This Week In Publishing

The Publishing This Week

Almost forgot to announce: CONTEST NEXT WEEK. Stay tuned.

BookEnds hit the hot button issues this past week and I couldn't be happier. First up, the ever-popular question from those outside of publishing looking in: How Do Bad Books Get Published? Jessica Faust confesses that the question makes her mad and tires her out, and I will confess that I agree with Jessica's confession, but she nevertheless makes a stab at guessing why people feel this way (hint: it's a subjective business, people!).

Jessica also invited her readers to vent, and boy did they ever! #1 peeve expressed: agents not responding to queries.

In other agent blog news, Kristin Nelson explains why agents sometimes rely on vagueness and stock phrases when responding to partials and manuscripts. It's not because we're lazy, sometimes we really just don't know what to say.

Remember when Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize in literature and she let out an exasperated "Oh, Christ" and it was really awesome? Well, her mood hasn't improved much since then. Via Shelf Awareness, the BBC reports that Lessing has called her win "a bloody disaster" and says, "All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed." Best Nobel Prize Winner ever??

Via Publishers Lunch, if you want to know why the publishing industry is, um, unique, look no further than this article about publishers considering doing away with printed catalogs in favor of electronic catalogs that would, you know, save money and the environment. A bookseller sums up the mood in response to this proposal: "Booksellers like to sit around the table with the catalogs. They thumb through them and make notes. It's a real interactive kind of experience, so there is an emotional attachment to the current kind of catalog." And there you have it.

And finally, let me just say that I'm really proud of my state today.

California here we come. Right back where we started from. Califorrrrrrrniiiaaaaa... Califoooooooorniaaaaa... Here we coooommmmmmmmeee..

Um. Sorry.



Have a great weekend!

Braggadocio

One of Curtis Brown's distinguished agents, Emilie Jacobsen, suggested a great blog topic to me the other day and I'm pleased to follow her lead.

The shrinking violets among us often lament that they hate to brag about their work in a query as the mere idea makes them palpitate and sweat. Well, you're in luck! As Emmy pointed out to me the other day: you shouldn't anyway.

Now, I want to qualify this. Bragging honestly about your personal qualifications and publishing credits is not only appropriate, it is appreciated. If you are the world's foremost expert on alien monkey encounters, well, then I would like you to be upfront with me that you are the world's foremost expert on alien monkey encounters.

But when it comes to describing the actual work in a query, we really don't want to be told how great it is.

There's a further qualification I'd like to make, which is that there is a sliver of a place for positive characterizations, such as describing a suspense novel as "fast paced," although be very careful with these labels because it's always better to show these qualities in the query rather than tell.

But when an author describes their work as "hilarious" or "amazing" or "great" or a "masterpiece" or "more gripping than THE DA VINCI CODE" or as "beautiful as Faulkner"... well, as Emmy said: "I'll decide for myself, thanks."

The rule of thumb on braggadocio: leave the reviews to the critics.

You Tell Me: What's Your Favorite Book Based On a True Story?

I had nearly finished reading Jon Krakauer's INTO THIN AIR on the way to work this morning and I had to resist walking down the street with my nose in the book. This proved to be a wise choice when I was nearly plowed over in a crosswalk by an SUV inattentively making a right hand turn, and was saved by a quick leap backwards and a loud shout. Drivers of San Francisco -- please be careful when there are literary agents in the crosswalk! California's car cell phone ban cannot come soon enough.

But in any event, INTO THIN AIR is an amazing book!! I'm sure many of you have read it, but Krakauer's step by step chronicle of his team's ill-fated 1996 Everest expedition is one of the most perfect combinations of subject matter and incredible writing I have ever come across. Not only that, I have it on good authority that Krakauer is an extremely nice person and a pleasure to work with.

Krakauer really proves that it is not enough to have witnessed incredible events, you have to be a tremendous writer. Check and check.

So now I'm wondering: what is your favorite work of nonfiction based on actual events? This rules out general nonfiction, so I guess we're looking at history, memoir, biography, journalism.... you get the idea.

Fun Times in Atlanta

After returning from my first trip to Atlanta, I would like to file this report: holy crap the people there are nice.

From the lady who walked half a block to help me buy a MARTA ticket out of their bizarre machines (I think it might be easier to buy a ticket to the moon), to all of the people on the street who said good morning to me as I walked by (I ummed a halting "good morning" back as it slowly dawned on me they actually weren't crazy), to all of the awesome people at the Atlanta Writer's Conference.

Nice nice and nice!

And I especially want to thank those amazing and talented blog readers I had the opportunity to meet at the conference. It was really great to put faces with blogs and screennames, and thanks for such a warm welcome.

I would also like to report:

- The Georgia Aquarium is really something to behold. Whale sharks, belugas and drawling schoolkids losing their freaking minds aplenty.

- At the conference I had the pleasure of meeting fellow agents Nat Sobel, Tina Wexler and Amy Hughes, and we had a really fun panel Saturday morning in which we pretty much agreed with each other on the increasing necessity of authors building as much of a platform and network as possible, on the desirability of a novel to go with a collection of short stories, and on how at the end of the day there are no hard and fast rules in this business. Any writer would be fabulously lucky to have Nat, Tina or Amy as their agent.

- Little did I know you have to pay to go to the living commercial that is the Coke Museum! And if you go to the World of Coke, do not expect to see any mention of New Coke. Apparently still a sore subject.

- The Flying Biscuit may be the best breakfast spot in America. After a redeye to Atlanta, those biscuits, cheese grits and coffee were mighty appreciated. Oh, and the people there were really nice, although you probably already knew that.

- Did you notice I said "mighty appreciated?"

- I had my ration of fried food -- fried shrimp at Atlanta institution Manuel's Tavern.

All in all a very fun and too-brief weekend. I already can't wait to go back. Thanks to everyone who made the conference happen.

This Week in Publishing

This Week in...

Whaaa? This Week in Publishing on a Thursday?

Tis true, tis true. Tomorrow I am off to Atlanta for the Atlanta Writer's Conference, where I will be meeting with Georgia's finest and hopefully find time to peruse their vaunted aquarium. And eat fried stuff.

So an abbreviated week in publishing:

Mark your calendars for May 20th, because Patricia Wood will be hosting a tribute to the one and only dearly departed Miss Snark, who gave me my christening as a blogger and promptly obliterated my Inbox with incoming queries.

Are you an aspiring author looking to build a network you will be able to draw upon in the future? Well, one great example of how to make it work is Chris Eldin (nee Church Lady), who this week is hosting an online party for Sandra Cormier. A great rule of thumb that she demonstrates: ask not what authors can do for you, but what you can do for authors.

In other publishing news, via Publishers Lunch, HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman reported that the children's market is "on fire," with sales up 50%, although she noted that Zondervan has been under pressure lately due to changes and diminishing sales in the CBA.

And finally, the New York Times discovered Steampunk! Yes, a mere 18 years after William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE, the New York Times chronicles that there are some people who like to read about science fiction set in the past and admire retro sci fi. You wacky steampunks! I guess this means the Times should be all over blogging literary agents by 2025.

Have a great weekend!

You Tell Me: How Will We Cut Through the Crap I Mean Less Than Stellar Books?

First off, a message for the people who subscribe to the blog via e-mail: thank you for subscribing via e-mail! The purpose of You Tell Me is to foster a brisk and lively discussion in the comments section on the actual site, so if you are only e-mailing me your responses you are missing out on what is either a thoroughly interesting discussion or a thoroughly hilarious discussion, depending on the day. To comment, please click the headline of the blog in your e-mail, scroll down until you see "post a comment," click that link, and then follow the instructions. As much fun as it is to e-mail me your answer, it has been scientifically proven that it is 17.59 times more exciting to join the discussion on the site.

Transition.

As many of you anticipated in the comments section of yesterday's Can I Get A Ruling?, there is natural corollary question to the belief (that currently 84% of you share) that we are currently in a Golden Age of Books due to the erosion of previous constraints and limitations on the book publishing marketplace. And when anyone can publish a book quite easily, the nagging question is this one: how in the heck am I going to know where to find a good one?

Sure, there are reviews out there, but so many have proliferated in recent years that it opens up a second question: how in the heck am I going to know where to find a good review site?

As the spigot of publishing opens up wide, we're going to have to find a way to drink out of that fire hose. As more and more people self-publish and the overall quality of the book population inevitably dilutes due to a vastly lowered bar, what is going to take for the good books to stand out?

And if you were an agent faced with a narrowing slate of blockbusters published by mainstream publishers and a vast sea of self-published books, what would you make of all of this?

Can I Get a Ruling?: Are We In A Golden Age for Books or Not?

It's time once again for that semi-regular blog feature that I actually didn't forget about (at least this time): Can I Get a Ruling?

Today's Can I Get a Ruling? involves our favorite schizoid industry, which somehow manages to be seen as being in decline while growing at 3%, and where 400,000 books were published in the last year but (seemingly) fewer of them are published by mainstream houses who are (seemingly) focus on a narrowing slate of blockbusters.

My question to you: is this a good time for books?

Garth Hallberg sums up the irony of the industry's current predicament with an insightful breakdown of some of the complaints about publishing and the current "crisis of reading" balanced against the fact that the supposedly money-driven and monolithic publishing industry is comprised of, wouldn't you know, people who love books, including small presses who are more interested in producing beautiful books than becoming billionaires.

So which is it?

Pros: more choice than ever, more opportunities outside mainstream publishing, more possibility for non-mainstream authors to find audiences via the Internet, e-retailing breaking down geographic boundaries for people who before didn't have access to bookstores, online communities to discuss books, insert your own here

Cons: fewer, bigger bestsellers, competition from other media, decline of newspaper book pages, too much choice, fewer authors able to support themselves writing, possible dilution of quality as more books are self-published, insert your own here