Fascinating Facts Leads Author
To the Real Challenge: Selling It

The norm at Terra Nova is that I’m editing books and publishing books written by other people. But now I’ve published a book that I wrote myself (though edited by someone else, of course). It feels like an unusual hat to have on.
 
This book has come to be because of a powerful force acting on me. That force is named New Mexico. It’s the state I’ve lived in for thirty-one of the past thirty-eight years. Somehow, over that time, it has spread tentacles that seized and entrapped my inner feelings.
 
If you’d like an idea of what specifically those tentacles consist of, sorry but you’ll have to buy the book. It’s titled Fascinating Facts of New Mexico, and it’s available at your local bookstore or via cyberspace from some outfit named after a river, but I forget which. (Maybe it’s the Danube or Nile or Monongahela.)
 
But generally speaking, what’s behind the book is the fact that I simply became so fascinated by the state’s people and places and stories as I learned more and more about them—and since most of those thirty-one years were spent in the newspaper business, I came to learn a great deal. It’s information that adds a real fullness to my life in New Mexico, and it inspires me to share some of that fullness with others. It’s a gift I love to share—and to receive in return the next person’s intriguing and unexpected knowledge of the state.
 
So now I’m a “published author.” And though I was obviously spared some authors’ ordeal with their editor and/or publisher, I’m not spared those authors’ confrontation with the marketplace. The same eight hundred new books published every day that every other author is up against is aiming to shove me into the remainder bin as well.
 
How can I survive? How can I convince the 173 million U.S. book readers (or a reasonable percentage thereof) to choose my book over anyone else’s? The answer I’ve always told Terra Nova authors is “marketing.” And if I didn’t already know it, I’d tell it to myself now.
 
I sit here at my computer having been “launched”--personally--into the world of appearances, interviews, tweets, reviews, Facebook, articles, signings, readings, blogs, press releases, etc/etc/etc. And it feels like a good world to be in for me, with powerful reward from both the enthusiastic response readers are giving Fascinating Facts, and from knowing I’m doing the max to help myself, in the super-tough job of connecting a book with readers.
 
So yeah, as I noted upfront, having an author’s hat on feels a little strange. But that doesn’t make it a bad thing at all. It simply means I’ve moved from one kind of challenge to another. What else is life here for anyway?

Bookends is a New York Times column in which two writers go mano a mano over a book-related issue chosen by editors to put them at opposite ends of the widest possible spectrum.
 
One such recent spectrum was book subjects that are "underrepresented in contemporary fiction." (Though the question “Compared with what?” was ignored, I think the intended answer would be the world we breathe and bleed and breed in.)
 
For Ayana Mathis, joy was on top of the “missing” list. Today's writers, she said, have dived into a sea of "despair, alienation, and bleakness." And she sees the reason clearly—a need to "write against" our culture's most common images of how people live: those created by ad writers and political speech-makers. As a result, Mathis says, "We have elevated suffering to the highest of virtues."
 
However, the counterpointing Siddhartha Deb awards writers more personal responsibility for what they ignore: refugees drowning at sea, life in solitary confinement, endless doomed struggles to merely pay the rent. "Literary fiction," he says, "seems cut off from . . . the very substance of living." And the cause that he sees goes deeper than Mathis's view; it is "the narrowing of sensibilities and interests of those writing today."
 
I realize there's a theory that "literary fiction" is impervious to the marketplace, that its creators should somehow be able to buy gas and pay the babysitter with specie consisting of the good, the true, and the beautiful. This is fantasy, of course. Reality is that those allowed by idealism or trust fund to avoid considering what people might want to read—the "demand" part of the capitalist equation—are pretty few on the supply side of the writing world. The large majority might wish they had that luxury but know they’re sadly stuck with the need to at least occasionally consider their audience.
 
Deb holds out Elena Ferrante, a writer focused on "unpalatable truth," as someone who "might free herself from the tired pursuit of fiction as a matter of professional advancement" and replace it with "indifference to what the market wants." He probably regrets that she's shown no interest in having her novels go unread. As a fallback, my best suggestion is that Deb, an author praised for both his fiction and non-fiction, step forth himself into that land where writers answer only to themselves.
 
"The rot of today’s literary scene," he laments, is "reinforced by the corporate demands of mainstream publishing houses"—clearly unacceptable for any person of honor. It's only a matter of time, I'm sure, before Deb will be bravely putting his keyboard fingers where his mouth is—except, that is, for the middle one proudly reserved for his readers.

I wanted to do a pirouette. Almost everyone else in my dance class could—usually with a smile on their face. It seemed perfectly simple.

 This was 2004. And 2007. And 2009. Etc. etc. etc. Finally in 2013, I told my teacher: “This is my year of the pirouette.” I was absolutely determined; I would master it, come what may!

 Today, I still can’t do a decent pirouette.

 For me, that was the hardest thing I ever tried to do in my life. Except for writing a novel.

The point here is how easy something can look from the outside—until you try to do it on the inside. Continually, I’ve learned in the publishing business, people feel, “I’ve read novels all my life. Of course I know what it takes.”

 But that’s from the outside!

I’m doing a pirouette. When do I rise en pointe? (Or even demi-pointe?) When does my arm close? How far? When does my toe rise to knee? What’s the angle of my leg? Where should my weight be? And where does the momentum come from?

I’m writing a novel. How can my plot grab the reader? Do my characters grow and change? Have I smoothly blended background and narrative? Does my dialog sound like people really talk? And what point of view am I telling this in anyway?

For all you writers out there who think you know instinctively what it takes to make a novel work, I’m saying: Take a class; take a course. (Or maybe even two or six.)

As the poobah of manuscript vetting for Terra Nova Books, it’s clear to me that far too many people believe their natural intelligence plus knee-jerk and gut instinct will suffice. Wrong!

Certainly I’ve heard often enough about exceptions—authors who write wonderful books off the top of their head, so to speak—that I can’t call it impossible. But for the other 99 percent, any worthwhile novel is intrinsically far too complex, with far too many moving parts, for this kind of shortcut to succeed.

As a norm, people don’t want to hear this. Increasingly, the culture around us proclaims that doing it the easy way (whatever “it” happens to be) is the goal we should all be shooting for. And indeed that can sometimes pay off—all it takes is setting your sights low enough.

The options are clear: You can spin round and round like a top on your toes; you can write a story readers can’t put down. Or, doing either or both, you can fall flat on your face.

In the competition for world’s dumbest aphorism, “What I don't know can’t hurt me” is certainly a leading contender. In a publisher’s workaday world, it’s continually saddening to see this point emphasized so repeatedly by the manuscripts crossing my computer screen.

Simply put, too many would-be novelists have thought it unnecessary to learn basic information about the craft they are undertaking. And as a result, they’re wasting an immeasurable amount of time, energy, and emotion over many many months and years.

If this might be you, please consider the many options out there to learn the rudiments of planning, plotting, structure, setting, character, conflict, etc., etc. Look beyond your old English teacher, the proofreader next door, your cousin the tech writer. You'll be the one who gains from it—and your readers.

Is there a way for an author to both face the world of reviews and maintain sanity?

I don’t think so.

It’s the power, the sheer power, we’re up against, those people out there—anonymous in all but name—who hold our “fortunes” in their hands (using the term loosely for the whispy background scrim in most writers’ lives). But the larger point is that they hold our egos too. How they see us (we believe) will shape how the world sees us, and thus—inevitably—how we see ourselves.

Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad if they got it right more often. But these picky-picky-picky folk keep crapping on us just because we didn’t write the book they wish they were good enough to write themselves. (That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.)

So I went online and looked for credible data on overall percentages of positive and negative book reviews, and couldn’t find any. Giving the benefit of the doubt, maybe it’s because so many reviews just end up in the wishy-washy middle.

Assuming that neither you nor I write the perfect (or the perfectly awful) book, it will always be possible to say, “On the one hand . . .” and “On the other hand . . .” I guess I’m just fatally old fashioned to think a reviewer should give me more help than that—such as conclusions and opinions, for instance—in deciding whether a book is worth my time and money.

I recall an author saying once he’d concluded that over the length of his career, it had taken five five-star reviews to overcome a single one-star in his mind: “The praise just bounced off” (responding to them like most of us do when our partner bestows five-star or one-star ratings).

Because the person reviewing a particular book is always such a great unknown, the result is the same toss of the dice. If we’re going to dismiss a negative review with, “Hey, what does he know anyway,” there’s no defensible way to see a positive opinion any other way.

Except that we’re human—with praise as essential to a healthy man, woman, or child as food and water.

Reviewing is like healing, a pastime (“profession” for just an oddball few) where the byline owner can create the only entry criterion that counts. Logically, that should lead us to pay it little mind, but somehow things don’t work that way. We can tell ourselves it’s just one person, one isolated assessment, thus deserving a weight of exactly one in stacking up the views of everyone who’s read or may read our book. But somehow the mere fact of the writer’s officially allotted soapbox (even if self-allotted) gives an imprimatur it’s probably impossible to ignore.

For Catherine McKenzie, for instance, who’s now written four best-selling novels, the appearance of her first major review way back when led to an equivalent of the king’s food taster. “I had someone read it for me first to let me know if I should read it . . . because if my book was going to be trashed in a national newspaper, I kind of didn’t want to know.”

Maybe she had something there. Maybe it could be a solution for the rest of us as well. And what about all those other places in life where a negative opinion—or even rejection!—could lurk?

“Hello, this is Marty with the Your Happy Answer Company, just calling to ask if you’d be interested in dinner and a movie with [fill in client’s name]—or if that won’t work, maybe a bike ride and a picnic.”

Wow! Obviously this is a startup destined to bring much more wealth and glory than I’ll ever find in the publishing business. And then I can write a book about it, sharing my success with the adulating public. The reviewers will all love it. I’m sure they will.

Or at least I think they will.

I mean, I hope they will.

They’d better, the damn bastards!

Elisa Gabbert has written two published books, one of poetry and another that (according to its website) “uses the lyric essay like a koan.”

Already, I’m intimidated, but I plunge ahead nonetheless because her subject of the moment is titles—of stories, poems, books, and portions thereof—and it’s one I wrestle with many a day of my working life.

“Titles are advertising,” she says. “Like covers and blurbs, they are trying to tell you what kind of book you’re holding, what other books it is like, and what kind of person is supposed to like it.” This seems to me to be asking quite a lot. In my own simplistic publisher’s mind, I’ve usually settled for a title that makes a potential reader want to know more about the book, rather than return it to the shelf immediately.

Then (to make her counterpoint, I assume) Gabbert cites Miranda July’s The First Bad Man—“not a bad title, but it’s the wrong title for the book.” Specifically, “it doesn’t tell you anything about the book as a whole, and worse, it sets the wrong tone—an ominous tone for a funny book that is not about bad men or men at all.” Picky picky me—much too thick to fathom how being flatly deceptive still qualifies this as “not a bad title.”

But there also are criteria on which Gabbert and I agree, such as an aversion to:

• The formulaic: What We Talk About When We Talk About [That Thing], or Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About [Whatever] but Were Afraid to Ask.

• The fatally turgid: Gabbert deploringly cites Because I Am the Shore I Want to Be the Sea, but I’m left totally in awe by No Matter How Much You Promise to Cook or Pay the Rent You Blew It Cauze Bill Bailey Ain't Never Coming Home Again. (Really!)

• The rhythmically sing-songy: Then We Came to the End or I Know This Much Is True. (And I share Gabbert’s fondness for spondees, such as Bleak House or White Noise.)

Being a poet, she cites with approval the poet’s gambit of stealing a title from the words that follow “because the mind likes familiarity.” When it alights on the phrase a second time, “there’s almost a subconscious ding of recognition.”

This “ding” is not to be taken lightly. The best titles are different—but not too different. The reader wants a phrase, an idea, an echo that feels comfortable but also says there’s something distinctive about this book. A title can be puzzling but not bogglingly obscure. It’s tricky.

Trends come and go. We may have outgrown the Secret Lives of phase, but I’m pretty sure negative ideas are in vogue at the moment: Everything I Never Told You, All the Light We Cannot See.

Ultimately, it’s the same for a book’s title as for the full cover surrounding it: Deciding on the one that “works” (defined as optimum satisfaction of both aesthetic and commercial criteria) is more art than science. But that’s simply saying the emotions play a larger role than the intellect does. And that’s simply saying titling a book is no different a process than choosing your “bathroom tissue”—or buying a house. Art imitates life.

In my last blog, I talked a little about Dave Biddle, a serious writer whose sales success left him feeling that “the Goddess of Books has been squatting over me on a cruelly random basis, relieving herself as she sees fit.”

This is not a laughing matter. It’s hard to be a part of the book business at the start of 2015 and not feel whipped and ripped by the mindless maelstroms of chance. Seldom (if ever) have writers been so little the masters of their fate and captains of their souls.

So what can any of us who are so inclined realistically do to gain (regain?) some measure of control over one’s professional and artistic lives?

Step No. 1, I suggest, is making your book the best it can be. And to accomplish this, Step No. 1.5 is getting the honest input of a knowledgeable, independent mind. (This does not necessarily mean your English teacher neighbor or cousin who edited her high school yearbook.)

Likely, the person you’re seeking will have some professional abilities you yourself lack, in addition to taking a more objective view of your work. This is help you should be willing to pay for. But how do you actually find the right helper? How can a writer know who will be the best editor from among all the candidates out there hollering Me! Me! Me!

Just as no specific qualifications are needed to advise someone on losing weight or dealing with depression, anyone who chooses can hang out a shingle that says “Editor,” and offer opinions on whether you’re using too many adjectives or your characters don’t seem credible.

Selecting the best editor is an author’s decision that can literally make or break your book’s chances for success—and there are very few clear guidelines (other than hoping you pray to the right God). But in case that doesn’t work, here are a few other points to look for:

• The editor’s uncommon ability to see both the forest and the trees. This is essential, and an area in which you should look for experience. In manuscript terms, it means subject-verb agreement and run-on-sentence avoidance as well as the larger picture of whether this book—fact or fiction—is organized in a logical way for the reader (granting that fiction has a little more leeway, if the writer is skilled enough to pull that off).

• Someone you can communicate with easily and comfortably. This is a relationship—in exactly the same sense as the one you have with a live-in partner (even though the benefits may differ slightly). If writer and editor can’t be fully honest and open with each other, the relationship is doomed to failure. There is not an objective criterion: You, the writer, and you, the editor, must feel right in your gut about the connection between you both; that’s all there is.

• The writer’s openness to suggestions and another person’s opinions. “Kill Your Babies” is the most common cliché on this point—attributed to everyone from Chekov to Wilde to Ginsburg to Faulkner (although the real originator seems to be the unheard-of Arthur Quiller-Couch). The fact is that clichés become clichés because they’re right and true. What this one means, plainly and simply, is that passages—or characters or descriptions or wondrous turns of phrase—are not really worth the eternal life of publication simply because their creator loves them (as any mother does her children). They need to be viewed in terms of how the reader will see them. And usually the editor is the better judge of this than the person who gave them life.

So that’s a few factors for the writer to think about in turning out the best book possible. But then, assuming you’ve accomplished all this, the question becomes how you make potential readers aware of what you’ve done, and get them to part with hard-earned shekels in exchange for it. The answer—a word that makes most writers want to shrivel up like an amoeba into their own ectoplasm—is “marketing.”

Unavoidable fact: Every day in the U.S. of A., eight hundred books are published. That’s the competition every author’s book must face—today! And then tomorrow, there will be eight hundred more. And on and on and on.

How do you make your book—your blessed, personal creation, heart of your heart, soul of your soul—stand out from the other seven hundred ninety-nine?

The only answer is “marketing”!

What’s the best way to connect your book with potential buyers? Book store readings? Signings and discussions? Radio and TV interviews? Online and print reviews? Newspaper and magazine articles? Blogs? Tweets? Pinterest boards? Facebook postings? And the many other things I haven’t even thought of or mentioned?

All of the above!

That’s the sad fact of 2015. When I speak to groups of writers or book business folks, I often begin with: “I am the bearer of evil tidings.” And that’s the truth. There are only two kinds of books, I end up telling them: the ones whose authors get 100% behind marketing those books, and the ones that have no readers. There isn’t a third category!

No one wants to hear this. But the only alternative is pure and simple denial—which benefits none of us.

So this is the hard reality for authors. You can accept that it’s what you must do, or you can become a cake decorator or Big Box greeter. Take your choice. Sure, you don’t want to be out there “interfacing” with hoi polloi (when you could be pouring your soul into your next book) any more than you want to be slitting open your veins. But nobody asked. The planet is getting hotter, and there’s only one way to sell books.

So that’s today’s dose of “evil tidings.” I hope it helps. I hope it leads to more people buying more books worth reading written by more writers who’ve become tougher and more realistic than their natural inclinations might lead them to. May Dave Biddle’s omnipotent (albeit incontinent) Goddess of Books be with you.

David Biddle has written a bunch of articles and essays published in national magazines, newspapers, and online, plus three books (a novel and two short story collections) published by himself. In 2010, before he became a publisher, he had a plan.

Amazon would be the answer. The math looked simple: Ebooks that he brought to market through the Big A’s self-publishing program would net him $5.59 each (since Big A’s cut of his $7.99 “cover price” would be $2.40). Bottom line: almost $30,000 a year in his pocket; the only thing he’d have to do would be sell a hundred books a week.

Plus the best part of his plan: “all without having to kowtow to industry professionals ever again.”

Maybe this is a writer with a bit of an attitude problem. For one thing, even though those “industry professionals” may sometimes tell him things he doesn’t want to hear, they really do have the same goal he does: as many readers as possible for as many books as possible. And it might have made a little more sense to see the relationship as a cooperative rather than a kowtowing one. But hey, Dave has his point of view; I have mine. So it goes.

Biddle goes on: "It's all about product. You just need to pound away every day. I was plotting my career. I was going to become a full-time writer. Finally! At 52, I was going to shove my day job of thirty years and write my ass off every single day until I died.”

Speaking personally, I think I would do hara-kiri before crapping on another writer’s dreams. So if that’s Dave Biddle’s roadmap for success, more power to him. (But I also think my support doesn’t stop me from recognizing what he’s described for what it actually is: dreams.)

As Steve Miller once famously reminded us, “Time keeps on slipping into the future.” And in Dave Biddle’s future, enough time finally slipped by that he was forced to concede: “I've been an indie author for almost three years. And I haven't made squat—yet.”

In a metaphor that makes me jealous (of the imagery though not the result), he wrote: “I feel like the Goddess of Books has been squatting over me on a cruelly random basis, relieving herself as she sees fit.” He went on to explain: “I'm embarrassed to write here that, on average, I make about $10 a month on book sales. That's two to three units sold every four weeks.”

If I should I turn the viewfinder away from Dave now and take a selfie, I see a guy in the picture with a pretty strong bias against self-deception, which poor Dave—alas!—fell serious victim to. (Of course, most of us don’t pick our biases. Maybe yours are aimed at blondes, or the Dallas Cowboys. But for those who can set their own targets on the mental firing range, lying to oneself—even little white lies—is a pretty useful one to blast away at.)

As for Dave, he was forced to confess: “It's been painful to lose my original starry-eyed optimism about the book world. . . . These days, I know how difficult it is to break out as an author.” He’s learned some lessons, he writes, the foremost of which is, “There's way too much competition.” On Amazon’s Kindle "Best Sellers" list—a tally title of almost-hysterical hyperbole—Dave’s novel, Beyond the Will of God, had only 777,028 other “best sellers” ranked above it.

“Not to mince words,” he says, “but there's a shitload of books out there for sale.” After counting up the numbers, he concludes that, “If you apply the law of supply and demand to this situation, you will feel a serious amount of Goddess pee on your head.”

So what’s an author to do? How do you:

• Make sure the book you either submit to a publisher or publish yourself is the absolute best it can be?

• And then once that best book is published by someone, get readers to fork over money to buy it?

In other words, how do you keep your head dry in the land of the incontinent Goddess? I’ll be offering some reasonably waterproof umbrellas in my next blog.

The New York Times offers a regular feature in which two writers discuss what purports to be opposite sides of a book-related question. These have included such thoughtful subjects as the utility of literature, the place of sentimentality in fiction, and how books can threaten relationships.

One recent week, Daniel Mendelsohn, author of seven books including prize-winners and best-sellers, extolled the place of books in the life of the French. For a writer, he says, it feels like, “Paris is the capital of the world”—as shown by the fact that “every block in central Paris seems to sprout at least two small, intelligently stocked bookshops.” He also notes that a major factor making this possible is the French law designating books as an “essential good,” which has sheathed the double-edged sword of deep discounts and free delivery that let Amazon slash so viciously through the Eden of America’s writers and publishers.

In theoretical counterpoint, Mohsin Hamid, author of three novels including prize-winners and best-sellers, advises writers to realize they are just one variety of the nation’s toiling masses. Books have no privileged position in this country, he reminds us, even though to writers, editors, designers, agents, publicists, booksellers, and their ilk, they are different: “We forgo higher wages doing other things because we love what we do, because we believe in what we do. Surely our industry deserves special treatment.”

But he really doesn’t think so. A much bigger problem for America as a whole, Hamid believes, than the specialness or lack thereof that we feel for books is the decided lack of specialness in our feelings about the simple work of making a product--any product: books, boots, auto transmissions, or the latest Silicon Valley widget.

That feeling was around, he says, in the middle of the last century, before the pendulum swung as far as it has now toward enshrinement of our rights as consumers—the right basically to wallow in all the deep discounts and freebies an Amazon can lavish on us.

“Maybe we can learn something from that America…,” Hamid writes, “to value producing as much as we do consuming.” Maybe even writers can.

“Maybe we are missing something by focusing on how special we are as book people,” he adds. “We seem to be ignoring the bigger picture: namely that we are workers, and that our experience is converging with that of many other workers in America.” We should think about uniting, he suggests sotto voce, “at least a little. And not just with other writers.”

The point here, of course, is being “special.” I can take the fact that I write books, for instance, as a clear sign of my special creativity. But what about the fellow in the next studio painting portraits with elephant dung, feeling just as emotionally attached to his work as I do to mine? Isn’t his a special creativity too? (Certainly I couldn’t do it.)

So probably, creativity’s not much of a criterion. But maybe there are other reasons to value an author more than an elephant-dung painter. Maybe one of these people (I’ll leave you to guess which) is adding something semi-important—or at least a little bit tasty—to the planet’s stewpot of knowledge, ideas, emotions, and crazy, half-baked theories. That seems like it could have some worth.

And what about those others alongside us in the vineyards, the cubicles, on the assembly line, driving that semi? It’s different kinds of ingredients they’re tossing in their pots, making different dishes to go on our collective great big menu with my pot of stew. But you won’t get me calling them less crucial to the healthy mix of grub that feeds us all.

Let’s face facts: Is how these folks make a buck really what defines them? The differences between us all are so easy to see: She’s blonde, I’m dark; he digs ditches, I write. So what?

“Our experience is converging,” Mohsin Hamid says. Maybe that’s the better point. Maybe we’re all better off realizing the kinds of things we share—the satisfaction of achieving a common goal with others, the pride in a job well done, the bitterness when it goes unnoticed—rather than focusing on what we think makes us different (by which we really mean better).

Here’s my vote for the greater commonality of writers with other Homo sapiens, rather than just the hubristic subspecies of Homo sapiens authorus. It’s the outcome, I’m out on a limb to say, most likely to increase our link with Homo sapiens bookreaderus. And which of us doesn’t want that?