Marty Gerber
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Writing on my mind

If Godzilla and king Kong Wrote a Book, What Would They Call It?

12/11/2014

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I can remember having an idle thought once that it was a good thing my wife’s pregnancy was taking nine months (though I know her opinion differed) because the time was needed for us to suggest, reject, pore over, and battle over all the endless possibilities for naming our baby-to-come.

Similarly, though with obviously smaller stakes, I can recall emotional family discussions over what to name the household’s newest cat or dog—complicated by the fact that four people now had to agree rather than just the original two.

So what’s in a name? While Juliet implied that it wasn’t of much importance, the amount of thought and feeling often invested in the choice tells me most people feel otherwise. Which brings us to the progeny resulting when a writer’s chosen words fertilize the ovum of an idea. What shall we title this book?

In recent weeks, that question has been the subject of considerable mental gymnastics and anguished discussion concerning three books being published by Terra Nova.

On one hand, the decision is an “artistic” one, part of the same creative process that has produced the book. For the author, the ideal title will encapsulate the concepts and themes the book itself is built on, and will do it in a way that reflects the author’s own finely tuned sense of language.

But the decision is also a “commercial” one, to put it bluntly and crassly. The equation is pretty simple: Terra Nova is a business; it wants to make money from the sale of books (as do the writers of those books); the main source of that money is readers who part with it in exchange for the books; a book’s title is a key element in the decision-making process of that potential buyer.

Sometimes a solution between these differing points of view is reached through calm, reasoned balancing of pros and cons, pluses and minuses. Other times the consideration of conflicting opinions seems more like a King Kong vs. Godzilla rematch.

The author has already lived with the book a long time before it gets to me. The two of them have become intimate partners—sometimes in both the best and the worst sense. There’s a lot of emotion tied up in their relationship. And then the voice of Mammon speaks, disguised as me (or at least that’s the way it sometimes gets heard).

The author has usually given the book a title that fits, that works, that resonates with the meaning and intent the writing fed off all through the arduous, stressful process. But now this other person, wearing a badge that says “publisher,” shows up to suggest that the vague entity out there named “reader” may not take these words exactly the same way. And the battle is joined.

On one level, it can be said that this is about money: If no meeting of the minds can be found, then who is willing to sacrifice what for the sake of possibly selling a few more books? But money is merely a tangible representation of the essential but ephemeral value of connection. At rock bottom, a book is a connection, between the mind of the writer and that of the reader; that is its power and its only real purpose. If the book doesn’t have readers—meaning “buyers,” to go and be crass again—then the author has spent a great many hours doing something only for his or her own personal benefit, akin even to masturbation we might say (though this is not necessarily a negative pastime, of course, just not something most people hope to make money from).

So wearing my hat (or badge) as publisher, I’ve recently been embroiled in three sets of conversations with authors —in person, by text, by email, by voicemail, by mindmail—about what to title their books. Seemingly, all three have been resolved without bloodshed. “Come let us reason together,” the Good Book says, and ultimately it was a process that worked (although aided in one instance by a random epiphany). Strong feelings were voiced many times, but amazingly, a spirit of accommodation rather than intransigence triumphed.

Now all we have to do is see whether anyone buys these books.

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Blindly Through the Desert, the Only Road There Is

11/29/2014

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Megan Stielstra writes stories and essays and tells them out loud at theaters, festivals, bars, museums, maybe even restrooms for all I know. Her work taps into a unique life—in exactly the same sense that each of our lives is unique. The difference is that Stielstra pays attention.

She has ideas, as we all do. She looks at them from one side, then another, from the top, the bottom, the reverse, the obverse. She inverts the idea, she subverts it, she follows wherever the process takes her. Talking about one essay, she said in an interview, “During the writing, I stumbled into some questions about memory. I walked around with those questions in my head. They were stuck there, in a good way, and all of a sudden I was writing to figure out . . .  not necessarily the answers but why the questions mattered. That happens all the time: you start writing one thing, and you end up in another. Maybe that’s the one you were supposed to be writing all along.”

It’s a great concept. It’s called freedom. Sure, we as writers, like all explorers, need a starting point. But once we start moving, it’s like walking the desert. The terrain is flat, bare, maybe harsh and austere. We see a depression, a watercourse. We follow it; it deepens; the sides get steeper: an arroyo, a gully, a canyon. We move through shadows. The earth changes, the vegetation, the life forms scurrying past the corner of our eye.

Soon we may not know the way anymore, or at least not the way that got us there. There’s no going back. But ahead . . .

 . . . ahead lies the great unknown, the infinite unknown. Scary? You bet it is. But oh, the world that’s waiting!

The point is the discovery, each of us finding out for ourselves what’s there. And it’s never the same as what the next person finds.

Revision can take you there, into writing totally different from what you started out to do. Character can take you there, if you give the souls you create the same humanity that the metaphoric God gave me and thee. Gluing your ass to the seat of the chair can take you there, trying the same scene ten different ways till you find the one that works.

Fuck writers block—just keep moving ahead! Lower your standards; flush them down the john. Follow the momentum. If you’re free enough, you’ll never know where you’re going. But if you’re lucky enough, you’ll know damn well when you get there.

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in praise of praise

11/20/2014

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The sun rises in the east. Writers want blurbs. Certainly the two truisms are equal.

You’ve written a book. That’s great; good for you; way to go! But how the hell are you going to get readers to buy it?

It’s easy, the theory goes: Just have lots of people—hopefully people those readers have heard of—write blurbs for the cover extolling your progeny as God’s greatest gift to fiction at least since James Michener met Joseph Pulitzer.

And then when the reader-to-be is eagerly browsing the local book store, those mellifluous words will leap from the cover and drag hard cash (or its plastic simulacrum) from reader-to-be’s wallet direct to book store’s bank account. Sounds like a no-brainer to me.

Of course we’re talking here about, for instance, Maria Semple’s loving view of Maggie Shipstead’s Astonish Me: “So dazzling, so sure-handed and fearless that at times I had to remind myself to breathe.” Or maybe we have in mind the king of kongratulatory kindness, Gary Shteyngart, when he said about the author of English, August: “Comparing Upamanyu Chatterjee with any other comic novelist is like comparing a big fat cigar with a menthol cigarette.”

Those—without doubt!—are words we writers would give half our keyboard fingers for if only we could be their subject.

(But consider the source.)

Shteyngart, a writer deservedly honored for his craft and creativity, has also been clear about his criteria: “I look for the following: two covers, one spine, at least 40 pages, ISBN number, title, author’s name. Once those conditions are satisfied, I blurb. And I blurb hard.”

Whyever has he set his standards so high, an achievement boggling to aspire to? The reason is clear.

He loves us. He knows the fear, bile, hormones, and substances we have put into our work (blood, sweat, toil, and tears being so last century). And he believes we’ve earned the right to connect with anyone we can find who’s willing to dispense sufficient adoration, and perhaps a few shekels as well.

Although Shteyngart, overwhelmed by the demand, has sadly announced plans to retire his “blurbing pen” (actually to hurl it into the Hudson River), his ethic fills me with inspiration. I stand ready to take up quill and cursor. No writer’s labor should go unrewarded, and though words may be the only reward I’m wealthy enough to offer, my full supply waits pantingly for your call.

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and may the lesser evil win

11/10/2014

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Whoops! Here’s a blog that could become out of date—meaning bypassed by the randomness of events—between the time I write it and the time you read it. (Talk about living dangerously.)

It’s about Hachette, about Amazon. And who knows? They could announce any instant now that Hachette has “won” (likelihood 5%–10%) or that Amazon “won” (90%–95%). After all, who would have thought that in the midst of all the above parties’ mutual pummeling, Amazon would have come to a seemingly amicable agreement last month over the same issues with Simon & Schuster (terms secret, of course, just like the Amazon and Hachette bargaining stances).

Though Amazon started out in the book business, that tiny piece of its balance sheet has become dwarfed by toiletries, sweaters, snow shovels, and other items more essential to the “real world” than mere words and ideas. Amazon is in the business of selling, unlike most companies which are in the business of making money. Buying customers, with price and convenience, is Amazon’s M.O., and what product it’s selling to any particular customer is pretty secondary.

Obviously, the short-term gain for the customer comes from paying as little as possible for whatever you’re buying. So when Amazon insists it’s on the reader’s side, the guys with green pictures in your wallet are going to cheer their approval.

But then there’s the matter of Amazon’s unique business strategy. While the recent claim that the company has created a monopoly is pretty specious, it’s tough to avoid the fear of “potential monopoly” when the goal is to sell everything to everyone (a competition with only one real rival: Walmart). What happens when Amazon succeeds, when it really can set whatever price it chooses for books and all its other commodities? Do we assume desire for profit will then be outweighed by Jeff Bezos’ love for the good, the true, and the beautiful?

Is Amazon really on the customer’s side? Is Hachette really on the author’s side? Don’t be silly! Hachette is on Hachette’s side, like Amazon is on Amazon’s side. That’s the basic nature of the game; it’s called capitalism.

Bottom line, naturally, the issue is power: who gets to call the shots (i.e., set the prices). Authors by the hundreds have rallied to each of the adversaries, depending on which side of the page they see their butter on.

To those in the Amazon camp, it’s all pretty simple: Lower prices mean more sales, more readers. And it doesn’t really matter if the seller gets those buyers the same way it gets them for any other product.

But for those of us to whom books have a little in common with oxygen, it’s an analogy that rankles on the level our neurons fire at. Yes, we’re economic animals, but we’re also beings who can sometimes contain larger values, part of our human uniqueness.

What’s an idea worth? What does a well-turned phrase add to my life? What’s the importance of a character who gives me a little more understanding of the world I live in? These values are real, even though you can’t give them a price tag.

And because they are the content of its “products”—the thread count of its linens, if you will—Hachette seems slightly closer to understanding them than its enemy of the moment. There’s little enough else to hang on to in their battle, so that’s enough for me.

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Good riddance to creativity!

10/27/2014

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“Let’s make a deal,” a couple of companies—one of them backed by $25 million in venture capital—are telling book readers. “We’ll give you access to hundreds of thousands of ebooks for only $10 a month,” they’re saying in effect. “And all you have to do in return is let us track every detail of your reading habits while you plow (or skim) your way through those books.”

“Well, why do they want to know this?” an inquiring mind might ask. “Who cares?”

The answer, say the two enterprising outfits, Scribd and Oyster, is “authors.” The writers of books, they believe, are dying to do exactly what’s been done before to make their work even more irresistible—and are willing to pay for the information that lets them do it.

So what do you as a writer want to know: How long should your book be? How many chapters should it have? How much description makes readers just skip through it? When does your plot become too complex? What makes whodunit readers jump to the end? The data miners are doing the homework; they’ve got the answers.

And by the way, what genre should you be writing in anyway? Do memoir readers really quit before romance fans? Find out. Why buck the odds?

I think this is great news for authors! Everyone who’s ever tried to write a book knows what a pain it is trying to figure out these things for yourself. Now you can just see what someone else did and check what results they got. It makes the path to best-sellerdom as clear and easy to follow as the yellow brick road.

Good riddance to the crazy idea of having your own concept and a vision before you type Chapter 1 at the top of the page. Let the info these good folks are piling up tell you what’s been done before, and then just pump out more of the same. This business of creativity has always been overrated in my book, and it’s about time someone figured out a better way.

 “Self-published writers are going to eat this up,” says one independent publishing exec. “They want anything that might help them reach more readers.”

And as a novelist with eight published books on the market asked: “What writer would pass up the opportunity to peer into the reader’s mind?”

So for any author out there who might be dreaming about doing something different, forget it, give up—get with the program! The gurus of publishing have seen the future, and they’re writing your obit.

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Books By The Numbers: Not All Red Ink

10/14/2014

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It’s not hard to be pessimistic about the future of books—especially if you don’t have a name that’s already made millions for one of planet’s handful of megapublishers. For the rest of us, the background music is the cacophony of 800 books being brought to market every day—the sound of a pretty dismal dirge.

But now come some numbers that I think might add a bit of an upbeat. The source of those numbers—the Pew Research Center—considers them relatively dismal, but I think its expectancies were simply too high.

• How many American adults have read a book in the past year? Considering all the faces around me stuck in screens of one size or another, I might have guessed maybe 50 to 60 percent; Pew says it’s 75%.

• How many people read a book every month? Pew says 28 percent have read eleven books or more in the past year. Pretty close to one a month. (But where are they all? Glued to Kindles under the covers?)

• People with at least some college have read an average of five books in the past year. And the average 18-to-29-year-old—a cohort that’s almost always read less than older groups—still finishes nine books a year.

• And (most encouraging of all) according to the National Endowment for the Arts, the number of 18-to-24-year-olds who’ve read a book outside of work or school is unchanged since the antediluvian days before the Creation of Facebook, at 52 percent.

So those are some numbers. While I can’t quite say they make me Pollyanna in rose-colored glasses, they sure don’t enlist me in the doom-and-gloom brigade either.

I’d guess that the lure of a good story probably remains the same as it was when the first Cro-Magnon hunter regaled the campfire crowd with his latest escape from the grim reaper in saber-tooth guise.

The story has never been the problem. The problem, if we choose to view it in those terms, is all the other story-tellers out there struggling to regale the same caveman ears—or eyeballs in their modern update. But, counter to the delivered wisdom from some quarters, at least the prize we’re all fighting for doesn’t really seem to be vanishing before our eyes.


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Skip the Book, Just Read His Brain

10/4/2014

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Do the same parts of the readers' brain become active when they read specific parts of a book as the ones that fired when the author wrote the passage?
The world of the atom, the world of the cosmos—it’s all so last century. Now it’s the world of the mind—or at least the brain—that dominates science reporting, with its research and discoveries about what actually happens in our heads as we go through the daily whirlwind of thoughts and emotions, interactions and experiences.

These synapses spark as we devour a hot fudge sundae; those cells flash watching a psycho on the screen seize his victim; the blood throbs here thinking of our beloved, thrums there at the ex-beloved who jilted us.

And what happens when we read a book?


What happens when we write one?

The masters of neuroscience have set out to find the answers. And for an eager guinea pig—who knows, he might even write about it one day?—they lucked into Arnon Grunberg, one of Europe’s hottest young novelists.

The idea was to connect him to enough gadgets and gizmos to monitor his every twitch, pulse, and brain wave as he labored over his latest novella—and then do the same to fifty people reading the book.


Will the same parts of the readers’ brains go into gear when they read specific sections as the ones Grunberg mined to write them? And does this mean they’re cycling through the same patterns of understanding and emotion?

That is the question.

And if so, so what?

As for Grunberg himself, there might be reason to question how seriously he’s taken his foray into brain imaging technology. In the past, he’s been accused—by admirers—of viewing the life and work of a writer as something of a lark. After all, this is a man honored twice for writing the best first novel in his native Netherlands—first as himself and then again six years later under a pseudonym.

So how does it feel trying to mix an insider’s and outsider’s view of pounding the keyboard while twenty-eight electrodes are affixed to his skull? Said Grunberg: “It’s like having someone else embedded in my own brain.”

Wow, does that make me shudder and cringe! Writing a book can be crazy-making enough for some of us even when there’s no one else inside there but little old me.
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Of Pages and Paper

4/8/2014

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PictureHeart of Darkness
Recently, I read a true paean to ebooks. “Last summer,” the author wrote, “I read Heart of Darkness on my cell phone. I read in line at the supermarket, sitting in my dentist’s waiting room, and even by sneaking peeks during traffic jams.”

Now, granted that Heart of Darkness isn’t a book of impressive length, I still consider this a pretty impressive feat. Mainly it’s impressive for the powers of concentration required by type that’s maybe a sixteenth of a inch tall (as well as by Conrad’s mystical, mystifying, and gripping tale).

The proud phone reader, though, was quick to assure us that actually, he goes both ways. (“I love print books.”) But he’s still pretty boggled by the fact that he remains in a distinct minority.

My guess is that it comes down to the eternal thrust and parry between science and soul. You can sure list a slew of reasons that e-readers can’t be matched, from changeable fonts to synching with a dozen other gizmos to toting around the OED in your back pocket. But, at least for anyone first captured by the magic of words on a page when that page was made of paper, there’s a look and a feel and a sense and a heft—and yes, a romance—that transcends all the acknowledged utility of electronic impulses.

But let’s face facts: We who once knew a world without computers are dying off a lot quicker than the kids we raised. And what happens when the lights go out on the last folks in the hospice who didn’t learn their ABCs on a screen?

For reading’s survivors, the habits they came out of the playpen with are the ones they’ll be shaped by. No need for the kind of relics consigned to the little old shop in an out-of-the-way neighborhood whose faded sign whispers “Used Books.”

I can see the place now: an ideal setting for some ambitious author’s fable for phone about the long-ago days of paper, ink, and pages you’d feel as you went from one to another. It would start out, “Once upon a time ….”



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    Marty Gerber is the editor and co-owner of Terra Nova Books. He established the publishing company in partnership with his son, Scott, in 2012 after working as a freelance editor of books and professional journals since the early 1990s. Before that, he was a newspaper writer and editor for many years, both with some of the nation’s leading dailies and as the founder of startups in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, N.M. He also has taught journalism at New York University and the University of Arizona, and has ghostwritten two books and written two others as himself.

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