The Publishing Contrarian

“Scan this Book!” was the title of Kevin Kelly’s feature article and “manifesto” in the The New York Times Magazine on May 14th. The article was about Google’s hell-bent-for-leather scan-athon of the books from five major research libraries and what this massive effort portends for the world (a digital universal library), for publishers (business model implosion) and for authors (books as loss leaders).

• For the world at large, the digital Universal Library will rescue long-neglected, long-lost, and long-forgotten books: that’s good. I’m all for the UL or DUL. The scope dazzles me. Even though I am one of the “well-booked” per Bill McCoy, GM of Adobe’s e-publishing business, I want the info of the world a click away and I want to be able to drill down until the bit snaps. Beyond my own egocentricity, I empathize with the “billions of people world-wide who are underserved” by having limited or no access to books, but can boot up a computer. Here, let me contribute my old books, those written by me and those on my shelf. Let me read the “marginalia” (is that a word you can say in mixed company?) that Kelly predicts will make my books even more valuable to the world. Let me click away madly and locate 32 million books, 750 million articles and essays that humans have published, as the article says, “since the days of Sumerian clay tablets.”
• As a result of the impending business-model implosion, the inflexible, traditional publishing industry will be sidelined: that’s their personal problem. Free online books on Web sites, in publishing blogs and in The Universal Library will require that the industry trash its stone-age business model and stop throwing good money after bad to shore up the crumbling status quo. All the free books online right now — not to mention the prospect of 32 million free books online — should have Peter W. Olson, Jane Friedman, Jack Romanos and David Young, Presidents and CEOs of Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Hachette, respectively, marshalling the troops, not circling the wagons. “Publishers, be very, very afraid,” the editor of The New York Times Magazine warns on the front cover.
• Authors will now have the opportunity to capitalize on having written a book, rather than being forced to rely exclusively on paltry royalties: that will be reward enough, and those rewards can be enormous. “Digital technology has now disrupted all business models based on mass-produced copies, including individual livelihoods of [authors].” The publish or perish crowd in science, medicine and academe write books for credibility building and ivory tower scaling. Business people who write books about their industry want a published “leave behind” to get a leg-up on the competition. Sure, they’d like to make money off the sale of individual copies of their book, but that is a secondary goal. As free online publishing spreads and The Universal Library grows, the author who writes a book with the primary goal of selling tens of thousands of copies is going to find a smaller and smaller paying audience. But writing books has its rewards, even if not one copy of the book is sold. For some authors like Val Landi, selling the movie rights to his book A Woman from Cairo may be the biggest and best payoff. Cathy West, a Bermudian author who writes for the Christian market and has bimonthly chapters of Just a Little Walk on her Web site, may or may not make money directly from sales of her book, but she may be rewarded in some other way, tangibly or intangibly, in some manner or another, as she casts her bread upon the water. Steve Clackson, although he was absolutely pilloried by a few writers critiquing his novel, Sand Storm, two weeks ago after he posted a few chapters of his book online, may not ever find a traditional publisher, but writing a book and self-publishing online may get his book picked up by the Universal Library, eventually, and who knows, maybe his fortune lies in some anti-terrorism-related venture or screen writing assignment in Hollywood. The Wicked Witch of Publishing is happy to have written three nonfiction books ages ago and to have been “well-published” by HarperCollins, St. Martin’s Press, Pocketbooks, Berkley Books and a variety of foreign publishers, because it helps her land big contracts for big bucks in the corporate world, and it makes her, shallow creature that she is, so bewitching at cocktail parties.

Perhaps it is time to demand a reversal of rights right now for midlist, backlist and deadlist books that publishing companies have dismissed, neglected, forgotten and allowed to go out of print. These old books and still new books languishing in the bowels of some distribution center, could be freely and generously given to the Universal Library for scanning (copyright waived!) and be one-click-available to all potential readers, literally forever.

Perhaps ignoring the traditional publishing companies as they skip merrily along their own well-trod path to who knows where is the best approach.

Perhaps all those writers who faced the patient blank page everyday and nevertheless created a living, breathing book, but couldn’t find a traditional publisher, should self-publish right now online, and reap some of those rewards that are just out there ready to be discovered. 

Note from the Wicked Witch of Publishing: Leave your email address if I don’t already have it! I try to send a quick email out when I put up a new posting. Also, the Wicked Witch of Publishing is up to no good! Again! If you are a first-time author with a manuscript languishing in the slush pile, definitely leave your email address so the Wicked Witch can get in touch with you to help you with a new service she is offering in a week or two. (Click on “Email” under “Pages” on the sidebar).

Something memorable happened to me years ago in a bookstore in the ocean resort of East Hampton, NY. No, it wasn’t meeting Peter Mathiessen (a founder of ”The Paris Review” and recipient of the National Book Award for The Snow Leopard) rearranging the display of his amazing trilogy Killing Mr. Watson, Lost Man’s River and Bone by Bone. Nor was it bumping into Billy Joel in the addictions section. I encountered what I think is that rare bird, a “handseller.” Why so memorable? Because if that’s what it was, I haven’t seen one since.

It was summer and I decided to read as many books as I could about the Vietnam War while rotating in the sun at Georgica Beach. I’d pushed through Winston Groom’s Forrest Gump and Better Times Than These, John Del Vecchio’s The 13th Valley, Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War, Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, Michael Herr’s Dispatches, and was searching the local bookstore for Francis Fitzgerald’s Fire in the Lake. At some point a young woman, who had been sorting and shelving books when I walked in, turned to me and offered to help. When I mentioned Fire in the Lake, she knew immediately that the bookstore didn’t have a copy. After we chatted briefly about the books in which I was interested, she offered to order Fire in the Lake or any other book I thought I might like to read on the subject of Vietnam, and she made some recommendations about additional titles. I told her not to bother to order Fire in the Lake. I thought I’d just pick up a copy at the B&N on Fifth Avenue and 17th Street in New York City. 

About three weeks later, I walked back into BookHampton. This same woman was sitting at the cash register. When she saw me, she lit up, reached under the counter, pulled out a book and waved it at me. You guessed it: Fire in the Lake! She hadn’t known my name. She hadn’t known if I’d ever be back in the store, but she had special ordered this book and reserved it for me: “Save for tall woman with great tan.” I bought the book. Handseller? 

Before I switched over to the business side of publishing, I’d just finished my third nonfiction book and completed a 16-city tour organized by St. Martin’s Press. No matter how tired and disoriented I was on this tour—running from TV show to radio station to local newspaper to airport—I managed to locate the local bookstores and do what every other author does: sneak around, look for my titles, and turn them cover face out. (Guilty, as charged!) Not once during that entire process did anyone ever walk up to me and offer to help me find a book.

Lo, these many years later, I can honestly say my experience in quaint BookHampton remains unique, unless you want to count the time I stumbled across a shelf filled with employee recommended books in Barnes & Noble on Sixth Avenue in New York City. Each book had a brief, handwritten synopsis and a few personal comments about why this book was so liked by the employee. I bought Mikal Gilmore’s Shot in the Heart through the recommendation of what I’ll describe as a variation of handseller. Shot in the Heart was a gripping book and a real page turner. It was written by Gary Gilmore’s younger brother. You remember Gary Gilmore? He requested a firing squad for his execution…and he got just what he asked for. Last time I looked, that shelf was gone.

Wandering a bookstore, clearly looking like I am browsing for something appealing, should bring a handseller trotting over. (I’d even welcome a recommendation for another book at point-of-sale.) I’m just not sure what one looks like because sightings are as rare as those of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker in Arkansas. I’ve heard they exist, but the sightings are suspect. I don’t come across them in the independent bookstores and I certainly never see them in the bookstores like Barnes & Noble or Borders. In fact, I have to track those guys down and wrestle them to the floor if I want help, then it’s: ”Let me check the computer to see if we have it…. Next customer.” 

Actually, come to think of it, I was a handseller once! I was nosing through the display of new fiction titles at B&N alongside two women about my age who were trying to figure out what to buy for one of their mothers. I reached for Isabel Allende’s Daughter of Fortune and said, “My mother just loved this book.” Sold!

Frazer Dobson of Park Road Books in Charlotte, North Carolina, may disagree with me, as might Robert Gray, formerly of Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vermont. I don’t doubt that these extraordinary book buyers epitomize the definition of handseller, but my personal experience leads me to believe that handsellers are on the endangered species list, and very close to extinction.

Note from the Wicked Witch of Publishing: Leave your email address if I don’t already have it! I try to send a quick email out when I put up a new posting. Also, the Wicked Witch of Publishing is up to no good! Again! If you are a first-time author with a manuscript languishing in the slush pile, definitely leave your email address so the Wicked Witch can get in touch with you to help you with a new service she is offering in a week or two. (Click on “Email” under “Pages” on the sidebar).

What a beautiful place, I thought, as I walked into The Carnegie Club in New York City. Great selection for a quiet meeting to “dis” and “dish” about online publishing, writers, editors, authors, the publishing industry, independent bookstores, Barnes & Noble and Borders. What better source of insider information is there than Ron Hogan, all 6’4” of him? He and his colleague Sarah Weinman crank out the kind of information that has made them the first click in the morning for those who know and those who want to know what’s going on in the publishing industry right now.

From about a half-a-block away I saw Ron waiting politely outside The Carnegie Club. Thank goodness, I thought. It’s always a relief to me not to walk into a bar alone and decide whether to stand self-consciously by the coat check or slip onto a bar stool and hope (particularly at 4:30 in the afternoon) that no one thinks I’m there for a jump on happy hour.

“Funny kind of a smoky smell in here,” I commented to the waiter as he escorted Ron and me to a cozy, quiet corner near the windows overlooking West 56^th Street. “That is because,” the waiter said, “you’re in a cigar bar.”

That’s a “second,” I thought, having wandered into my first cigar bar recently with a cigar smoking friend in Sag Harbor, NY. I actually love the smell of most cigars and my head snaps up at the scent of that cherry tobacco with which men used to fill their pipes before pipe smoking fell out of favor and cigarette smoking was banned almost everywhere—except cigar bars.

So Ron and I hunkered down, with him smoking his cigar and me smoking by proximity, drawing in all the second hand smoke I could get.

Ron and I talked about a lot of things, many of which I plan to blog about. He’s headed for Washington, DC and BEA–BookExpo America—which is billed as “the largest event serving the book market in the world.” I’m thinking about going. I have it on good authority (Ron’s) that press passes are given out liberally to bloggers who blog about books and the publishing industry. I might ride the rails from NYC to DC and spend a few days networking and loading up on free books, though you can only carry and then read so many books. Frank Wilson, The Philadelphia Inquirer’s book review editor and Books Inq. blogger, also asked if I am I going. So, I’m thinking about it. I’m tempted.

We also talked about the Indian princess who has fallen from grace. I still feel so bad that the disgrace of this will haunt Kaavya Viswanathan for the rest of her life. She didn’t think about that when she cadged more than a few lines from Megan McCafferty’s books. Kaavya is much too young to understand the stigma of being caught cheating. She should have a chat with Senator Ted Kennedy about his Harvard experience. (People may not talk about it, but they always remember, and if they forget, believe me, someone will remind them, whether it’s one year or thirty years from today. Look, I just mentioned Senator Kennedy. If you don’t know what I am talking about, it won’t take you long to find someone who does.) And call me just too empathetic, but I can only imagine what her family is going through: Higher than high one minute on the glory brought to the family and then ….

We talked about “real” salaries in publishing and how much people really make given the hours editors, for example, spend working in the office and working at home at night and over the weekend. I have it on good authority (mine) that in the city most senior editors max out at about $75,000 or $6250/month and then fall into the 25-28% tax bracket. (That’ll make you borrow receipts from a friend!) Seventy-five thousand, by the way, is considered a very good salary in publishing. I’m not talking about the publishers and I’m not talking about the “star” editors making a few hundred thousand or several hundred thousand dollars a year. I’m talking about someone who has an adequate track record of successes and has been around for a while, doing creative quitting along the way to squeeze a two- or three-thousand-dollar raise out of the next publishing company. I don’t know any editor who works only a 38 or 40 hour week. My guess is that many editors work a 50-60+ work week. How much are they making when you factor in all those hours? How much do they have to live on? In New York City a one-bedroom apartment is renting for about $2300 - $2500/month. Throw in a garage (outdoor or indoor, side street, not avenue) and you can add $350-$400/month. No wonder editors walk around with the lining of their pockets hanging out and eyes dialated and fixed from exhaustion.

Ron and I talked about driving traffic to websites and blogs. Mediabistro’s Galleycat.com has the publishing industry pacing outside its door at dawn each morning.  Thousands of people drop by each day. I do, too. I’d be interested to know how galleycat.com and publishersweekly.com compare in unique hits each day. (Notice I am saying unique hits, not just hits. There’s a difference: the former being someone entering the blog, the latter being the number of pages viewed by the former.) Of course, it’s none of my business, but that doesn’t usually stop me from asking!

Nice chat with Ron! Two drinks (Ron), two diet cokes (the Wicked Witch of Publishing), two cigars (Ron) and an entire bowl of mixed nuts (the Wicked Witch of Publishing) and we parted at the corner of 56^th and Seventh avenue. Ron headed uptown and I headed for the play Shining City with Oliver Platt on Broadway.

The next morning when I woke up, I thought: WHAT IS THAT STINK! I sniffed around the apartment, but the stink was everywhere. Actually, it seemed like it was following me. Of course, it was my hair! It reeked of cigar smoke and the pile of clothes thrown on the chair in the corner of the apartment stank, too. No wonder people seated next to me at the play were leaning as far away from me as possible and seemed to have hankies over their noses much of the time. No wonder on the subway ride home people slid a little bit away on the seat.

Next time, Ron, I’m picking the place–a juice bar.

Note from the Wicked Witch of Publishing: Leave your email address if I don’t already have it! I try to send a quick email out when I put up a new posting. Also, the Wicked Witch of Publishing is up to no good! Again! If you are a first-time author with a manuscript languishing in the slush pile, definitely leave your email address so the Wicked Witch can get in touch with you to help you with a new service she is offering in a week or two. (Click on “Email” under “Pages” on the sidebar).

At last, a play on Broadway that is something other than pap for the suburban housewives and their nodding, snoring husbands. Of course, I knew my window of opportunity to get tickets would be about thirty seconds once the rave review came out in The New York Times, but a quick call, a hard negotiation over the tickets ($96.00? I think not!) and, voila, I had my two $46.25 “mezz” e-tickets appear on my computer screen.

I also telephoned my English friend Bridget and suggested she join me. (Her manuscript, What’s Mine is Yours, is sitting on an editor’s desk at a major publishing house.) I thought she might enjoy a respite from being on her knees 24/7 and reciting all those Hail Marys about a potential contract that would change her life forever. I was right. She loved the idea of seeing an Alan Bennett play.

What a crowd! What a scramble to push our way to our seats. I cannot think of a time in recent memory when I have seen a “standing room only” crowd in a theatre in New York City, let alone three rows deep. It’s been years, and back then, the SRO crowd was always seedy looking students, waving discounted tickets, and hoping at intermission to slip unnoticed into an unoccupied seat. Not tonight, believe me, every seat was taken. Indeed, the entire crowd was upscale, refined looking and, how shall I say this, clearly very diverse in its sexual proclivities.

It was a good thing Bridget came with me so she could translate. This play was in English, right? “I’m from the south of England, and I’m having trouble understanding these boys.” Throw a layer of schoolboy French onto the north-of-England-speak for twenty-minutes at the near-beginning of the play, and the Wicked Witch of Publishing couldn’t laugh uproariously in the right places, unlike all those guffawing expats in the audience. 

How small were people in 1917 when The Broadhurst Theatre first raised its curtain? Not only had I landed us in the second-to-last row of the mezzanine, far right, but the seats were better sized for Lilliputians than the well-fed, much taller crowd that was jammed cheek-to-jowl and knee-to-seat. I’m not sure whose pocket I slipped my hand into—mine or his—while seeking a tissue, but I murmured an apology anyhow, and he accepted it.

Intermission? A madhouse! Let’s go! I clambered over my neighbors and headed into the thick of it, only to be stopped mid spiral staircase by an imperious, ferret-faced usher demanding that people get off the staircase. No glass of wine for the Wicked Witch to while away fifteen minutes while cruising for celebrities and potential interviewees for The Publishing Contrarian. As I pressed my back to the wall and inched my way carefully up the staircase, masses of smartly dressed women elbowed and shoved past each other to reach their ultimate goal–the toilet, loo, WC, powder room in the basement. Casting a glance back over the crowd in the main lobby and then down into the orchestra section where many people were still seated, I had but one thought: firetrap.

I loved The History Boys, even if I couldn’t understand every word of the dialogue. I loved it because it wasn’t the usual, superficial, let’s-aim-for-the-lowest-common-denominator-theatre-goer production. I loved it because I was cast back a million years to listening to recitations of Auden, Hardy and Housman. If the boys had mentioned Chaucer, I would have leapt to my feet and recited the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Yes, the first 18 lines and, yes, in olde English. (Hah! Suddenly, a newfound respect for that decrepid, spinster teacher, Miss Spence!)

A New York City crowd doesn’t waste much time on clapping. Even at the opera, where curtain calls keep going on and on ad nauseam and standing ovations are de rigueur, the crowd is hightailing it from the first bow. We’re just that way! I loved it. Let’s get outta here! At the conclusion of The History Boys, a few people gave a standing ovation, but the majority of us just clapped really enthusiastically and then skedaddled for the local parking lots, limos and subways. (Perhaps the more polite Brits stayed on a bit longer or followed the cast to Angus McIndoe, the Broadway hangout mentioned in The New York Times.) Denizen of the subway that I am, I peeled off from the high-end crowd and hopped the Broadway Local. I headed downtown, clutching my Playbill and recalling memorized verses from Kipling and Donne, and great lines from Shakespeare.

I’m heartened and, yet, disheartened by the results of my survey: I did cast a slightly “different” net for my survey: I included Web friends, personal friends, strangers appearing in group emails I received from friends, and fellow-volunteers at New England English Springer Spaniel Rescue. Referrals from other blogs trickled in for a look-see, and comment, as well. (Thank you to everyone who stopped by! My “visitor counter” was whirring madly again!) Here’s my armchair analysis of my straw pole:

1. What books are you and your family actively reading? We read, and read a lot. Well, YOU read a lot. It’s clear I’ve got to put my foot through the TV, stop blogging obsessively, or go on a long vacation to an isolated, electricity-free beach to match the ferocious pace of reading that seems to be going on. However, I think we have a dirty little secret about what we are reading and we don’t want to fess up. What I should have asked for question #1 was: What highbrow and lowbrow books are you reading? I, too, committed a sin of, shall we say, title omission. Yes, I do have The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri ready to read, but I also have Marley & Me by John Grogan in my stack, too. (I’m hanging my head. Yes, I guess, I’m a literary snob and the occasional, but very closeted, trash reader.) When Frazer Dobson doubled back after seeing my comment asking why none of the best-sellers were on anyone’s list, he, too, admitted to, gasp, reading Stephen King! So I am going to chalk up all of those responses to: Legamus – we read, indeed we do, and leave it at that.
2. Were any of these books from online, self-publishing companies such as iuniverse or lulu? Discouraging news here. No. No. No. No. No. So many No’s. Frazer Dobson’s comment in the previous post should be read carefully by all self-published authors. Frazer is a bookseller. He finds self-published books generally poorly written and poorly edited, if edited at all. And are we really surprised that the general reading public (not the rabid blogging, Web surfing survey takers here) looks blank when I mention iuniverse or lulu? It takes a lot of marketing to reach outside the Internet and drag people in. A company’s reach is only as far as its marketing arm can throw the ball. They have to be throwing the ball and not just satisfied with making money off of desperate, unpublished or unpublishable  (sorry!) authors. The Casual Count: 22 no/3 yes.
3. Were any of your books free, online books in PDF format? No. No. No. No. No.  So many more no’s. So rarely had anyone read an online book, and then not complained about how uncomfortable it was to be facing the computer screen, it became clear that these folks would much rather have been reading in bed, pajama tops covered in chocolate chip cookie crumbs, and a nice glass of warm milk on the beside table. And the question I might have included was: Did you read these online books to the end? I just finished reading A Half Life of One online, and I tell you it was torture to sit on my swivel chair, pitching forward and backward, resting my elbows on the desk or half-sliding off the chair for the hours it took to read that book–good (and horrifying!) though it was. The Casual Count: 22 No/4 yes. 
4. Did any of your books come from seeing author websites? This count looks a little better, but when you look closer, you see that, again, it’s the literary blogging community checking out each other’s Web sites, introducing themselves to each other; in short, marketing themselves to each other, and not reaching the general buying public at all. I’ve heard a lot about Val Landi and the success he has with A Woman from Cairo on his Web site. (Val and I are trying to get together in NYC.) Val Landi recommends an independent Web site for all authors. He wants authors to refinance their houses, sell their first-born, and do whatever it takes to have a presence on the web. Is he taking into account that authors may not have his Harvard MBA background, or his resources, or his commercial drive, or his ability to work with Web designers? The Casual Count: 22 No/7 yes.
5. Were any of these books purchased directly from Random House, Simon & Schuster, William Morrow, Knopf or Rodale’s online bookstore?  Nusquam, nihilum, nihil. No. Publishing executives howl with laughter about the ridiculousness of lowly authors self-publishing and making feeble attempts to promote their own books into something other than oblivion through personal Web sites, iuniverse or lulu. (Scoff, scoff.) But look! Publishing companies now have their very own vanity Web sites and are making feeble attempts to promote “their own” books into something other than oblivion through their own in-house, online bookstores. In some ways I find humor and not a little irony in this: Big, beautiful Web sites are launched without fanfare, maintained at great cost, and run by people obviously incapable of figuring out how to market the Web page to the buying public. Dare I point out that there are good and even GREAT books on these million dollar Web sites, and no one is buying from them? (With a million dollars, I can think of a million ways to reach the buying public and drag them to a publishing company’s Web site instead of letting them go to Barnesandnoble.com or Amazon.) The truth is, publishing companies don’t really care about their online sites. Authors’ online Web sites are a measure of desperation and determination. Publishing industry vanity Web sites are the sweet “arm candy” of self-satisfied, powerful, older, rich guys on 345’ yachts pulling up to dock at Little Palm Island: irrelevant, but pretty, and good for the ego.

If you feel like entering the confessional and revealing your secret passion for trash books, feel free to list them (anonymously if you must!) in the comments section below.

Thanks to everyone for dropping by over the past few days! Here’s some more limp-along Latin: Come back soon…Redeo nunc!

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How to Get on the Wicked Witch of Publishing (TM) Email List: Send an email if you want to be notified when a new posting goes live. Just go to the top of the right-hand sidebar, click on “EMAIL,” and fire away. Your email address will be stored.

Target: Blog-trotters, Internet passersby, New England English Springer Spaniel Rescue, my entire address book, all those people from whom I receive massive group emails that contain dumb or funny jokes, photos, chain-link emails, or another Dr. Phil survey (I scored 48, thank you, on the latest one)–and every single name within the group email, whether I know who these people are or not.

Objective: Well, we read, therefore we should be surveyed, but I, for one, never have been, nor have I ever heard of anyone I know being surveyed about his or her book buying habits. Let’s cast our own net and see if we can draw some independent conclusions ourselves about the state of online publishing and where we should be putting our efforts and our money. 

Could I ask you to take the survey and write your answers in the comment section below? Comments, by the way, don’t get posted until after I read them so I can delete the weird and the spam. 

Setting the Survey Scene: There is a huge storm and outage in your area and the neighborhood goes dark about 4 p.m. Nothing connects you to the outside world: no Internet, no phones (land or cell), no satellite, no nothin’. (Where are the old kerosene lamps you thought you’d never use again? In the basement along with the board games, but it’s DARK down there.) You dig deep in the back of the utility drawer and find an old battery powered radio from which you hear that it will be several days before you will be reconnected to the outside world again in any way. O Pioneers! You allow the water from upstairs pipes to drain into the pots in the kitchen. You open and quickly close the refrigerator. (Survival: it’s all coming back to you now.) Thank goodness you have those scented candles in the bathroom and some long white candles in the drawer in the dining room; you’re going to need them. You gather your family. They are in despair, frantically pointing the TV-remote toward the TV and pressing and repressing the “Power On” button and plugging and unplugging the computer, trying to reset it. Yes, the worst has come to pass. The family will have to READ by candlelight or spend the evening sitting in a dark room, making spooky faces at each other by holding the precious flashlight under their chins or casting shadow birds and rabbits with long ears on the wall with hands and fingers until the batteries die.

1. What books are you and your family actively reading that you can grab? By that I mean eagerly reading, not idly thumbing through hoping it will make you drowsy so you don’t have to sneak another shot of whiskey or drop an Ambien to reach REM sleep.
2. Were any of these books from online, self-publishing companies such as the much maligned (by traditional publishers and your friendly bookstore) iuniverse or lulu? Are you even aware of these websites as sites to buy books? Now that you’ve looked, what do you think? Would you buy a book from them if the author was someone other than a self-published friend?
3. Were any of your books free, online books in PDF format or had you planned to read them online, and are out of luck, on this dark and stormy night?
4. Did any of your books come from seeing author websites similar to A Woman from Cairo—very sophisticated, The Kill–trailer caused my dog to stroke out, or The Alphabet of Manliness—eek, eek, brace yourself? Do websites that sell books find you or do you find them? (I’m not talking about the big guys—Barnes and Noble, Borders or Amazon. I mean authors who are attempting to attract you to their websites.)
5. Did any of these books arrive at your now-darkened and chilly house because you purchased, say, directly from Random House, Simon & Schuster, William Morrow, Knopf or Rodale’s online bookstore? Have you ever purchased a book directly from the publisher’s website?

Wait! I think I see a light on down the road! Wow! A reprieve! The refrigerator is humming. Computer lights are flashing. The cell phone just beeped. Quick, try the light switches. Someone flush the toilet!

End of survey. Reminder: stock up on batteries, candles and…books.

Note from the Wicked Witch of Publishing: I’m taking the survey, too. See my answers in the first comment box!  

What a morning: up at 5:20 a.m., pawing through my closet trying to find my black suit, holding black stockings up to the light to see if they are run-free, donning my black trench coat and grabbing my black attaché case and black umbrella to head like a homing pigeon for The Harvard Club on 44th Street in New York City.

I was invited to a Breakfast Business Meeting sponsored by The Harvard Business School (or The B-School, to you!) with “Media Guru” Steve Murphy, President and CEO, Rodale, Inc., and “change agent,” as he was billed.

The Harvard Club is, well, The Harvard Club. Lots of large portraits on the walls. Lots of club chairs scattered about. Lots of dark wood. Cavernous rooms. Bow ties. My late mother once said to me that men who went to Harvard always managed to drop Harvard into the conversation within a minute or two of meeting you. It is absolutely true!

But I digress.

Quite a few people were from out of town, which surprised me given the nightmare of crossing a bridge or entering a tunnel into Manhattan between 6 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. The lucky Wicked Witch, however, could stumble over, bleary-eyed, from her apartment to The Harvard Club, and she did just that, spurred on by the thought of a free feed, networking and fodder for the blog.

Once there, I checked my coat (or else!), lowered my screechy voice to a library-like whisper, and ascended to the third floor meeting room. Coatless and name-tagged, I took the opportunity to load my plate with pound cake, fill a coffee cup with decaf and reconnoiter. (Where were the bacon and eggs, grits, bangers—for you UKers—or pancakes? I was so disappointed…and hungry.)

To my left Meredith Corporation and a handsome “conflict mediator.” To my right a job hunter. At the next table all suited up and a little closer to the speaker, The Wall Street Journal and Beneficial Capital Corporation.

At the start we (about 40 of us) were admonished that we could take notes, but that answers to questions we asked would be off the record. Uh-oh!

We were also told that if we asked a question, we should say our names and identify the company for which we worked. In this town, you are where you work. Uh-oh! Uh-oh!

Believe it or not, I can be discreet, so I’m not going to give you the details of Steve Murphy’s comments, not that it was a tell-all, by any means. Actually, he was quite disarmingly charming and seemed guardedly candid. I think it is okay to say that early on in his chat with us, he got applause when he announced he had been a literature major, but not at Harvard. There was also some talk about “silos,” having nothing to do with where you store, say, corn, but everything to do with “silos” of corporate culture. (Huh? B-School patois, no doubt.)

Q&A Time! Those publishing types who are members of the “heads down” crowd, kept their heads, well, down. (All the better to huff and puff later.) The Wall Street Journal gave his name, said where he worked and asked a question that went way over my head. The man from Beneficial said his name and company and held forth about magazine publishing and books, and mentioned…the Internet. Ah hah! Now was my chance. I raised my hand. Pick me. Pick me! Steve Murphy did. Uh-oh!

“Lynne Scanlon, Blogger, The Publishing Contrarian,” I announced. Heads swiveled. (Infiltraitor!) I also quickly threw in my B&N credentials and, just in case that wasn’t enough for the Wall Street Journal guy, I let them know that I was also an author—unlike most of them, I’ll bet!—with St. Martin’s Press, HarperCollins, Berkley Books. You can’t drop this info with a thud often enough into a conversation when you are dealing with self-important publishing execs of which, of course, I am one. Pecking order is everything.

Since the Internet had been mentioned, I had no choice but to reveal to the now-rapt audience that I had immersed myself in the literary blogosphere for months. I felt strongly, I said, that bloggers like Michael Allen of Grumpy Old Bookman (one of the top 10 literary blogs—peck, peck) who only self-published, and Bill Liversidge of Pundy House, with his online novel and his April 3th posting called “More Thoughts on Becoming a Publisher,” might, just might, portend a seismic shift in the publishing plates undergirding the industry.

For good measure, when I bounded up to Steve Murphy and elbowed all the other sycophants out of the way, I pressed The Publishing Contrarian business card into his outstretched hand. I had a quick personal chat with my new friend “Steve” (!) and told him I had jotted down on my card the name of a book written by Rigel Crockett that Rodale had published last year, Fair Wind and Plenty of It. Rigel is one of my commenters. I said to Steve: This is a very good book. You need to look at it again!

The only comment I feel comfortable reporting, given the admonition not to blab, was Steve’s final comment to me. I don’t want to read more into it than I should, but I think it was pithy and memorable: “Thank you for coming up to say ‘hi’.”

How did I do?

I want to let every rag-tag writer in on a secret: literary agents and editors are always looking for salable books. They make their living off salable books. Not only that, they often have new-book quotas they are required to meet each quarter.

So why not your book?  Why is the submission coming back again and again with a sad little rejection letter attached? Is your book simply awful? Have you wasted all that time and paper thinking you would be the literary darling of 2007, only to discover you’re no Jodi Picoult, whose  The Tenth Circle was #2 on The New York Times Book Review Best Sellers’ list last week or Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin, whose Three Cups of Tea was #14 on the list? 

Krista Wilson jumped at the chance to get her submission reviewed by a fresh eye—mine—last week after I offered to review submissions.  Remember, I didn’t judge the entire manuscript. I only looked at her cover letter, marketing plan, and a few first pages of her sample chapter.  Here’s the cover letter she initially sent me.

Original Letter:

Dear Mr. XXXXX: 
     I am seeking representation for a novel I have completed, Path of the Butterfly, which tells the story of Josie Papillon, the product of a short yet passionate marriage between a worldly French chef and a redneck waitress from Buckshot, Alabama. Quick-witted and talented, Josie lacks focus and ambition.  Despite having been her high school’s valedictorian, all she has done since graduation is make floral arrangements for minimum wage and sightsee with her father in whatever exciting city he calls home that year.  But the summer she spends with him in San Francisco changes her life forever. There she meets Julian, a sexy, wisecracking waiter with an enviably independent spirit. As their relationship blossoms, her father’s health withers. When he dies, a distraught Josie finds there is no record of him, anywhere, until he enrolled in culinary school in Paris when he was twenty-six. Before that, apparently Albert Papillon did not exist. The history of her parents’ whirlwind courtship and doomed marriage unfolds in counterpoint to the story of Josie’s own emergence into adulthood. 
     Fans of Rebecca Wells may like this novel for the saucy southern humor among the cast of strong women. And readers of Barbara Kingsolver’s work may enjoy it as well, since nature imagery is lightly woven throughout the story, showing how human lives mirror cycles in the natural world. 
     Path of the Butterfly made semi-finalist in the Novel-in-Progress category in the Faulkner-Wisdom Writing Competition in New Orleans last year.  
     I am enclosing a synopsis and a sample chapter. Should you wish to read the entire manuscript, I have included an SASE for your reply. Thank you for your consideration.
Sincerely,

Good, yes? Krista sounds like the intelligent woman she is. The writing is fine, but are you desperate to get to the marketing plan and sample pages? Are you convinced her book will “deliver?” In fact, as Krista told me, the submission package with the original cover letter was rejected 20 times. Here is what we worked on together. I lost count of the email exchanges, but I made many comments in the margins of her cover letter. In her second version she made sure to  

• Direct her letter to a real, live editor, not “Editor” in a publishing company. 
• Let the reader know immediately that her manuscript had won an award to separate her from the pack.
• Compare her book to a successful book the editor had worked on that was similar to hers. 
• Provide a synopsis of the book.
• Touch on some marketing ideas to show she “gets it,” that she’ll be the kind of author who helps with marketing. 

Revised letter: 

Dear Mr. XXXXX::
      Last year my manuscript, Path of the Butterfly, was a semi-finalist in the Faulkner-Wisdom Writing Competition in New Orleans for Best Novel-In-Progress. I have since completed the manuscript and am seeking representation while working on my next novel. Having read [name of book of same genre], I found it to be divinely Southern: sad yet humorous, uplifting yet real. I would love the opportunity to work with someone who knows and appreciates Southern fiction as much as you clearly do. I think you will find that my novel is similar in several ways to [name of book of same genre]. Both novels parallel the growth of a mother and her daughter over time. Both stories are set in small southern towns full of familiar charm and dishy secrets. And both novels are written in a literary style, yet have mass-market commercial appeal.
      Path of the Butterflytells the story of Josie Papillon, the product of a short yet passionate marriage between Pam McGuffey, a redneck waitress from Buckshot, Alabama and Albert Papillon, a worldly French chef twelve years her senior. A wonderful hybrid of her two worlds, Josie can guzzle beer and play a mean game of eight ball as well as she can critique fine Italian art—in fluent French. Despite her own artistic talents and her sharp intellect, her greatest flaw is “inaction.” She still holds the same job she had back in high school, has never been to college, and still lives at home. But every year she looks forward to spending the summer with her beloved Papa, in whatever exotic place he calls home that year.
      The summer she spends with him in San Francisco changes her life forever. There she meets Julian, the sexy British waiter at her father’s restaurant who shares her talent with oils as well as her quick wit. As their summer fling progresses, her father’s health withers. When she says goodbye to her Papa at summer’s end, it is for the last time. That autumn, her now estranged Julian makes the trip to Buckshot to tell her in person that Albert has died. Then the worst happens. When a distraught Josie tries to find where the Papillon family is buried, so Albert can be laid to rest next to his parents, she finds that they never existed. In fact, there is no record of Albert Papillon, anywhere, until he enrolled in culinary school in Paris at age twenty-six.
      Her own identity is so wrapped up in her father’s that Josie must find out who he really was and why he hid his past from her and her mother for all those years. She finds that she has an uncle she never knew, her father’s brother, and from him she discovers the sordid story of their life in a Hungarian circus, the tragic death of their mother during a performance, and a crime of passion in which Albert murdered his own father, a cruel man who was to blame for the accident that took their mother’s life. On the run ever since, Albert still managed to live his life to the absolute fullest. Unlike Josie, who, as her grandmother says, has been living “with her life on pause” long enough. A modern day Hamlet, Josie finally gets the courage to act, having been inspired by her father’s brave choices. She doesn’t exactly avenge a death or slay an evildoer, but finally, the reluctant hero “gets a life.”
      Throughout the story, the whirlwind courtship and doomed marriage of her parents unfolds in counterpoint to Josie’s own emergence into adulthood, giving the reader clues along the way to Albert’s hidden life. The story is told with home-cooked southern humor and highbrow wit, as well as a literary touch; nature imagery is woven throughout the story, showing how human lives mirror cycles in the natural world. Fans of both Rebecca Wells and Barbara Kingsolver wouldn’t be disappointed by this lush read.  
      I have already begun working on marketing strategies, including an interview with ABC News in Washington, a signing in the Day Butterfly Center at Callaway Gardens (since it is mentioned in the story), an article in the local newspaper in Montgomery, Alabama (near the setting of the novel) to coincide with a signing at a local bookstore, and an article in Portico magazine in Birmingham with a recommendation from them on a local morning news program there in town. I also have been promised a book signing at Park Road Books in Charlotte, North Carolina, where one of the owners is president of SIBA. She has promised to help me promote this book shamelessly at conventions! 
      Should you wish to read Path of the Butterfly, I have included an SASE for your reply. Thank you for your consideration.
      Sincerely

What do you think about the letters?

I sent Krista out to buy some beige or light gray stationery so that her submission would not only look and sound professional, but would also stand out from the crowd visually. 

By the way, I was really touched by the gratitude of the writers/authors who emailed their “slush pile” submissions to me.  Everyone was incredibly responsive to my suggestions and took action right away. I was pretty tough in my criticisms. I even asked one author “not to be mad at me,” and he replied that he wasn’t at all–just appreciative.  

Find someone to give you a fresh perspective on your submission. You don’t want a line editor, but you do want someone who can recap your synopsis and tell you why, after reading your cover letter, he or she might want to read the book and what makes the book special. Choose a friend who likes and reads the genre you have written. If your friend can’t rave about your book idea, neither will an agent or editor. Make changes to your submission. Fresh eyes can make all the difference.

One of the biggest jokes in publishing is the slush pile–that place no editor wants to go without hip boots, that place where paid “readers” hold their collective noses while they shovel through the manila envelopes, glance at cover letters, and then stuff everything, including a rejection note, into the SASE. So putrid is the stink coming off the slush pile, it is thought, that it is often the lowest of the low in publishing–interns and assistants, who don’t yet know where to hide and look busy–who become the gatekeepers and decision-makers about whether a submission will wind up on an editor’s desk or be tossed quickly onto the cart headed for the mailroom.

Question: How can you get an over-the-transom submission to stand out from the rest of the submissions so that yours gets a serious read?  

Answer: You’ve got to be able to sell the seller, and therein lies the problem. 

Last week I offered to review twenty submissions to try and find out what was wrong with them. Why were they being returned again and again from publishers as large as Random House and as small as…. Well, I didn’t even recognize the names of the publishing companies, but shouldn’t they have been begging for manuscripts?

Anyone who dropped by The Publishing Contrarian was welcome to send a copy of the cover letter, author’s marketing plan, and a few pages of the manuscript. Hundreds of people came to my blog. My behind-the-scenes “counter” went mad. Only nine people turned in submissions. I held spaces for a number of authors who were working on their marketing plans. These writers didn’t show. The doors closed at 6 p.m. on Wednesday.   

Amazingly, my little “slush pile” had only good, plausible story ideas, clearly written by intelligent and articulate people. (Why…let’s call them authors!) The problem was that had I been the gatekeeper with return envelopes in hand, I would have returned every single submission without getting past the cover letter. I’ll bet it’s the cover letter that gives off the stink in every slush pile. True, there may be more fecal matter in the mix, but the first whiff of something bad is originating with a weak and poorly organized cover letter. 

If, as a writer, you cannot can’t grab the attention of a submission reader in the same way a book jacket is supposed to grab the attention of a book buyer, you cannot expect a reader to make it to page one anymore than you can expect a buyer to make it to the cash register with your book. 

Tomorrow I will try and have an example of a letter that a writer and I hammered out over 20+ emails back and forth.

In this letter you will see

• The author establishes her writing credentials and piques interest in her award-winning, but as yet, unpublished, manuscript. (She’s got my attention!)
• She wanders a bookstore and does her research into similar genres to find the name of the publishing company and the editor so she can affix a name to her mailing label and avoid the slush pile completely. (How smart and how flattering I think!) 
• She synopsizes a rip-roaring tale in hard-hitting prose that, if the copy were squeezed onto a book jacket, would have the books flying out the door. (I want to read this book!)

The author is plenty smart and writes really well, but her original cover letter was like everyone else’s: much too general, didn’t emphasize her strong writing credentials (the award was buried at the bottom of her original cover letter), and didn’t really present the story in an exciting way. Actually, I had absolutely no idea what the book was really about until we had an email slug-fest about why people should care about her characters and what happened to them. Once she understood what I was looking for, she pounded out the copy.

No editor or agent cares about your marital status, number of kids, that this is your first or 100th book, that your dog is named Skippy. That’s the kind of info that goes on an inside flap of a book jacket or at the tail end of your book on the last page.

Editors and agents want to know what makes your book unique, and they want to know it upfront in the cover letter. They want to smell the money potential when they open the envelope–not the poop.

Excuse me while I try not to spew my pricey coffee onto my pricey laptop over this one. 

According to the article “Paperback Originals Are a Growing Niche for Literary Novels” in The New York Times today, publishers are adopting a “different model” from the hardcover-first, paperback-second publishing norm. Now they plan to publish paperback-only editions of “literature” written by unknown or, as the article says politely, “lesser-known,” authors. Publishing companies would be willing to forgo “the higher profits afforded by publishing a book in hardcover for a chance at attracting more buyers and a more sustained shelf life” for these books.

What profits? “When you’re taking back 50 to 70 percent of the hardcover copies you shipped,” to quote Morgan Entrekin, the publisher of Grove/Atlantic, I don’t think you are seeing much “profit.”

Once again the publishing industry is stepping over and around the giant elephant (you mineral-water-swillin’, 12-step programmers know what I’m talkin’ about) in the penthouse of publishing–the returns policy–that huge, looming, light-blocking, and oxygen-depleting pachyderm for which everyone keeps making excuses.   

What’s it going to take to change this absurd returns policy?

If the cost of shipping and handling (in and out and in and out) of the distribution centers was eliminated because publishing companies did not accept returns, the wholesale price of the book to the bookstores could be reduced dramatically. This savings could also be passed along to the customer in a lower price at the cash register. (I’m struggling to see the downside of this.) When I priced out ”special sales” at Barnes & Noble Books, the price per book dropped significantly when a book could not be returned. A sale was a sale. Period. In exchange the book buyer got a fabulous deal.

What’s it going to take to convince editors and marketing departments in publishing companies that throwing a book up against the wall to see if it will “stick” and sell, rather than carefully marketing a title, is causing the returns problem, too?   

How much more shelf-staying-power will there be in bookstores when a book, packaged-down to original paperback or not, still has to rely primarily on browse-and-buy amid the crammed stacks and overloaded display tables to make it to checkout?