IPPY awards

I'm delighted to report that The American Book of the Dead, a novel that I had the pleasure of editing last year, has won the "Visionary Fiction" category of the 2010 Independent Publisher Book Awards. Congratulations to author Henry Baum on his golden touch :)

Indy books vs Indy bookstores

In my other life as a journalist, I had the good fortune recently to attend a lecture by the owner of a very successful independent bookstore. He was speaking to a group of authors and small local publishers, and the dynamic was extremely interesting for a number of reasons.

• The majority of the participants were on the older side, and there was a lot of resistance to technology. Amazon, Kindles, iPhones - all were the enemy (though there was an undercurrent of idolatry, if I'm not mistaken). The smell of ink came highly recommended. Most of the questions were of the "how do you think technology X will affect writers" variety. Which seemed odd to me, since they were speaking to a bookstore owner, who clearly can't do anything about the influx of technology.
• There was a sense of shifting blame for the failure of one's books. It wasn't that the book was bad, or boring, or extremely limited in audience. It wasn't that people have limited incomes and can't just buy every book by a local author that vaguely overlaps with their interests. It's that bookstores won't buy local books, or it's impossible to get printed in the current market, or nobody will take a chance on their topic. Now, certainly there are great books being ignored out there. But it seems like leaning on these explanations may result in a lot of bitterness down the road. FYI.

Most interesting, though, was a question about self-publishing. An author was saying he'd self-published but now couldn't get even local indy bookstores to stock his book. This is a common complaint, and a totally valid frustration for an author that's edited carefully, gotten a great cover, and totally deserves the shelf space. But the bookstore owner still said no - it was very unlikely that he'd carry a self-published book.

The reason for this? Well, one of the only things that really good indy bookstores have that big chain and internet stores don't have is...quality control. The staff are reading the books, picking up titles that got great reviews or that they really liked. People come into the stores trusting them, knowing that whatever they choose to buy will be well done and worth reading.

So even though it seems at first glance like indy books and indy bookstores are a great match, from another point of view it's indy books that stand the greatest chance of running indy bookstores out of business. Ohnoes!

Too much to read!

I truly love to read. I was one of those kids who loved hiding in corners with books even before I could actually read the words. My parents bought me this little "nook" - a tiny rocking chair with a cat painted on it, with a matching little rug. So I could pretend to be an old lady sitting by the fire with a book, I guess? Anyway, it was great.

Lately, though, I've realized that reading has really insinuated itself into every corner of my life. And like any good addict, I've developed all these tricks and schemes to make myself think I'm not just reading all the time. I wake up and have tea and read something light and happy. Then I get to work, reading and editing. During breaks, I catch up on the million billion blogs on my blogroll. When I've got some spare time, I read review copies for the Self-Publishing Review. And then in the evening, I curl up with a good book.

So, right now I am reading, in approximate order of frequency,

• Nancy Drew - The Thirteenth Pearl (for the light morning read)
• Her Fearful Symmetry (for evening escapism)
• Slaughterhouse Five and Bonfire of the Vanities(out loud with Chris and the rat, who loves to be read to. Ach, grammar. The rat is listening. Chris is reading.)
• Nurtureshock (for two separate extremely informal book clubs with Anna-the-future-doctor and Nicky-the-current-mother-of-toddlers)
• Persuasion (for when I'm in that Jane Austin mood while eating lunch)
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles (for the second time, but I seem to have stalled at about 90%...I'll get back to it, I swear!)
• The Chicago Manual of Style (because I'm always reading the Chicago Manual of Style)
• And, of course, this month's developmental editing book, which is so much fun to have developing ideas for!

Because everyone's doing e-book stats this week - Of those nine books, three are hard-copy and six are on the Kindle. None of the Kindle books involved me paying money to Amazon. Though they've made sample chapters available over not-wireless, so I can actually get them now, which makes me happy. But not happy enough to buy anything from them. Keep trying, Amazon.

Anyway, leave me alone now. I have reading to do.

Writing your own back cover copy

The fact that authors have to write their own blurbs and cover copy when they self publish is a very awkward thing. For the authors, I imagine it's akin to torture. Poor authors - you've written the book, you've gotten it all fixed up, you've said what you wanted to say in 70,000 words, and now you have to say it all again in 50.

The results usually aren't too bad...back-cover copy is pretty formulaic, and you can't go too far wrong just typing in the copy from a published book in your genre, and replacing the key words.

The key thing is that you're trying to sell your book, right? So you say things that you think will make people want to buy it. That's good thinking, but sometimes I wonder if the authors have actually read their own books, the cover-copy is so far off the mark. Comparisons are made to books without the faintest resemblance either in plot or voice to the book in question. Allusions to authors, styles, and literature movements that the author hasn't been exposed to since 11th grade Lit class 30 years ago are demurely smuggled in. Characters are identified as the main character who aren't the main character. Really.

I understand the need to talk up your book, but really* - don't compare yourself to Crime and Punishment if the only similarity is that a crime occurs in your book and the perpetrator suffers because of it. It's like comparing your book to the Bible because it has God in it. And don't say your book draws from the surrealist movement just because you threw in a couple of vaguely weird bits that nobody would have noticed if you hadn't made a character say "Wow, this is so weird, I feel like my watch ought to start melting soon."

Moral: Back cover copy should both sell and remotely resemble the book you have written. It's bloody hard, but I promise it can be done.

*titles and genres have been changed to protect the innocent

The Girl who Played with Fire

This one doesn't even get a cover picture. Will I read the third book in the series? Yes, I will, if only because the second book in almost every trilogy is a boring disaster. I don't even know what was going on with this book. The NYT seemed to like it alright, but I'm going to have to diverge with them once again in matters of art...this was a horrible, plodding mess. A huge percentage of it is dedicated to Lisbeth buying a condo, furnishing it at Ikea, and going grocery shopping. Hurrah, right? When she was tattooing "I am a sadistic pig" onto the stomach of a man who really deserved it in the last book, I was totally saying to myself "Self? Don't you really want to know whether she'd go with the Aspelund or the Malm for her guest room?"

Actually, the best part about this book was that a couple characters had names that I only know from Ikea furniture.

When I finally realized what the main plot was, I couldn't believe it. I'd really hoped all that was just a subplot, and kept waiting for something more interesting to kick in, but about 90 percent of the way through I finally gave up and accepted that the bad guys were that two-dimensional. Gah.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

This book was really quite good. I agree almost exactly with the NYT review of it, which is a bit scary because that never happens...maybe writing my own reviews (I've got a new one up, by the way) has made me more attentive. It has its flaws, but one can only assume that the editorial process was somewhat stunted by it being a) a translation, and b) released after the death of its author.

However. This is a best-seller. The waiting list for the sequel at the library is prohibitive. People love it, they buy it, they fling money in its direction. And it's not trash, either. So I'd like to use it as a bit of an example of that thing I always say about how all the writing "rules" should come with the caveat "unless it works, and/or you do it really, really well."

This best-seller is guilty of breaking all of the following rules that authors in writing groups spend countless hours warning each other about:

• Not starting the story right away. The main plot doesn't present itself until 15% of the way into the book, and even then there is a fairly large plot detour before it gets fully underway.
• Not finishing the story quickly after the climax.
• Taking place in a foreign country, where people have foreign names and worry about foreign issues. Can an American audience identify with characters named Holger and Dirch? Do they care about social problems and corruption in Sweden?
• Being too long. This book is pretty long. I'm not sure how long, but definitely pretty long. Publishers don't like long books right now because of the cost of paper, you know.
• Having a major part of the intrigue be related to coded Bible verses.
• Having long passages of not immediately relevant history and back-story.
• Using multiple perspectives. It's all third person, but several different characters' points of view are utilized.
• Being about a writer, and then presenting a situation where the writer becomes famous and adored. I've actually got a whole post somewhere in the back of my mind about how funny it is that writers always become the most obviously passionate about their subject when they're able to work in their latent impossible dreams of total success, but for now, suffice to say that this is horribly cliché.

All this, and I still sped through it and immediately started on the sequel, as did many others from the looks of it. This is not an excuse to break the rules, and I'm not saying it couldn't have been much improved by hammering out these issues, but the story and writing were good enough to carry it through despite any objectionable elements. Food for thought.

***

PS - Amusingly, awesome group blog The Book Book just had a post on this as well. It's somewhat more useful than mine for things like, er, plot. Read it here!

Tales of Chinatown (1922)

Some things I love: short stories of the mysterious persuasion, literature from before political correctness was invented, fiction that takes place in really dirty parts of London when telephones and cars were unusual possessions.

Tales of Chinatown comes from midway through the career of the prolific Sax Rohmer, who specialized in writing about the "Yellow Peril" of the Chinese neighborhoods in London, and who died most ironically of the Asian Flu in 1959.

Many of the stories read like an unambitious contemporary knockoff of Sherlock Holmes, though with a somewhat more active role for the Watson character, Knox. Others, though, are just completely weird little supernatural vignettes that are much more Poe than Doyle. A theme of cultural identity runs through all the stories, with mixed-race characters struggling to keep the better part of their souls afloat in the face of much darker undercurrents that threaten to pull them into the dangerous criminal underworld.

Like I say, nothing that you could get away with nowadays without being run out of town with flaming pitchforks, and maybe rightly so. But still, a very interesting and revealing foray into a dark little corner of history.

Choke (2001)

I somehow made it all the way through Choke without realizing it's by Fight Club guy. I have possessed this knowledge in the past, but for some reason it just didn't click, despite the really obvious similarities. The plus side of this was that I was actually able to judge this book on its own. The minus side is that when you judge this book on its own, it's pretty unpleasant. Well-written, certainly, but really very icky.

Pacing's great, voice is great, style is great. Twist isn't nearly as good as Fight Club but I feel like I probably missed some details while I was skimming through the icky bits. It feels derivative certainly - the gross-out anatomy stuff, the support groups, the weird sex, the weirder jobs, the insane people. But hey, if you do something well, why not revisit it? All the great authors do. But I don't know. Anyone read both?

I feel like I like this one more in retrospect than I did at the time...It's not you, Choke, it's me. You did great.

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976)

I think the heat is probably making me cranky, so perhaps I was less patient with this book than I should have been. But I'm wary of just writing my dislike off to the fact that I am So Sweaty, because I clearly remember reading Jitterbug Perfume, and it was the same thing. In the case of JP, I giggled myself into a frenzy for about the first two thirds of the book, then suddenly realized I was tremendously bored, put it down, and never finished. I never do that, I'm a consummate book-finisher, so this stuck in my mind.

I did finish Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, but it was with a fair bit of grumbling and swearing. For about the first half it was pretty good, there were giggles to be had and intriguing images to be lost in. But then, splat. Two hundred pages of alternating mediocre erotica and mediocre philosophy, all wrapped in overdone self-conscious word games. And the history of whooping cranes in America. By the time the story kicked back in near the end, I was totally disenamored of both the characters and the plot, and found no satisfaction in a resolution that I probably would have quite enjoyed if it had happened a hundred and fifty pages sooner.

Next up, this "Chuck Palahniuk" character. He better watch out though, because until the thunderstorms start I am not on speaking terms with writing that doesn't make me forget I'm in the guldurned sauna here.

American Gods (2001)

It's approximately four hundred degrees and humid in Montreal right now. And of course, nothing in Montreal is air-conditioned, because it's winter all year. The only real reason I even own fans is to dry my laundry faster. But this week is that random week that happens every year where it's too hot to do anything but sit with your feet in a tub full of cold water until your toes all prune.

Fortunately I don't have to work this week, since my office is the hottest room in the apartment. Just being in it right now to write this post is a feat of extreme heroism.

I'd actually already planned to use this week to do some serious reading. There's just so much I haven't read, and so much of it sounds so good. I'd assumed I'd read all the classics since my parents were such lit snobs and I plowed through their walls of bookshelves several times as a young'n. But it turns out that there's a lot of brilliant stuff out there that doesn't fall into the categories of "Renaissance humanism," "Feminist self-empowerment treatise," and "German existentialism," if you can believe it. And a lot of it is a hell of a lot more fun to read.

So yesterday I read American Gods by Neil Gaiman. I'd never read anything of his before (duck and cover to avoid the withering stares of the fan base), but damn. I think I'm in love with the Americana branch of magical realism. I'm going to just go ahead and call that my favorite pleasure-reading genre until further notice.

AG in large part takes place in Wisconsin, with local landmarks, expressions like "yoopie" (person from the upper peninsula (UP) of Michigan that sits on top of northern Wisconsin) and bathroom doors labeled "pointers" and "setters" all giving it that delicious midwestern feel. It's also, of course, bizarre and supremely clever and just dirty enough, but I'm sure there are others out there who can much more eloquently detail its value as an important piece of modern literature.

It also (and I've definitely broken a sweat so this is my last point) breaks a lot of The Rules. It uses the "like we're living in a novel" bit not once but several times. It veers into long descriptive passages about towns and roads and landmarks to set the scene. It doesn't delve very deeply into the personalities of any of its elaborate cast of characters. Okay, most of them are gods, but there are a couple humans in there, and hardly any of them have more than one or two distinguishing traits. And its central conflict is a battle between Good and Evil. Cliche? I think so.

And do any of these things detract from the book? Not a whit. This is what I'm always talking about - the rules are there to inform you of things that a lot of writers do badly. But they can be done well, and if they are, your book can be a cult hit and bestseller even if it includes a full chapter describing the House on the Rock. Thank you, Neil Gaiman, for raising the bar.

Site changes and editing update

I am very pleased to announce that I now have a proper website for my editorial work at kallisti.ca. This is doubly delightful because, as a new Canadian permanent resident, I'm allowed to have a .ca domain, which I think is very neat.

The site was designed and built by Christopher Kahn, to whom I am eternally grateful. I think he did a marvelous job--I wanted the site to be simple and helpful, and I think that's just what it is. What you don't get to see is the amazing project database he also made for me, which is like magic. It leaves me free to assault misused hyphens and dangling modifiers instead of trying to strong-arm my math skills into properly organizing deposit invoices. Brilliant.

Just in time for the site launch, I got a lovely shout-out on the Self-Publishing Review for my work on Henry Baum's upcoming novel The American Book of the Dead, which I had the pleasure to edit last month. It's been really gratifying to hear some kind words from my authors even after they've spent weeks reorganizing subplots and rewriting their least-favorite scenes because of me! I've heard some horror stories of authors feeling very abused and browbeaten by freelance editors, and I really hope that I can make the experience a little more pleasant for the authors I work with.

Just finished off a YA project, and I'm taking the rest of the week off to finish up all the paperwork I need to do for my residency, all the chores I've fallen behind on...you know. Everything. I'm really looking forward to my next project--it's a delightful novel by an Authonomy author that's already in great shape, and I can tell we're really going to be able to make it shine. That'll probably be my last project for this month, and then I'm accepting submissions for the fall.

National Book Awards 60th Anniversary

I don't seem to be much of an other-website promoter, but this is just too damn cool. To me, anyway. Though to be fair, the term "tremendous book nerd" has been bandied around in relation to me in the past.

For anyone else who thinks a nicely-laid-out retrospective of classic books from the past sixty years is omgzawesome, the National Book Foundation has given us just that. There have been 77 National Book Awards fiction winners in that period, ranging from things I've heard of (The World According to Garp, All the Pretty Horses) to things like, well, The Wapshot Chronicle. Giggle.

At any rate, a great way to learn about what some very booky people have considered the most important book of the year since 1950. And whether these selections have stood the test of time, at least from today's perspective. I'd be willing to bet these things go in cycles, and the ones they're making fun of this time around will be the stars of the show for the hundreth-anniversary edition.

They've only got about the first dozen entries up right now, so there's plenty of time to catch up. Have fun!

Time Lines

I'm wondering whether many authors get a time line down on paper for their work. Give it some thought - it can help you clarify things to yourself and avoid ambiguities that'll confuse your readers.

If even you, the author, aren't sure what year something happened to your character, or what time of day it is when a scene takes place, how is your reader supposed to know?

Book Reviews

I admit it - writing is hard for me. I think it might be just that that I'm out of practice, but it's really an uphill battle. I admire authors immensely for being able to produce pages and pages of words, when I totally struggle to string together...like...two. Words.

Anyway, I've been writing book reviews for the website Self Publishing Review, which I've been quite enjoying. It's really fascinating to read the books that people have self-published! It must be terrifying to send your book off to be reviewed, especially without the buffer level of knowing that a publishing house accepted/edited/designed it. That way at least you can blame the publisher for any mistakes, and know that even if the reviewer didn't like it, at least the acquisitions editor did!

With the kind permission of Henry Baum, the mastermind behind the Self Publishing Review, I'm going to be going into a little more depth on the editing angle of the books I've been sent for review. I've made a few remarks on editing in the SPR reviews, but I'd like to talk more specifically about what another edit could have done for each book. It'll be a paragraph-structure adventure! But not right now, because I'm sleepy.

For the time being, you may revel in the glory that is my SPR reviews:
Daywalker, by Rebecca Rock (Vampires)
The Legend of Jimmy Gollihue, by George LaCas (Literary fiction)
Fairy Senses, by Frances Ruiz (YA Fantasy)

Don't you bring me no bad news

I've noticed that in the world of book reviews, there seems to be a policy of only reviewing books that are "worthy of review." That is, if the book is amateurish, or unremarkable, or just plain bad, there's nothing said about it. Silence.

Now, I can see how reviews, even bad ones, will serve as publicity for a book. I can see where reviewers might think they won't even waste people's time reading about something that they absolutely should not read.

But honestly, I don't buy it. In what other field, art or otherwise, does something bad not even merit a mention? Bad films get reviewed. Bad art shows get reviewed. Hell, bad microwaves get reviewed! But a mediocre book, even if it was good enough to get picked up by a publisher...nothing.

And I personally would like to know about these things! Even if it's just a one-liner: "Spelling atrocious. Cover amateurish. Story full of holes. Couldn't finish--like reading nails on a blackboard." That would do. Especially given the explosion of books available through POD and self-publishing...books really are a commodity rather than an art form a lot of times, and I sort of think they should be treated as such on the review circuit.

I really distrust websites that only run good reviews. I assume that somebody is paying them or giving them freebies, and I assume that their good reviews aren't trustworthy. Just like I wouldn't trust a math teacher who gives all his students A's, I don't trust a book review website that only rates books "excellent!", "classic!", or, at worst, "very good!" (book reviews dot com, I'm looking at you!).

If readers should have the freedom to decide what they enjoy reading (even if it's Twilight), they should also have access to the information necessary to make an informed decision.

That is all.

Kindle 2 has arrived on my couch!

March 30th, 1:00pm - Kindle is here! It was a ridiculous matter to get it - my mom had to buy it, have it sent to her in California, and then mail it to me herself. Because Amazon refused to ship it to Canada. But now, a mere half-day after my birthday, it is arrived.

1:05pm - It is so cute! Soooo cute. The packaging is cute too. It opens like a book!

1:25pm - I think I'm figuring it out. The instructions (in an ebook that opens when you turn it on) are really easy and quick to read, and most of the buttons make a lot of sense. I'm still not quite familiar with the note and clipping functions, but give me time.

1:27pm - Also, when it goes into sleep mode, it shows portraits of famous authors. I think the greyscale has 16 levels, so the pictures look really nice. Same or better than the quality in a lot of books, really.

1:35 - I have uploaded a book onto it! No whispernet, obviously, because I'm in Canada, but it also accepts .txt files, so I just converted a book that a friend sent me in Word, drag-and-dropped, and voila! There are no tabs because of the formatting, but despite that it looks nice and promises to be easily readable. And it remembers what page I get to... I'm a disaster with bookmarks so that's a nice touch.

More to come...

Um.

Now, I just read a book where the author felt it necessary to give an exhaustive physical description of every character in her book, no matter how minor. This was particularly funny when juxtaposed with the way in which major components of the plot (time elapsed between chapters, whether people were aliens or not, etc.) were left to be inferred, if not just omitted altogether.

My opinion of what constitutes an "exhaustive physical description," however, has just been shot out of the water by a friend who directed me to this unholy monstrosity (original post here)

Click to read.
Warning: The pain. Oh god, the pain.

At peace

I read best when I'm eating. I can concentrate completely, I'm content, I'm not looking for anything or in a hurry to be anywhere else.

This is actually one of the reasons I want an ebook reader - some books are just so damn hard to prop open when you're disassembling an artichoke.

The Reader

Well. So I've officially seen my one Oscar-nominee per year. Speaking of Oscars, it has come to my attention that the Dukes of Hazzard did not win any. Could somebody get on that? It had everything - a bar fight AND controversial material about the North vs South divide in the Civil War. It at least deserves a Pulitzer.

Anyway. I've been reading a lot about e-book readers lately. It really seems likely that they're the next big thing, and honestly, I like them. I didn't at first - I first saw one right around the first of the year in Chicago, and I thought it was neat but I didn't take it seriously. But the idea has grown on me. I do love physical books, and I would still want them, but I would never actually exchange money for a $30 new hardcover book. With all these readers, you can get free books, cheap books, and even with cheap books you know you're directly supporting the author with a big percentage of the sale. I think that's pretty cool.

But seeing The Reader...man, that movie captures the heart and soul of why paper books will never go away, and why nobody needs to be afraid they will. Everyone has those books, where it's just Franny and Zooey, or Alice in Wonderland, or whatever, but there's this one specific copy that means more to you than any photograph or memento ever could. You hold it and shivers go through you, and you open it up and you're a completely different person. You read it when you were feeling lonely when you were little, you read it out loud to your best friend or your favorite lover, you carry it with you no matter how many times you move and would weep at even the thought of leaving it behind. No electronic copy of anything is ever going to do that. You're not going to stroke your Sony Reader screen when you pull up a book you downloaded for your honeymoon.

That's all... I loved the movie, it was too long but it was beautiful and tricky and emotional and I'm quite glad I saw it.

Reading/Networking

Alright, well, I'm networking. Of the social-book-reading sites I've been looking at, Authonomy is definitely the most lively. It's made up mainly (or entirely?) of authors, and everyone seems happy to offer feedback and advice and be pretty nice about it in the process! Must be a British thing. The system is very reciprocal, and most people are being pretty upfront about that - you review my book and I'll review yours. I, however, don't have a book to contribute, but I'm still having fun offering up my opinions and seeing if they help. I've gotten a really positive response so far.

DailyLit I couldn't live without right now, but it still gets a mixed review. It has tons of classics, and tons of aspiring bestsellers, available to read free, and it'll send a little bite-sized read to your email every day at a specified time. The personalization options are fantastic, and it's so easy to get exactly what you want out of the function. Though I admit it's a bit weird reading Ulysses in 5-minute segments in the morning. But I've gotten further in reading it this way than I ever have before, so maybe there's something to be said for the method. On the other hand, the boards are pretty dead, and you get things like "27 comments, in 25 threads", where nobody is really talking to anyone. I think they should play up the book-club angle more, to get groups of people reading the same thing so they can talk about it.

Twitter I just can't figure out. It seems like people are making friends and forming lively communities, but there's no explanation of how this works anywhere on the site that I can find. Hmph.

Smashwords, Scribd, and Issuu I'm still working on... these sites all suffer a bit from being too geared towards writers and not accessible enough to people who want to be an audience. We'll see if I can figure them out any better in the days to come.