Month / June 2005

by DrMabuse

BEA: Impressions and Reportage from Thursday

Please note that I will probably be misspelling a good deal of names and, for this, I apologize. Because of wireless limitations, I will correct all such typographical errors upon my return home.

A few quick thanks are in order: one to Harper Collins, who was kind enough to offer wireless access for BEA’s many participants (several photos of congregating litbloggers hunched over their laptops in the galleria have made the rounds), and the other to Tina Jordan, who was kind enough to offer us all press credentials. I fully expect the reports to interlap. So I’ve been roaming Jacob Javits’ floors with a portable minidisc recorder and digital camera. The sounds will be edited and posted here upon my return to San Francisco.

* * *

I have a few initial observations. First off, I should point out that BookExpo America is a trade show, meaning that people here view and approach books as a business first and foremost. I’ve talked with publicists and exhibitors about what they hope to get out of BEA. Outside of educational seminars, like most trade shows, they hope to find the shortest path to profit — a not uncommon practice here in the crowded and unforgiving blocks of Manhattan. In some cases, that means stumbling into panels (such as yesterday’s litblog panel) for the “next big thing.”

But even this “education” sometimes leads publishers and publicists pining for a vote of confidence. Arthur Fournier of Guilford Publications confessed to me that he was relieved to see his conclusions confirmed by the big editors attending the morning’s Publishing and Electronic Media seminar. Likewise, Kevin Smith of Kuna, Inc., a publisher that specialized in materials written for credit unions, told me that he was particularly interested in the digital mediums being pushed, but expressed his surprise with how other publishers weren’t very forward-thinking in embracing these new conduits. He compared it to an army “fighting the last war to figure out what’s coming up.” Smith clearly didn’t want to follow this model. But when I asked him how he might convince others how to hop on the bandwagon, he felt that “thinking outside the box” himself and perhaps convincing others to do likewise might be a start.

If there is a problem with this approach, sometimes lofty intentions, or even modest goals of profitability commingled with artistic gain, get left in the dust. I talked with a cheerfully cynical man named Andrew Porter, who had a badge that read “Too Many ABAs.” Three years after selling his Hugo-award winning magazine venture, the Science Fiction Chronicle, to another publisher and getting, in his words, “screwed from the new publisher,” Porter told me that this was his “final convention in the book field.” He had attended every single convention since 1976 and handed me an impressive leaflet that listed some of the highlights. He called this BEA “his farewell tour” and had conceded this as an opportunity to catch up with friends.

Then there are the misconceptions about what these new technologies and conduits mean. For instance, if you ask a publisher what a “blog” is (as I tried to explain what this site was all about), this is when the confusion (and perplexed reactions about the technical and logistical fundamentals) kicks in.

Some folks, like Publishers Lunch‘s Michael Cader, understand that a blog operates as a conduit between reader and publisher and optimize their services to reflect this without compromising the credibility for either side. But if a publisher doesn’t know how a blog works, if they, as one publicist expressed to me Thursday night, don’t have the demographics at their fingertips, there’s a fundamental problem in the co-opting process. Because these are the hard stats that industry people look for. They have specific ways of conducting their business and, like any businessman, they want to turn a profit. So the real question isn’t “Are blogs viable in today’s literary marketplace?” (I would argue, based on the rise in sales of Sam Lipsyte?s Home Land and Kate Atkinson?s Case Histories, that they are; but to what degree, nobody truly knows) but “Are publishers flexible to refocusing some of their business strategies to this separate and independent force?” Or does it all boil down for the big Dan Brown kill?

My conversations so far have suggested that the cleanup is the thing but, at this point, I’m almost tempted to apply William Goldman’s infamous maxim about Hollywood: “Nobody knows anything.” I was unable to get into the “Capturing the Elusive 18 to 34 Year Old Reader” panel moderated by Jessa Crispin. It was SRO, but many people privately expressed their disappointment with me about the lack of ideas articulated. It struck me as a sad irony that such a palpable frustration would go down the day before the exhibitor floor opened.

I would again argue that pointing to a sales factor is a start, but delving into it and daring to think beyond the existing sales strategy might be a more successful way to meet this problem head-on. But shifting away from a perception (such as the idea that only people over 50 are interested in World War II) involves not only rampant persuasion among a publishing house?s staff (extending from the top down), but a dramatic (some might say revolutionary) shift with how people go about buying and reading books.

To be fair to the publishers, with the book industry left with sales that are sometimes tenuous even for carefully researched successes, it’s little wonder that shifting their strategies in the digital age remains an impossibility, particularly with so many unspoken issues concerning literary blog accreditation. Hoopla alone isn’t necessarily going to cut it for the book consumer. And sending an author out on a book tour, only to see the author greeted by a handful of people and crickets (none of whom buy the book, including the crickets, who are sentient and endowed with the ability to slide a credit card) is as equally risky as considering the digital conversational domain.

* * *

Email access is highly limited. So if you’ve sent anything, I haven’t yet received it.

* * *

For what it’s worth (and to clarify a minor rumor floating around), I’m not stalking Sam Tanenhaus. I just want to give the man an opportunity to respond to the criticisms hurled his way on these pages. So if you’re a friend of Sam’s, please tell him that I’m not a lunatic and that I’m just a persistent guy who wants to talk with him.

* * *

The LBC party at the Slipper Room was packed beyond anyone’s predictions with the very 18-34 crowd (or those hoping to market to it) in question. About a hundred people packed this bar on the Bowery. There is an audience for this stuff.

* * *

Liz Dubelman of Vidlit has a novel idea that she’s managed to parlay: humorous Flash-based “trailer” presentations of books for the Web. Think Jibjab meets books. Dubelman showed me “Yiddish with Dick and Jane” on her Powerbook. The short merged a Yiddish language lesson with the famous children’s primers. However, the short got Dubleman and several related publishers in trouble. It seems that the people who owned Pearson, who holds the rights to Dick & Jane, didn’t know whether “Yiddish” was a parody or something which infringed upon their rights. On a Thursday evening before a holiday weekend, armed with a bouquet of flowers, a process server served Vidlit (along with all the publishers that Vidlit had contracted with). Dubelman told me that she’s not sure what happened with the lawsuit, but that she believes it was settled through Time Warner. Vidlit has also produced shorts for Random House, Warner Books, and Little Brown. There are also shorts in the works for Scholastic and Harper Collins Children’s.

* * *

Compilations are a hot commodity these days. Paul Slansky didn’t have a problem finding a publisher for a new book due to be published by Bluesberry in January 2006 (co-authored with Arlene Sorkin) called I’m Sorry: The Apology Anthology. Slansky scoured databases with the keyword “apology,” only to unearth a vast deposit of insincere apologies, many of whom were delivered by politicians. But Slansky also included a speech from a former President that he found remarkably sincere. “Clinton had this unbelievable apology being delivered at a national prayer breakfast for the whole Lewinsky thing,” said Slansky. “It was breathtaking. It was like a preacher talking. And it seemed more sincere than any other politican I’ve heard.” The best apologies, Slansky said, were the ones that atoned for racial epithets, which involved “construing” the spoken faux pas. But one of Slansky’s favorite apologies involved four Los Angeles television stations apologizing for broadcasting a man’s suicide live.

by DrMabuse

We’ve Arrived

budparr.jpg

The above picture is the hard-working Bud Parr. The two of us are here at the Jacob Javits Convention Center figuring out the wireless setup. And it looks like all systems go.

I’ve attended a panel on blogging (a portion of which will be podcasted upon my return to San Francisco) and I’m hitting a few more today — all this on about 30 minutes’ sleep.

My efforts to make the acquaintance of Sam Tanenhaus backfired. Tanenhaus ran away before I could say hello. However, Ben Schwarz was a very personable guy.

But enough of this hobnobbing. You want real news and I’m here to give it.

Last night on the plane:

July 1, 2005, 10:09 PM Pacific Time

Using stealth detective work, I have determined that I am at least one of three people on board this JetBlue flight going to BookExpo. Sitting two rows ahead of me is a woman with colorful hair who “has a book out” that she sold at BEA last year. To her left, across the aisle, a gentleman who is also heading there to pitch “earthware.” Unfortunately, my peripheral hearing is dampened by two very nice yet very noisy kids. So I only have telling details to go on.

“A book goes through a two year process.”

“I sort of…stumbled into writing.”

“I’m the best at what I do.”

This writer, who also has interesting fingernail polish, is like many a San Francisco professional, an ex dot commer and someone who apparently stumbled onto writing by accident.

I’d say hello, but there’s two problems: (1) I’ve got a window seat and the other two seats in this aisle are occupied and the plane is about to take off, and (2) I sort of relish this James Bond stealth.

Anyway, there are more important things to consider. Namely, how I will sleep during the next five hours in a cramped JetBlue plane. I just got off the phone with my sis and told her that I could sleep peacefully on a bed of nails. This, of course, is braggadacio.

Right now, I’m highly amused by the bespectacled, black-haired man who knows nothing about the book industry, who didn’t come on with a tome beneath his arm, and who has one of those staccato titters (hehhehehehehehehooohooohaaaaaa) that’s meant to establish bonhomie. I like this guy and I hope the writer gets him hooked into the magical world of books.

June 2, 2005, AM (morning panel on blogging)

Max Millions showed up as promised in an alluring costume. I arrived late to the panel because I had just disembarked from a red-eye, but there seemed to be a confusion over what the role of blogging entailed. Many publishers in the crowd failed to understand that blogging was conversational in tone. Max Millions pointed out that you could smell the passion and that it was clearly distinguishable from sheer shilling. MJ Rose noted that she had seen hits rise on her blog, but had not seen an increase in comments. But she suggested that publishers might wish to adopt a blog-oriented catalog for their books.

One of the problems with the panel was that there’s still a fundamental chasm between bloggers and publishers. The publishers were more concerned with how they could use blogs as marketing tools. But when I heard the name Dan Brown name-checked (instead of, say, William T. Vollmann, an author who perhaps deserves more attention and whose sales could be boosted using the litblog conduit), I realized the disparity goes well beyond marketing and art, and more between cash bonanza and the kind of special literary niches that many litblogs are all about.

I’ll have more on this later when I post the MP3.

by DrMabuse

The Big Lesson Here: Perhaps City Hall and Topless Mitchell Brothers Dancers Shouldn’t Be Combined For A…Ahem…”Training” Film

I’m howling with laughter over how the City and the 49ers will handle this, particularly since the stunning video embarassment is readily available online. Offensive stereotypes, girl-on-girl action, homophobia, racism, and the 49ers — much of it shot in Mayor Gavin Newsom’s office.

Political corruption hasn’t been this fun to watch this since Marion Barry’s cocaine video.

by DrMabuse

Lauren Baratz-Logsted: “T.B.: Saying the Unthinkable in Fiction”

[EDITOR’S NOTE: While we’re on the move, Lauren Baratz-Logsted was kind enough to offer us an essay about her experiences with reading reactions.]

I didn’t set out to write books that would piss people off.

Of course, when it happens, I don’t mind it so much – at least, I’ve come not to mind it so much. When I sit down to write, since I primarily write books of a comic or satirical nature, my intention is to create something that will make people laugh and, between the laughs, think.

As far as intentions go, when I originally left my day job as an independent bookseller back in 1994, I didn’t plan on writing comedy or satire. I thought, like many a bright-eyed writer jumping into the fray, that I was going to write the Great American Novel. But I don’t think any writer can control her natural voice any more than she can control her tendency to check her Amazon numbers on an hourly basis. But the big surprise was that, when I sat down to write, the voice that came out was a decidedly comic one.

My first novel, The Thin Pink Line, was published in 2003. On the surface, the book is about a self-obsessed Londoner who fakes an entire pregnancy. But if you scratch the surface, you’ll also find a scathing indictment of the notion that, all too often in life, people make life-altering choices (marriage, children, et al.) – all because “everyone else is doing it.” Sometimes, they avoid serious thought about what the decision actually means.

When my book hit the stacks, things began well enough. All the pre-pub reviews were positive: Kirkus gave it a starred review with PW calling it “hilarious and original,” blah blah blah. What writer wouldn’t want to hear that? Particularly the “blah blah blah” part. But then the Amazon reviews started popping up and I realized I’d done something unexpected: I’d written a book that polarized audiences. If you look at my page there, you’ll see that out of my 100 reviews, half are for five stars, while the other half are one-stars. Not that reviews have any affect on my writing. And that’s not to say I don’t care at all about what people think. But if at the end of the day I’m proud of something I’ve created, then that has to be enough. I always like to say that I’ve been compared, variously, to Swift and shit.

While I respect the right of readers to hold the latter view, I hope no one will hold it against me if I prefer the former. As for the one-stars, they mostly seem upset about a single thing: they hate what my character does! Now, we don’t even need to get into the issue of people picking up a book that’s cover actually says the character fakes an entire pregnancy and then getting upset when she does, in fact, fake an entire pregnancy. The point is that I’d struck a nerve with people, many of them fundamentalist in temperament, who misconstrued things a bit, obviously believing that I (as the author) was endorsing Jane Taylor’s behavior.

I’ve come to realize that if readers don’t get that a book is satire from the get-go – satire being defined in my Webster’s Tenth as “a literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule and scorn; trenchant wit, irony or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly” – they miss the point of the exercise entirely, preventing themselves from enjoying the book. If I had to pick just one area of writing that is most likely to be misunderstood by an American audience, it would have to be satire. Before Helen Fielding and Nick Hornby opened American editors’ eyes to a new way of seeing, I regularly received rejections from publishers saying that while they thought the material was hysterical, they didn’t believe Americans liked comic novels or satire. And now that a lot of comedy and satire is published here, there is still a problem in that publishers are so bent on presenting heroines as being likable, as being “the girl next door,” that readers are understandably confused when they find those heroines doing over-the-top things like, say, faking an entire pregnancy. My characters are almost never girls next door. In fact, you probably wouldn’t want to live next door to my characters! But, hopefully, if you read the books, you’ll laugh a few times at the things they get themselves up to. And maybe you’ll find yourself thinking in the process.

And now I’ve written a third book, A Little Change of Face. And again, some readers have completely missed the point of the exercise.

A Little Change of Face is about Scarlett Jane Stein, a very attractive, 39-year-old, unmarried, Jewish librarian from Danbury who, for one reason and another, decides to sabotage her own looks in order to find out how the world will treat her once she’s no longer a swan.

So far, so good. No one had any trouble with that part.

However, they did have a problem with one of the supporting characters, T.B. (standing for Token Black).

Romance Reader at Heart, a website devoted to romance novels, wrote, “As if that name is not ridiculous enough, Scarlett and her friends talk in Ebonics while in TB’s company (TB is a lawyer and obviously uses Standard English). I am not even black and I found this offensive.” And the ubiquitous Harriet Klausner, who described my clearly British protagonist Jane Taylor as “Turkish” in a review of my previous book, The Thin Pink Line, weighed in with the following, “…and Scarlett speaking hip hop with a black attorney pal seem inane for educated people and clearly in poor taste. Simply Scarlett needs to dump her best pal and treat TB (don’t ask) with respect maybe the love of her life will do likewise.” Ah, well, grammar notwithstanding, at least Harriet gave me five stars anyway.

Sometimes, when in doubt, I’ve learned to let crazy Jane Taylor do my talking for me. Here’s Jane, talking about her problems getting the wording regarding race right in my second novel, Crossing the Line:

I hadn’t known many black people in my life, but what few I’d known, I’d liked. Oh, I do know that sounds like one of those backhanded compliments, like when someone says, “Some of my best friends are Jewish” – which really is true in my case, but only in the singular, since my best friend, no ‘s’, is David and he is Jewish. (At least, I’m pretty sure he is; he never really talks about it.) And, anyway, what would be better, to say that some of my enemies are Jewish or that the few black people I’d known I’d hated? Neither of which would be true, of course. As a white Christian, my random sampling of other races and religions was just too limited to make any kind of meaningful sweeping generalizations. All of this said, if anyone else ever comes up with a way to say, “I’m not a racist” without people automatically knee-jerking to “Ah, she’s a racist” or “I’ve liked what few black people I’ve known” without sounding like some kind of insufferable prig, please drop me a line.

Oh, and here’s one last interesting part on that subject: I can say “I hadn’t known many black people in my life, but what few I’d known, I’d liked” and fully realize that there will be some who will find the remark offensive. And yet, any remark I make about the white people I’ve known would have to be more offensive, the truth being that having known a ton of white people in my life, there had been precious few I’d genuinely liked. So there.

Jane, as most readers agree, is often nuts on most subjects, but here she’s saying something that makes sense to me and it relates directly to A Little Change of Face and the problematic – for some readers – character of T.B.

For intelligent readers who read the book closely, I don’t think they’ll have a problem seeing what I’ve done here. I’ve created a character who is an indictment of the fact that, however far we may think we have come since the Civil Rights Movement, all too often, in books and on TV and in film, African-Americans are still relegated to supporting roles in our society. As T.B. says to Scarlett when they first meet, referring to her own nickname, “I am the movies, and TV too…I’s the judge and the pediatrician and the prosecutor…I’s the local color, I’s the next-door neighbor, I’s the best friend who gets killed so the star can get angry…I’s expendable.”

And anyone who is willing to take a hard look at the entertainment industry would have to honestly agree, she’s right. Friends, one of the most successful sitcoms in history, and even set in New York City – New York City! – is about as white a show as there ever was. And just look at the three people who die in the beginning of Jurassic Park: the fat guy, the smoker and the black man – this is Hollywood’s definition of who’s expendable.

But Scarlett doesn’t see T.B. as expendable and says as much. Indeed, she refers to TB as “the glue” and anyone reading closely should see that as well. T.B. is the female character that Scarlett is most consistently honest with as T.B. is with her. T.B. is the female character who most consistently provides Scarlett with unconditional love and support and, again, it goes both ways. As for what is inaccurately characterized as Ebonics in the book, I’d have to wonder if someone who could see such a shadow where none exists might not be carrying around their own collection of racial guilt or if they’ve ever even had any close friends of another race at all.

Here’s some of my own personal history and you can take it for what it’s worth:

When I was twelve years old, both my best friend and my boyfriend were black, and while the latter is mostly forgotten, the former still blazes clear in my mind 30 years later and will for as long as I have memory. Stephen King, another writer who’s been maligned for other issues than I have, does occasionally get things right . In his novella Stand By Me, he passes a remark that has stuck with me in essence all these years: the best friends you will ever have are the ones you have when you are 12 years old.

As far as I am concerned, the character of T.B. is as much a tribute to that friendship as it is anything else. It is a tribute to two young girls, both very short, who played basketball together and talked slang together. Despite both of the girls being highly educated, they often lapsed into the vernacular that T.B. and Scarlett used. They laughed and loved and argued so much sometimes it made the fans in the stands uncomfortable.

I know in my heart that even if the entire rest of the world reaches misimpressions about the character of T.B., that young girl that I loved so much, Donna, would totally understand.

I do realize that, as writers, we do not get the luxury of sitting on every readers’ shoulder – I’m picturing a very mini-me here, perched on your shoulder, a glass of Shiraz in my hand – directing the reader’s attention to what’s important in the work, explaining jokes that don’t go over at all, or correcting misimpressions. But one still does hope for intelligent readers, readers who can be depended upon not to mistake an uber-British Londoner for a Turkish woman. And, maybe just occasionally, readers who are intelligent enough to see that what others might perceive as racism is in fact anything but.

Lauren Baratz-Logsted is the author of The Thin Pink Line and Crossing the Line. Her third novel, A Little Change of Face, will be published in July 2005. Her essay, “If Jane Austen Were Writing Today,” is collected in Flirting with Pride and Prejudice: Fresh Perspectives on the Original Chick-Lit Masterpiece, edited by Jennifer Crusie and due out from Benbella Books on September 1.