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What I Learned from James Patterson
I’ve been lucky enough to write with James Patterson for the past two and a half years.
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Reading Books in L.A.
When I tell people about my book club—started by my mother, held at the local community center, and open to the public—the conversation sometimes grinds to a halt, ending in a semi-uninterested, “That’s so sweet, you and your mom.”
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Doing 50,000 Words in 30 Days
As you read this 750-word essay, I’ll be taking a nap.
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The Best Route for Authors to Take (When Signs Ahead Say ‘Merge’)
There has been a lot of discussion, predictions, and all kinds of rumblings since the recent announcement of the upcoming merger of Random House and the Penguin Group.
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Judging the Awards
Award season is here and along with the celebrations come the mutterings and complaints.
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Amish Reading List
“What do the Amish think about your books?” That question gets tossed at me whenever I’m at a book event, and the answer isn’t all that surprising.
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The Joy of Shared Reading
Books and conversations about them have always been an important part of my life. Reading books provides us with the opportunity to reflect, immerse ourselves in cultures beyond our own borders, and affords us the occasion to consider ourselves in the context of the generations who have come before.
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Too Much Information
An old adage says the role of literature is to delight and to instruct, but contemporary novels often seem more intent on instruction than pleasure. It’s a confusion of veracity with authenticity, a reluctance to let a novelist’s research stay where it belongs—in the background of the book, if it’s in the book at all.
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The Erasure of Liu Xiaobo
When the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature was announced in the early morning of October 11, I met the news with worry.
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Keeping It Real
We’ve always had a problem with “fake.” Whether it was a fake Kate Spade handbag or a knockoff clothing line, fake has always been a part of our culture. Most of us can spot fake. Fake, however, is not limited to fashion anymore. Fake and counterfeit have begun to permeate the publishing industry. We’ve seen knockoff titles like 35 Shades of Grey, but now there’s a new wrinkle: fake reviews. Studies have shown that most people used to believe consumer reviews. Not so much anymore, especially when reviews can be bought, or in some cases, simply faked. The message seems to be: if you want to get noticed, you’d better be prepared to “fake it.”
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Bending Over Backwards
On a February evening in 2010, I stood in an oversized, overheated exercise studio in lower Manhattan. From my vantage point near the corner, I gaped as a sea of people—mostly women in their 20s and 30s—balanced exquisitely on the ball of one foot: thigh crossed over thigh, foot wrapped around ankle, arms intertwined before their chests. Suddenly, in unison, they descended into a perfect, unwavering, one-legged squat.
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A Story of Hope
The year I became a literary agent, an independent press published my first children’s book. Now, seven years later, the same press has published my second children’s book. But this is not a column about an agent who is learning how tough it is to be an author. This is about something else.
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Promote, Promote, Promote
When I signed my debut novel, The Angels’ Share, with Winter Goose, a small press, I knew that a healthy share of marketing and promotion would be my responsibility. Not a huge surprise—small houses don’t have a lot of resources to throw at literary fiction. But what was surprising was that when I spoke with others who’d signed with larger publishers, I kept hearing that unless their book was “Big” (and sometimes even if it was), the authors still had to do most of the nitty-gritty publicity themselves.
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How to Wholesale E-books
Although the Apple, Macmillan, and Penguin lawsuit is still pending, now that the court has approved the Department of Justice settlement terms with Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster and the termination of their agency pricing contracts, all publishers will no doubt be revisiting their e-book pricing models.
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Seduction and Serendipity
In 1987, when I was an undergraduate, I was browsing in a bookshop in Cambridge, England, when a book (one copy, spine out, on a shelf in the back of the store) caught my eye: Some Girls, Some Hats and Hitler by Trudi Kanter. It was a self-published memoir which, unusually for such a thing, had made its way into a mainstream bookshop—I can only imagine that the title had caught the buyer’s attention, as it had mine.
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A Novelist In Two Languages
I came to the United States in 1996 on a scholarship that sent me to Buffalo, N.Y. I was eager to take a creative writing class, something that didn’t exist in Germany, and so I started writing fiction and poetry in English. My Austrian roommate and I agreed to stop speaking German to each other. I kept family calls to a minimum, purged all German books and magazines from the house, and read Kafka in English translation. Memories of past conversations came to me translated—my parents admonished and scolded in perfect English.
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Seven at One Blow
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised when something peculiar happened in my seventh year as an editor at Orca Book Publishers. After all, seven is a magical number in fairy tales, and Orca is a children’s book publisher. There are seven continents, seven oceans, seven Harry Potter books. So, Why not a series of kids books about seven cousins? When my publisher, Andrew Wooldridge, asked me to edit “the magnificent seven,” my first question was “How many are we going to publish per season?” His answer: “All seven in October 2012.” I wanted to yell, “Are you insane?” but that’s not the kind of thing you say to your boss.
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Before There Was Grey, There Was Rose
It was 1998, the dark ages in publishing.
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Watch What You Write
As publicity director at three well-known presses and a book industry professional for over 15 years, it perplexes me a bit that topics once exclusive to industry insiders (and still almost exclusively addressed solely by publishers per standardized procedures, mechanisms, and even contractual agreements) are now being bandied about on author blogs, author Twitter feeds, and even via author-written articles on trade news sites. Being an avid reader and a huge admirer of authors—make no mistake about it, they’re a primary reason why I’ve devoted my career to doing what I do—the present online-I-can-say-anything-because-I’m-a-published-author environment we now live in makes me a little disappointed.
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In Search of the Perfect Blurb
It seems marketing books in the 21st century is harder than ever. There are fewer bookstores to reach out to, and so much shopping is done online. How can a publisher help launch a first novel from a promising writer? Like we did way back in the 20th century, we provide advance reading copies to reviewers, sales reps, and key buyers. We use more modern methods—making e-ARCs available, reaching out to bloggers, and using Facebook and Twitter to connect directly with consumers.
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