1. Draw a hand turkey.
2. Decorate your hand turkey to your liking.
3. Imbue your hand turkey with one of the four cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, restraint, courage) and one of the seven deadly sins (lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, pride).
4. Send your hand turkey on a quest that takes him or her to multiple international locations.
5. Happy Thanksgiving!
Next stop: Cairo!
As you may have read in today’s Times, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has stopped taking submissions [subscription required]. They are calling it a “freeze-lite” as opposed to a “hard freeze.” I take this to mean that if a sure thing comes along, then they will bid on it. Anything less will receive a pass.
I’m not surprised at this news. I’ve heard through the grapevine that advances are suddenly, precipitously lower (an agent friend told me that a book he would have sold for 75K last year went for ten) and that the market was generally cool, but this is the first time I’ve heard a publisher go on record saying that they’re not buying.
Do not fret. In publishing this time of year is notorious for being slow anyway. (August can also be bad.) If you’re killing yourself to get that proposal/manuscript out the door, you might be better off taking a break, gaining some perspective, enjoying the holidays, and then ramping up again in January/February. This is especially true if you’re a first-time author. Making that manuscript even 5% better might make all the difference in the world when it comes time to sell. The bad times can’t last forever.
Point two: Publishers may not be buying books, but now is the time for us readers to really pour it on. We are not going to get our government bailout. If anything money for the arts is going to get scarcer. So if you’re interested in seeing books and authors survive, then the market is our only hope.
(The undercover book editor and blogger Moonrat wrote an excellent post earlier this month about what the economy did to publishing in the month of October. You will want to read it.)
So go out and buy a bunch of books, new, from a bookstore. Read them, give them as gifts, use them to prop open windows, hoard them obsessively in your basement. And for those of you who enjoy (or at least tolerate) Facebook, there is the Buy a Book, Save the World! group. I believe this is the result of some of Moonrat’s readers hearing her call. Go Moonrat! Go books!
A reader writes:
I’ve been doing some unpleasant networking lately, and, generally: How much should you really invest in kissing the ass of people you don’t like?
I mean, there are a lot of people more powerful than me who I need to open doors. So, I do everything I can to curry their favor. And yet, I’ve noticed in life that I get a lot farther when I network with people I genuinely like, I suspect that is because they genuinely like me too. A lot of my networking with people I, deep down, dislike, seems to peter off into not much. This could be because I actually am pretty high in my career and there’s not a lot of easy places to move forward, or it could be because it’s a waste of time to network with people you’re not really simpatico with.
Your thoughts? Is all networking good networking, or is there a way to network smarter?
In the Good Old Days, we writers faced lower social expectations. When James Joyce advised writers to practice “silence, exile and cunning” he did so in a culture that mostly wanted writers to write, a culture where if you really wanted to go out and shake things up, then you hopped on a train.
Today, with the exception of the cunning part, Joyce’s advice sounds like career suicide. (“Cunning, sociability and noise” is more like it.) Now audiences expect authors to do events, have a website, answer personal e-mail and in some cases even participate in the making of the work. Meanwhile, the industry almost requires that you be a marketing expert, branding guru and public personality. They’d also very much appreciate it if you’d learn to photograph well.
Your networking woes are a side effect of these new expectations. You know that the work doesn’t speak for itself. Hell, even the speaking for itself doesn’t speak for itself any more. So you’re doing your best by making connections, buffing your profile, and hoping it all pays off.
I suspect that you’re a victim of your own success. You’re past the breakthrough phase. New gains can feel incremental. But the struggle is still the struggle. So rather than give you advice, I offer this reminder:
Remember what networking felt like in the very beginning. Remember how terrified you were the first time you tried to impress an editor. Remember how awful it felt to go to your first businessy cocktail party. And remember to give yourself a little credit. Networking will probably never be fun for you, but you must be doing something right or you wouldn’t be where you are today.
Hey, Dory from Finding Nemo! Take us out:
I am currently reading David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.
Cloud Atlas is one of those rare novels that I not only enjoy, but that also reminds me why I wanted to become a writer.
Cloud Atlas makes me feel like this:
The Greek city of Rhodes is getting it’s Colossus back and I couldn’t be happier. Sadly, it won’t be a giant dude standing bestride the entrance to the port, but the piece will be big and visible, and its intent (gaudy symbol of peace) will hearken back to the original.
What does this mean to you? Glad you asked:
1. Scale
I’ve been meaning to talk more about scale on these pages, and this story provides a good reason to start. As yesterday’s post on blogs-to-book showed, an incremental approach to your art can bring rewards. But there is a lot to be said for the big, grandiose, attention-getting project. The film triology. The opera cycle. The definitive volume. (Ideally, you’re working both ends of the spectrum.)
2. The Universal
It’s easy to trick yourself into thinking that New Times makes us New People, but the Universal is alive and well. This weekend Twilight will open and you will read articles about how the supernatural has gone completely mainstream. But underneath all the vampires is a story about young love. And it doesn’t get more ancient than that. The weirder things get, the more relevant the basic human experience becomes.
Finally, a thought experiment:
If you had the time and the talent to make something ginormous, what would it be? And what aspect of the its ginormosity would connect to the Universal?
I’ve been meaning to write about the blog-to-book phenomenon but the A.V. Club has saved me the trouble. Their delightful roundup/rundown “Why buy the cow? 27 popular websites that became books” shows that while there is much to be maligned, there is also much to be celebrated.
Yes, some of the sites (and their subsequent books) cited in the article are shallow, infantile, unessential and perhaps even contributing to the decline of our culture. (I’m looking at you, Stuff on My Cat.)
But there are also examples of writers and artists who used the Web to find an audience for otherwise unmarketable projects. If you’re not an established writer (and increasingly if you are) it’s getting harder and harder to sell projects that are perceived as too small, too quirky or even too voice-driven. It’s encouraging to see that the Web can provide a back door.
Still, there is a larger question behind the A.V. Club’s feature. What do we want out of books?
Is a book just a shape an idea can come in? Or are books a form whose unique qualities need to be articulated, respected and perhaps even fought for?
Do we reject books that aren’t sufficiently book-like (whatever we decide that is)? Or do we embrace anyone and everyone in the hopes that a healthy book industry will ultimately take care of the good even as it tolerates the bad?
In case you haven’t heard, Malcolm Gladwell has a new book out. It’s called Outliers and it’s about genius, success, and giving the world a new conversation starter. (The Guardian has a nice excerpt that will help you keep up with the intellectual Joneses . . . those f*cking Joneses.)
I haven’t read the Outliers yet, but I’ve already come across four or five reviews/excerpts/interviews that touch one of the book’s main ideas: time in the saddle is a best predictor of success. Mastery takes about 10,000 hours. Start young. Work hard. Reap rewards.
Is this idea true or merely true enough? Again, I haven’t read the book so I can’t judge. But I am curious to see if MG describes the nature of the work done during those 10,000 hours. Is the definition of work broad (research, daydreaming, procrastinating) or does the prize go to the Iron Butt who simply grinds it out?
In any case, watch for the number 10,000 to enter the national conversation. Personally, I was rooting for this guy:
The queue is empty.
Send a question to dennis.cass<at>gmail.com or leave a note in the comments.
I will do my best to answer in a way that advances the cause of awesomeness. Your awesomeness.
Thank you.
A reader writes:
What about taking the idea of trying to become someone you’re not and gaming that? Like sort of considering your “author self” a character you’re playing. Kind of like Lemony Snicket. You could let your audience in on the joke if you took it far enough. Alter-egoishly.
Thanks to psuedosu for this question in the comments to the post about making something out of your shyness. Here are my thoughts on alter egos:
1. Commitment is everything
To promote his alternate history World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, Max Brooks did this brilliant NPR interview where he and Neal Conan dryly and slyly updated H.G. Wells’ legendary War of the Worlds hoax. Proof that your persona doesn’t have to showy to be effective.
2. And yet you are allowed to get a divorce
Before Neal Pollack was an Alternadad, he was America’s Greatest Living Writer, a Norman Mailer parody that was very funny but perhaps too inside to warrant a large audience. You don’t want to switch characters too often, but you are allowed to grow and change.
3. You may not have to go as far you think
The Times recently did a piece on Carolyn Chute, an author who I believe quite genuinely has iconoclasm to spare. At the same time, posing with your mountain man husband while brandishing an iconic firearm shows an understanding of what sells in this culture. In other words, when a major newspaper comes to visit your isolated, rural compound, you don’t hide your AK. You wear it.
Attention Twin Cities metro area readers who for some strange reason have a gap in their schedules, and are interested in taking a flyer on a performance by a relative stranger, AND are willing to do so at extremely short notice:
I will be doing my slide show at the Bakken Library and Museum, as part of their Bakken Evening Out program. For those of you who just clicked the link and came back, yes, the Bakken is indeed a small, independent electricity and magnetism museum. You got a problem with that, chief?
I’m actually very excited to do this show. I’ve performed the slide show version of HEAD CASE in bookstores and in libraries, on college campuses and in bars. This time, I’m breaking it up into 15-minute segments that will run on the hour starting at 5:30 p.m.
How will this go? It depends. The show, which is a mock scientific lecture patterned after the real scientific slide shows I watched while researching the book, tends to function on two settings: KILL and EAT IT HARD. (If you come, secretly hope for EAT IT HARD. It’ll be uncomfortable, but human.)
