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On to Book Two
My first novel, Ten Girls to Watch, comes out July 31. The last few months I worked on it were heavenly. I spent my days fixing sentences and making tiny plot tweaks, swapping thoughts and revisions with my wonderful editor, Sarah Cantin. She seemed to like my every change almost as much as I liked hers, and even the smallest of our adjustments felt like vast improvements. The book got so much better. We reveled in it. But that was then, and now, instead of the end, I’m back at the beginning, starting novel number two. How exciting! How terrible.
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The Art of the Deal
When your publisher puts up the dough to send you on a 20-city national book tour, they’re expecting you to transform yourself from a hermitic wordsmith into a traveling salesman.
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Listening to Your Readers
Listening to your readers is a good thing to do. Trying to please them all is something else entirely.
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Of Decisions and Dream Chasing
After publishing his first book himself, an author wonders if he will do it again.
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Reviewing the Reviews
When my first book was published, I decided not to read the reviews. Why give strangers the power to uplift or shatter my spirits? I’d take the high road, the spiritual path. Actually, I was terrified of the media interviews to come and knew they’d be hard enough to muscle through without someone’s criticisms swirling in my head.
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How The Mysterious Bookshop Competes with Amazon
Like many bookstores aboard the Titanic of independent bookselling, the Mysterious Bookshop hit the Amazon iceberg a few years ago. More accurately, it hit us, and we’ve been doing everything short of throwing women and children out of lifeboats, to avoid drowning in the icy waters of insolvency.
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Making Fair Use More Fair
I miss Ayn Rand. Actually, I miss her voice in my new book. And I blame copyright law.
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The Rise of Daddy-Fic
The stage is set for a daddy-fiction movement. It’s time for dads to say what they need to say about child care, stereotypes, and other dads who won’t change dirty diapers.
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What the ‘Y.M.C.A.’ Decision Means for Publishing
Lloyd Jassin is an intellectual property attorney who writes on contract, copyright, and trademark issues affecting the book publishing industry.
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Writing for Hi-Lo Readers
Stephanie Perry Moore has written more than 50 inspirational novels, including Saddleback Educational Publishing’s new Lockwood Lions flip-book series, which was coauthored with Moore’s husband, former NFL football player Derrick Moore.
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Disintermediating Amazon
More readers than ever are reading more books than ever. Yet for more than two decades now, for at least as long as I’ve been in publishing––and certainly preceding the rise of Amazon––the lamentations of publishers and storeowners have filled the land. There have been little blips along the way when things seemed to be looking up—a Harry Potter series here, an Oprah Winfrey selection there—but overall it’s been a long, sad decline. We’ve been an industry of enablers: giving huge discounts to mollify ailing stores; overstocking books to mollify ailing publishers. The outcome, more often than not, has been and continues to be shelf space stuffed with unsold product and massive returns. A very few benefit while almost everyone else involved, be they retailer, author, or publisher, suffers.
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Evolving with the Industry
When I first entered the publishing industry back in 2006 as an author, there was still a giant chasm separating print and digital authors. The “digital books aren’t real books” mindset was still firmly in place, and even today, that lingers.
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A Man of Vision
Brian Gibson, CEO of the supplier of the ubiquitous supply chain system commonly referred to as Vista, died on April 22 after a 14-month fight against cancer. Most people in publishing will probably not know of Brian, but his impact on the industry over the past 30 years, in both the U.K. and the U.S., was profound.
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Looking for a Ghost
I’ve ghosted books on nearly every conceivable subject. The first question every new ghostwriting client asks is, “Are you an expert or do you know anything about [fill in the blank]?” My answer is almost always the same: “No.”
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The Upside of the DoJ Lawsuit
Sometimes we need to be pushed to do what is best for us. That certainly appears to be the case with the publishers’ business model for e-books and its competitive strategy with Amazon.
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The Sophomore Novel
This summer, I’m learning to ride a motorcycle. I plan to jump it through a flaming hoop at my book party.
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People to People = Sales
A fascinating experiment in bookselling was recently launched in Tokyo: Daikanyama T-Site, created by Tsutaya, one of Japan’s leading bookstore chains. Unlike most of its stores, which are pulsating, neon-lit urban hubs where you can buy books, magazines, coffee, and DVDs till late at night, Daikanyama is more sedate, with glass walls, weathered wood floors and shelves, with a target audience of the over-50s, or what the Japanese call the “silver market.”
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‘Could You Personalize That?’
At a book fair I once signed two books to “Tom.” Tom turned out to be “Rod.” Rod refused my offer to sign new books for him. With a malicious grin, Rod said he planned to show my bloopers to his friends as evidence of our close personal friendship.
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Finding a Gateway to Audio
Maris Kreizman is audiobooks editor at eMusic, a music and audiobooks digital retailer.
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Finding the Truth in Fiction
In a recent New York Times T magazine article, Holly Brubach, a writer I admire and a friend of Tanaquil Le Clercq, took umbrage at my audacity for depicting the life of the late great ballerina and fifth wife of George Balanchine in my forthcoming novel, The Master’s Muse. Brubach contends that fiction which imagines the lives of “real, usually famous people” aren’t novels at all, but a sort of lesser form, “custom-made for a culture fixated on celebrity.” Examples she cites are Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife: A Novel and Ann Beattie’s Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life. I assume she would include Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife and Nancy Horan’s Loving Frank, two recent books in the category that have captivated many readers.
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