Not one parent at the show could open Tiger, Tiger to even begin page one because it’s so menacing, so terrifying and so creepy …. or so it seemed by the look of it.  The fact that the author, Margaux Fragoso, lived to tell the story would seem astonishing enough;  that she writes in a beautiful, gripping narrative voice with the most astounding insights opens our ears (and, incredibly, our hearts) to otherwise unspeakable matters.

I can say that once you do open the book and you do begin reading, it’s impossible to put down. And boy, is it needed. Fragoso refuses to be either victim or avenger. What she learned about herself and human nature keeps us appalled and instructed every step of the way. From the start, her choices in life are so unexpected and in a way so thrilling that … well, again, you hafta see for yourself. The wait may be excruciating, because Tiger, Tiger is going to simmer (and not on the back burner) at Farrar, Straus & Giroux until its March publication.

(BTW, thank you, Autumn, at From The TBR Pile, a blog for readers that’s turned up a good handful of other books named Tiger, Tiger [or Tyger, Tyger in goblin speak] that you can find here. And extra thanks of course to poet William Blake who started it all.)

*About the Trade Show

NCIBA stands for Northern California Independent Booksellers Association, and this group, like a dozen other bookseller organizations across the country, sets up a mini-convention every Fall so that bookstore buyers can be sure they’ve got their inventory ready before crazed gift-givers stampede the store.

This year, Publishers Weekly reports, attendance was down at these regional trade shows all over the country as independent bookstores continue to close. And yet despite eBook readers like the Kindle and iPad stealing storekeepers’ sales by offering so much text space you could fit over a thousand books on a single unit, a new light is dawning. First, customers who love the experience of holding and reading a physical book are buying them in stacks (gosh, it turns out that actual books make better gifts than empty space on a reading device). Second, Google is late but still may launch its own eBook inventory in December, and went it does, Google Editions will be offered exclusively through independent bookstores.

This could be a huge boost  and maybe a saving one for indies. Of course Amazon loyalists will resist it, but because the treasure trove of Google Editions is said to be even more massive than Amazon’s and could be faster and more easy to negotiate through indie websites, Google Editions could wipe out the unfair competitive advantage that book vendors from Amazon to chain stores have been using to drive indies out of business.

Equally important, again, is the fact that so many readers are finding that they miss the tactile environment of “real” books and don’t enjoy the impersonal robot look of eBook readers after all. Finally bloggers and Tweeters are discussing what we’re not told about the Kindle experience — the dull screen, sanitized text, lack of page numbers and phony Victorian drawings of authors (Poe, Dickinson, Joyce) who end up looking more funereal than literary. Remember, if you’re a supporter of independent bookstores, November and December are the make-or-break months, plus it’s so much fun to buy personal gifts for everyone on our lists, including kids, in a single bookstore.

DRIB (Don’t Read if Busy)

I hope when Tiger, Tiger is released that Farrar’s publicity department will raise an issue that’s hit the headlines this week and caused a Facebook/Twitter boycott of Amazon regarding a title called The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure: A Child Lover’s Code of Conduct by Philip R. Greaves.

Here’s a book that provides a real service to child molesters by showing how to get around those pesky laws protecting minors and how to stand proud about not using condoms with children, how to make the whole experience kindly and fun for everyone,  and much much more.

If you ever needed proof that nobody’s home at Amazon, here it is: The company routinely bars pornography and other sexually explicit or offensive titles, yet Amazon, caught sleeping at the switch when this pro-pedophile book got listed on Kindle –  tried to hide behind First Amendment issues as messages of outrage came pouring.

Anderson Cooper of CNN does a good job covering the issue and finding out just how icky and dangerous The Pedophile’s Guide can be by interviewing everyone’s favorite therapist, Dr. Phil McGraw, who makes enormous sense about the difference between free speech and exploitation. Cooper also explores with New Yorker legal correspondent Jeffrey Toobin why “no court in the country” would ever force Amazon to remove the book, and why that’s a good thing (it’s up to you, Amazon, not the courts) in this important video.

This week enough people protested to shame Amazon into removing the book, thank heaven, but the point to make here is that Fragoso’s insight about pedophiles’ sense of entitlement in Tiger, Tiger is mirrored in The Pedophile’s Guide and useful for society to know.

Welcome Back, Laura H

Not so scary but equally mesmerizing is another hot-as-a-firecracker work of nonfiction, Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand (Random), which, as lush and addictive as her first blockbuster, Seabiscuit, comes out right on time for the holidays.

And what a book it is. Unbroken takes off like a shot as we watch a manic boy, born to be a juvenile delinquent in the 1920s, named Louis Zamperini running away from cops and storekeepers so fast that instead of going to prison, he’s discovered by track-and-field coaches and wins his way into competing as the youngest distance runner at the Berlin Olympics of 1936.

(Two quickies from the thousands of absorbing details Hillenbrand unearths: 1) German fans were so entranced with American sprinter Jesse Owens that as soon as stepped off the train in Berlin, scissors-wielding crowds surged forward  “and began snipping off bits of his clothing” with such fervor that a near-naked “Owens leapt back onto the train.” 2) When not racing, the incorrigible Louis Z. went around Berlin stealing “souvenirs,” including a Nazi flag that was seductively hanging in front of Hitler’s very Reich Chancellery. Two guards caught him, but he talked his way out and was even given the flag to take home.)

Although terrified of airplanes, Louis Z becomes a turret gunner on the WWII bomber Green Hornet but is shot down in the Pacific with two other airmen, and they all slowly starve on a disintegrating raft until Japanese planes spot them in the middle of a million miles of ocean and begin strafing just as Louis dives under the raft where — ta da! — sharks have been waiting for just this moment. And that’s just the end of the Prologue.

Other writers might better describe how it feels to be a speck in an indifferent and watery wasteland, but that giant existential loneliness really hits home, thanks to Hillenbrand’s incredible research and edge-of-your-seat storytelling. Sure to be another dense and luscious bestseller and a great gift for non-sailors, just as her last book Seabiscuit was beloved by non-horselovers.

That semi-talented professor David Shields is certainly enjoying unprecedented acclaim for his new book, “The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs,” released recently from Knopf.

Just the other day on the “Today” show, Matt Lauer confirmed that the book is such a mixture — so brilliant and so offensive at the same time — that no one can read it without vomiting.

Lauer himself admired the book yet succumbed when he said, “My favorite part was when Scrotie McBoogerballs slid his head up into the horse’s — bleagh! awwwrrflgh!! ptui! pppt. ppt.”

As soon as he recovered, Lauer asked about the deeper significance of the book: “Was that chapter a slam on healthcare reform, as people have suggested?” he asked the author.

Answering from his home, where his parents have grounded him for using dirty words in print, author Butters Stotch said, “Yes, I pretty much think so.”

Respected Blogger “Remixes” Books in Search of Literary Excellence

Oh, wait a minute. I have just “remixed” two very similar books. This is a remarkable achievement on my part that might be called a “literary wake-up call,” very much as the Shields’ book itself has been labeled, except for the fact that I feel my own lunch going into a state of reflux while trying to introduce the two:

1) The first as mentioned above is “The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs,” a fictional novel by the fine young character named Butters Stotch in the epic TV series, “South Park.” While critically acclaimed, the book is so gross that a new game show has been invented in which contestants wearing headphones listen to the text in an isolation booth until they can’t stand it any longer and throw up all over the glass.

2) That act naturally reminded me of “Reality Hunger,” a “real” book consisting of 618 short pieces, mostly quotations by very good authors (Emerson, Goethe, Yeats, Gornick, Thoreau) that in many cases the real author, David Shields, has “remixed” with generally lousy quotations of his own.

I say “Reality Hunger” is “real” because you can hold it in your hands or read on a screen. It costs an obscene $24.95, which can also stick in your gorge, but that more systemic assault comes later.

“Remix” v. Original

The basis of “Reality Hunger,” according to Shields, is that we children of the Internet have been bombarded with words and ideas from so many sources in one giant “mash-up” of information that any integrated thought of more than a few paragraphs is meaningless.

Let’s, instead, pull some statements out of this hodgepodge of reality and see if they makes sense. Here for example is #200:

“Art is real.

I make it real by putting it into words.”

That statement seems obvious, but Shields, of course, has a larger message. He wants to say that when we don’t know who’s talking, in the context of the other 617 statements he provides, each one may take on a different meaning according to our own subjective interpretation. This itself is a comment on the way people live in the reality of hodgepodge (although really, a list of 618 statements can be so sterile and boring that you find yourself dozing off half the time, but more about that later.)

Anyway, if you do want to know who made that statement — since Shields could never say anything so succinct and to the point — an Appendix is offered in the back where you can look up the attributions of all 618 statements.

The problem here is that when we find #200, the line reads: “Picasso; Virginia Woolf.”  This must mean that Picasso said the first line and Woolf said the second. Fine. But when Woolf said, “I make it real,” does the “it” mean art, which one would think because Shields has put the Picasso statement about art above, or does “it” mean, when she said or wrote it, a color or a feeling or the sound of thunder or the thought she just had?

I’d like to know because Virginia Woolf was a genius and David Shields is not. Scrotie McBoogerballs comes closer to being an authentic source because even as a fictional character in a fake novel, he levels with the reader. Shields is messing with us and calling it art.

Losing the Reader’s Trust

Oh, well, maybe I’m being too picky (not). Let’s look at #300, a comparatively lengthy statement credited to science fiction writer William Gibson. It begins:

“The recombinant (the bootleg, the remix, the mash-up) has become the characteristic pivot at the turn of our two centuries.”

That’s the first sentence of #300 that — oh, but wait. Shields seems to have written this sentence, which I assume because I found the original quote by Gibson via Google, and the above sentence isn’t in it.

The rest of the quote is correctly attributed to Gibson, but a closer look at the original shows that Shields has “remixed” Gibson’s words by deciding to:

– update Gibson (for example, the word “record” is replaced with “CD”),

– edit Gibson (“But” replaces “though”),

– trim Gibson (“the whole metastasized library of” is cut from the reference to “Dean Scream remixes”),

– and disagree with Gibson (the game “Doom” is out while “World of Warcraft” has been added in).

Well, the first three these changes could be seen as harmless enough — although I hate them, hate them: Gibson was a visionary writer who lived in his own time and said what he considered the truth for that time. It’s not fair to Gibson or the reader to mix up Gibson’s words to such an extent that we don’t know who is talking.

But for Shields to barge in and cut some of Gibson’s examples out while putting his own in is just unconscionable. In the end, we no longer trust either writer. This may be exactly what Shields is going for — your confusion at each moment is your art — but hell, we learned that years ago from reading classified ads.

Now maybe Gibson rewrote this paragraph himself in an essay that one can’t find through Google, but even if that were the case, it doesn’t change Shields’ responsibility to his readers. Unlike Scrotie, Shields doesn’t tell us where we’re going when he sticks our head up the horse’s bleagh! arrrrrwwwwwgggh! pppt! ppt.

Svengali vs. McBoogerballs

But Shields doesn’t care about the reader. It’s more authentic, he believes, to take pithy snippets written by real authors out of context and “remix” them with his own thoughts or those of others.  For one thing, he can take more of the credit than he deserves because he’s riding on the coattails of smarter people.

For another, simply holding up a mirror to reflect the blurring of gobbledygook vs. art is enough, he believes.  As expressed in  #156, “I want books to be equal to the complexity of experience, memory, and thought, not flattening out with either linear narrative (traditional novel) or smooth recount (standard memoir).”

Yeah, but how? By lying? By playing Svengali? However he’s set it up, the format allows Shields to steal without impunity –  “Plagiarism is art,” he says, or is it Picasso –  since Knopf and its parent, Random House, have brought in the lawyers who’ve insisted on attribution in the lengthy appendix. The problem as we’ve seen in #300 is that the attributions can’t be trusted, either.

Reading It Anyway

I’d suggest that you read the unbelievably excited praises from a wide range of contemporary authors that Shields and his publisher have  plastered across the jacket, but most of those authors are quoted inside the book, so their credibility is strained, too.

However, I do find that their excitement in many cases parallels my own. Believe it or not, there’s a lot to learn from this book, even a lot to  … pardon me, here it comes again … to lo …. oh dear, gotta go, bleagh … to love.

More next time.

This is the story of a self-publisher who did everything “wrong” to publish a charming and humorous gem that I’m recommending to everyone.

The big lesson I had to learn (again) is that “professionals” in the book business like yours truly can easily lose their trust in the reader and their eye for creativity. Instead of enhancing the publishing process, too often we pros get in the way of very good, very original and often even memorable books.

In my own defense may I say that 99 times out of 100, the self-publishing author needs guidance from a wizened (I used to think that meant wise; now in my declining years I see it’s right on the money) veteran of industry standards and procedures.

Too Shy to Paginate

The author in question is Niko Mayer, a member of the book group I facilitate at Book Passage in Corte Madera, Calif. When Niko asked me to endorse a collection of travel stories that she had written and illustrated, I felt a certain dread creep in.

1. First, there was the title: “Travelin’ Light Is Not for Me: Worries Weigh a Lot.”

Well, it’s a bit wordy and hard to follow, I thought, not to mention a little precious.  A customer may read it several times and still not know what the book is about.

I told Niko a good rule of thumb about titles: If the reader has to look inside the book to understand the title, you’re not there yet. But if the title is catchy, and intriguing enough to lure the reader into the book  — to make us curious, to make us open the book to learn more — you’ve nailed it.

Uh-huh… said Niko.

2. Then came the illustrations (see below)

Hm. All the drawings were like this: Spirited and earnest, certainly, but amateurish and dated, too, I felt — reminiscent (to me) of ladies’ teas in the ‘50s. Again, a preciosity crept in that made the art a bit self-conscious.

I told Niko a rule of thumb about illustrations: If they distract readers to the point of making us lose our focus or enjoyment of the story, you’re not there yet. But if they enhance the text and add a personality all their own, like a bonus, it’s worth every extra penny to include them.

Hm, said Niko.

3. Then came the typeface (see below).

Okay, this had to be some kind of faux handwriting font with one of those cute names (I thought maybe “Postcard Crimp”) that I guessed was supposed to resemble pages in a person’s travel journal. That’s fine for a while, but soon I found myself squinting at paragraphs that looked a bit like a rough draft, as though jotted down without a thought. Considering typos and occasions where the type runs into illustrations, the reading of the text could be simpler, cleaner.

I told Niko a rule of thumb about content: When the typeface calls attention to itself, it steps in front of the writing (literally in this case) and confuses the author’s meaning. That’s not fair to the reader.

The typeface, said Niko,  is called “Handwriting Dakota.” Not “Postcard Crimp.”

4. Other things I puzzled over: Why was there no Table of Contents, no page numbers?

Niko said later the template that her printer (Blurb.com) used for self-published books didn’t leave room on the page for art and pagination, so the latter had to go. As to a Table of Contents, the idea hadn’t occurred to her.

I got the feeling that the author was too shy to paginate: Niko thought of “Travelin’ Light…” as a coffee table book or bathroom read that you could flip open anywhere and simply start browsing. Who would take it seriously enough to remember a specific page?

The Lesson Begins

5. The dread increased as I turned to the text, which I worried would not redeem difficulties in the design. Then for the next hour I heard somebody chuckling happily, and realized that it was me.

Niko, it turns out, has a gift for dry, wry humor that sneaks up on you on nearly every page. She and her husband Steve (what a patient man! I thought at first. Then: What a lucky man!) have traveled the world together (she sometimes solo),  and have had many misadventures that are both entertaining and amusing.

But the delight here lies in Niko’s approach, her insistence on traveling on her own terms. “I expect everything to go wrong, and I do everything I can to insure it doesn’t,” she writes. This means preparing and packing for the worst – “tsunamis, strikes, and poison gas in subway tunnels” — as well as more ordinary problems (dengue fever, malaria), though she does have her limits.

On a trip to Africa, “I stopped short of carrying my own blood plasma supply,” though much to her regret. Waking up with a swollen black tongue is the subject of the second  chapter (they’re not numbered) called “Open Wide and Say ‘EeeeeuuuuuWWWW,” a title I most certainly would have discouraged but begrudgingly found charming, especially after the origin is discovered.

In any case, having realized long ago “how much I loathed being uncomfortable” away from the comforts of home, “I tried to take my home with me,” she writes. This makes her the most resourceful packer in modern times. If Steve is right that Niko has a “four-degree comfort range,” it follows that she’s always going to be “too cold or too hot” wherever she goes, so she takes pains to “pack for two seasons to protect against misery.”

Early on, we surrender to her logic. Stuck in the back of a hotel with a limited view, Niko places on the window sill a special thermometer “made for sailors that calculates the wind-chill factor along with the temperature.” She refers to it as a “tiny” device while Steve calls it as a “portable weather station,” but the point is, phoning the doorman to ask about the weather would never work for Niko. “The doorman is from Austria, not California,” she tells Steve. “How would he know what I consider cold?”

Two Kinds of People

Niko realized years ago, that she and Steve represent two kinds of people in the world: “Luggage-intensive” travelers like Niko, pictured on the cover with six pieces of luggage, a stack of books, umbrella, goldfish bowl and electric fan; and “carry-on” travelers like Steve, who never seem to bring more than a few small bags.

“The carry-on people believe that they are efficient, and yet they are the ones slowing down the boarding procedures,” Niko writes. “They don’t trust the airlines to deliver the bags. They believe the overloaded group is slowing them down waiting for lost luggage. But notice who they borrow from when they need toe spacers.”

Ah, toe spacers. It’s fascinating to see how many unusual items (well, for you and me)  turn out to be necessities for Niko. She provides a full-page list at the front of the book that appears to be suggestions to consider if you have space (2^nd skin and moeskin, baking soda, DIY medicine book, bactine”) but turn out to be essentials that Niko takes on every trip.

Here is just a part of it:

Water purification tabs

Vitabath

Inhaler

Humidifier

Curl Shampoo

Curl Conditioner

No-Curl Shampoo

No-Curl Conditioner

Hair Gel

Laundry Soap

Tuna

Arnica

Inflatable Hangers

So while many people are awed by travel – by the fact that airplanes actually fly, for example – “for me, the most amazing invention is the expandable rolling suitcases,” Niko writes. She packs many of them because, despite taking classes like “108 Outfits in a Carry-on Bag,” she can’t reduce her clothes to a dreary all-black wardrobe (“I looked like I expected a death in the Royal Family”); mix-and-match apparel (“so shapeless that no necklace could rescue it”); or a dress-up-or-down basic outfit (“I remain unseduced by the novelty of scarves”).

The author seems to thrive on adventure, but she does note that “Steve is allergic to luxury, while I’m allergic to risk.” That only means that when he wants to leave the safety of a group in Nepal, she spends all night “catastrophizing (at which I excel),” to good purpose.

While the “excursion provider” insists that sherpas will be bringing not only a cook but two cabin boys, Niko isn’t so sure (“What about oxygen tanks?”). And it’s not danger she’s worried about so much as a certain phonying-up of authenticity: A guide who asks passers-by for directions. An exhausting trek up a mountain that seems remote until a taxi wanders by. A promise that “You carry nothing. You lack for nothing” that really means no food or water for 20 miles.

Like many of us, Niko and Steve want to see the real, un-touristy places of the world, but are there such things left these days?  The author might not  have meant for this to happen, but often “Travelin’ Light…” reads like a cautionary tale, to warn us that no matter what our interests may be in the remote, the untouched, the wild, or the pristine, some kind of business is already thriving to service (or is it exploit?) our needs.

Of course, Niko has the wit and good humor to make all this funny. If the chances are pretty high wherever one goes of hiring charlatans or fanatics who are busy putting up a sign that says something like “Sunrise Travel,” a better way to read it would be “Surprise Travel” and let catastrophizing claim the day.

Learning My Lesson

All of this to say that gradually I grew to love every aspect of this book, including the title, which states exactly what the author wants us to know before we buy it. The illustrations that at first seemed so dated and pinched now look adorable and revealing. Even the typeface with it’s don’t-I-look-authentic look appears, to me, so charmingly close to being real handwriting that I would hate to see a cleaner, more easy-to-read and, yes, sophisticated font.

So now it’s my turn to be wrong. It’s wrong to force old formats and constraints onto self-published books. It’s wrong even for trusted old fogies like myself to forget that once authors are freed from  “professional” standards, they are answerable only to themselves. Sometimes their gut instinct can free us all from the limited expectations of an industry that’s gotten too streamlined and arrogant.

The fact is that “Travelin’ Light … “ is a good book because of all that’s “wrong” with it, for one reason because the author trusts the reader to give the book a chance, and we do.

Maybe it’s not exactly an impulse buy, but I bet it will go far on that other trusted industry phenomenon, word of mouth. Niko wrote it in a spirit of playfulness that you can see in the photograph of the two of them straddling the Equator.

Whenever I’ve given it to people without saying a thing about it, the reaction has been universal: “What an unexpected delight! We loved it! Especially the time Niko and Steve are nearly shot by a firing squad on page — oh wait, why are there no page numbers…”

“Kidnapped by Radical Feminists”

Finally I was so delighted and surprised by a chapter in which Niko signs up for a trip to Greece, led by a Belgian Jungian spiritualist/feminist/psychoanalyst and seeker,  that I immediately bought First Serial Rights to get ahead of the crowd of magazine editors (okay, I paid a dollar) and hereby offer it to you in its entirety below.

Niko says she was attracted to this special tour for women because the guide promised to “illuminate the psychological aspects of mythology” right at the sites of the Earth Goddess, Gaia; the God of Healing, Asklepios; the Oracle of Delphi itself, and many others.

It’s an understatement to say that Niko’s fears come true in a most comical way as she watches some (not all) members of the group bring out the panpipes, the drums, the runes, the chanting and dancing while the guide “spoke in Capital Letters” about how “the Journey has something to Teach” us all.

Suffice it to say that every historic site they visit is a holy, peaceful, historic sanctuary “until we arrived.” There is even one person – perhaps the product of too much therapy, radical feminism, New Age spirituality and folk music –  “who kept her ‘Inner Child’ (a doll) in a backpack,” bringing it out to hold in front of her “to witness this marvelous feminist solidarity.” This is just one example of Niko’s incisive but never mordant observations.

Go here for a pdf of “Kidnapped by Radical Feminists.”

I never thought I’d see this in my lifetime: Unpublished authors so smart and so quick on the Internet that they’re selling their work through iPhones apps, iTunes and eBook readers without going through that cranky old sluggish machine called mainstream publishing.

Here’s  author Seth Harwood (see last two columns below), who recently attended Bouchercon, the mystery writers’ conference, and sent this dispatch:

The New Thing

“The new thing  seems to be authors putting their unpublished works out on Kindle themselves and selling each title for .99 or $1.99, of which they keep 35 or 70 cents respectively.

“The idea is that you can get new Kindle owners to stock up on cheap titles to fill their device when they get it. A few authors have sold upwards of 4,000 copies of unknown books and are using that launching pad to get bigger deals from publishers. Who knows how many of those buyers actually read the book.

“Of course, there are still roughly 40 times more iPhones and iPod Touches out there sold than Kindles, so the biggest action among individual authors lies in getting their books sold through Apps at equally low prices.”

The Old Thing Reacts

I must say I wouldn’t have believed that people who love books would buy titles based on price rather than quality if I hadn’t found myself in the freebie sections of Audible.com and iPhones for months now or warmed to the notion of trying short stories for 45 cents and why-not-take-a-flyer thrillers by unknowns for .99 to $1.99.

(And just to show you those free first-chapter offers can stimulate sales, my apologies to psychologist/author Wayne Dyer for smirking when I saw the title of  his new book, “Excuses Begone! How to Change Lifelong, Self-Defeating Thinking Habits” from Hay House (288 pages, $24.95). I used to think Dyer has been writing the same self-help book for the last dozen titles, but solid research and reference to a fresh plan of action in Audible’s free Chapter One convinced me to buy the damn thing.)

It’s not that any of these electronic versions replaces traditional books (and let’s stop talking as though they do; we won’t know for a long time). What we see now is new access to the printed word and new ways to build the reading audiences for books in every form possible. (For example, I’m hardly alone when word of a new book arrives  via the Internet and I call my local independent bookstore to get a copy.)

The New, New Way

You can see how profits may be surprisingly good for mid-range authors who skip the publishing route and go directly to e-Books themselves by checking out Joe Konrath’s incredible story at his website, “A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.”

Here is an established writer with a series of Jacquelin (of course her nickname is Jack) Daniels detective novels at Hyperion making more money on the Internet with his unpublished works than Hyperion (chained to the list price) can bring him through its own Internet distribution channels.

For example, Konrath compares income from five of his titles published by Hyperion, which sold through Kindle at prices ranging from $3.96 to $7.99; and four self-published titles he sold himself through Kindle at $1.99.

Although the self-published titles sold at far reduced prices than those from Hyperion, the difference in sales was nearly 1 to 9 (Hyperion to self-published). His cut for the self-published books was bigger, too, so at the end of six months his income from the two sources looked like this:

4 Hyperion titles sold through Kindle: $2008

5 self-publihsed titles sold through Kindle: $6860

It’s not a lot of dough, but if Konrath’s detective novels continue to sell at the fast clip he thinks they will, and if Ebook sales increase (“I’m 100% sure Ebook sales are going up,” he writes) in all electronic readers (Sony, etc.), he calculates that “by the end of 2010 I can make $5000 per year per Ebook title by self publishing. I can easily write four books per year.”

Plus, he can write many more than that and could end up making $70,000 a year because the Ebook demand is building so fast. (He’s even going to put “The Newbie’s Guide to Publishing” as an Ebook on Kindle.)

The Big Reverse

I think of this as another cycle of the old pulps, in a way. Just as people used to pay 25 cents for a Pocket Book detective novel off the spin rack and not worry about quality, today we can do the same with 99-cent novels and check out new voices  without much risk.

This leads  the new breed of authors like Seth Harwood and Joe Konrath to believe a big reverse is underway: “Ebook rights began as gravy,” Konrath writes. “I can picture a day when the print rights are the gravy, and authors make their living with Ebooks.” (My italics added – it’s another thing I never thought I’d see in my lifetime.)

Well, that is moving fast. Maybe too fast, out-of-control fast. We’ve seen this kind of Internet hysteria before.   Everybody gets a new gadget (iPod, iPhone, Kindle) and rushes over to the fun place (iTunes) to buy stuff we absolutely must have (a favorite song from high school!), and a fad is born.

It may not be too long before former stick-in-the-mud publishers jam their titles into every imaginable Internet slot, and the resulting glut turns more readers away than invites them in. The bubble bursts, everybody says gee, we’ll never do that again, but then a new gadget is born, and we all rush around trying to make a buck out of that.

But Are They Any Good?

I don’t mean to appear so dazzled by the initiative and optimism of authors like Seth Harwood that I’ve forgotten to ask the question every reviewer and reader wants to know:  Is his writing any good?

His first published novel (Three Rivers/Random House), “Jack Wakes Up,” which begins a series of books (Seth’s already written three), is both a refreshing crime novel and a witty look at 21st century existential angst through its title character, a charming wiseacre/former actor/reluctant sleuth named Jack Palms.

True, everything about this original paperback looks like a flashy postmodern Chandler spinoff that fans of paperback detective fiction might pick up for a good airplane read, something fun and quick.

But that’s just the page-turner part.

Had it been published in hardcover like, say, a Chuck Palahniuk novel, the package would have said take this seriously; the author is a worth it. But that’s not what Three Rivers/Random House is saying here.

While I’m a big proponent of publishing first novels in original paperback, it’s sad to see a gem like this thrown out to the public without support or even (dare I even wish this) a little creativity. Maybe there’s no budget or even a person assigned to getting the word out, but I wish at least someone at Random House had spotted the map Seth laid out in creating an audience of 80,000 (see #2 in this series). And this is a primed audience that most certainly wants to be recontacted, wants to create new viral energy and wants to help launch Seth’s second book with inspiration and tweets galore.

And look how much they’d have to work with:  While “Jack Wakes Up” touches wonderfully on the full spectrum of  the hardboiled school, ranging from Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane to James Cain and Robert Parker, it’s also a meditation, a spoof, a homage and a pretty good action story all at once.

The Back Story

But it’s the hero’s vulnerability and a heckuva back story that win us readers over.

Early on we learn that a few years ago, Jack Palms got his big break as an actor by starring in  “Shake ‘Em Down,” a giant Hollywood success of the punch-’em-up variety that has turned cute guys into franchise millionaires like Eddie Murphy in “Beverly Hills Cop,”  Sylvester Stallone in “Rocky” or  Bruce Willis in “Die Hard.”

But before he could make the sequel, “Shake It Up,” Jack developed a drug problem, a bad marriage and a tendency to cold-cock the wrong people (like his ex, it’s rumored), at which point he found himself in rehab when he should have been making sequels #2, #3, and #4.

So at the start of “Jack Wakes Up,” our almost-hero is back, broke and single. He’s a lot wiser, conscientiously sober, and ready for a comeback if only the studio’s insurance company will cover him.  Waiting for the phone to ring at his classic hillside Sausalito apartment with its terrific view and overdue rent,  Jack is offered a job that throws him headlong into San Francisco’s underworld and face-to-face with one colossal babe named Maxine, and this novel is off and running.

Part of the fun for any movie-watching reader is that Jack is still recognizable as a tough-guy movie star whom every hotel clerk, bartender, parking attendant, bouncer or waiter claps on the back,  ushers to the best seat in the house, buys a drink or provides the info tip he needs. Jack knows it’s all phony: If the sequel is never made, he’ll sink into oblivion, and his famous face will turn into has-been land (“Say, weren’t you…”).

But the twist is that he doesn’t march around like that smug idiot on “Burn Notice”  trying to recreate the GQ image. His new sobriety and divorce have given him a peace of mind that raises real doubts about going back to the false Hollywood love-you-man bullshit again.

So unlike most crime novel heroes, Jack opens the crack in his emotional armor just a tiny bit more with each adventure, and this makes him far more human and intriguing to watch than any of the usual annoying smart-mouthed imitations parading around in “Oceans 11″ remakes.

It’s the Writing

As always,  it is the writing and in this case the observational acuity that makes a novel like this follow us around.

We do hear Chandler in the background when a beautiful bartender “gives Jack a look, all eyes and big red lips, that would stop a train.”

We do feel that sinister noirism as Jack sees his name on a possible death list and “gets a soft chill up his spine.” But we’re more engaged watching the author play with existential  references when, for example, Jack starts agreeing with a bad guy who’s lying to him and, and, glancing at “the flat surface of his coffee,” Jack notices that his reflection has disappeared.

Mini-finesse like that makes  “Jack Wakes Up” more than a hoot, as is “Young Junius,”  Seth’s work-in-progress about a streetwise kid from the projects. But the real treat in Seth’s writing  can be found in short stories (“A Long Way from Disney,” vols 1 and 2) that he seems to be hiding under the covers like a little kid.

A Writer to Watch

One story is about a sad young boy who catches a frog with a butterfly net while his parents are back at the house, arguing. Holding the frog in the net up to eye level, he tells us:  “I could see his toes poking through the holes in the net. His eyes were draped with clear lids that fell and then rose back up slowly.” It’s a brief but vivid moment that foretells everything that happens in the rest of the story and makes you think, hmmmm, here’s a writer to watch.

In another,  a couple of stoners bumming around Europe find themselves at Pamploma when the terrified bulls begin slipping and sliding on wet cobblestones, and runners (mostly American) pile up in front of them, getting gored and stomped on without letup.  The narrator, caught in the mess of fear, gore, soul-deep loss (why does anybody go to Pamploma?) looks up for a moment. “Two parallel lines of buildings outlined a strip of grey sky above me,” he muses, “as if something still existed outside of what I saw.” The economy and honesty of that of statement reflects both the narrator’s last spark of hope that life awaits defeat, and perhaps always has.

A Wild Goose Chase?

After reading his short fiction, much of which has appeared in a number of literary journals, I began thinking of Seth as a serious writer who may be — well, not off on a wild goose chase but not sitting in a quiet room writing more serious fiction, either. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was taught by Marylynne Robison and Denis Johnson. There is a tenderness that sneaks out of his short stories and tugs at the heart so much you want him to stop doing anything commercial except write.

But Seth got an agent and a publisher for “Jack Wakes Up” and he’s determined to “grow” the series. Right now that’s too bad, because the publisher won’t let him continue to give the book away as a full pdf, as he did when he first built his audience, won’t let him sell the book on his own through iPhone apps or eBook readers, never helped him with an independent bookstore tour (he set it up and They are letting him give away the first three chapters of the novel free here and the entire book is still free as a serialized audiobook podcast here, but this feels awfully back-handed paid. That awful self-fulfilling prophecy is on its way: If returns come back, promising-but-not-enough sales for #1 will convince the publisher he doesn’t have enough of a “platform” for #2 or #3 in the series.

I guess that’s routine these days – as an author, you have to do the marketing work by yourself, and then if the publisher sees your book “taking legs” (walking out of the stores by itself), you might get a new contract. I never saw this kind of pressure on, say,  Sue Grafton, Robert Parker or Patricia Cornwell. They would never would have gotten past book #1 if their publishers hadn’t stayed in for the fight. And they were pre-Internet: no ready-to-go readership of 80,000 waiting out there, as Seth has.

The True Believer

But Seth is a true believer. He can’t help believing that young Internet adepts like himself  can help the publishing industry change so profoundly and so quickly that our tragic era of flat sales and increasing costs will come to an end. He asks – and the new breed of angry young writer is not going to stop asking — why publishers are dragging their heels so badly when it comes to the simplest things, like going after iPhone apps aggressively or using podcasts as free publicity, or reducing the price of Ebooks to reflect reduced costs (in paper/printing/binding/shipping).

And other true believers are out there doing that work for publishers. Remember the old “open source” movement that encouraged everybody to share what they knew on the Internet so we could all benefit? That’s a basis for author marketing. When you share your art, and people like it, they want to help spread the word.

“Thanks for spreading the word, and thanks for listening,” says Erin O’Briant on every episode (there are seven) of “Glitter Girl,” her funny lezbo-garageband novel,  which she recorded from deep inside a closet (fabric absorbs echo) and gives away as a podcast on iTunes, where readers can leave reviews.

“I’ve built my reputation on giving away high-quality stories in podcast form,” write thriller novelist J.C. Hutchins in Fast Company. “To keep my current fan base fat and happy, I need to keep tending that farm. Fat and happy fans are evangelical fans.”

And that’s the point I think mainstream publishers don’t get. In their need to control every facet of the publishing process, they can’t believe authors are already so much farther ahead of the marketing game, and so much more powerful.

Author Jesse Kornbluth even wrote in  Publishers Weekly that publishers should just give up what they do badly, “attach $5,000 to $10,000 to the advance” and let the author use that money “for digital marketing expenses and Website enhancement.”

It’s such a wonder: All these questions are going to be answered sooner or later, maybe by unpublished writers who happen to reach home plate first.

BRANDING OUR CHILDREN

Last week’s New York Times arts section had a story about a travel writer with an autistic son whose “wild temper tantrums” abated only when he was riding a horse.   

The travel writer had a bent for nonWestern medical traditions, so he and his wife took their son to Mongolia where shamans and horses helped the boy achieve “an amazing ‘recovery’ and ‘healing,’ ” or so the Times quotes the dad. He also said his son’s temper tantrums “all but disappeared” after the trip.

The story is meant to be inspiring, and it is, except for the many business deals that seem to trump and the son’s role in it all. For example:

1) the travel writer dad is well connected in NY, so before the trip he got a $1-million-plus advance from Little, Brown based on a 37-page proposal about the “prospective adventure.”  

2) Dad also took a filmmaker along to create a documentary. 

3) He made YouTube video of himself and his son riding a horse that “stoked interest” in the book’s auction. 

4) He optioned the feature film rights to the producers who made “Lord of the Rings” and “Golden Compass” — with himself as scriptwriter.

5) He says part of the advance is going to a ranch he’s founded to treat autistic kids who like horses. 

HOW THE BIG BOYS DO IT

I’m sure this travel writer dad started out with the idea of helping his son, and hey, maybe he needed to finance the trip so he started pulling deals together. It’s just worrisome to see every related industry kick in to make this a million-dollar sure thing with the boy as a much-scrutinized cog. Perhaps Dad realized he needed the PR value of creating the charity ranch in case somebody accuses him of exploiting both his son and autism. 

At the same time, the NYT article is written as a kind of a model scenario for writers. It says, This Is The Way the Big Boys Do It.  Don’t wait until you write the book or even know how your story ends. Build your power base now. Start the marketing process now. Remember Elizabeth Gilbert? She was writing magazine articles about exotic spas for the rich before jotting down a similar of “prospective adventure” submission, which earned her a sizeable advance that paid for an all-expenses trip around the world and resulted in “Eat Pray Love.”

A LESSON FROM “SIX FEET UNDER”

Let’s just hope the little boy appreciates all this and doesn’t, you know, mess things up. Remember the Rachel Griffiths character and her brother in the HBO series, “Six Feet Under” a while back? As the story unfolds, we learn that these two were the subject of a best-selling book by their psychologist parents who apparently told the world about every single foible, fear and dysfunction their  children experienced from birth. 

Now in their 30s when we meet them, the adult children not only have serious psychological problems, they can’t take a step without somebody recognizing their name and exclaiming, “Oh, it’s you! Did you ever get over that case of genital warts (or gambling addiction or dyslexia or whatever it was –pardon paraphrasing)?”Because of their parents’ book, their privacy has long been destroyed, and as a result they have no sense of identity, are filled with resentment and could blow up at any time (as the brother does). Meanwhile their parents have made a pile of money, enjoy immense fame and sympathy and blame the kids for not moving past the attention from the book that “spoiled” them in the first place.

A BANDWAGON APPROACH

I’m not saying the travel writer is using his son in the same way, but who knows what the long-term effect of this well-oiled marketing/publishing/documentary/YouTube/movie/charity ranch operation will be? He’s autistic, for heaven’s sake. He’s already isolated from our reality and not very trusting of adults, and who can blame him?  I can’t bring myself to mention his name for fear of contributing even slightly to a system that is grounding his experience into marketable hairballs that he’ll be pressured to cough up for the rest of his life. 

And it’s not as though dad and mom can take him to a place free commercial pressures or fans: Foreign rights alone have already been sold in 17 countries (and counting).

This is hardly the first time that merger mania of parent corporations ends up promoting this bandwagon approach to packaging a saleable product and/or  book. What I will never understand is how slavishly everybody working for those corporations mouths all the tidy platitudes that cover their bets.

Here for example is the head of Little, Brown explaining why his publishing house made the “rare” move of spending $1 million before the book was written  and ordering an even rarer first printing of 150,000 copies:

“It just touched so many points of interest – helping to heal an autistic child, traveling under difficult circumstances…(and) the chances you’ll take for love.” 

Translation: “It just touched so many points of interest –YouTube, Hollywood, the documentary, the charity ranch, soaring rates of autism….and the love of any book publisher for all the green-lighted systems that will do the work for us.”

“MARLEY AND ME”?

Then there’s the humor part. Little, Brown, sent out a brochure to booksellers describing “The Horse Boy” as combining “the adventure and optimism of ‘Three Cups of Tea’ with the powerful connection between man and animal that readers loved in ‘Marley and Me.’ “

“Marley and Me”? Wait a minute. I was sure the brochure was going to refer to Temple Grandin’s “Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior.” I mean, that’s really thoughtful and documented and moving — but no. Let’s not throw the wrench of something too complicated into this giant machine with its simple and  simplistic “high concept” story.

“Marley and Me,” after all, was a huge bestseller and a huge movie – another example of How the Big Boys Do It – and it concerned an enormously popular subject (dogs) that might, in the right context, slop over some of its fad appeal to the growing interest in alternative treatments of autism. 

Room for Love?

I’m not saying the shaman approach is wrong. In fact, I’m hoping  the documentary-maker and the YouTube video director and the Hollywood dealmakers all took a step back so this little boy could connect with somebody real – not only a shaman whose prayers might truly have a healing influence but someone [a parent?] who loved him unconditionally and stayed with him after the spotlight was removed. 

If the boy was jerked away from the shaman to be photographed on a horse with his dad in a mawkish picture (below) suitable in someone’s eyes for a jacket illustration, and then hustled off to the van so the travel party could get to the next shaman and the next horse and the next photo op, well, let’s hope the boy was truly on his way to “recovery” as his dad told the NY Times.

We learn that the author has recently carted his son, now 7, off to Namibia to meet with more shamans, so who knows? Maybe there’ll be a sequel.

I think what grates me the most is that New York Times article taking its place right on schedule by giving this multi-tentacled project its blessing. You want to know why newspapers are dying? Well, they aren’t trustworthy. They sound like Entertainment Tonight. They don’t probe enough. 

True, some evidence of journalistic principle does emerge. A mother and doctor/author (of “Autism’s False Prophets”) say they are skeptical of anecdotal evidence and warn that the son’s behavioral changes could be temporary. But overall, the tone of the piece is congratulatory, even cloying. Other doctors “who have worked with autistic patients say a child can make big leaps in development,” the article goes on vaguely, “and that stories like [this one] can provide inspiration to families.” Might as well have come off a press release.

Even the title of the book, “The Horse Boy,” has a phony ring to it.  Remember the last time a brief submission earned the author a $3.5 million advance from a publisher? Why, of course, that was “The Horse Whisperer,” and what a winning combo-title it was! Now “The Horse Boy” is here to ride on those very coat tails. They say publishing’s a crap shoot? They mean childhood, don’t they?

Somewhere in the midst of discovering tiny Bellevue Literary Press and its incredible launch of an original trade paperback called “Tinkers” (191 pages; $14.95),  I decided to take a look at the book to make sure it was worthy of a whole column (or, as it turns out, two). 

Paul Harding

Wouldn’t you know, this first novel by Paul Harding has so much originality and fresh writing that I could not believe — well, first, that the author is still in his 40s (see left; surely his mind’s age is about 142); and second, that the intricate and animated construction of the novel becomes a character in its own right.

My only regret is that as much as I admire Bellevue Press for its literary standards, I wish the cover copy for “Tinkers” weren’t so dreary. 

“An old man lies dying,” it begins. “As time collapses into memory, he travels deep into his past where he is united with his father and relives the wonder and pain ….” Sounds like a dozen other books to me, and misses a certain playfulness on Harding’s part. In most deathbed scenes, the soul rises gracefully to heaven, but here the house (which the dying man once built himself)  — in fact everything in his universe — comes crashing down on him.

As walls crack and foundation gives way, George Crosby, a former teacher lying in his rented hospital bed, remembers teaching his grandkids how to staple insulation in place. “Now two or three lengths of it had come loose and lolled down like pink woolly tongues,” along with shattered windows, caved-in ceiling, and “electrical wires that looked like severed veins” to George.   

There is no respite. “The second floor fell on him, with its unfinished pine framing and dead-end plumbing and racks of old coats and boxes.” Now he sees right through a crippled roof as “the clouds halted, paused for an instant, and plummeted onto his head. The very blue of the sky followed…Next fell the stars, tinkling about him like the ornaments of heaven shaken loose. Finally, the black vastation itself came untacked and draped over the entire heap, covering George’s confused obliteration.”

A Seam to Slip Into

But we don’t have time to ponder this hallucination (or true experience?) because Harding suddenly skips back 70 years to introduce us to George’s father, Howard, the tinker of the title. 

Howard is first seen in the 1920s, driving his mule-drawn wagon with its “heavy chest of drawers, each fitted with a recessed brass ring, pulled open with a hooked forefinger, that contained brushes and wood oil, tooth powder and nylon stockings, shaving soap and straight-edge razors.” 

His job is plodding and practical, but Howard is something of a dreamer. In the fall, as his mule, Prince Edward, pulls the cart along the back roads of rural Maine, Howard’s eye is affixed not on the tin buckets, boot strings, nails or child-sized coffins he’s sold but on the “blazing maple leaves” on which all things, for that moment, rest.

Maybe this is a story of how people live in nature, we think, and it is, but there’s much more to it than that. During the winter, Howard visits an aging hermit who lives so deep in the snowbound forests that he has to walk for miles to meet the tinker. Howard watches him emerge from the whiteness like an existential dot  (see cover illustration below) and ponders the blurring of wilderness and humanity.

“No one could imagine how a man could survive one winter alone and exposed in the woods, never mind decades of them. Howard, instead of trying to explain the hermit’s existence in terms of hearth fires and trappers’ shacks, preferred the blank space the old man actually seemed to inhabit; he liked to think of some fold in the woods, some seam that only the hermit could sense and slip into, where the ice and snow, where the frozen forest itself, would accept him and he would no longer need fire or wool blankets, but instead flourish wreathed in snow, spun in frost, with limbs like cold wood and blood like frigid sap.”

The Opposite of Death

If Howard sees the hermit  woven almost literally into the landscape, it’s because his vision has been artfully occluded by nature. Suffering from a severe form of epilepsy, he has become acutely sensitive to the coming of a seizure — his “diet of lightning”: 

“The aura, the sparkle and tingle of an oncoming fit was not the lightning — it was the cooked air that the lightning pushed in front of itself.”

Howard doesn’t remember any of the seizures, but he knows that “his brain nearly fried in its skull pan” during it. It’s as though a door opened to “the star-gushing universe,” and sheer voltage “instantly burst the seams of his thin body.” 

Here, then, epilepsy becomes the lens by which Howard can see, more clearly than people who don’t have the disease, how the universe reclaims the body long before we die. For Howard, in the instant “when the bolt touched flesh…he became pure, unconscious energy. It was like the opposite of death, or a bit of the same thing death was, but from a different direction.”

The mention of death and its opposite provides an early clue to the novel’s huge design. “Tinkers” is  concerned with a meeting of humanity and matter that signals vast and (previously) unknowable change. Because they live in rural Maine, the characters already feel part of nature’s transformations. Time has little chronology until they notice it, and space is as infinite as emotion. 

The few Native Americans left, “as old as light and just as diffuse,” appear briefly as guides between natural and manmade worlds. An Indian emerges out of the forest to repair a birch bark and vanishes without sound or movement. Others are seen only “as silhouettes traced by the sun.” One legendary Native American, long gone, appears when fishermen see him “dart by the water deep beneath their boats, chasing salmon.” 

Reabsorbed Back

And so the young Howard wonders: Did the Indian leave quickly to return to the forest, or was he “reabsorbed back, not only into trunk and root, stone and leaf but into light and shadow and season and time itself.” 

This idea — that death is not an end but a gradual integration of life from one state to another — becomes the novel’s central preoccupation. And it’s not just life – all things are changing, consumed by each other, all of the time, as when Howard finds an old book in an attic: “The dust in the air was made up of the book I found,” he writes in a journal. “I breathed the book before I saw it; tasted the book before I read it.” 

So for inanimate objects, too, there is no such thing as beginning or end, only a constant remixing in which we humans are the lucky ones, Harding seems to say,  because we get to observe.

In the spring, for example, Howard, having stopped his wagon after a snowstorm, gives his mule Prince Edward a carrot and wades into a beautiful field of wildflowers:

“Howard closed his eyes and inhaled. He smelled cold water and cold, intrepid green. Those early flowers smelled like cold water. Their fragrance was not the still perfume of high summer; it was the mineral smell of cold, raw green.” It’s as though we can inhale the very passage of time.

From Infinity to Controlled Time

 “Tinkers” speaks just as eloquently to the fact that we are human, after all, locked into perceived ideas of time and space, trying to control both.  

It’s no coincidence that George, when he retires, turns into an expert tinkerer and repairer of ancient clocks, through which he ponders the phenomenon of controlled time. 

Hundreds of clocks, their inner workings spilled everywhere in the house (the same house that’s ready to collapse on him when his time is over), represent an amazing truth to George – that the power of time can be “tamed by the successive gears, from savage energy to civilized servant, to perform the most rarefied of tasks: namely…to mark precisely each of the 86,400 seconds in our earthly day, and furthermore, to do so for eight days at a time…” 

It takes eight days for a typical hand-wound clock to run out of time, eight days for George to die, and eight days for the time in Harding’s story to run out. Time in this ingenious novel is both clocked and mixed up by vignettes, journals, instruction manuals, observations, meditations and diaries. Tense can change with the next paragraph, as can first- and third- person voices. For a while, it’s hard to know how all the little stories are related to the one big story. 

But that’s the joy of any exquisite mosaic. The placement of each precious gem is so compelling, sometimes so breathtaking, sometimes even life-changing, that we’re content to wait until the grand picture emerges, at last. 

Personal Note

Since reading “Tinkers” I find myself thinking of its images and messages all the time. 

I’ll never go out on a boat again without seeing that Indian chasing salmon under the water. 

When people my age (60+) refer to their bodies as “betraying” them by growing old, I’ll think of the endless reabsorption that’s given new life by our bodies and returns new life when our bodies are born. (This doesn’t help alleviate anxiety about death; it just makes the process more interesting.)

And when someone refers to death as the end, I’ll think of “the opposite of death,” that process in nature that is ongoing and infinite, allowing human beings “fleeting glances”  that “the mystery is ours to ponder.”

Gee, I am still not hearing much enthusiasm from mainstream houses in New York about my idea that book publishers should stop putting out expensive and wasteful hardcover editions at the start of a book’s life and begin with original trade paperbacks instead.

(Here’s how most of the response went: You idiot. Original trade paperbacks are an old and outdated idea. Everybody’s tried it and everybody fails because trade paperbacks don’t get reviewed, don’t make enough profit for booksellers, aren’t taken seriously by TV/radio shows, and are too easily damaged in shipment. Even when they get to bookstores and even when they’re displayed face-up [too rarely!], the covers curl up on the table, so you lose about one out of ten.)

Remember, I’m not talking about established best-sellers that have found an audience willing to pay $30 per copy. I’m talking about books by new authors of midrange or serious literary books who don’t have a marketing budget behind them and can no longer depend on affluent readers who’ll take a chance on unknowns.

A Sales Rep Speaks

So: Do original trade paperbacks ever succeed? Thanks to Lise Solomon, a sales representative for the book distributor Consortium, here is a case in point:

“Last season I sold a first novel (‘Tinkers’  by Paul Harding), which I loved and wanted to make happen in my territory of Northern California. ” ‘Tinkers’  had the help of a Marilynne Robinson blurb on the cover and a great package from the relatively unknown independent publisher, Bellevue Literary Press, which announced the book as a trade paperback original. I had ARCs for key buyers and sold it passionately everywhere I could.

“The buyer at Book Passage in Marin County loved ‘Tinkers’ so much that she asked if there was any way Bellevue could print a hardcover edition for the store’s First Edition Club. The publisher did a short run of 500 copies, which sold out quickly, and ended up printing another 500. Then Powell’s in Portland, Oregon (the Northwest rep loves the book, too) asked about selling its own proprietary hardcover edition, too, and Bellevue printed 750 copies that presold out quickly.

“But most stores responded to the trade paperback. They were willing to bring in 4-12 copies of an unknown author from an unknown press.”

A Classic Case

So here is a classic case of launching a trade paperback from the ground up. The elements are: Passionate sales reps, savvy independent booksellers, a first book that stood up to expectations; and big initial orders (4-12 copies) that, compared to the usual buy for first novels (0-2) involved a risk on everybody’s part.

And if we are to take this story as an omen, it appears  the hardcover audience has boiled down to a collectors’ market that bookstores like Powell’s and Book Passage know how to cultivate.

The chain bookstore reaction, I learned later, was typically haphazard, with Borders coming in for a strong order of 1500 copies and Barnes & Noble making almost no buy at all.

Word Began to Spread

Back to Lise’s story: “The publisher got a grant to bring the author (based in Boston) out for four bookstore signings because of  the initial enthusiasm and because Book Passage needed its hardcover copies signed.

“Word began to spread. The San Francisco Chronicle reviewed it several weeks ago, as did the Los Angeles Times. The Boston Globe reviewed it last weekend, and rumor has it that it will get a New York Times Book Review soon as well.

“The trade paperback has been selling well because of the reviews and because of some passionate booksellers who wrote shelf talkers well enough that Bellevue sold through the first edition of 5000 paperbacks and 500 hardcovers. Bellevue went back to press for BOTH. Those just landed, and we’ve been out of stock for a few weeks, every rep’s nightmare, but I Bellevue is planning for a third printing since over half of the second printing is already sold.”

Is “Tinkers” a fluke or are original trade paperbacks finding a newly receptive place in the world? Lise Solomon says, are you kidding? “This should be the model!”

Looking at The Numbers

I asked Bellevue Press’s editorial director, Erika Goldman (below right), how many copies of the trade paperback edition have been sold since its January publication. She said, “8,000, and we’re about to go back to press a third time for a total in print of 12,500.”

To put that number in perspective, I remember back in the Big Bubble ’80s when the marketing director of Knopf told my colleague Bill Chleboun and me how dispiriting it was to send out a first printing of 3000-3500 hardcovers for first novels and see most of the copies returned in three months.

Even Knopf with its elegant reputation for discovering gifted authors could not generate enough hardcover sales to keep those books from sinking through the slats.  So for Bellevue Press to reach 12,500 in three printings only two months after publication is pretty sensational.

Weaning Off Hardcovers

Could trade paperbacks like “Tinkers” become the norm? Could a publisher just stop publishing hardcovers first, and begin most books’ lives with trade paperback editions?

“I admit it’s taken a while to get the ‘hardcovers first’ notion beaten out of me,” said Erika on the phone from her tiny office at Bellevue Literary Press in New York.

A veteran editor from the mainstream (Simon & Schuster, Charles Scribner’s Sons), Erika added,  “I was raised with the idea that if you don’t publish a hardcover first, you’re not going to get review attention. But distributing with Consortium has taught me a lot. I asked them point blank if there were any books that should be published hardcover first, and they said, ‘Other than art books, not really.’

“So we had the strange experience at Bellevue Literary Press of doing our first fiction books in hardcover because I was trying to wean myself off an old need. From then on we’ve been focusing on publishing fiction in trade paperback exclusively.”

Erika didn’t have to convince an acqusitions committee or pub board to go along with her. With her assistant editor, she is one of two full-time staff members, having co-founded Bellevue Literary Press with Dr. Jerome Lowenstein (below left), a faculty member at New York University School of Medicine, about three years ago.

How Bellevue Started

If you’re wondering whether the “Bellevue” of the title refers to the nation’s first public hospital (the one where all the crazies and the killers allegedly used to go), you’re right: Bellevue Hospital, now 271 years old, is both a general hospital whose ER is filled with patients handcuffed to stretchers and a modern medical center affiliated with the NYU School of Medicine.

For many years, third-year medical students at NYU School of Medicine have been required to write essays about their experiences with patients – not clinical experience, mind you (“3 mg Percodan administered 0500 hours”) but personal experience, the kind that inspired philosophic and poetic meditations.

Over the years these writings have been so eloquent that in 2001, The Bellevue Literary Review was created, consisting of student writings and outside submissions. The BLR, which continues to publish poetry, fiction and nonfiction twice a year, in turn generated discussions about whether NYUSM could publish books, and voila, the Bellevue Literary Press was born in 2007.

Most of Bellevue’s 20+ titles are decidedly not about health advice or medical advancements. (“We don’t publish popular reference titles at all,” says Erika, “only narrative nonfiction and fiction.”) Like the BLR pieces, the titles are loosely related to medicine and other sciences. Manuscripts qualify for submission if they “tell us something about the human condition.”

“Tinkers,” for example, is ostensibly about epilepsy and the way it was treated in the 1920s. But the writing is so dense with ideas that epilepsy is only a lens by which Harding examines much larger issues –  humanity’s bent for harnessing chaos, for example,  and what we learn when order tends to, you know, blow up in our faces.  (See complete and better written review next time.)

Drawing the Reader In

With its look-closer illustration of a distant, lone man walking toward a forest in a vast blanket of snow on the front cover (see above) and praise not only from Marilynne Robinson but Barry Unsworth, Elizabeth McCracken and a starred review from Publishers Weekly on the back, “the package draws people in,” Erika Goldman says, “and when they start reading, they can’t leave.”

Using a hardcover to reach those readers, adds Erika, would have been a mistake. “We think it’s more important to get as many readers as possible, and with the price point for the paperback,  we can still make the book beautiful.

“Bellevue Press titles don’t have to be hardcovers to be appealing objects as books, and we believe very much in the book as a beautiful object. That doesn’t mean we’re not responding to the whole electronic-download world, because we are. But we also want our physical books to be cherished, and you can do that with a beautiful trade paperback.

“So I don’t feel that we’re sacrificing any of our aesthetics by publishing in trade paperback first – I think we’re freeing ourselves up to respond to the market in a way that we can’t as easily when we do hardcover.”

A Loaded Question

I asked Erika this obviously loaded question: “After your many years with mainstream and corporate publishers, do you feel that working out of your tiny office for a tiny independent house has changed the way you think about the book industry?”

“I felt the difference immediately,” she said. “My first BookExpo after the founding of Bellevue Literary Press was like coming home to all the passion and all the quirkiness and all the originality that leads to a lot of unusual titles. For me it’s that counterintuitive energy that book publishing is all about. At BEA it was just so exciting to be in the [small press] aisle rather than running up and down the stodgy, stuffy, uptight, besuited corporate aisles.”

[How I love that word "besuited."]

Still, I said,  Consortium sells a huge number of titles coming from dozens of other presses to quite a number of bookstores. Don’t you worry about Bellevue’s books getting lost in the shuffle?

Erika: “You know what I used to worry about? A lot of jaded people in mainstream publishing who would say, every time you express enthusiasm about your titles, ‘Yeah, well, show me another one. It’s a very different attitude at Consortium, and much more rewarding from my perspective.  I’ve never worked with a sales group that’s more service oriented and responsive and impassioned.

“I’ve always been a mid-list editor so I tend to treat every one of my titles as an individual labor of love. Of course I’ve published books for commercial reasons, but for the most part I’ve worked on lists that I’ve crafted and that have been expressive of my sensibilities and vision. Trying to get attention for that part of the list is never easy, but at Consortium, that’s what they’re about. I don’t have to make excuses for it.”

Erika Goldman adds that she’s not a one-person show. “Our wonderful assistant editor, Leslie Hodgkins, manages much of the list, and we have a fabulous consultant, Janna Rademacher, doing publicity and marketing. I’ve felt it was essential to pursue all phases of the publishing process, especially when so much momentum can get word of this trade paperback out to an audience that will take a chance on it.”

Next column: A review of “Tinkers,” a book that will haunt me as long as I live.

I may end up posing quite a number of Things I’d Love to See in the publishing industry, but a recent email from an editor in New York points out what a tangled knot mainstream publishing has become — too tangled, it seems, to make any substantive changes. 

The editor’s message responds to a recent column about publishers ending the tradition of publishing a book in hardcover first, then waiting a year for the trade paperback (if any). I proposed that publishers start with the cheaper but still beautiful trade paperback edition first. Especially for books by unknown or midlist authors, the already wasteful practice of publishing hardcovers seems senseless.

And now that money is short, readers are far more likely to take a chance on trade paperbacks; book reviewers who used to require hardcovers (honestly! I haven’t heard that one in 20 years) have been overtaken by bloggers who LOVE paperbacks; and since even publishers dismiss hardcovers as “promotional copies for the trade paperback,” my thought is: Just reverse the process.

Here’s what the editor from mainstream house has to say about that: “If you want to push the idea of trade paper originals, perhaps you could examine how authors expectations’ for an advance would have to adjust, and perhaps how publishers might also try more dynamic royalty approaches rather than the industry standard royalty, which is 7.5% for tradepaper.”

Well, okay! I thought. A few adjustments on either side (author/publisher), and off we go. 

But no. It’s not that agents and authors I talked to don’t love the idea – they do. Rather the old suspicions that have been built into an adversarial relationship for centuries come crawling to the fore.

“I’d be fine with it [the idea of publishing trade paperback editions first],” said one agent. “If the publisher offers a bigger advance because after all, the author is taking the risk so the publisher can save money; and if the publisher supports a real marketing campaign that explains to reviewers and booksellers and interviewers why choosing a trade paperback format does not mean the book is substandard (because everybody thinks hardcovers are top of the line), and if the publisher sends the author out on both real and virtual book tours to make it clear the trade paperback form is better when it’s the first off the press, then we’d consider it.” 

Yikes. Well, let’s go back to the publishing side. When I asked the editor to give me an example of “more dynamic royalty approaches” the response was, “I don’t really  have any answers.” And then came the usual criticism:

“The argument for the trade-paperback-only is an old one, and it always starts from the consumers’ point a view. Which isn’t a bad place to start! It doesn’t overcome the structural problems: reviewers favor hardcovers, and some review organs have ruled out paperbacks altogether. Bookstores also tend to favor hardcover display space over paperbacks (note which format comes first as you walk into the store). And the financial model that authors and agents and publishers are used to argues against it: the royalties generate more slowly; the costs are amortized more slowly.”

Well, the booksellers I talked to agree only this far: Everybody makes more money from hardcovers, when they sell. If the books just sit there because nobody knows about them or about the author, no matter how hard the bookstore’s staff gets behind them, sales are hardly going to be brisk. 

“Of course we display hardcovers at the front of the store!” a bookseller said impatiently. “They’re the newest books from the publisher. Then you go to the reprints.”

So here is my problem. Until publishers make an orchestrated and committed (and hyped) effort to change, and appeal to colleagues (not adversaries) in the book trade to change, too, nothing is going to happen. 

(I know the old argument: Joining together to create industry-wide change could be called collusion and we’d all be sued! Okay, so don’t join together. Somebody make a decision. It would take only one of the big houses to start the ball rolling before the other houses would follow. We know this because the model is so familiar:  Whenever some new thing, like say, books with “YOU” in the title, or dogs in the text or vampires on the cover, hits a nerve, then they all do it. That’s the way things work in publishing.)

I’m hardly the first to say that resistance to change is going to be the doom of mainstream publishing. But I admit it’s just beginning to sink in that Internet publishing has taken off so fast that New York publishers may have only five or six years before the empire really starts to crumble. 

Of course they’re all making concessions to new ways of publishing on the Internet, but in terms of setting out those “dynamic new approaches” that are needed right  now – come on, it’s the Obama era, for crying out loud – I worry that a new kind of paralysis is setting in.

Last week’s column about publishing trade paperbacks first and letting them earn their way into hardcover publication (rather than the other way around) brought a delightful and informative email exchange with California writer Lois Levine.

If you read yesterday’s New York Times piece about authors establishing themselves on the Internet by selling enough self-published books to lure New York publishers into offering a contract, here’s how this was done in BC [before computer] times.

The only difference is that Lois and co-author Marian Burros didn’t have a clue to what they were doing, as evidenced by Photo #1.  (Burros went on to write for the old Washington Star and now the New York Times, but that would come much later.)

1) Self-published edition in mimeo

Here’s how the email exchange went after Lois read the column asking publishers to start the publishing process not with hardcovers but with trade paperbacks:

Lois: You are probably not old enough to remember that my first cookbook, “Elegant but Easy,”  was published in paperback by Collier Books (1968). When it became their best-selling book, it  was then brought out in hardcover by Macmillan. It still sells, though Marian Burros and I revised it in 1998 for Simon & Schuster. It has sold more than 500,000 copies.

Pat: Do you remember why Collier started with the paperback? Did S&S start with the hardcover in 1998?

Lois: Collier Books at that time had an idea that they could make a big splash if they brought out lots of paperbacks, so they bought our book as one of 100, I think, that they were going to use in this experiment. When it became their best-selling book, they had their Macmillan division bring it out in hardcover. Yes, Simon & Schuster started the book in hardcover, but now it’s in paperback.

Pat (After I asked her to send photos of the covers): I must say Photo #1 doesn’t look like it came from a New York publisher.

Lois: Right, that is the original, the self-published edition that we mimeographed in my Connecticut basement, collated in my house with the help of my mother and all her friends and sold ourselves with a reorder form in the back. We had sold almost 3000 copies before Collier came to us, having seen some of the publicity we also did on our own. The ’60s were the “do it yourself” days when two naive housewives could actually have a best seller. I often thought our story would be a fine movie with Doris Day playing me.

2) First Collier edition, 1962

Pat: Had you tried to submit the book to mainstream publishers first?

Lois: I could have papered my walls with rejection letters. Even looked into Vantage Press but we were astounded that they wanted US to pay them. They kept sending us special delivery letters reducing the price, but we said no thank you.

It was about two years of rejections before we mimeographed the first 250 copies and thought we would have them for shower gifts, hostess gifts for the rest of our lives. The first batch sold out in 10 days and we then rented an electric mimeograph machine and did 500 copies. After they sold we had them professionally printed  — 1000 at first and then another 1000 before Collier came to us.

Pat: How did you distribute? Did you get the book into any bookstores?

Lois: No, the mimeographed books were sold by word of mouth only as we had a reorder form in the back of the book.

Pat: Did you do any publicity – author appearances, interviews, after Collier picked it up?

Lois: Oh my gawd…did I do interviews: TV on the Joan Rivers show, radio call-in shows in New York (once with Margaret Truman hosting) and DC (where Marian’s husband and mine called in pretending to be disgruntled cooks), years and years of talks to women’s groups all over the country, et

Pat: What did your husbands say when they phoned?

3) Collier’s 6th printing, 1965

Lois: I don’t remember exactly, but they pretended that they had followed a recipe that didn’t work. We recognized their voices, though. It was hard not to laugh as we answered their nonsense questions.

Pat: Do you still make public appearances?

Lois: My favorite story happened a few years ago when I was in New Jersey visiting an old friend. Trader Joe’s had just come to her area, so she asked if I would go with her to point out some of my favorite items.

As we were going down the aisles with my comments, we noticed a woman following us. She got up her nerve to push a jar in front of me to ask if I liked it. My friend Barbara said, “She knows because she is from California and that is where Trader Joe’s began. Anyway she writes cookbooks.”

When the woman asked which one, and Barbara said, “Elegant but Easy,” the woman pointed me out to her friends as “the famous author” and they followed me up and down the aisles as if we were doing a commercial for TJ’s.

Pat: Tell us about the jacket designs over the years.

Lois: The inside was always the same, but publishers kept changing the photo on the cover. They even had one with a picture of a crown roast, although there was never a recipe for it in the book.

A Fine Old Tradition

I have heard stories like this from all over the West for nearly 40 years. They reveal an aspect to book publishing that’s too often forgotten – the love of expressing oneself in writing, the love of publishing from the ground up, the love of family and friends exuberantly creating an actual  publishing bee to get that book out there to like-minded readers.

The self-published version of “Elegant but Easy” doesn’t look very polished, but one feels that love just by looking at the cover. Imagine the power of word-of-mouth that could sell 3000 copies simply through an order form in the back.

Until recently I haven’t heard as many stories like this from Eastern states because the closer one got to what used to be called Publishers Row in New York, the less the impulse to self-publish seemed to occur. Standing in midtown Manhattan with a half-dozen corporate monoliths towering above, it was not easy for an author to think, hey, I can do this on my own.

Perhaps that’s why yesterday’s New York Times made self-publishing sound brand new and dazzling and thriving, which it is of course in its present incarnation of POD (Print On Demand) technology and Internet downloading.

But we shouldn’t forget that self-publishing has been a fine old tradition in many areas of the country, and that the impulse to self-publish is valued because it comes from the heart, from the ideal of many different voices expressing many different ideas, and because sometimes it produces a gem like “Elegant but Easy.”

It’s not that I actually blamed MIchel Korda for robbing editors of their power a few columns ago — rather I attributed the former Simon & Schuster editor-in-chief with causing the anti-editor dominoes to start falling in the 1970s.

Korda was the first influential publishing leader to say that editors at mainstream houses should acquire marketing savvy so they’d get out of their ivory towers and stop mumbling about literary values at sales conference. That fatal push into the commercial domain proved their undoing, I felt. Not to mention the loss of literary standards that had once made hardcover books worthy of their price.

But here is a current editor and publisher (quoted last time) and  “a longtime former colleague of Korda’s” who writes in his defense:

“Dear Pat.

“… Michael Korda can probably speak for himself, but my understanding of his feelings on the subject was that Michael wanted editors to reign supreme – so they needed a range of talents in marketing and deal making to make sure their dominion wasn’t overtaken by these other functions. So I think his intent was to protect the editorial position, not debase it. Of course I knew him at a later stage in his career. Perhaps his thinking evolved.”

I’m glad to hear this point of view, because it sent me back to Korda’s 1999 memoir, Another Life, in which he notes that “wacky ideas proliferated as share prices rose” as early as 1961. Among them: “instead of editors choosing which books to publish by reading them, ’sales experts’ would determine the right ‘product mix’ for each list.”

Korda put himself firmly on the editorial side back then, alarmed that publishers, increasingly sold to corporations, dismissed editorial talent in favor of the more business-oriented marketing departments: “As Wall Street beckoned, [publishers] became even more concerned to show that theirs was … a business for grownups, not one dominated by spoiled children in the form of editors and authors.”

Still, I never thought Michael Korda imagined he was “protecting” anybody but rather that he was tossing out a really bad idea in his typically glib fashion. By the 1970s, he was a major voice in publishing and could have fought for his editors. Instead he stripped them of editorial control and encouraged a caving in or pandering to anything that would make a book sell.

Of all people, Korda knew there was a reason editors were kept separate from marketing for more than a century of publishing history. No editor can help to improve the quality of a serious manuscript and its  sales appeal at the same time. At some point, something’s got to give, and usually it’s the editorial standard by which books are supposed to be chosen in the first place.

Even by the late ’60s, Korda notes that the head of S&S would shut down skepticism about a book’s commercial success from the sales department by saying, “Are you an editor? No. Just sell the goddamn thing.” Korda loved this especially when it was said about his risky purchase of an unknown University of California book, “The Teachings of Don Juan,” which would become a smasheroo for S&S. Later, when Korda believed “the businessmen were taking over” in the early ’70s, he caved.

An Example

The first time I noticed the direct consequence of Korda’s decision occurred in the early ’80’s. Sitting in the office of a literary agent, I happened to notice a letter from a mainstream publishing house on the agent’s desk. The agent went out of the room for a few minutes, and a breeze from the window turned the letter facing my way (I couldn’t read things upside down then) so I found myself, you know, glancing at it.

Signed by the editor-in-chief, the letter conveyed the following:

“We think we would like to make an offer for your client X’s novel but are alarmed by the news of Uncle Henry’s terminal cancer in Chapter One. It seems to us this announcement will depress readers early in the book and alienate the very audience X is hoping to reach.  If X would consider moving Uncle Henry’s news to Chapter 7, we will continue consideration.”

Another paragraph praised the writing and the structure of the novel. Only the matter of moving the cancer diagnosis was at issue. I was horrified. A major publishing house interfering with the author’s decision, not for any literary reason,  only for a blatantly commercial one? This is what happens, I thought angrily, when you make editors develop so-called marketing savvy.

The agent returned, and I didn’t even apologize for reading the letter. “I can’t believe this editor would violate the creative process like this!” I said, champion of author’s sensibilities that I was. “The arrogance of it! How you must dread showing this letter to the author. I’m sure he’ll be furious.”

“Are you kidding?” the agent said. “Why, X would sell his grandmother to get an offer from this house. Of course he’ll make the change.”

So I got a little lesson there (they’ve all caved in!), but the point was, the editor never mentioned what kind of damage (if any, I grant you) moving Uncle Henry out of the first chapter might do to the integrity of the book.

I know that editors make far more intrusive demands today. Or they’ll say flat-out that the book is good – even that it deserves to be published – but they  can’t make an offer because the house can’t sell it. (The word “sell” was never conceded to be a factor years ago.)  Or they do make an offer but are reversed by the ubiquitous “pub board,” a group that’s also dominated by marketing people and concerns.

So I don’t blame Korda per se. But if he was hoping to “protect” editors by encouraging them to think of marketing and editorial concerns at the same time, he only accelerated their eventual demise.