Battered Suitcase Blog

Vagabondage Press posts useful features on publishing and promotion. Worth linking to.
Battered Suitcase Blog

Duotrope Digest: Writer's Submission Manager

New to me...a FREE submission manager for poets and writers. If like me, you have 20 to 35 submissions out at time, check this out. Not going to trash my card file and log book, but I spent the whole day entering data--and find it very useful. Stats on return times, a good search feature for publications.

Duotrope Digest

What Publishers Really Want...

I've been entering journal entries from 2001 when I first started working on the novel I've begun to re-write. Interesting to revisit my thoughts at the time. Then came across an email from an agent that I'd pasted into the journal--reply to a query for my first novel. 

It's so mindless, so laughably inane--such a perfect example of what publishing is really about.

... nice of her to give me useful advice. Kinda like painting by the numbers... 

Thu. 7 Jun 2001 21:38 EDT
From: .... @AOL.com
To: ... @sju.edu
Subject: RE: Query

Dear Mr. Russell:

While I find you to be a talented writer, the style of writing that is
salable today has dialogue almost solely moving along the plot and the
action, and for revealing the characterization. All this is important
as well as building some degree of excitement and/or suspense immediately.
Since your novel seems largely introspective, I feel I cannot market your
work successfully at this time. Should you decide to rework your 
novel with dialogue carrying the narrative, I'd be pleased to look at it
again,
Sincerely,

 

Post-Avant, SoQ, Oral/Visual Poetries

A lively discussion from April, 2009,  on how we might critically define our multi-varied poetries. ... or not
 STRONG VERSE
G.M. Palmer,
Art Durkee,
John Moore Williams and
VizPo Central all chime in.

What it all boils down in a way is simply the struggle for markets, the creation of marketing techniques, and securing a base from which to launch one's endeavors forth in the poetic /academic market place. "Pushing the Product" as they say in the music industry--"shipping x number of Units"--trucks rumbling through the night on lonesome "routes" long abandoned for the more glamourous freeways, stocked with crates and boxes of Units whoe main point of existence is simply that--that they exist and were shipped. How many were sold--usually conflated with those shipped--is a matter open to conjecture. The books, however, have long been cooked and "That's Entertainment."

 David-Baptiste Chirot

Is this really what "it all boils down to?"

Let's hope not.
Palmer (of Strong Verse) wrings his hands at the sorry state of poetry. Unfortunately, as seems typical of members of that particular choir, he's way too impressed by sales figures and embarrassingly wrong-headed comparisons with the likes of whats-her-name... of Harry Potter Ltd. One more sad example of how the Corporate Empire's Bottom Line psychosis derails rational thought
But he hosts a good discussion.

Cory Doctorow on the Future of Publishing

Meet Publisher's Enemy No 1, Corry Doctorow

John Barber

From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published on Friday, Nov. 13, 2009 4:37PM EST
Last updated on Wednesday, Nov. 18, 2009 3:42AM EST


The traditional publishing industry's worst nightmare arrived in Toronto this week when science-fiction author Cory Doctorow addressed the TD National Reading Summit on the burning question of “How to Destroy the Book.”

As one of the world's most successful bloggers, a writer who freely gives away his work as well as selling it – and not least, a genuine expert in the suddenly fraught world of international copyright – this Toronto-born phenom knows as much about wrecking traditional publishing as anyone alive.

[...]

The novel, about the struggles of technology hackers in a future economic upheaval, is being made available in a dizzying variety of forms – from downloads and “aps” to a deluxe limited edition of 250 copies made at a family-owned bindery near Doctorow's London home, priced at $250 a piece. But like Little Brother, Doctorow's bestselling young-adult novel of 2008, Makers will be free on his website to any reader with the hard-drive space to store it. Those who want a $15 paper copy will be able to order it from print-on-demand publisher lulu.com.

As a service to other writers, Doctorow said in an interview conducted while he stood on the platform between carriages of a speeding British train, he is experimenting in ways to “delaminate” the traditional publishing industry.

“Right now, we have this vision of the publisher as a monolithic service entity that proves everything from typesetting and printing to distribution to sales support, marketing and PR,” he said. “But there's no reason it has to do all those things in one go.”

Or even the basic ones – like providing its products to retail outlets.  [...]

But these are not the book-destroying feats Doctorow detailed at this week's conference in Toronto, which is devoted to the development of a national reading culture. The real wreckers, according to him, are the publishers and entertainment firms using digital technology to undermine the traditional rights of readers.

“What they're doing is throwing away copyright rules that describe what rights readers have to a book, and replacing them with these farcical end-user licence agreements that say you don't really own the book, you only license it,” he said, noting that consumers who buy audio books from iTunes are required to agree to a 26,000-word licence agreement.

“I don't think people write 26,000-word licence agreements in order to give you more rights,” he said. “They only do it to take away your rights.”

Read the rest HERE<

Edmond Caldwell on Book Lists

From Contra James Wood

Recently a literary blog or site or whatever calling itself The Millions posted for the edification and entertainment of its readers a list of “The Best Fiction of the Millennium (So Far).” The judging-process was set up along American Idol lines – a panel of literary Simon Cowells and Paula Abduls coupled with a poll of the faceless audience, culled from Facebook.

The resulting lists generated the type of discussion that you would expect: expressions of pleasure over the presence of favorite titles along with much quibbling about who was left off – behavior which, essentially, reproduces the work of the list itself, “playing along” even where the participant has differences over this or that selection.

Therefore I was happy when at least one litblog commentator, Andrew Seal, sounded like he was going to go beyond mere participation in the spectacle. As he wrote in a September 25 post:

“The inclusions and placements of the list are not really worth quibbling about, and itemizing the good books that were left off is about as easy as falling off a log. I'm not really interested in specifics, because there's a much bigger issue which the list raises—”

Ah, I thought, now we’re getting somewhere! He continues:

“—if ordered lists like this must exist, to whom should we be listening to fill them?”

Oh. A critique of the make-up of the celebrity-judges panel, in Andrew’s view too heavily skewed to young and US-based creative writers, with not enough critics, editors, and academics, so that perhaps the panel was too narrow or not expert enough. He may or may not be right on that score, but we haven’t gotten to any “much bigger issues” yet if we’ve just moved from quibbling about the selection of books to quibbling about the selection of judges. That’s playing the same game at one remove, when what we need to do to get to “bigger issues” is to examine the game itself.

Read the rest here List Lust, or, The Banalities (Updated!)

Comments and discussion on Blographia Literaria

Chic Lit: Marketing Gimic? Genetic/Existential Divide?

A while ago I mentioned a reading survey I gave my freshman. I asked them a number of questions about the books they'd read while they were in high school, both assigned and unassigned reading. I was surprised at how widely read they were, collectively, if not individually, and have been giving this considerable thought--how can I use this information in future classes?

I noticed that there were a number of titles that only the women had read, but none that were only on the men's lists. This held true by title and by genre. There were a few women who read sports books, adventure--but no men who read chic lit.

None. I admit that I'd not read any in that category myself. Not "Bel Canto", not "Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood," let alone the cheesier stuff... you know, the one's with pastel covers covers, photos of female bare feet 0(no one admitted reading Good in Bed, but given some of the other titles, I don't believe them).

So I asked... after pointing out this apparent difference in reading tastes, that is--I asked one of the women. Do you think the world would be a better place if the men you know had read the books in question?

The class exploded (well, not quite... ) but there was a spontaneous and enthusiastic and collective female YES!

So, I asked. If you had the power to require the men you know to read these books....

YES!javascript:void(0)
Publish Post

Hmmm... not having read any of these title myself, I had to wonder--what am I missing?

Anything?

And if so, what in particular? Please enlighten me. What is going on here?

Authorial Voice: Carver, Nabokov... Where is Walter Benjamin when we need him?

Dan Green has initiated two discussions on the Reading Experience: a piece on Tess Gallagher's announced intention to publish early versions (BGL-- Before Gordon Lish) of Raymond Carver's stories: HERE and on Vladimir Nabokov's request that his final unfinished manuscript be destroyed: HERE.

To date, there've been 41 comments to these posts. I would like to add a question. To what degree are all the opinions expressed in these comments (my own included): on postpartum authorial rights, the integrity of the individual voice, the limits of the editorial prerogative, not merely colored, but virtually pre-defined by a largely unexamined fetish of the Individual Creator?

The difficulty of extracting the aesthetic and existential questions from those of marketing rights makes the question all the more interesting.

More on Literary Magazines

Daniel Green has an essay in CONTEXT
HERE on literary magazines. He's done his homework on this one, comparing a number of the more prominent lits. He raises the one question that really matters: why is the fiction published in these magazines so uniformly bland, why are there so few exceptions (Green mentions some)to the conventions of narrative realism? One would think, if there is any mission to justify this strange institution, it would be to seek out and encourage writers who challenge the forms and expand the range of short fiction.

Green's essay is a MUST read.

What Purpose do the Literary Periodicals Serve?

[Also posted at MetaxuCafe, where this has drawn a number of comments]

A month or so ago, Lev Asher, on LitKicks hosted a discussion on hardcover versus soft, contributors included agents, publishers, writers and reader/consumers. It was good discussion. Informative. Offered some new ideas.

I'd like to see a discussion like that on literary periodicals. There seems to be more of them then ever. Most have circulations well under 5,000. Most pay contributors in complimentary copies, if that.
Each one of these periodicals receives hundreds, and many, thousands of submissions a month. Is it the hope of becoming "respectable," of making an honest buck--that drives writers to spend their time and money, printing and copying and addressing and mailing and keeping records so you don't send the same story to the same place?

What is driving this?

First, let's confine this to short stories. Poetry spreads like mold, under rocks, behind the wallpaper, pops out of urban lawns like mushrooms. It finds its readers by laws of its own. But fiction is something else. Aside from Harpers (which publishes no more than 12 stories a year) and The New Yorker (which may publish 100), what's left? Esquire. Playboy. Maybe a dozen open slots left in the Real World. What's left, the last remaining outlet for print publication: the Little Lits. So what drives this is the writers. When the readers disappear, what else is left?

But why?

If you don't get paid, and almost no one is likely to read what you publish in one these magazines, what's the point?

If you submit your work to these journals, what benefit do you imagine will come from it? You think, maybe, once you have some magic number of stories in print--that will turn the trick and get an agent to beg for the rights to your unpublished novel? Or are you playing the second-tier lottery game? Selection in one of those annual anthologies (yeah, that'll sure be the thing gets the eye of the New Yorker editor, right? BASS, the sesame key to fame and fortune!)

Question is, how does any of this square with reality?

What is the reality?

I get the feeling it's nothing more than a phantasmagoric con game, but not even the shills and carneys are aware of the con.

I've seen the lits attacked because they were assumed to be run by the "Academics", FMA Mafia Cartel, or some such. Great resentment because no one but Academics would read anything published in them.

Hey, be thankful for any readers you can find, I say. And be grateful for "Academics," They got into their line of work because, at least in the beginning, literature and reading was something they really cared about. Come on, now, these can't be the bad guys, that's like saying those 9th C. Irish monks were to blame for the Dark Ages, because--in their labor to preserve ancient learning--they were the only ones left interested in it!

Which brings us back to the beginning: what's the point? And how do we come to an informed understanding of what all this means?

James Tata: Part 10 of 10: The Publishing Situation

Excerpt from the last post in this series HERE

.. but let me make an introductory note, to put this first.

I put 8 years into writing my first novel (working title, The Magic Slate). I'm still trying to sell it. Where agent or publisher have responded, it's been consistently of the, this-is-a-fine-beautifully-written-and-engaging-work, unfortunately-we-don't- think-there's-a market-for-this-kind-of-thing-But-good-luck-anyway! sort of thing. I had one agent who told me to let her know when I published it--so she could be sure to buy a copy.

What is one to think?

I'm neither discouraged nor optimistic. Yes, I want to publish my books. But the effort is the obligation I feel I owe them, not what drives me to write. What interests me in this experience is what it illustrates about publishing today. Until I set up my blog, I felt isolated, as though this were a problem peculiar to myself. But I've come to see that there are readers and writers, reviewers and critics who seem to represent a similar, semi-disenfranchised community.

This has been a revelation. A nascent movement with a common medium but as yet no common name. Read the LitKicks hardback/paper back exchange... on the surface, there's the business as usual rhetoric, as though it were primarily a marketing problem. How convenient. If you have to reduce the problem to marketing terms, the real subject, the real difference , the naked reality is covered over with fig leafs in the shape of dollar bills.

Making money and the market come first is escapist, an excuse to avoid confronting the issues: we don't have to think--it's merely a matter of understanding the automatic process, of following the rules--as though they were equivalent of the Laws of Physics.

Or like Pinker... it's genetic. Science is not bound to making the world look the way we want it too--it's the obligation of scientific thought to upset our expectations--Good Fred, he wrote a book on this--thinking dangerous thoughts or some such! But writers and artists are there to provide genetically programmed comfort. What business do we have concerning ourselves with "reality" beyond semblance?

There is an ideological bias here that needs to be confronted, torn open, exposed for all its poverty... exposed in its role in supporting the insupportable status quo of Empire.

I would like to see a lot more open discussion on the literary blogs, more confrontation, more argument. We have editorial power to control the spam, the polarized rhetoric. Let's make more of engagement, explore and expand the dialogical potential of blogs on literature and arts.

post rant: here's Tata
---

In spite of its genteel self-image, publishing is a business. Though writers fight for meager institutional patronage to buy themselves time to write, book publishing itself, unlike the performing arts, is unsubsidized. (University presses may be subsidized, but they are a part of the same reputation-gilding apparatus as campus-affiliated "literary" magazines.) This is actually an advantageous condition, as commercial rough and tumble is an inoculant against the snobbery of an art treated by the wealthy as yet another item of their conspicuous consumption. Blaming mainstream writers and the journalistic book press for the comparative homogeneity of what the publishing houses produce is not only wrongheaded but in the long run self-defeating. It is often mentioned with chagrin that, due to the writing programs, there are more writers than ever, as if a multitude of sophisticated writers and readers were a bane rather than a blessing. Instead, imagine how many of those obscure writers might be producing work of high quality that does not fit into the mode of conventional realism and the narrow milieu that the publishing houses--and the complacent portion of the readership--believe is the only way that American writers can write. As that cadre of obscure writers continues to become as ethnically eclectic as America itself, the stories and novels and poems they produce will rival any national literature for variety, whether it is narrative, linguistic, experiential, political, social, or any other literary element imaginable. There are more subjects to write about in 21st century America than comic books, cruise ships, high school hijinks, and the victimhood detailed in too many "personal memoirs."

Discursive narratives of foreign origin, film or literary, are allowed greater leeway by American publishing houses, film distributors, critics, and audiences than are discursive narratives by American writers and filmmakers. Not for a minute do I believe that American artists do not produce challenging formalist narratives, only that such work is not afforded the same enthusiasm given similar work by artists working abroad. That these various American audiences are ready to engage with challenging work, provided it is foreign, appears to reside in an identification of "difficulty" with the exoticism of other cultures rather than as a characteristic of narrative art, regardless of its origin. It's as if American audiences think American culture is straightforward enough to warrant only linear narratives, as if complicated, contradictory lives are only lived by people in unfamiliar cultures. This is a perverse state of affairs, one that has radically narrowed our collective idea of contemporary American fiction in both subject matter and style. The vitality of our national literature demands that serious readers, writers, and critics put the New York publishing houses under the same fire for complacency that audiences and artists subject the Hollywood studios and the recording industry to.

More on, Compartimentalization of Desire

Levi Asher, of Literary Kicks, (previously mentioned) invited agents, publishers, booksellers and authors to participate in a discussion on marketing books--something set off by questions about hardbound versus paperbacks--why publishers of literary fiction don't put out first editions in paper back, why we don't get reviews of paperbacks... I had about the same time, raised some related questions, but on a more theoretical level, about reviews and marketing--whether or not all reviews are essentially reviews of books "as commodities." (See about three posts down) Ads in disguise. No matter the integrity or intention of the reviewer.

I was profoundly disturbed by the contributions of Simon Lipskar on Asher's blog. Now, Lipskar, an agent for Author's House, and no doubt a fine advocate for the writers he serves, offered insider informed arguments on how the system works, what is and is not possible.

What's wrong here, I asked myself? He's on the side of his clients. He knows his business.

I posted some questions of my own--what does it mean for how we perceive our work as writers, for how we evaluate literary merit, in a context where there can be no competing "reality" but that of the market--where the real value is determined by the bottom line--and all the rest is mere opinionating from the margins?

How do we not let that affect the aesthetic judgments we make? As writers? As critics? ...and inescapably--as reviewers?

Levi Asher, in reviewing the discussion to date, wrote that this should not be about Capitalism versus whatever... but deal with what we can expect from the realities we're left with.

I agree and disagree. Yes, this is valuable in the limits he sets out. I'm learning. I want to make a buck for my efforts like anyone else. So I pay attention and am happy for this discussion.

But why? ... I keep having these nagging doubts, that the cards are stacked against success for what I think really matters.

It's like the message here is: GET WITH THE PROGRAM.

And! WoW! If You aren't watching those GET RICH WITH REAL ESTATE (well... not anymore)... HERE'S how you can (maybe not exactly "get rich"), but ... like Writer's Digest... pure ideological whitewash...

Is that what the whole Beat thing comes down to for you, Levi?

How the mighty have fallen...

The Compartmentalization of Desire

I've found the comments by Simon Lipskar in the discussion on Book Pricing for Literary Fiction (Lev Asher's LitKicks)
both enlightening, and more than a little troubling. No question that he understands the reality of marketing books, and for questions that arise within that context, I'm convinced we have to accept his expertise. As long as we limit our activities to the ideology of the market, these seemingly autonomous forces determine what we can and cannot do, and for that matter, what we can and cannot think; what is the point, after all, of wasting our time in fantasies? Reality is reality.

Or is it?

I wouldn't bother to raise the question if I had more faith in our power to compartmentalize, to judge the value of a book as a commodity, and as... whatever else it is: art, literature, a cultural artifact, without leakage, without contamination from one compartment to the other. I would assume that an agent or publisher who admitted a book's "intrinsic" value into commercial considerations would not see leakage from that side as "contamination;" more likely, this would be an argument against the totalizing ideological influence of the market. But this would be true only to the degree that the membrane is permeable only in on direction.

Is it?

Here we are, subject to an ideology which informs us what is,and is not real, informs us that we are at best, instruments governed by that reality, that we cannot operate outside of it, that our freedom, such as it is, consists in understanding the operational forces (as Simon does), and choosing after the fact, what those forces have determined for us. Because what is "real," is the market, we all know perfectly well, that no value can exist apart from it, no value that is not fully quantifiable and subservient to its Laws. How then, to return to my question about compartmentalization, are we to formulate ideas or make judgments that are not thoroughly contaminated by the governing ideology? The problem is--how do you separate forms of desire? And when we talk about 'values,' that's what we mean--forms of desire. Take reviews, as just one example--one area where we express (and consume) public judgments on the value of books. No matter the intelligence, the integrity of the reviewer--book reviews, on one or more levels, become reviews of a salable object, or more precisely, of how the book will effect the desire to purchase and own.

Reviews: The Book as Commodity

Here's a question I would like to see spread around and broadly considered.

Is it possible to write a book review in any commercial venue that is not, by intention or otherwise, a review of the book as a commodity?

Because "reviews" are, whether published in the usual commercial settings--newspapers, magazines--or on blogs, web sites--other supposedly, "non-commercial" venues--catalogs of their desirability for readers...and so, for buyers of books--is it possible to write a "revue" at all, that is not essentially, no matter the intent of the reviewer, a review of a commodity?

It may be, and this is my current opinion... that the very form is inescapably corrupted. That is, if the first assumption on writing a review, is not that it is, in fact, inescapable (that a review is always going to be, primarily, a review, not of a work of literature, whatever that means, but of a commodity), than the answer to the question is, no.

Accepting that assumption--or should I say, recognizing that reality? How then does one go about writing a review, that is a review of the work itself... and not of the "book" as a commodity?