasp of practical details—like deadlines or basic accounting—even with cutthroat agents involved, the optics of going after someone publicly for non-delivery and non-payment did not work in a publisher’s favor.  So, often, authors got away with not repaying advances based on flimsy loopholes and how skilled their agents were at scaring or shaming the publisher.

But, times have gotten tough in recent years.  Margins are tighter as a result of the e-book revolution and the Justice Department has decided to stick its nose into publishing practices that many argue it has no knowledge of or understanding about.  So, it’s not entirely surprising that Penguin has taken the rather shocking step of suing a number of high profile writers for non-payment.

On the one hand…well, yes.  If you sign a contract that specifies that you need to repay an advance under certain conditions and those conditions come to pass, any legitimate business would go after you to recoup their money.

On the other hand, this makes me sad, because it feels like yet another of publishing’s intangibles has been sacrificed to the bottom line.   To me it seems that this takes us many more steps away from the days when publishers went out of their way, financially and otherwise, to enable an author—even the most wayward of them (see The Lost Generation)—to thrive creatively and produce the kinds of literature we’re still reading today.  Did they lose some money? Sure, but I’m pretty certain Scribner (and Random House and S&S, etc.) is still collecting on its investment.

What do you all think of this action by Penguin?

 

 

September 12, 2012   Miriam   authors, bestsellers, competition, creativity, fun, Miriam, writing  
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Spousal envy

A lot of authors are married to or in relationships with other authors.  Who better than another author understands the need to jump out of bed in the middle of the night in order to write down the solution to a tricky scene in your novel, or the misery of staring at a blank sheet or screen and feeling like you’ll never have anything to fill it with, or the fugue state you enter when the characters are racing you through the plot at breakneck speed and it’s all you can do to keep up with them, never mind eating, showering, or answering the phone.   So, yeah, we see a lot of authors who live together and work together and share the ups and downs of the writing life.

And, I’ve always wondered how it must feel to be the less successful half of one of those relationships.   Because even if both authors are supremely talented (Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne…) you know there’s always one half of the couple who garners the greater acclaim critically or commercially (sometimes both).  And, given how fragile creative egos can be, it’s gotta smart a little no matter how much you love your significant other when her book is the talk of the town while yours is languishing in the remainder bins.

This piece by Niall  Leonard, EL James’ husband, is delightful precisely because it is snarky and meanspirited in just the right proportions.  On the one hand, Mr. Leonard is doubtlessly enjoying his wife’s success (and, we hope, if theirs is a good marriage, rejoicing for her).  On the other, he’s a wee bit cranky that her blockbuster is taking over their lives and that all anyone wants to talk about is Fifty Shades of Grey when he’s got his own book to peddle.  He doesn’t come across as unduly bitter and clearly has a sense of humor about the whole thing.   Or does he?

How hard would it be for you to watch your spouse hit the literary jackpot while you’re toiling away in obscurity?  Would you be noble and selfless in your support or would you secretly be drawing mustaches or devil horns on his/her author photo?

August 15, 2012   Miriam   authors, classics, critiques, favorites, fiction, fun, Miriam, opinion  
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The sense of a beginning

As we’ve discussed many times on this blog, a truly great opening line to a novel is the holy grail for those who read and write for a living.  A beautiful, evocative, powerful first sentence can mean the difference between committing to a 600-page journey or picking up the remote.  The truth is, most novels, even the ones we decree to be masterpieces, don’t have particularly memorable opening lines.

For instance:  “The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through.”

Or, “When the lights went off, the accompanist kissed her.”

Or, “The play—for which Briony had designed the posters, programs and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crepe paper—was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch.”

These are the first sentences of three of my favorite novels of the past decade or so.  Solid openers, certainly, but nothing of the caliber of “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”  I believe that these three books (The Corrections, Bel Canto, and Atonement in case you hadn’t guessed) will become classics (if they haven’t already) despite the fact that Franzen, Patchett, and McEwan didn’t knock it out of the park with their first swing.

I just started reading Gone Girl and because it has been hyped to the heavens by everyone I know who’s read it, I was looking for a brilliant start.  And…it’s fine.  It made me want to keep reading but it didn’t grab me in a vice grip and drag me into the book.  To be honest, it felt a bit forced and writerly.  So far, however, the novel’s terrific and living up to the reviews.

My point, and I do have one, is that the first line doesn’t have to be mind-blowing.  It just needs to be good, intriguing, well written.  It should pique your curiosity even if it doesn’t turn you into a quivering mass of anticipation.  Ah, but the next 90,000 words need to keep you interested.   And, then you can try again—with a stunning closer that stays with you long after you’ve finished the book.

Of course, if that’s all too much trouble, you can do what these folks did and write some truly gruesome first sentences.  They will definitely grab someone’s attention.

What are the first lines from novels you’ve loved that didn’t exactly knock your socks off?  And why did you keep reading anyway?

August 02, 2012   Miriam   authors, fun, interaction, marketing/publicity, mentors, Miriam, relationships, self-publishing  
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Support systems

We’ve lately had the good fortune to represent some lovely women, like Tracey Garvis Graves and Colleen Hoover, who started out self-publishing their fiction and for whom we’ve now been able to make some significant deals with “legacy” publishers (have I mentioned that I really dislike that term?).  These women are very smart and committed about their work, but they are also incredibly generous in their support of other writers who are embarking on the same kind of venture.  They belong to online support groups where they critique each other’s works, give each other tips on how to market their books, and serve as cheerleaders to each other on their public platforms.  As Jane mentioned in her blog post last week, authors mentoring and supporting other authors should not be a surprising phenomenon, but, in fact, it often is.  It’s also wonderful and important and we hope that other authors are taking note and emulating this kind of esprit de corps.

But, as I mull over this interesting development, it occurred to me that I don’t see this kind of “community” among male writers.  Sure, people like our own David Morrell are tireless in speaking at conferences, sharing  insights with up and coming writers, and offering priceless advice (in David’s case like the professor he once was).  And I know that  Joe Konrath, whom we’ve represented for many years, has a huge online following for his often controversial but always provocative views about the publishing process.  But, I have not seen the kind of small  influential online writing groups among male writers that seem to be flowering in the women’s fiction world.

Why is this, do you suppose?  Is it a XX/XY thing?  Is it because of category?  Is it because men are more naturally competitive and women more nurturing (to apply the most pervasive stereotypes)?  Or do these groups exist and thrive and I’m just not hip to them?

July 18, 2012   Miriam   classics, fun, Miriam  
4

Colorful prose

My friend Jim Donahue sent me a link to this interesting story about a limited edition of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury that is color coded to facilitate reading the Benjy section of the book.   I love stuff like this!

I’ve long thought this Faulkner novel to be one of the most original and powerful works of American literature.  There are passages that have stayed with me through the years with a clarity  that is startling (especially given my famously poor memory).  But even so, it is a book that leaves you feeling like you’ve had the mental workout equivalent of a boot camp session run by the Louis Gossett, Jr., character in  An Officer and a Gentleman.  Which is why I get such a kick out of color coding the disjointed, stream-of-consciousness, Benjy section.

Of course, this piece makes me wonder what else should be color coded to help the reading process.  I’m thinking Kant’s work could use some fuschia and lime text to help us with the categorical imperative.  And, man, you’d need to invent new shades for Finnegans Wake. 

What books have you found so impenetrable that you need a rainbow of highlighters to keep track of things?

June 20, 2012   Miriam   authors, controversy, culture, media, Miriam  
10

Content pressure

A friend of mine alerted me to this story about Jonah Lehrer’s self-plagiarism (which turned into a story of him plagiarizing others) and it made me sad.  This kind of thing keeps coming up (whether it’s plagiarizing or making things up, a la Frey and Mortenson) and it’s disappointing, sure, but it’s also puzzling.

Rather than opting for knee-jerk demonizing, I find myself wondering if it’s possible that these talented people are just cracking under the pressure to produce content at a speed that is unsustainable in order to catch the miniscule attention span of readers used to having 17 websites open at once and getting their information in McNugget bites.   Or, as in the case of those who “embellish,” if it’s the trying to make their stories bigger, shinier, funnier, more tragic, more more in order to grab your and my interest.

Is any of this excusable?  Are we collectively putting too much pressure on our writers and thinkers and pushing them over the edge into the ethical abyss?  What do you all think?

 

 

June 06, 2012   Miriam   BEA, fun, Miriam  
3

It’s BEA week…

…and, since all anyone’s doing is trying to find a comfortable seat somewhere on the floor of the Javits Center and thinking ahead to their drink order at one of the cocktail parties happening around town, I thought I’d ask you guys to make up a story involving these three pictures I took while making the rounds at BEA yesterday (yes, that’s Jim sporting an Afro). Go!

 

 

 

 

 

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