Are Subtitles Necessary?

Agents and publishers spend a lot of time creating subtitles. In fact, if you were to measure how many man- and woman-hours go into the process you would say they spend an inordinate amount of time in these deliberations. I say "deliberations" but as often as not they are debates, and some of them turn into donnybrooks with noses bent far out of shape and people not talking to each other. Publishing folks take subtitles seriously, and we advise you to do the same.

There is a lot at stake. A confusing or amorphous title desperately needs to be sharpened and focused with the help of a handful of explanatory words. But subtitles are not merely any words. They have to be perfect words.
Subtitles are not composed so much as they are distilled like acid so that every syllable etches an indelible impression in the mind of a customer gazing at a stack of books. A word out of place can well mean a sale lost.

Though subtitles are usually worked out in a dialogue between editor and author, the influence of the publisher's sales representatives is always in the room. The question What the hell does the title mean? coming from a sales rep is a command to go back and come up with a better one.

These remarks are prompted by a blog by Robert McCrum in London's Guardian.co.uk urging publishers to drop subtitles altogether. McCrum is incensed that the publisher of John Carey's biography of William Golding felt compelled to add this subtitle: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies.

McCrum waxes positively bilious over the spineless editorial crew that came up with that one. "Picture the scene at Faber & Faber," he writes. "Carey's manuscript has been delivered, and the book is in production. Then, at some routine sales meeting, the worm of doubt starts to creep in. Up pops some bright young spark. Excuse me, says the BYS, I'm not sure that some of our younger readers will actually know who William Golding is. I mean, he's been, like, dead since 1993, and most of his books are out of print." The fact that Golding won a Nobel Prize for Literature and his masterpiece is required reading at countless colleges does not seem to have assured the publisher that readers will identify him without having to be hammered on their heads.

That's why McCrum wants to do away with subtitles entirely. "The truth is, if you have to justify your book with a subtitle, the game is up," he says. "Buyers pay scant attention to them; librarians and bibliographers often forget to catalogue them. They linger only as fig leaves of authorial shame. Who now remembers, or cares, that George Orwell's Animal Farm bears the subtitle A Fairy Tale, or that Herman Melville's Moby Dick was also known as The Whale?"

Author and English professor Ben Yagoda agrees with McCrum. In 2005 he published an article on the subject for the New York Times Book Review section. "Nobody really notices subtitles," he wrote. "They are a sort of lottery ticket in the economics of nonfiction book marketing. Publishers throw all kinds of elements in them - vogue words and phrases, features of the book the title didn't get around to mentioning, talismanic locutions like 'An American Life' - in the (almost always) vain hope that something will pay off." In fact he thinks the convention has become a crutch for publishers: "What's changed recently is that the subtitle has been asked to bear ever more weight. So many books are published nowadays that each one needs to proclaim its own merits; and with advertising budgets shaved away to nothing, the task falls to subtitles. As a result, they have become ubiquitous, hyperbolic and long... Once you've read the cover of 'Shadow Divers: The True Adventures of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II', is there really any need to crack open the book?"

On the other hand, some subtitles dare you to resist cracking open the book. I'm thinking of The Bad Guys Won! by Jeff Pearlman. He follows that title with a veritable millipede of a sub: A Season of Brawling, Boozing, Bimbo Chasing, and Championship Baseball With Straw, Doc, Mookie, Nails, the Kid, and the Rest of the 1986 Mets, the Rowdiest Team Ever to Put On a New York Uniform, and Maybe the Best. We dare any sports fan to pass that one by without at least picking it up.

If you think today's subtitles are long and convoluted, read Yagoda's The Subtitle That Changed America and discover some historical predecessors (including the one for Robinson Crusoe pictured above) that cannot be uttered in a single breath. You will also match the following book subtitles to titles:

• The Story of a Man of Character
• The Ambiguities
• A Novel Without a Hero
• The Modern Prometheus
• Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations
• A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love
• A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
• Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America

After a recent bruising negotiation with an author over trimming his 22 word subtitle, I definitely agree with Yagoda's conclusion: "I miss the time, not so long ago, when it was possible for a book to go out into the world with only a strong title followed by a few hundred pages of outstanding writing."

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Stop Me Before I Procrastinate Again! YouTube, Facebook, Twitter 21st Century Equivalent of Pencil Sharpener

Back in January we told you about app addiction. Not everybody is hooked on Apple applications, however. Some are addicted to Twitter, others to Facebook, still others to YouTube. Writers are addicted to anything that will divert them from the work at hand. You go on Google to research a fact for your book and, well, one association leads to another and pretty soon you've drifted far, blissfully far, away from your book.

Authors have procrastinated from time immemorial, and their excuses have evolved with the available technology. In the 20th century the usual dodge was a trip to the refrigerator or pencil sharpener. Today's authors still go to the refrigerator, but as for pencils many don't know which end the writing come out of now that they have spellcheck and other computerized editing tools. So they seek distraction on the Internet. And its seductions are far more addictive than anything ever offered on street corners.

"You get to your PC every morning with hours of productive time ahead of you," writes Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times. "Next thing you know, it’s 5 p.m. and you’ve frittered the day away on Digg, Hulu, Wikipedia and your fantasy football league. And no wonder — how can anyone expect to get anything done when you’re plying your trade on one of the most distracting machines ever invented? With so much available on your PC — your friends, blogs, games and even TV shows — working in a modern office can often seem as rattling as working on the floor of a Las Vegas casino."

If you're highly motivated and disciplined you can govern temptation, or you can ask your spouse, boss, friend or business partner to make sure you don't stray from your purpose. That seldom works. Any chain smoker who has given a pack of cigarettes to a friend and ordered him not to give him one knows why. But now there are computer programs to monitor or curb your obsession. There's even one that virtually pries the mouse out of your hand and redirects it to the book you're supposed to be working on. Manjoo, himself a victim of wandering attention, tried some of them:

I've been using a slate of programs to tame these digital distractions. The apps break down into three broad categories. The most innocuous simply try to monitor my online habits in an effort to shame me into working more productively. Others reduce visual bells and whistles on my desktop as a way to keep me focused.

And then there are the apps that really mean business — they let me actively block various parts of the Internet so that when my mind strays, I’m prohibited from giving in to my shiftless ways. It’s the digital equivalent of dieting by locking up the refrigerator and throwing away the key.

Of course, if you're as clever as Manjoo - he's Slate's technology columnist - you can find the key after throwing it away. You can just hack the blocker app until you you're back on YouTube or Twitter wasting hour after blissful hour. Goodness, where did the time go!

Read Taming Your Digital Distractions and prepare to take - or download - the cure.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Retired Random Ed-in-Chief Dumps on Publishing Hand That Fed Him

Now that Daniel Menaker, former Executive Editor-in-Chief of Random House and fiction editor of The New Yorker, is two years away from the publishing industry, he has issued a scathing denunciation of it.

His philippic, published in (of all places!) Barnes & Noble's dotcom review, not only offers a familiar litany of reasons why the industry has become toxic, it actually offers some that we didn't think bothered us (lunches!), so that those of us who remain gainfully and even happily employed in the book trade will feel lousy about ourselves. It's hard to read this dreary recital without feeling we should not leave our work stations without showering off the smell, like sewer workers or fish mongers.

"Publishing," Menaker writes, "is often an extremely negative culture." He then proceeds to barrage us with a dozen negativities ranging from back-biting colleagues to "holding the hands of intensely self-absorbed and insecure writers." Then there's "fielding frequently irate calls from agents, attending endless and vapid and ritualistic meetings, having one largely empty ceremonial lunch after another, supplementing publicity efforts, writing or revising flap copy, ditto catalog copy, refereeing jacket-design disputes, and so on..."

Are you depressed yet? I hope not, because Menaker is just getting started:

And this is only the beginning of the negativities that editors must face. Barnes & Noble doesn't like the title. Borders doesn't like the jacket. The author's uncle Joe doesn't like the jacket. The writer doesn't like the page layout and design. Your boss tells you the flap copy for a book about a serial killer is too "down." The hardcover didn't sell well enough for the company to put out a paperback. The book has to wait a list or two to be published. Kirkus hates the book. Another writer gets angry at you for even asking for a quote. The Times isn't going to review the book. And so on.

It's often said that when your job just isn't fun anymore, it's time to leave. We don't know why Menaker resigned from Random House, but it would be safe to speculate that he was no longer having fun. The tipoff is in his attitude towards authors. In Complaint #10 Menaker is at his most vituperative:

Speaking of the need for attention, if it hasn't become clear by now, you must be prepared to suffer transference from your writers as much as any therapist is by his or her patients. Usually, writers, like anyone else who performs in public and desires wide recognition, no matter how successful they become, have an unslakeable thirst for attention and approval -- in my opinion (and, I'm embarrassed to say, in my own case) usually left over from some early-childhood deficit or perception of deficit in the attention-and-approval department. You will frequently find yourself serving as an emotional valet to the people you work with. It can be extremely onerous and debilitating, especially given the ever-decreasing number of your colleagues and the consequent expansion of your workload.

Call authors challenging, call them neurotic, temperamental, demanding, frustrating, maddening and irritating. But if you don't, ultimately, love them, then you are well and truly quit of the publishing business. And the business is well quit of you, too.

Read Menaker's Little Book of Lamentations here.

Richard Curtis

All-Star Speakers Booked for September WD Conference

The Writer's Digest Conference, scheduled for Friday September 18 through Sunday September 20 2009, is open for registration, and here's a chance to hear a stellar cast of media leaders talk about platform, networking and social media. It convenes at New York City's Marriott Marquis Hotel in Times Square.

Here's a short description.

The Writer's Digest Conference is an innovative and ground-breaking conference, featuring the industry's top forward-thinking speakers, leading sessions on topics relevant to the current state of the publishing world. Chris Brogan, social media genius, is the keynote speaker. Other speakers include Mike Shatzkin, the industry's top publishing consultant; David Mathison, whose online sales success is the new business model; Bill O'Hanlon, one of the country's top motivational speakers; April Hamilton, leading proponent of independent publishing; Jennifer Gilmore, author and former publicity director at Harcourt; Kassia Krozser, editor of BookSquare.com, a leading publishing blog; Christina Katz, author and well-known blogger; Amy Cook, attorney focusing on issues affecting writers and small publishers; independent editors Ruth Greenstein, Linda Carbone, and Alice Rosengard; and Seth Harwood and Scott Sigler, whose own podcasts and videocasts have made them superstars in the business; and many more, plus the editors of Writer's Digest!

Yours truly has been invited to serve on a panel chaired by Jane Friedman, Publisher and Editorial Director of Writing Communities at Writers Digest. Come up and say hello!

RC

Authors: Are Your Readers Zoning Out on You? It May Not Be Your Fault

Like many publishing professionals I've trained myself to step outside of my mind while I read a manuscript and monitor the intensity of my involvement in the work. In a perfect reading experience my disbelief, in the famous phrase of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, will be willingly suspended from beginning to end and I will never become conscious that there is a world outside of the one I am reading about. Unfortunately, perfect reading experiences are as rare as perfect experiences in every other field of endeavor.

And so, sooner or later as I turn the pages of a manuscript, I will become aware of a police siren or the sound of a television program in the next room, and the spell of the book I'm reading will be broken. If it's a good book I'll plunge back in and soon lose myself again. If it isn't, my monitor will sound with growing frequency. I will make a mental note of the places where my attention flagged so that I can help the author analyze where he or she lost me.

Non-professional readers - the public at large, that is - may not have the same powers of self-observation, but they have little trouble speaking up when a book fails to hold their attention. "Boring." "Couldn't finish it." "Put it down, never picked it up again."

In most cases the responsibility for failure to keeping readers interested rests with the author. But not always. An article by Carl Zimmer in Discover magazine informs us that distractability is far more normal than we may realize. Zimmer cites an experiment conducted by a team of University of California Santa Barbara psychologists led by Jonathan Schooler. The test had to do with a book, and not just any book: "In 2005 he and his colleagues told a group of undergraduates to read the opeing chapters of War and Peace on a computer monitor and then to tap a key whenever they realized they were not thinking about what they were reading. On average, the students reported that their minds wantered 5.4 times in a 45-minute session."

Wandering minds are one things, but zoning out completely is quite another. Here's what Schooler and his colleagues discovered:

"Schooler and Smallwood, along with Merrill McSpadden of the University of British Columbia, tested the effect of zoning out by having a test group read a Sherlock Holmes mystery in which a villain used a pseudonym. As people were reading the passages discussing this fact, the researchers checked their state of attentiveness. Just 30 percent of the people who were zoning out at the key moments could give the villain’s pseudonym, while 61 percent of the people who weren’t zoning out at those moments succeeded."

One of the most striking discoveries repoat imbibing a moderate amount of alcohol actually sharpened concentration. However, before you reach for the vodka bottle, note that there is evidence that a wandering mind offers many significant benefits. "The regions of the brain that become active during mind wandering belong to two important networks," Zimmer explains. "One is known as the executive control system. Located mainly in the front of the brain, these regions exert a top-down influence on our conscious and unconscious thought, directing the brain’s activity toward important goals."

"The other regions belong to another network called the default network. In 2001 a group led by neuroscientist Marcus Raichle at Washington University discovered that this network was more active when people were simply sitting idly in a brain scanner than when they were asked to perform a particular task. The default network also becomes active during certain kinds of self-referential thinking, such as reflecting on personal experiences or picturing yourself in the future."

So, next time you find your mind drifting off while reading a book, it is appropriate for you to ask yourself whether it's the author's fault for failing to keep you involved; or is it, rather, just you reflecting on a matter of great importance or solving a problem you couldn't master before you started reading.

For the full story, read Stop Paying Attention: Zoning Out Is a Crucial Mental State.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by Discover magazine.

Bestselling Kindle Newbie Ready to Share Secrets of Success as Soon as He Knows What They Are

J. A. Konrath identifies himself as the author of three thrillers featuring Lt. Jacqueline "Jack" Daniels (that's not him pictured at right). He has also published two works of horror under the penname Jack Kilborn, a full-lengther plus a novella in collaboration with Blake Crouch.

He uploaded his books to Kindle (as well as to some other e-book outlets) and has compiled a fascinating account of the experience, studded with precise sales information and embellished with invaluable tips to writers seeking to emulate him.

First and foremost, his horror novel Afraid, irresistibly priced at $1.99, sold over 10,400 copies in the first month of its release. The novella, Serial, was released free a month later and was downloaded by Kindlach ( people of the Kindle) over 34,000 times. Grand Central, which issued print editions, assisted with online promotion.

Konrath then posted some of his other books on Kindle. You can read about his strategies for pricing, product description, networking and other strategies on his blogpost A Newbie's Guide to Publishing. He shares some pertinent observations plus do's and don'ts. But when it comes to penetrating the mystery of why some of his books sell more units than others, he confesses to being clueless:

What I've learned about units sold: Nothing. I have no clue why The List, which is a fun technothriller about cloning, is outselling Origin, which is about a secret government compound studying Satan.

Welcome to book publishing, rookie. You're in good company. Even the preeminent Alfred A. Knopf threw up his hands in despair, lamenting that his efforts were fifty percent successful, he just wasn't sure which fifty percent.

RC

It Starts with Your Autograph and Ends With Your Soul

Kindle owners seem to be susceptible to strange personality disorders: they have a hard time separating the device from its content. Just when we're getting past the compulsion to add book aroma to reading devices, the new manifestation of this strange mental condition is asking authors to autograph Kindles.

The New York Times's Andrew Adam Newman reports that at a recent book-signing, David Sedaris was handed a Kindle to inscribe. Sedaris was quick to recognize the cognitive dissonance of this moment and wrote, “This bespells doom.” Clearly, we're close to the collapse of civilization when the box becomes more significant than the book it contains. But let's face it, authors don't care whether civilization collapses as long as they can sell their books. And clearly, this fan did not buy the book in the store where the signing took place. He downloaded it off Amazon's website and brought his Kindle into the. This seems like a flagrant breach of manners and of the bookstore's hospitality, the equivalent of crashing a wedding.

Newman cites another fan who at least is sensitive to the distinction. At a reading by novelist Jennifer Weiner the fan presented her Kindle to the author for an autograph, but she “felt very embarrassed and like I was doing something wrong,” she said. “It’s a promotional opportunity for both the writer and the bookstore, and if you’re asking for your Kindle to be signed, you’re taking the bookstore out of the process.”

Read Kindle Joins a Literary Ritual: Authors Can Autograph It and judge for yourself.

Richard Curtis

This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times. Every blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers. Without them our free society would not only be impoverished but imperiled. We must strive to find a way to rescue the industry, even if it means nothing more than buying a paper on the street. Support your local newspaper.

Asked to Donate Work for Nothing, Artists Flip Google the Bird

"I should do a freebie for Google? What's the matter, do they have a tin cup and an eye patch on the street? F**K NO!"

Though none of the artists solicited to donate their work for nothing to Google Chrome actually said that, they might well have paraphrased Harlan Ellison's foaming-at-the-mouth rant against Warner Bros. and all other corporate patrons that think they're doing writers and artists a favor by displaying their work.

Canadian-based illustrator Gary Taxali's written response to Google was slightly more printable than Ellison's, but the writer would certainly agree with the graphic one issued by the artist (left). Here's what Taxali had to say:

DON’T CALL ME
In the last little while, there has been a MAJOR backslide in the industry. Poor rates have been an issue for a while but things are becoming worse. Clients fees are getting even lower and the rights theyre demanding are even higher.

You want examples? How about SWATCH calling me and asking me to design a watch. They wanted a complete transfer of copyright for a paltry fee. As if thats going to happen. Google calls me and wants my work for their new search engine all over the web, the fee? Nothing. Editorial clients are slashing 1999s fees almost in half and citing the bad economy as an excuse. You know what? My excuse is that the economy is bad so you have to pay me MORE for an illustration. Hows that for an economic stimulus package?

So heres to every client with shitty fees and terms. Do not waste my time or contact me. I am very busy working with clients who respect artists and youre wasting my time with your solicitations. So for you, I give you a special salute that I hope will keep you away because I dont need your work.

According to Andrew Adam Newman writing in the New York Times about the Taxali-inspired uprising, his posting on Drawger "drew more than 200 responses, many from other illustrators who also had rejected Google’s offer." Newman quotes another illustrator, Brian Stauffer, who also turned Google down. “When a company like Google comes out very publicly and expects that the market would just give them free artwork, it sets a very dangerous precedent.”

Sadly, there are plenty of artists who need the exposure and will take Google up on its offer.

And of course, Google may feel it needs an eye patch and tin cup. It only squeaked by the first quarter of 2009 with a $1.42 billion profit.

You can read the whole story in Newman's Use Their Work Free? Some Artists Say No to Google. You can also Catch a snatch of Ellison's fulmination on YouTube and buy it online.

Richard Curtis
This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times. Every blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers. Without them our free society would not only be impoverished but imperiled. We must strive to find a way to rescue the industry, even if it means nothing more than buying a paper on the street. Support your local newspaper.

Copyright Asteroid Hurtling Toward Earth, Impact Due 2013

Evan Schnittman observed it as a smear of light on the fringe of our galaxy, but it took media guru Mike Shatzkin to fully articulate its significance. And significant it is, a possible game-changer in the internecine struggle among authors, publishers, and Google. It has to do with a little-known provision of the US Copyright Act of 1978.

Schnittman, a Vice President of Business Development and Rights for Oxford University Press, mentioned it almost as an afterthought at the end of "There Will Be Disintermediation", the final installment of a brilliant three part analysis in his Black Plastic Glasses website. "Mark your calendars, folks," he declares, "the disintermediation begins on January 1, 2013. What happens on January 1, 2013? See for yourself in the US Copyright Act of 1978, section 203. {…Termination of the grant may be effected at any time during a period of five years beginning at the end of thirty-five years from the date of execution of the grant…}" [bold print is Schnittman's.]

"What if this change," asks Schnittman, "was so significant that it could possibly even spawn an industry wide reset of the way we do things?" He leaves us panting for an answer, and Shatzkin provides it:

"It turns out there is a clause in the 1978 copyright law that allows any author to reclaim any copyright despite any contract with a publisher, simply by serving notice. The copyright can be reclaimed no less than 35 years and no more than 40 years from the book’s original publication. So books published in 1978 can be reclaimed by their authors from 2013-2018.".

"One wonders" Shatzkin ruminates, "how many agents are aware of this law and are preparing for it."

Actually many agents have been aware of it for years, and a number have invoked it. It's commonly referred to as the "Widows and Orphans Provision," because it entitles immediate family members to recover from publishers or certain derivative licensees (like movie companies) the copyrights to works published by a deceased author. (Don't worry, men, widowers are included!) What some agents may not be aware of is that an author doesn't have to be dead for the reclamation to take place; he or she simply has to live long enough to take advantage of the provision. For books licensed to publishers after January 1, 1978, the law is effective "thirty-five years from the date of publication of the work under the grant or at the end of forty years from the date of execution of the grant, whichever term ends earlier."

What surprises Shatzkin is that Article 203 has not come up in discussions about the Google Settlement, and we owe him and Schnittman a debt of gratitude for placing it on the table.

Until recently we'd have said that (except for a small number of evergreen backlist books) most titles coming up for reclamation under the Act are worth little or nothing. But with Google's push to monetize old books, even moribund ones may have value either to their authors, their publishers, or Google. As Shatzkin puts it, for some old books "it looks like a new payday has been set up."

For the full text of Article 203 of the 1978 Copyright Act, click here.

Richard Curtis

Is It a Good Deal?

For the first edition of my book How To Be Your Own Literary Agent I produced a down-and-dirty precis of book contract terms, "Is It a Good Deal?" This synopsis was intended for use as a handy reference when immediate action is called for. One of the salient terms listed was the size of advances.

Since then I've received many calls and emails from authors thanking me for this synopsis, but here's the odd thing. Since 1983, when the first edition was published, I've scarcely changed a thing! Sure, I added electronic rights to one of the updates. I also raised the bar a notch for trade and mass market paperback royalties, reflecting a shift (I'm happy to report) from a buyer's market to a seller's.

But advances? Each time my publisher requested an update (the most recent was 2003) I was asked if advances had risen since 1983. The answer was no. And here, 26 years later, that's still my answer and I'm sticking to it.

To read the complete article, click here.

Richard Curtis

In Ancient Rome, Every Author Was on a Roll

My book is thumbed by our soldiers posted overseas, and even in Britain people quote my words. What’s the point? I don’t make a penny from it.

Just another author bitching about his profession, right? Right, except his complaint was written two thousand years ago. The author was Martial, and he was not just one of the great Roman poets of his day, he was also a defender of authors' rights, according to a delightful New York Times Book Review article by Mary Beard, a professor of classics at the University of Cambridge and classics editor of The Times Literary Supplement.

Beard reminds us that "books" in Martial's Rome were papyrus scrolls and, as the printing press was some fourteen centuries away from invention, they were transcribed by hand, ofttimes by slaves. And - where have we heard this before? - there were plenty of ways for copyists and booksellers to rip writers off.

"Like Martial," writes Beard, "most Roman writers knew that the profits of their writing ended up in the pockets of the booksellers, who often combined retail trade with a copying business - and so were, in effect, publishers and distributors too."

"At best, the author received only a lump sum from the seller for the rights to copy his work (though once the text was “out,” there was no way of stopping pirated copies). Horace, the tame poet of the emperor Augustus, made the obvious comparison: booksellers were the rich pimps of Roman publishing and authors, or even the books themselves, were the hard-working but humiliated prostitutes.

Bear cites numerous ways that grievances two millennia old seem no farther in the past than the last issue of the Authors Guild Bulletin:

• "There’s a lot in the Roman literary world that seems quite familiar two millenniums later: money-­making booksellers, exploited and impoverished authors, celebrity book launches and career-making prizes..."
• "With slaves on hand to summon up refreshments, it would have been not unlike the coffee shop in a modern Borders."
• "A cut-price book roll would presumably have fallen to pieces as quickly as a modern mass-market paperback. But worse, the pressure to get copies made quickly meant that they were loaded with errors and sometimes uncomfortably different from the authentic words of the author."
• "The Roman launch party took the form of select readings from the work, given semi-publicly or at exclusive invitation-only events, perhaps in the home of a rich patron."
• "Roman emperors paid for high-profile prizes, more like the Pulitzer or the Booker."
  

After reading Scrolling Down the Ages by Mary Beard, you may conclude that, compared to your Roman counterparts, you don't have it so bad after all. On the other hand, our literary forebears didn't have to put up with the torments of reserves against returns.

RC

Shared Worlds

Some time ago, the Community for Creative Non-Violence, an advocacy group for the homeless, commissioned a Baltimore sculptor, James Earl Reid, to create a sculpture. In due time, his skilled hands produced a piece called Third World America, celebrating the dignity and suffering of homeless people. It was a work that both the advocacy group and the sculptor could be proud of, and they were. But then, as both began making plans to take it on tour, a question arose that nobody had bothered to explore in any depth: Who owns Third World America? The Community for Creative Non-Violence claimed the sculpture was a "work made for hire." Not only had the group hired the sculptor, but had also imparted to him its vision of what the piece should look like, and had even given him much input on details. Be that as it may, claimed Reid, he was the sole creator of the work and he should retain the copyright.

The dispute triggered a legal battle culminating in a Supreme Court decision that has important implications for writers. For, if you substitute "publisher" or "packager" for the group that hired Reid, "writer" for "sculptor," and "book" for "sculpture," you have a perfectly analogous relationship to one quite commonly found on the publishing scene. Under the "work-for-hire" provision of the Copyright Act of 1976, publishers, packagers, magazines, newspapers, and other persons or businesses may copyright in their own names works that they conceive and "farm out" to freelance writers. Like the Committee for Creative Non-Violence, these parties originate the writing projects, furnish writers with detailed specifications, and offer writers abundant editorial guidance. Are they not, then, entitled to claim ownership of copyright to those works? Are they not entitled to exploit those works in whatever way they wish, with no further obligation to the writers?

Click here to continue.

Richard Curtis

Are Pirate-site Downloaders Better Than Muggers, Pickpockets and Shoplifters? This Victim Doesn't Think So

"Before you click that download link at a torrent site or megaupload or sendspace ask yourself one question. If I was in a bookstore, would I just drop this book in my purse and walk out of the store? Because that is exactly what you are doing when you download a book without buying it." So says Delilah K. Stephans in a blog entitled "Think before you download".

It's easy to talk theoretically about crime as long as nobody puts a face on the victim. Stephans puts a face on a victim of e-piracy and it's her own.

"My book sells for $2.99 of that I make just over a dollar on every sale. So if say 50 people download the book those 50 people have reached into my wallet and removed a $50. What if it was a hundred? A thousand? Now, ask yourself would I reach in a stranger’s pocket and take a fifty? Of course you wouldn’t. Recently a fellow author found his book on a pirate site – there were 150 downloads. That’s 150 books or in his case $300.00 that was stolen from him."

The author asks, "Do I think you are evil if you pirate a book? Of course not." But why not, Ms. Stephans? Last time we looked, stealing was a breach of the eighth commandment. Some may shrug off e-piracy as a misdemeanor, but there is no footnote for "Thou Shalt Not Steal" distinguishing between e-books and bank vaults.

So, we support Ms. Stephans's admonition: "Before you click that download button – consider the money you are pulling out of the author’s wallet."

RC

Is Your Book Waiting for You at the Google Orphan Asylum?

Though it's generally agreed that Google's settlement with the Association of Publishers and Authors Guild was fundamentally sound, the New York Times's Miguel Helft points out an aspect that has many critics deeply troubled.

For the purpose of explaining it simply, we can divide books into three fundamental categories: 1) Those whose copyright is currently in effect and the copyright owners have been located; 2) Those whose copyright protection has expired and have entered the public domain where anyone may publish them without obligation to the copyright owner; and 3) Those whose copyright is currently in effect but the copyright owners have not been located or have not asserted their ownership.

If you're in the first category you are afforded a large measure of control and protection including the right to opt out of the Google settlement. By opting out, you retain the right to file your own lawsuit or join a separate lawsuit against Google. If you opt out, you will not be entitled to receive any payments under the Settlement, or take advantage of other Settlement benefits. You must submit your opt-out instruction online or postmarked on or before May 5, 2009.

If you're in the second and your book has fallen into the public domain there's not much you can do about it But thanks to the changes in copyright laws starting in the mid-1970s, the ranks of authors who have outlived their copyrights are rapidly diminishing as we shift to protection for seventy years after the death of the author.

That leaves the third category and that's the one that observers are worried about. Describing them as orphans, Helft explains that as a result of its scanning initiative, Google has become in effect the legal guardian of these millions of abandoned books, which gives Google "virtually exclusive rights to publish the books online and to profit from them." As a result, "Some academics and public interest groups plan to file legal briefs objecting to this and other parts of the settlement in coming weeks, before a review by a federal judge in June."

Though every book was once some author's love-child, many titles in this category may be of little literary, commercial or academic merit. Yet, who's to say? One scholar's trash may be another's treasure, and the scholarly community is loath to give Google the right to make that judgment. This provision of the settlement may therefore be modified when the 134 page document comes before a court for approval in June. Robert Darnton, head of the Harvard University library system, makes no bones about it: “Google will be a monopoly,” he declares.

Needless to say, Google takes a very different view. “This agreement expands access to many of these hard-to-find books in a way that is great for Google, great for authors, great for publishers and great for readers,” Helft quotes Alexander Macgillivray, the lawyer who represented Google in the lawsuit.

Authors in the third category do have a remedy. Google is creating a Book Rights Register, which will be co-administered by authors and publishers, that will enable rights holders or their heirs to claim their orphaned books and collect any money that Google's exploitation has earned for them - less Google's 37% commission.

So, calling all authors or their heirs: visit http://books.google.com/ and enter your name in the Search box. If any of your books are there, review the copyright status of your books. If they are still legally protected by copyright you may elect to opt out out of Google's offer to make them available in their program. If you keep them in the program you may earn a little money from Google's exploitation of your publication rights. But you also you run the risk of having your book converted into formats that are competitive with those in existence or that might come into existence; and after Google takes its cut you will end up with a fraction of the value you might otherwise earn.

RC

National Book Awards Creates Special Citation for Twitter Books

Belated April Fools!

But that could conceivably be a headline in the foreseeable future. For now it's a followup to our blog about about the emerging art form called the "vook" - an amalgam of video, novel and other digital media. It's inspired by a recent post by Rob Horning on popmatters.com, written as a comment on the concept of a Twitter Book. A Twitter Book is kind of like a vook only, well, tweetier.

Horning expatiates on the transubstantiation of authorship from linearity to multimodality. And if that sounds slightly pompous, it's because Horning's polysyllablism is infectious. But if you keep your head down and plow through the two dollar words you'll be rewarded with some solid insights into the effect digital media are having on authorship, such as this:

"This sort of thing may indeed portend “the end of authorship,” as Salam titled his post. But I’m a little surprised he didn’t go the Roland Barthes route and proclaim 'the death of the author,' and append the Foucaulidan corollary, the triumph of the 'author function.' They were commenting on the dubiousness of using authorial intention in assessing the actual effects achieved by a particular text. But technology has made such concerns sort of passe. Authors aren’t being discarded because their works may not say what they intend; instead, relations of production in the publishing industry call for collaboratively manufactured texts to meet corporate goals. Exit authors; enter coders."

"Exit authors; enter coders" is an all too apt phrase that will be the theme of many a debate about the future of books. Read Horning's entire post. It's called The future of book manufacturing.

And if you're wondering what this all has to do with the seductive lady pictured above, she's soul singer-songwriter Charlene L. Keys, AKA "Tweet". At least she's not nicknamed Vook.

Richard Curtis

If They Asked Me, I Could Write a...Vook?

"The day is coming—and much sooner than you may think—when authors will no longer be able to define themselves simply as creators of literary works. As electronic technology hurtles too fast for even futurists to keep up with, a generation of readers is emerging that will not accept text unless it is interactively married to other media. The twenty-first century's definition of "author" will be as far from today's definition as you are from the town scribe of yore."

I wrote that over ten years ago in an article called Author? What's an Author? I didn't know it at the time, but I was anticipating the arrival of the vook. And now it's here.

Brad Stone, writing in the New York Times, defines it as "a multimedia hybrid that is tailored to the rapidly growing number of digital reading devices. "Vooks, created and named by a Silicon Valley entrepreneur Bradley Inman, combine traditional fictional storytelling, online video, and other digital media to create an amalgamated art form. "Vook," explains Stone, "tries to address a big problem for book publishers as they expand onto digital formats.

"For all the hype and initial success of devices like the Kindle, they threaten to strip traditional books of much of their transportive appeal. Images on the jacket cover, inviting fonts and the satisfying feel of quality paper are all largely absent, replaced by humdrum pixels on a virtual page.

Even worse, on multipurpose reading devices like the iPhone, more immediately gratifying pastimes like video games are a click away for readers with short attention spans."

Defending himself against traditionalist criticism, Inman says, "Books are finally coming online but they are very one-dimensional. I think we can experiment and do this better.”

His observation would seem bear out an observation I made recently in a piece called Watching Books.

"Reading text on a screen without sound, color, or movement, one develops the uneasy feeling that something is missing. We wonder, Is that all there is? I’m not a psychologist but it seems more than likely that we are bringing to text viewed on screens the same expectations we bring to television, movie and computer screens. Indeed, something is missing! How can we not be disappointed - even, God help us, bored - when these blocks of words fail to stimulate the same intense response as a YouTube video? We are trying to extract a linear experience out of a nonlinear medium."

Okay. We how have a name for the art form. But what shall we call the vook's creator? In Author? What's an Author? I struggled to give it a name.

"As I acclimate myself to the rich atmosphere of computer technology, I hear the word 'author' used less and less and 'producer"'used more and more to describe those who assemble, integrate, and purvey multimedia software packages to consumers. As the trend toward multimedia accelerates, as I predict it will, the role of the author must, without question, become subordinated to that of the producer. Authors will become scenarists, creating story lines for or textual supplements to full-motion video films for personal computers. The real creative stars will be those who can produce brilliant and stimulating programs for display on home entertainment systems."

So where does this leave good old-fashioned writers and publishers? Well, if they want to survive they have no choice but to join the 21st century. In Author? What's an Author? I suggest some ways that authors can find their place in this rapidly evolving world.

Richard Curtis

New Web Service Frees Writers to Write

A day in the life of a writer:

• Upload files to Google for Google Book Search
• Negotiate author agreement with Google
• Upload files to Amazon for Kindle ebook sales
• Review terms for Google Search
• Enhance listing with Books in Print
• Enhance listing on websites
• Develop viral marketing campaign
• Create Facebook, MySpace and Twitter pages
• Import video and display video on website
• Set up links to literary agent, movie agent, editor, and fan club
• Create Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter pages
• Set up a blog

Let's see -- is there anything this writer has forgotten to do? Ah, yes, one thing. Write.

Yeah, but after wrestling with all that technical stuff, what writer has time to write?

Laura Dawson understands this. She's launched a "boots-on-the-ground" service called AuthorWeb to take some or even all of the burden off authors' hands. Dawson is a 20-year veteran of the book industry with experience in both traditional publishing and e-commerce. She describes herself as "an independent consultant offering expertise on the digital transition."

For a reasonable fee, says Dawson, AuthorWeb will

• Upload your manuscript to Google for Google Book Search
• Upload your manuscript to Amazon for sale on the Kindle
• Make sure you are listed with Bowker’s Books in Print program so your book is listed on all e-commerce sites
• Work with Barnes &Noble.com’s Small Press division for web (and possible store) distribution
• Work with your POD service (Lightning Source, Lulu, Xlibris, etc.) to make sure you are getting the value you’ve paid for
• List you on author sites such as Filedby
• Set up a Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter account, create your own blog, or Enroll you in AuthorsGlobe to help you get virtual speaking engagements

Most authors can do some of this on their own, but not everybody loves to do it, and for some it's colossally boring. That's where AuthorWeb comes in. "The hard part about writing a book should be writing the book," says Dawson. "You’re not a digital marketing guru – you’re an author."

Of course, even if you outsource these tasks to AuthorWeb, maintaining your involvement and presence will still require a commitment of time and attention. But it's certainly worth checking out Dawson's service to see if it offers a viable tradeoff for all those hours spent on non-writing tasks, some of which -- let's face it -- are just the modern procrastinators' equivalent of making rubber-band balls and paper clip chains.

Dawson also publishes a free bi-weekly e-newsletter called The Big Picture that covers trends in digital content delivery, plus publishing news and analysis.

RC

Collaborations, Part 2

In this second part of our discussion of collaborations, we'll examine a collaboration agreement and discuss the salient terms. What are the financial arrangements and the split between co-authors? How are the credits and bylines accorded? Who's liable for any claims arising out of the collaboration? There are countless considerations and just as many pitfalls.

Click here to learn about them.

RC

With Lying Off the Table, Agents Lose a Key Advantage

It's a sorry day when authors and agents can't lie. If we can no longer fudge sales figures, maybe it's time to turn in our Blackberries and retire to our lavish Hamptons beachfront estates.

That was my reaction to the 2007 jury ruling compelling Clive Cussler to pay a movie company $5 million for (among other claims) inflating his book sales to induce the company to acquire film rights for $10 million. The film was a dud. Now that a judge has ordered Cussler to pay the company an additional $13.9 million in legal fees, I feel compelled to speak out.

It wasn't always this way. In the Golden Age of Agenting (circa 1986-93), the hot power center of the publishing and movie industry was occupied by a legendary cadre of literary agents like Paul Reynolds, Scott Meredith, Freddie Fields, Lew Wasserman and Swifty Lazar, for all of whom the salient virtue was guile. The relations between agents and the moguls of film, television and publishing were more adversarial than they are today, and both sides seized advantages over the other with little obeisance to the spirit of the seventh commandment. The agent who lacked cunning was consigned to the B List and deserved it.

As the twentieth century progressed, these fabulous individualists gave way to a more collegial, collective and committified approach to conducting business, and in time a sort of Geneva Convention of ethical conduct evolved that pretty much characterizes business on both coasts today. The rules and regulations of the powerful Writers of Guild of America govern movie and writers and their agents, and the Canon of Ethics guiding the conduct of literary and dramatic agent members of the Association of Authors' Representatives has replaced the rough justice of that bygone era. Since many of the principles of the Canon were formulated under my administration as president of the AAR, I leave it to you to determine how deeply into my cheek my tongue is thrust as I offer these observations.

One ethical innovation formulated in the mid-'90's was a more stringent code for the conduct of book auctions. The prevailing tenet up to then could be summarized by the phrase "Anything Goes," for there are no licensing requirements for literary agents, at least in New York City where a great many of them practice. Agents auctioning books were not required to reveal to the winning bidder the identity or bid of the underbidder. Many agents succumbed to the temptation to enhance the size of competing bids, or to bluff altogether. Many a winning bidder suffered buyer's remorse after reconstructing (often by simply phoning other participants in the auction) the bids and learning that the highest underbid was miles behind or did not in fact exist.

Perhaps a watershed event in the transformation of book industry rules was an auction in the early 90's for a major novel by an author who has since gone on to become a blockbuster star. As legend has it, the agent told Publisher A that she had a one million dollar offer (a lot of money then, and a lot of money now) from an unnamed publisher, whom we'll call B. Publisher A, desperate to land the huge fish, impulsively doubled the offer without conferring with her editorial board. She landed the fish, to the dismay of Publisher B who had believed the book was in his bag. His dismay turned to something approaching apoplexy when he learned that Publisher A was the head of another division of his own company. The company had been bidding against itself! Despite cries of "Foul!" the agent felt no compunction to adjust the terms of the deal.

What emerged from this event was a condition imposed by publishers that agents must reveal the name and offer of the highest underbidder under penalty of cancellation of the deal or reduction of the winning bid. This condition is reinforced by the provision of the AAR's Canon of Ethics stating that members "undertake never to mislead, deceive, dupe, defraud, or victimize their clients, other members of the Association, the general public, or any person with whom they do business as a member of the Association."

Which brings us back to L'Affaire Cussler. In its coverage of the lawsuit The Book Blog reported that attorneys for the principal of the production company alleged that "author Clive Cussler duped the Denver industrialist into paying $10 million for film rights to the adventure novel 'Sahara' by flagrantly inflating his book sales to more than 100 million copies. 'Cussler and his agent had gotten away with these numbers for years,'" said the industrialist's lawyer. "'It was a lie and it doomed the movie'"

Setting aside the Cussler team's contention that the producers were simply sore losers pinning the blame for their movie's lousy performance (it lost about $78 million) on the author of the book; and setting aside the likelihood that Cussler's books have in fact sold 100 million copies worldwide (though it's impossible to get an accurate count), we have to face the fact that inflated printing and sales figures are a time-honored tradition in the publishing industry. Except during contract negotiations, when each side hauls out numbers and counternumbers, most denizens of the publishing business are complicit in (or at least tolerant of) exaggerated printing and sales figures, for it's a victimless crime, or was until the Cussler case. Think about it: why would an agent challenge a publisher's bloated boast about his or her own client?

But the authenticity of such boasts was dealt a grievous blow by the introduction of Nielsen BookScan in 2001, a more or less scientific system for compiling sales data for publishers. I say "more or less" because the Nielsen Company does not include certain book sales outlets in its data mining, and that bloc of non-reporting stores can account for as much as 30% of a book's performance that doesn't appear on BookScan's database. Nevertheless, it is an accurate enough bellwether to sharply curtail an agent's efforts to produce impressive numbers out of whole cloth.

In short, our options for hyperbole and creative embellishment have been so hamstrung that we've been cornered into resorting to the truth to support the promotion of our authors' performance. What's the fun in that?

Some days an agent can't make a buck, and that is no exaggeration.

Richard Curtis

Copyright (c) 2009 by Richard Curtis

Revising Truth with One Click of the Mouse

Few pleasures compare to reading early iterations of a famous book or musical composition. When Beethoven's long-lost piano rendition for four hands of his Grosse Fuge (pictured here) was discovered and displayed at Sotheby's, I lost myself gazing at it until impatient visitors elbowed me away from the glass case. Not only were there numerous changes and emendations but on one passage the composer had scratched out the score so violently he tore the script and had to apply a paper patch over it. With similar fascination we pore over drafts of the Declaration of Independence ("We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable") or Beatles lyrics (Paul McCartney wrote something called, "Baby, You Can Wear My Diamond Ring" which John Lennon rewrote as "Baby, You Can Drive My Car") or the Gettysburg Address, which flowed almost fully polished from Abraham Lincoln's hand.

Since the dawn of computerized word processing scholars have rightfully expressed alarm that such drafts of works in progress will be completely expunged by technology. Andrew Motion, in an essay entitled Saving writers' manuscripts for the nation published in the online edition of the Times Literary Supplement, writes,

"A manuscript can show the cancellations, the substitutions, the shifting towards the ultimate form and the final meaning. A notebook, simply by being a fixed sequence of pages, can supply evidence of chronology. Unpublished work, unfinished work, even notes towards unwritten work all contribute to our knowledge of a writer’s intentions; his letters and diaries add to what we know of his life and the circumstances in which he wrote.”

And poet Kevin Stein, in a Kenyon Review article called Death by 0s and 1s, says,

"What eventually finds its way into literary archives may well be altered over time. Today it's the poet's worksheets, manuscripts, drafts, and letters - maybe even her notebooks and scribbled back-of-the-envelope verses. Given the above, however, one wonders if soon computer diskettes and flash drives will become germane to the notion of literary "papers." Those media carry new poems and drafts that never made their way onto paper, so they carry invaluable digital cargo. Sure, hard copy drafts may be printed from each for storing in special collections, but what does it mean to take the original and present it in form the author never felt comfortable enough to give it? Maybe the poem as digital object must be retained as such.

Happily, revision control software exists enabling authors, editors, scholars and students to track iterations and save them for future analysts. Though not nearly as thrilling as standing inside of Walt Whitman's mind as he constructs, deconstructs and reconstructs "Song of Myself", at least the process will not be lost to us entirely, as it was in danger of doing in the early years of word processing.

But now there's something just as ominous to worry about. "Consider", we read in Amazon Kindle = Privacy FAIL by a blogger named Stephanie, "what might happen if a scholar releases a book on radical Islam exclusively in a digital format.

The US government, after reviewing the work, determines that certain passages amount to national security threat, and sends Amazon and the publisher national security letters demanding the offending passages be removed. Now not only will anyone who purchases the book get the new, censored copy, but anyone who had bought the book previously and then syncs their Kindle with Amazon...will, probably unknowingly, have the old version replaced by the new, “cleaned up” version on their device. The original version was never printed, and now it’s like it didn’t even exist. What’s more, the government now has a list of everyone who downloaded both the old and new versions of the book."

"I hope," says the blogger, "this comes off as a crazy conspiracy theory spun by a troubled mind with an overactive imagination."

We hope so, too. But Nicholas Carr, writing about the automatically updatable book in his "Rough Type" blog, has elected to worry this bone. "One of the things that happens when books and other writings start to be distributed digitally through web-connected devices like the Kindle is that their text becomes provisional. Automatic updates can be sent through the network to edit the words stored in your machine - similar to the way that, say, software on your PC can be updated automatically today." "Does history begin to become as provisional as the text in the books?" Carr frets.

It's definitely a fretworthy issue. Given the state of our technology, censorship, rewriting of history, and mind control are only a few clicks away. As blogger Stephanie says, "Censorship in the age of the Kindle will be more subtle, and much more dangerous."

Ernest Hemingway said, "The first draft of anything is shit." Maybe. But is anything more fundamentally honest than shit?

Richard Curtis

No, I Haven't Read Your Book, But I've Seen the Video

A wag once said about book advertising, "We know it's fifty percent effective. We just don't know which fifty percent."

I was reminded of this quip when I read J. Courtney Sullivan's essay in the New York Times Book Review about the thriving industry dedicated to designing book-specific websites and producing elaborate video tie-ins. "Today, you can’t be a successful writer without having a little Barnum in your bones," Sullivan quotes thriller writer Brad Meltzer, one of the earliest creators of a website devoted to a book.

Though it's now accepted wisdom that every author needs a website, it didn't take long after the introduction of book sites like Meltzer's for authors to try outdoing each other to produce the most colorful, interactive, and sense-stimulating sites money could buy. Book videos were introduced around 2002. Then publishers raised the stakes by creating dedicated web pages for their prominent authors and featured books. In time these displays grew into Hollywood-like productions, and publishers began asking authors to contribute to the cost or even to produce the trailers themselves. "A sizable industry has sprung up," Writes Sullivan. For instance,

"AuthorBytes, a multimedia company started in 2003, has built sites for more than 200 clients, including Paul Krugman, Chris Bohjalian and Khaled Hosseini. They cost from $3,500 to $35,000 — with writers paying about 85 percent of the time. The staff of 20 even includes three employees whose entire job is updating."

A visit to the AuthorBytes ("Everything authors need to shine online") website is instructive. Among the services offered are custom websites for authors and publishers, podcasts, multimedia Trailers and online book promotions.

Authors who can't pay the freight for productions like those done by AuthorBytes often try to do it themselves, with less than stellar results. "Many book videos are little better than home movies, painfully dull and almost laughably bad," comments Sullivan. "But others are impressive, full-scale productions. Naomi Klein’s nearly seven-minute companion film to 'The Shock Doctrine,' directed by Alfonso Cuarón with a full crew and shown at the 2007 Venice and Toronto International Film Festivals, has been downloaded more than a million times."

Do these dog and pony shows sell books? That takes us back to the fifty-percent rule. Or maybe it's the eight percent rule, for Sullivan cites a survey that found that that's the percentage of book shoppers who visit author websites in a given week. "It didn’t, however, say how many clicked on the 'buy the book' link," she says.

But is that the point?

There's nothing wrong with having a little Barnum in your bones. But, despite Sullivan's conclusion that the Web promotions have not proven themselves, it's likely that her article, See the Web Site, Buy the Book, is only going to contribute to the ratcheting of author anxiety to an almost pathological pitch. In an essay called "Watching Books" posted a few months ago I wrote:

It never hurts for authors to be attractive and promotable, and no one in publishing is so naïve as to deny that publishing decisions are influenced by an author’s sex appeal, charm, showmanship, and other extrinsic factors. To utilize the mighty resources of the Internet in order to play up those factors is by no means deplorable as long we keep things in proportion. Which means that, ultimately, it’s all about the book. But as the publishing industry’s drift into the rapids of show business accelerates, we should not be surprised to see computerized pyrotechnics become significant if not decisive factors in the acquisition of books.

Sullivan's essay suggests that the trip down the rapids has indeed accelerated for authors.

Richard Curtis

Publishing Mysteries Revealed at Last. Sort of.

Though I've done my best in my Publishing in the 21st Century blog to explain the arcane practices of the publishing industry and the mysteries of the creative process, I don't think I could produce a better or more succinct (3 minutes 37 seconds) summary than the one displayed on YouTube ascribed to Macmillan's digital staff. Nor do I think I could produce anything wittier. It's so so completely deadpan you can't spot the bulge of the tongue in cheek.

April Fool's Day three months early, but who cares? A great spoof is a great spoof any time.

RC

President Obama -- Put America's Writers to Work!

Among the few special interest groups not petitioning the government for a bailout these days are writers. Paul Greenberg, in the New York Sunday Times Book Review, speculates on what such a rescue package would look like. The bulge of his tongue in cheek is apparent, but underlying his geniality is an important reminder that although the official (according to National Endowment for the Arts) ranks of professional writers are modest at 185,000, their combined voice represents a significant influence on American culture and needs to be heard.

Unlike the crybabies in the financial and automotive sectors of our economy pleading with Congress to compensate them for their own greed and stupidity, writers are a proud and independent lot, and though they're not above pocketing the occasional windfall - an unexpected movie option or foreign sale - I don't know of many who would go hat in hand to their legislature to lobby for a bailout just because their agent can't find a publisher for their latest novel.

No, writers don't want a bailout. What writers want is work, and Greenberg reminds us that in 1935 at the height of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt acknowledged the value of their profession by creating the Federal Writers' Project. Over 6,500 writers were put to work writing guidebooks, local and regional histories, photographic essays, oral memoirs and the like. (A film about this era, Soul of a People, is currently in development.) "The most well-known of these publications," Wikipedia tells us, "were the 48 state guides to America (plus Alaska Territory, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.) known as the American Guide Series."

President Elect Obama has established, at the heart of his economic recovery program, a plan to rebuild our nation's long-neglected infrastructure of rutted roads, crumbling dams, rusting bridges and leaking sewers. A student of American history and in particular of President Roosevelt's New Deal, Obama sees parallels between Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration and Obama's own determination to put Americans back to work on meaningful projects that will restore pride to its wounded citizens.

I'm relatively certain that the crumbling infrastructure of the publishing business will not be found on the list of federal projects requiring urgent attention. But as our community of writers, journalists and poets surveys the landscape, we see newspaper, magazine and book publishers on a precipitously downward slope. Some of their decline is self-inflicted, through failure to envision, understand, and take advantage of the revolutionary power of digital delivery of information. And some of it is their unavoidable blindsiding by market and technological forces. But whether writers are witting or unwitting victims of upheaval, we find our profession upheaved, and we lift our eyes to our new leader for help.

Luckily for us, our new leader is a writer (and a damned good one, too). He's one of us. So, perhaps, as he and his cultured and literate brain-trust set out to repair America's physical plant, they will recognize that there's a lot of writing to be done to support and celebrate our nation's reconstruction and to give it a voice and intellectual underpinning. We'll need artists, too, and musicians, just as we did when President Roosevelt launched his program to haul his country's citizens up by their own bootstraps.

President Obama, when you open up those envelopes from your publishers and shake out the handsome royalty checks rewarding you for your inspiring words, remember your fellow writers. They are a priceless resource. Put them to work. They will cost a fraction of what the government is paying to bail out banks and insurance companies and automobile manufacturers (the secret is out - writers will do it for love), and they will reward you and the American people a thousandfold.

Richard Curtis

Books Don't Get More Encrypted Than This

We know of some novels that were buried by critics. But here's one that was buried by its author.

A San Francisco area author named Mary Kavanaugh actually held held a funeral for her rejected novel, Family Plots. After sixteen submissions she decided not to slip quietly into Author Oblivion. Instead, she invited friends to "view" the book, as well as rejection letters and other relevant documents, in a virtual open coffin. She invited guests to "bury their dead dreams, too."

Honest, guys, I don't have the imagination to make this stuff up.

Here's an excerpt from the obituary:

Family Plots, the first novel of Bay Area writer Mary Patrick Kavanaugh, died uneventfully on July 22, 2008, upon receipt of its final rejection letter. According to the coroner, the cause of death was "lack of interest from the mainstream publishing industry."

The novel was born in 2001 at the University of San Francisco’s graduate creative writing program. Despite beginning its life babbling and confused, early caretakers said it demonstrated great potential to entertain. With the assistance of professors, writing students, editors, book agents, and a snappy blurb from one of the author’s famous writer friends, the novel made its debut in the offices of sixteen New York publishers, all of who flat out rejected it. The rejecters have each been invited to serve as pallbearers at the open casket service, giving them a bonus opportunity to kill this project, while simultaneously enjoying a holiday in the Bay Area.

Family Plots is survived by the author, Mary Patrick Kavanaugh, its agents, Judith Ehrlich and Sophia Seidner, two writing groups, three editors, seventeen proofreaders, and the harsh realities of a cruel publishing industry that drove it to this untimely death.

Funeral services were held on December 6, 2008, at 4 p.m. at Lifemark Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland. Those unable to attend may pay their respects via the webcast.

In lieu of flowers, the author is inviting friends and strangers to bury their own dead dreams and dashed hopes in virtual cemetery plots.

Click on her website and visit the cemetery (the flock of ravens is a particularly macabre touch). It's all great fun.

Maybe her stunt will inspire a publisher to exhume the deceased or even resurrect it.

RC

Take This Job and Shove It

Most writers dream of leaving their day jobs (some have night jobs as well) and launching careers as full-time freelancers. In their eagerness to realize that goal, many of them quit as soon as they've made a few sales. This decision invariably turns out to be ill-advised if not catastrophic after the author discovers that he did not properly reckon the cost of independence, project the size and flow of earnings, or prepare himself psychologically. Even an author lucky enough to strike it rich on his first book should use the utmost restraint before quitting his job to become a writer. By the time he realizes he doesn't know what to write for an encore, he may have raised his lifestyle to an unsupportably high plateau.

The questions of whether and when writers should go full-time are among the most common and vexing that agents have to deal with, and if an agent ever had a notion to play God, here is his opportunity. The responsibility for this decision is awesome and demands ten times the prudence required to advise authors about such matters as selecting the right publisher for their books. The number of factors is large and their complexity intimidating. It's the kind of decision that should be reviewed with a great many people to collect as much input as possible.

Click here to read more.

Wired's Kevin Kelly on The Overthrow of the Book

The Sunday New York Times Magazine of November 23, 2008 is called "The Screens Issue" and carries a number of brilliantly insightful articles about the media revolution of which we are all both active participants and hapless victims. The most arresting piece of all is Becoming Screen Literate by Wired's Kevin Kelly and I can't commend highly enough.

After more than five hundred years of domination by printed text, Kelly says, "Now invention is again overthrowing the dominant media. A new distribution-and-display technology is nudging the book aside and catapulting images, and especially moving images, to the center of the culture. We are becoming people of the screen."

The collective mentality of today's social networking generation - what Kelly calls the "hive mind" - is utilizing cheap and ingenious digital tools to produce movies, videos, anime, 3D computer models and other wonders. The "author" of these works is not an individual but, rather, a cultural community. It is even bigger than what the French call the auteur, the unifying human vision that infuses a motion picture. The hive's human components do not necessarily know each other but contribute anonymously and selflessly to the creation of a media event that is not only greater than the sum of its part but possesses immense global reach and impact.

'After all," writes Kelly,

"this is how authors work. We dip into a finite set of established words, called a dictionary, and reassemble these found words into articles, novels and poems that no one has ever seen before. The joy is recombining them. Indeed it is a rare author who is forced to invent new words. Even the greatest writers do their magic primarily by rearranging formerly used, commonly shared ones. What we do now with words, we’ll soon do with images."

RC

What Your Agent Has Done For You Lately

After talking a hotheaded author out of beating up his copyeditor, I began to reflect on some of the unusual things that agents are called upon to do in the course of their careers. I am often asked to speak to groups of aspiring writers and explain just what literary agents do. I wonder how the audience would react if I told them that among other things, literary agents babysit for their clients' kids, paint their clients' houses, and bail their clients out of jail. They even fall in love with their clients and marry them. In fact, I have done all these things and more.

If you think that all agents do is submit manuscripts in the morning, collect checks in the afternoon, and go to lunch for three hours in between, you're in for some interesting insights. Click here for the inside dope on the secret lives of literary agents.

- Richard Curtis

Are Literary Agents Friends or Rivals?

Are literary agents friendly with each other? Are they mutually suspicious or hostile? Do they steal authors from each other at every opportunity, or do they cooperate with one another? Do they have a code of behavior? Are they too competitive to act collectively? You may be surprised to learn the answers. For the complete article, click here.

All Agencies Great and Small: Part 2

I'm not sure that authors understand the structures of literary agencies much better than they understand those of publishing companies. For those of you who are shopping for an agent or thinking of switching agencies, or who are simply interested in organizational dynamics, it might be interesting to compare agencies of different sizes and structures and to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each type. In the first installment of this piece we discussed the advantages and disadvantages of sole practitioner literary agencies.

With the introduction of a second person into the agency - even a secretary with no discretionary power - the dynamics of the firm usually alter sharply

To read more, click here.

Burn, Which, Burn!

The good news is that book editors are now reading manuscript submissions on Sony E-Book Readers and Amazon Kindles. But agent Richard Curtis reminds us that one unwelcome byproduct of this innovation is that Word for Windows documents, the format of choice for most authors, display typographical and grammatical errors in the form of glaring red and green underlines that distract editors and might even make them question your writing skills. To read Curtis's analysis of what writers should do about all those "Reddies" and "Greenies", click here.

All Agencies Great and Small - Part 1

I'm not sure that authors understand the structures of literary agencies much better than they understand those of publishing companies. For those of you who are shopping for an agent or thinking of switching agencies, or who are simply interested in organizational dynamics, it might be interesting to compare agencies of different sizes and structures and to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each type.

To read more, click here.

Do Agents Have Clout?

Whenever authors gather to discuss the merits of their agents (it may legitimately be wondered whether they ever discuss anything else), the word "clout" inevitably enters the conversation. Clout is the measure of an agent's influence over publishers, and though it is by no means the sole criterion by which agents are judged, it is certainly the ultimate one. What is clout? How do agents wield it? And is it everything we crack it up to be?

To read more, click here.