the cockeyed pessimist

IT WAS A VERY GOOD YEAR

2012-01-04T14:17:00.010-05:00

One of the great pleasures in publishing is discovering terrific writers. One of the frustrations is not being able to find an audience that would do justice to the novels they write. There is a system in publishing that mirrors what the Occupy Wall Street movement has focused on: Multinational Corporations RULE. Small independent presses are the 99%, and the 1% are the Big Six Multinationals—whose home offices are largely to be found in Germany (Hotzbrink owns Macmillan and Bertelsmann owns Random House), France (Hachette), and England (The Penguin Group)—with the last two majors being Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, incorporated in Australia until 2004, when they reincorporated in the USA, but with tentacles still stretching to Australia and England. The only remaining colossus clearly American owned is Simon and Schuster, owned by CBS. By virtue of the advertising budgets, radio and television stations, major magazine and newspaper ownership, book clubs, expense accounts, and other media outlets, their releases dominate the print reviews, interviews, articles and are able to create “stars.” I love Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, but has anyone ever seen them interview a guest whose book comes from a small independent press? The same applied to Oprah at her height. The Big Six, with over 100 imprints, manage to turn writers into celebrities.

I’ve reported how this system works in past blogs over the last couple of years, and have no need to flog a dead horse (or a living Tyrannosaurus Rex) again, but you can always read these past postings. Instead, I’m happy to report that, despite the odds, 2011 was a very satisfying year for us, with seven of our authors gaining artistic recognition.

Kermit Moyer’s The Chester Chronicles won the 2011 PEN/Winship Award for Fiction (the third time in the last seven years one of our novelists won this New England Prize—previous winners being Edward Delaney’s Warp & Weft, and K.C. Frederick’s Inland.

ForeWord Magazine included Charles Davis’ Standing at the Crossroads as one of their Top 10 Books for 2011. Only one other novel made that list.

Georgeann Packard’s Fall Asleep Forgetting was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards for both the Bisexual Fiction and Lesbian Debut Fiction Awards.

The New Mexico Book Award for First Fiction went to Liza Campbell for The Dissemblers.

Jenny Shank’s The Ringer was a finalist for both the Denver Book of the Year Award and the Independent Booksellers Reading the West Book Awards. It was also a Tattered Cover Summer Reading 2011 selection, and sat atop the Best-Seller lists in Denver and Boulder for several weeks.

Luxury Reading.com listed Louise Young’s Seducing the Spirits as one of their top 10 books for 2011.

Maud Adjarian, doing a round-up of memorable mysteries in Library Journal, listed Leonard Rosen’s All Cry Chaos as one that “had all the elements of great crime fiction: unforgettable characters, edge-of-your-seat suspense, and page-turning plots.” And she backed it up with an interview with Len in the same article—the only writer interviewed. Now in its second printing, Chaos also had four foreign translations—with sales made in The Netherlands, Turkey, France, and Spain Additionally a film option was signed with Captivate Entertainment (whose principals produced the “Bourne” film series), and audiorights were sold to Blackstone Audiobooks.

On a strictly commercial level, four additional film options were renewed last year by our extraordinary film agent, Jeff Aghassi, who has represented us for over 15 years. (How extraordinary is he? Does anyone know a television and film agent who reads everything he pitches and who you can talk to the same day you call?): And here are the books in play: Rob Levandoski’s Serendipity Green by Right Angle Pictures: Harriet Chessman’s Lydia Cassatt Reading the Morning Paper by Upper Gate Entertainment; Paul McComas' Planet of the Dates by Eye in the Sky Entertainment; and William Browning Spencer's A Child's Christmas (one of the tales in his The Return of Count Electric & Other Stories) by Upstart Entertainment.

With 17 subrights sales overall in 2011, three standouts were the sale of Sherril Jaffe’s Expiration Date to Beijing Mediatime Books in China and Jaden Terrell’s two forthcoming “Jared McKean” mysteries, Racing the Devil and A Cup Full of Midnight to Rowohlt in Germany.

For those who prefer to listen to books rather than read them, we are blessed to have Haila Williams, Blackstone Audiobooks acquiring editor on the same page as us when it comes to appreciating quality fiction. In 2011 (in addition to All Cry Chaos) they also produced Chris Knopf’s Black Swan—his fifth Sam Acquillo mystery—and have proved to be great publishing partners (Chris unquestionably being one of America’s most masterful writers in this genre), and have already signed up his tenth thriller, Dead Anyway for 2012. Haila also signed up three 2012 mystery: the aforementioned “Jared McKean mysteries written by Jaden Terrell and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist David Freed’s Flat Spin.

The other great pleasures of 2012 were working with some truly fabulous, creative, intelligent and kind people—from the people who turn manuscripts into well-designed and beautiful books: our cover artist Lon Kirschner, our copyeditor Joslyn Pine, and Susan Ahlquist, our typesetter. To Felix Gonzalez, our always sunny guy in charge of shipping and receiving who works tirelessly in getting these books out. To Rania Haditirto, our former managing editor (who can still pitch in from home), who gave birth last fall to a beautiful baby boy and who chose and tutored her successor, Cathy Suter. Cathy has proved to be a gift from the Gods, with so many skills (an artist with a background in publishing, computer literate, and a joy to spend time with five days a week, and here for the long run (not likely to have a baby with four daughters, three of them in their 20’s and a just turned 13 years old). Jenny Hartig, ex-actress and current Bridgehampton librarian who sends out rejection letters once a week. Caleb Kercheval, our webmaster and designer. And I must include two wonderful interns: Sarah Flood and Christie Sheehan. Sarah will stay on as a salaried jack-of-all trades and Christie, who goes back to school, has done some excellent interviews.

I close out this blog with Christie’s interview with Michael Adelberg’s, whose widely praised A Thinking Man’s Bully was one of our last novels published in 2011 (In our interview on our January Newsletter on The Permanent Press website you can read her interview with Julie Mars, one of our first authors for 2012, whose novel Rust drew pre-publication raves).

Q: What made you decide to write about bullying from a parent’s perspective? Did you have a particular goal in mind in doing this?
A: I was inspired to write Bully after I had a conversation with the parent of a bully about his son’s conduct. The man said the right things, but I knew he wasn’t going to do a darn thing to curb his son. The father’s not really a bad guy, and he’s not all that different from me. He’s just stuck in the post-macho male conundrum: half-proud of his son’s badass streak and other Neanderthal behaviors, but he can’t admit to it. I always wanted to write a novel and thought ‘Oh gosh, no one talks about this.’ I wanted to talk about it.

Q: In the book, the main character has reservations about publishing his memoir, which discusses the death of his best friend. Did you face similar hesitations in having your own book published?
A: My novel is not autobiographical, but the book has many autobiographical elements in its setup and setting. After the drafting of the book was nearly complete, my nephew, a young man whose slacker wit infuses the teen characters in the book, took his life. It was so terrible on so many levels. It made finishing Bully very emotional and difficult. But it also gave me fresh insights into much of the book’s content. While I’d do anything to reverse the loss, the final version of Bully is better because it is informed by tragedy.

Q: In another interview, you said that bullying has always been a problem and is inherent in human nature. Why do you think it has recently received more attention?
A: Bullying has received increasing attention because we have, as a society, lessened our tolerance of it—just like child abuse or a variety of other social pathologies that used to be tolerated. Our tolerance is lower and our ability to detect it is better. Bullying doesn’t just get pushed under the rug or dismissed with “boys will be boys” bromides anymore.

Q: From your perspective, do you have any suggestions of ways for our society and schools in particular to address the bullying situations both in and outside of the classrooms?
A: That’s an excellent question, but probably one that should be addressed to someone who’s a real expert on the topic. While I’ve been both the hammer and the nail at different parts of my life, I don’t know if I’m the best person to answer this question. What I do think is that parents often pass bullying down to the next generation. It’s a learned behavior. Maybe we can take some solace in knowing that we choose the behaviors we model for our kids and perhaps can modify our behaviors. I’m pessimistic about the impact of simplistic slogan-driven campaigns. But just as we’ve made gradual progress as a society in so many ways, from lessening racism to wearing seatbelts, we can make gradual progress in fighting bullying. Gradual is the key word.

Q: Were there any real-life influences for the therapist, Lisa Moscovitz?
A: None of the characters in A Thinking Man’s Bully are based on a specific individual, but little pieces of real people are in these characters. With Lisa, I borrowed a college professor of mine. She was extremely subtle in guiding me when I made strong or ill-considered statements. Only after we’d finish our conversation would I realize that she had me in revisit a topic and speak more thoughtfully. She showed great restraint, which is a greatly undervalued virtue. In my book, Lisa was repeatedly tested by the narrator, Matt Duffy. He tried to irritate her, conceal difficult truths, and throw her off in numerous ways. But she stayed focused and patient, and let him learn at his own pace.
Q: Who are your literary influences? Any favorite authors?

A: I don’t really have favorite authors, but I do have favorite books—a lot of them. I can’t do justice to them all. Some favorites are Travesty by John Hawkes, Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee, The Inheritors by William Golding, and the short stories of Flannery O’Connor. Among newer books, I‘m a huge fan of Marc Schuster’s The Singular Exploits of Wonder Mom and Party Girl (published by the Permanent Press), Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer, and Tristan Egolf’s Lord of the Barnyard. Egolf’s novel, like mine, deals with hardscrabble males rubbing up against societal rules they don’t fully understand. I was influenced by Thomas Rayfiel’s Time Among the Dead (also published by the Permanent Press) and Peter Carey’s The True History of the Kelley Gang. These books showed me how much fun it is to deal with flawed narrators who carefully select which facts to offer the reader in the interest of trying to redeem themselves. I love the concept of selective, manipulated narration. This challenges the reader to infer what the narrator refuses to reveal. Another book that influenced me was I Am the Cheese, a very sophisticated young adult book by Robert Cormier that I read in 8th grade. I Am the Cheese is about a young man a on a trip to place that is unknown to him. Chapters are built around parts of his trip, and after each episode he discusses that part of his trip with an unnamed interviewer. You don’t find out until the end that the narrator is in a psychiatric hospital. The analysis from the interviews and the dual plots—one around the narrator’s trip, and one around the narrator’s attempt to understand where he is now—impressed me so much. I wanted to try something similar.

Q: Do you have any particular routine or schedule that you try to follow when writing?
A: I’m a lunatic and do not recommend my schedule to anyone. I’m a workaholic, and I cram in too many things. I work my real job as a health policy wonk in the day, try to be a good dad in the evening, and then perform research as a historian after the kid’s go to bed. After that, I write fiction. I write maybe twice a week; I’ll just wake up at two in the morning with an idea and then write until I go to work. I write in the middle of the night because that’s when I have time to do it—not because I think there is something serene or magical about those hours. I proofread my work on weekends, but I my serious drafting happens in the middle of the night.

Q: What advice would you give to budding authors?
A: The single thing you have to do is proofread again and again and again. Maybe there are a handful of truly brilliant writers who can get it right on the first draft. But I imagine that most budding authors are like me. We need a dozen drafts to truly do things justice. With Bully, I made major revisions and removed enormous pieces of text because they weren’t totally right. I am lucky that I’ve had great peer reviewers. I tend to do what they suggest in the belief that even if I don’t like the recommended change, they read my work with less bias than I can. Maybe I’ve been blessed in that I seem to be less emotionally attached to my writing than many authors. If someone tells me something stinks I take their word for it and try again. There are four chapters that aren’t in the final version because

Q: As a footnote, what gave you the idea to add footnotes to the book?
A: This is a delightful topic. When Bully was at its biggest, 270 pages long (now 190), it included 150 footnotes. Many were the type of notes that might be written for an academic journal. I just love the pomposity of the academic footnote and included long footnotes on the pop and high culture topics that fill my book, everything from Rock em’ Sock em’ Robots and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Matt Duffy, the fictional memoirist, wants people to know he’s smart, so his memoir would be inclined go overboard on tangential information. But the footnotes also had Matt’s mean sense of humor and reflected his need to make a point about everything. Peer reviewers split over the footnotes, but many worried that they were just too much of a distraction and too out-of-sync with fiction norms. On the final advice of Marty and Judy Shepard, who have been publishing wonderful fiction for a long time, most of the notes were shortened or removed entirely. What you see now in the footnotes is greatly scaled back. But I was still able to maintain a little of Matt’s attitude in the notes that remain, and people seem to like the notes in this abbreviated incarnation.

A always, I welcome your comments.

Marty

BOOK AWARDS REDUX

2011-11-10T17:30:00.010-05:00

On November 8, 2010, I wrote a blog entitled TWO AWARDS YOU CAN’T BELIEVE IN, citing the Whiting Writers Award’s and the Awards given by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, my complaint being that closed nominating systems, where fiction cannot be brought to the attention of judges by publishers, but only by “insiders,” is inherently arbitrary and lessens the integrity of such prizes.

This year it’s time for an anniversary update, about the arbitrary process of selecting “winners.” Award winning fiction is not like award winning athletic events, played out in the open. Additionally, there are so many literary awards, many designed to raise money for the sponsors of these prizes who may break down fiction (and non-fiction as well) into dozens and dozens of sub-categories and charge more in submission fees than either the National Book Awards or the Pulitzer Prizes do. Okay, one can add on the back cover of a book that it won the Hollywood Book Award, or was a winner, gold, silver or copper finalist for another award, but these things do not add to book sales and are never publicized in the mainstream media.

I have the greatest respect for The National Book Awards and Pulitzer Prizes, for they are open and winners surely do flourish (I have the same respect for the Hammett Prize and Edgar Awards when it comes to mysteries). You pay your entrance fee and send five or six copies out to jurors and if the Gods are with you, the payoff is excellent. The National Book Critics Circle has some impact, but here, too, only books read by members are paid attention to, and the list of rotating critics who decide from year to year whose book is “worthy” of consideration, generally speaking, review books from one of the six conglomerate publishers that crank out, through their hundred or so imprints, 85% of what gets published, read and reviewed. No entrance fees are charged, but this NBCC Award is less than completely open.

This arbitrariness extended overseas this year, as regards the Man Booker Prize for fiction, when a great brouhaha arose when many in in the British literary establishment charged that Man Booker morphed from awarding their prize for excellent fiction to honoring commercial fiction instead, and these critics have decided to give their own award to restore a higher standard. First we export McDonalds to England, followed eventually by a decline in the excellence of a major book prize.

Here in the States the media covered well a press release from the Whiting Foundation announcing that TEN WRITERS OF EXCEPTIONAL PROMISE EACH RECEIVE $50,000 WHITING WRITERS AWARD. I suppose if any of us could afford to pay out $500,000 in award money each year, we’d get a lot of publicity for this, too. But it still remains a closed loop. Money talks but quality walks when it comes to promotion.

Another beef I have with promotion has to do with our reverence for youth rather than age, the prime example being the annual awards given by the National Book Foundation’s honoring “5 Under 35” each year. Why not honor, at the very least, “7 over 70?” In case the NBF wants to consider such a category, let me list five novels by writers who will be septuagenarians and octogenarians in 2012, and a sixth from an octogenarian we’ll be publishing in early 2013: These are Isaac: A Modern Fable, by Ivan Goldman; Looking for Przybylski by K.C. Frederick: An Unattended Death, by Victoria Jenkins: The Man on the Third Floor, by Anne Bernays; Knock Knock, by Suzanne McNear; and in early 2013 The Conduct of Saints, by Christopher Davis (and perhaps some other publishers could supply additional titles to the competition).

Ultimately, of course, some brilliant fiction is never considered for any prize at all; Man Booker only awards their fiction prize to citizens of Britain, Ireland, and Commonwealth nations first published in the United Kingdom. The Pulitzer and National Book Awards only give prizes to U.S. Citizens. And you can be sure that nobody at the National Book Critics Circle or The Whiting judges ever got to read about or consider Charles Davis’ Standing at the Crossroads (which we published this year), or his earlier novel Walk On Bright Boy. Charles is an Englishman, living in France. His novels were not published first in the U.K. He’s not an American citizen, but more a citizen of the world, who has also lived extensively in Africa and other parts of the globe. His novels have drawn accolades from the pre-pub reviewers (Kirkus, PW, Library Journal), a host of excellent bloggers, a few regional newspapers, but nothing from the important national newspapers like The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post. What follows is the very latest review of Crossroads, written by Claudia Robinson for the Luxury Reading web site on October 28 (it makes me wish there was a fiction award for Novel of the Globe, for I would surely like to nominate this book for it):

“It was danger that brought us together, danger that has driven us up the mountain, and it is danger that eventually jostles us unceremoniously into one another’s arms. Otherwise, it would not happen. Even if we had met in another place at another time in which the tender marrying of white skin with black was not condemned, we are too far apart in hope and in despair to be a likely couple. But when two people are pursued across a mountain by the Warriors of God, some coming together is inevitable.”
In a land torn asunder by violence, the hot, stifling air rife with the scent of impending war, two souls, polar opposite in every sense; color, religion, purpose, faith and drive, collide and implode with an unnamed need and desire, with a only a dry, unforgiving desert as their witness. Kate is a white scholar, seeking to put names to the atrocities done to human nature in the name of God, by documenting, and photographing, everything she sees. Her travels lead her directly into the path of a black, barefoot librarian, seeking to share the written word, it’s beauty and power, with all he comes across.
Inexplicably drawn to one another, the unlikely duo stand firm and fast against the regime, but a small victory is quickly discounted as the pair find themselves lost and pursued in the desolate and disparate mountains of Africa. Embodying and indemnifying everything the Warriors of God stand against, Kate and her barefoot librarian are pit against nature, mankind and themselves, as they defy the odds and attempt to stay one step ahead of death. Despite their hunger, their fear and the certainty they feel that escape is not possible, the two manage to find love in the wilderness, fusing their need for one another with the need to survive, to exist, to co-exist, despite their multitude of differences.
Written with painstaking detail, mellifluous grace and seamless eloquence, Standing at the Crossroads manages to at once engage, enchant and haunt the reader. An obvious labor of love, this tale of star crossed lovers, and their will and passion for justice at all costs, explodes across the pages in lyrical prose, that can’t be explained accurately, but must instead, be experienced.
Brilliant, intelligent, heartbreaking, Standing at the Crossroads is powerful and passionate, leaving readers to hold their breath, fists clenched, in alternating bouts of pleasure and pain. Only 159 pages long, it dares anyone who picks it up to put it down, proof positive, that sometimes, the best things do indeed, come in small packages. Sublime from start to finish. Rating: 5/5

I look forward to reading your comments about this posting, and hope you will sign up to be informed, automatically, when the next blog is posted.

A new Newsletter will be posted on The Permanent Press website (http://www.thepermanentpress.com/) by day's end on November 11th.

Marty

AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVID SCHMAHMANN

2011-08-23T16:26:00.015-04:00

Just as I exprienced blog fatigue, Christine Sheehan, our summer intern, aided by Cathy Suter, our managing editor (replacing Rania Haditirto, who is on maternity leave), decided to interview some of our current novelists. And so I offer you their interview with David Schmahmann, author of The Double Life of Alfred Buber, which I found fascinating. Small Press Reviews said that this novel “Reads like a lost Nabokov novel; the prose meticulously wrought, the plot deeply complex and psychologically layered, exploring the inner life of a man distanced from himself and reality by his own lies and a soul full of secret shameful desires.” My own assessment of Schmahmann's novel is that it is so rich and original that it deserves to contend for a National Book Award or a Pulitzer Prize.

I would add that on our Newsletter, we'll be posting another interview they did with Leonard Rosen, whose All Cry Chaos will be published in September.

Do let me know what you think of this particular feature and if you'd like to see more of them as blog postings.

Marty

Now on to the interview:

Throughout the book, you use vivid imagery in the description of Thailand. Have you been to these places that you describe or did you do research that enabled you to create such lifelike descriptions for the reader?

I was a lawyer in Rangoon, Burma for a number of years and during the years that I worked in Burma I spent time in Bangkok so I know the place well and I know the places that I write about.

What did you want the reader to feel about the unique relationship between Buber and Nok?

I wanted the reader to understand in the end what it was that Buber was experiencing in his life that drove him to seek the kind of companionship that he almost found with Nok. In the end I wanted the readers to not necessarily pass judgment on his moral choices but to emphasize with him as a man that was deeply lonely and motivated and doing the best he could to find fulfillment in the circumstances that he found alienating and distressing. In respect to Nok, I wanted to be sure that I created a person that wasn’t seen as morally depraved or a victim but as someone that was doing anything she could do to make the best of her life. I wanted to see if it was possible that they have a relationship of substance. Of course, it’s mostly in Buber’s mind and exists in his imagination.

Why did you decide to include Buber’s self-reflections in italics throughout the novel? Was there any underlying purpose for this other than exposing the internal dialogue of the character?

Buber, as you know, is not entirely truthful in how he tells the story and there are several layers to the narrative some of which are happening and some of which aren’t. The italics are really when Buber steps the furthest from the action in the novel and gets about as self critically elusive as he can. There are several sections where he tries to come to terms with his actions. For instance, when he is lying on a bed with Nok, he is craving something that he can’t achieve. They are interludes in which Buber tries to deal with the most troublesome parts of his thoughts.

Why did you choose to have the character of Nigel act as the conscience of Buber?

Because Nigel is sort of the linear authority in Buber’s life. When Buber first comes to America, it’s Nigel that sets him on the straight path to some sort of recognizable future and he’s a reference point for Buber. He’s an authority figure who might say and comment on what Buber is doing and thinking. In the end, it’s when Nigel dies that Buber’s life goes completely off the rail.

What is the writing process like for you ?

I write novels primarily because I have to process what I see and think. In the case of this novel, for instance, it’s a confluence of things in my life, such as the notion of being an outsider, being a liberal outsider and a white Jew in South Africa. The experience of standing somewhat outside and looking in is how I’ve felt most of my life. I looked in awe in Southeast Asia where you find men plucking around streets in Bangkok with young girls, most of whom have limited choices and find themselves in the city, and yet it’s not as simple as that. If you watch the girls, you’ll see that they are cheerful and upbeat and almost courteous about it and the men are something other than plain johns out for sex. They appear to me as men living out a fantasy of an actual girlfriend. They are living out eternal dialogues all of their own. When I see something like that I process it by retelling it. The world in my novel is seen the way I see it, sort of from afar and a series of events that I witnessed close up. A number of times I’d think, who is this, what are these people? I come home, sit quietly in my study and put myself in the shoes of the people whose stories I want to tell. This novel just sort of flew off the typewriter and wrote itself. The fact of the matter is I put myself in the shoes of Alfred Buber and it was easy to see the world as him.

Did you use your memories of Durban, South Africa in describing Buber’s town of Rhodesia?

Yes. Buber comes from one of the two major towns in South Africa, both of which I’ve been to. There was something more about Rhodesia that was quite unique in my experience of aesthetics. Where I grew up, the world is quite small and provincial and the expectations are strained and one’s role and how one is supposed to see the world is decided. I wanted Buber to have a proper British upbringing. This forms how he sees the world. He also has a colonial upbringing. This establishes him as an outsider and certainly changes how he sees the world, such as when he returns to Bangkok, a third world country; it affects his relationship with an unequal [Nok]. That was something that was formed by my youth in South Africa.

Do you think that Buber’s more lifelike than we’d like to think?

Firstly, I have gotten a number of emails from people who’ve read it and who see either themselves or others in Buber. I have a sense that what I write about is far from unique. I’m not writing about someone who goes off on a sex tour. What I’ve attempted to do is to recapture and tell a story that’s been told many times before and best told in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: ‘In the room women come and go, talking of Michelangelo.’ My book is the way it is for a reason. Buber is beyond anything else we’ve talked about. He’s a man who has a deep and quiet longing for women, yet the understanding, friendship, romance and sex of women is totally unavailable to him. The Buber we see at the end is not the short fat man we see in the beginning of the novel. He sees himself as invisible to women and that creates a longing inside of him that he chooses to try and fill by going off on a sexual expedition. It’s about a man’s attempt to communicate in some meaningful way with women, and in Buber’s case it occurs in misplaced romances with a coworker and a housemate. He also is misplaced when he idly worships a man who works with him who proves to be unworthy. Poor Buber does not see the world in a truthful manner. The central solution for him is to find a woman who he is in love with, and Bangkok is a metaphor for that.

Do you think this book increases sympathy for both the bar girls in Thailand and the lonely businessman?

I’m not writing about a lonely businessman. I’m writing about something in men that, to me, is something that exists. I don’t want people to pass judgment. I have no time for and am not interested in being politically correct; he’s just a man struggling with something and I’ve tried as best as I can to portray him. He is a misguided person trying to find his way. It’s simply an attempt to describe a life and a need to describe him in an artistic way. Anyone who passes judgment on him is misguided. If you read those books, life for these impoverished girls is quite dreadful. They’re pushed around, and these young girls have very difficult lives.

Do you have plans for another book ?

Of course! Writing novels is what gives my life depth. I have outlines for another novel that I’m very involved in but I’m very busy at the moment so it’s slowing me down. I’m working very hard on outlines for a novel that I’m going to call The Color Of Skin. It’s based on something that that I saw in southern Africa, where I come from. There’re many descendants of a northern English explorer named John Dunn. He lives a colorful life, had about 50 Zulu wives and his descendants are all shades of color. For the most part they are like fish out of water. They try to make the best of it and continue to live their lives the best they can. I wondered what it would be like to be one of these people, and to try to understand the way life is for them. It is a narrative told by the descendants of John Dunn for whom skin color is a mark of civilization, and they try to understand their place in America by the color of their own skin.

How long does it take you to write a novel?

It depends on if I’m involved in lawsuits. Usually, it takes about six to eight months. I’m very direct and focused. I close the door and immerse myself in the character. I have the arc of the story and storyline clearly set; it’s just a matter of the moment in time and having to juggle all the things going on. In three months time I should have a readable, full copy of my next novel.

What advice would you give to budding writers?

Don’t do it—go to law school, medical school, learn a profession and earn a living in a normal, critical way—whatever you do don’t become a writer except if in your heart you have absolutely have no alternative. You become a novelist because you absolutely have no other choice. In the waning days of the American civilization it’s not a way to make a living or a way toward career fulfillment.

STOP DEGRADING MYSTERIES

2011-06-29T16:40:00.020-04:00

A few years back, Charles McGrath, writing in The New York Times Book Review, said that Elmore Leonard deserved a Nobel Prize for Literature, given his gifts for writing exceptional dialogue, creating memorable characters, an ability to tell a compelling story without wasting words (much as Hemingway could), and constructing inventive and taut plots. But of course, McGrath, being no dummy, realized this was not likely to happen, given the fact that mysteries and thrillers are step-children when it comes to major literary awards: no matter how literary they are, nobody takes them seriously as being on the same playing field as other novels lauded for style and substance (John LeCarrê, though a Brit, is the perfect example of this, for his mysteries never competed for Nobel or Man Booker Prizes). Forget the Nobel Prize. I can’t recall any mystery that was honored by either the Pulitzer Prize or a National Book Award during my 32 years as a publisher, and I welcome correction if I’m wrong.

This, to me, is a knee-jerk insult to literary writers who are pigeonholed as belonging to this sub-class when it comes to being eligible for the major literary prizes. Chris Knopf, for example, can write five “Sam Acquillo/Hampton Mysteries,” and garner many honors and mystery prizes. Head Wounds was named one of the best mysteries of 2008 year by both Mysterious Reviews and Deadly Pleasures, and won the Ben Franklin Award for Best Mystery. But on a more inclusive level, he only qualify on the state level, as a three time finalist for the Connecticut Book Awards, where his novel Two Time (2007) and Philip Roth's Everyman were named runners-up for this award. The difference being that Philip Roth can compete for the big national book awards, whereas Chris (just as Elmore Leonard), faces a stacked deck in this regard.

A similar fate might be expected for Leonard Rosen’s first fiction, All Cry Chaos, which debuts in September. It is one of the most richly layered novels I’ve read in ages, as well as being one of the best mysteries. But Rosen’s novel goes far beyond that, portraying the disorganization, chaos, and senseless violence in today’s world, while at the same time bringing in Chaos Theory, mathematical models, and fractals—the organization of matter and the very nature of existence itself, which is the biggest mystery of all. One Catholic theologian reading the manuscript said that it proved the existence of God. Not being a Catholic, I can only say that it is in keeping with Taoist and Buddhist teachings.

I share McGrath’s feelings and believe that the only way to change this perception that mysteries are “second tier” novels is to take it head on, and that despite this existing stereotyping it’s incumbent for all publishers who value artful writing, and have mysteries to back it up, to start submitting their novels—as we are doing—for National Book Award and Pulitzer consideration, for I’ve seen a trend afoot where more and more gifted writers are trying their hands at mysteries and thrillers.

MORPHING INTO MYSTERIES:

In 1978 my wife, Judith, and I started publishing books, evolving, over the years, into doing fiction primarily. Publishing one title each month, for the most part, we established a reputation for literary excellence, culminating in the LMP/R.R. BOWKER EDITORIAL ACHIEVEMENT AWARD—the equivalent of a publishing “Oscar”—the winner being chosen from five finalists by electronic voting from colleagues in the industry. Since we began we’ve gathered more honorsper book than Macmillan, Random House, Penguin, Hachette, Simon & Schuster or Harper Collins—the Big Six of conglomerate publishers—including having a National Book Award finalist (Sandra Scofield), a Nobel Prize winner (Halldor Laxness) and a Nobel nominee (Berry Fleming). This year Kermit Moyer won the PEN/WINSHIP AWARD for Best Novel—the third time one of our writers gained this prize in the past seven years with Edward Delaney winning in 2005 and K. C. Frederick in 2008.

Up until 2008, we only published an average of one mystery a year from among the 5,000 submissions we received. This was not a case of our dismissing mysteries, for we make no discrimination between mysteries or other artful fiction. It’s just that few mystery submissions measured up to our standards, which are books that have multidimensional characters, from writers who are craftsmen regarding language, narrative flow, and plot; writers who do “original” work, grounded in reality and avoiding clichés. Yet among those few we selected were some exceptional writers, many of whom were Edgar Award and Hammett Prize finalists. In 1979 we re-introduced the work of Richard Lortz, whose supernatural thrillers (Dracula’s Children, Bereavements, and Lovers Living, Lovers Dead) were hailed by dozens of critics. We also published Domenic Stansberry’s first three noir novels, and Reed Coleman’s first four mysteries. But in 2009 the tide began turning when we published four mysteries, in 2010 five, three more are coming out this year, and eight are scheduled for 2012—half of our list. How to account for this transformation?

Firstly, the mystery submissions we’ve been receiving have greatly improved. We don’t get generic copies of Cromwells or Cobens or Crichtons or James Pattersons or Ken Folletts. These books are the provenance of large publishing houses just as movies featuring car chases, explosions, gun battles, and lots of casualties are the provenance of Major Motion Pictures. This underscores the short sighted stupidity of the large publishers who, looking to find their next “Major Best Seller,” have largely given up on taking a chance on good, literate, and relatively unknown mystery writers—or even known writers who haven’t sold a minimum of 10,000 copies when previously published, thereby failing to earn back the advance they received.

Why have we received so many well written mystery submissions? I believe—aside from people we launched earlier—things began changing once we published Chris Knopf’s The Last Refuge back in 2005. After reading his manuscript I thought it even more engaging than Elmore Leonard’s The Hot Kid, published that same year. And, unlike other writers who move on elsewhere, Chris gave us a total of five Sam Acquillo mysteries (Two Time, Head Wounds, Hard Stop, and Black Swan, (as well as a stand-alone, Elysiana—published in 2010). All these mysteries were published by Blackstone Audiobooks, all had terrific and widespread reviews, and the first four Sam mysteries were published north of us by Random House Canada. There were awards, and sales in seven other countries. The end result was that well over 30,000 copies of Knopf’s thrillers were read in North America and thousands more listened to. This cumulative success has resulted in more agents sending us quality fiction that did not meet the criteria for what the big houses were interested in.

This led to Jodie Rhodes, a west coast agent, sending us Connie Dial’s police procedurals that we published in 2008 and 2009 (Internal Affairs and The Broken Blue Line). Connie, having worked her own way up the ranks from beat cop to detective in Internal Affairs, Homicide and, finally, to Captain and Commander of the Hollywood division of the LAPD, brought an authenticity to her mysteries that few could match. This was followed by four thrillers from two other agents: Eve Bridburg at the Zachary Shuster Harmsworth Agency brought us Len Rosen’s All Cry Chaos, which had been turned down by all the major publishers (we‘ve already sold five subsidiary rights). Jill Marr at the Sandra Dijkstra Agency then brought us David Freed’s Flat Spin, coming out next year and two mysteries by Jaden Terrell, Racing the Devil and A Cup Full of Midnight, also due in 2012. Talk about complex characters and good writing! Freed, a Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative reporter, has a protagonist who’s a down-and-out flight instructor, a former government assassin now working on his Buddhist nature, a love/ hate relationship with his ex-wife, and balances a tense and crisp story with laugh out loud dialogue. Terrell’s private eye still loves his former wife, has a son with Down Syndrome, and lives with a close friend, a gay man, who is dying of AIDS. These are all well drawn characters, nothing cardboard about them, and, here, again, we’ve already sold audio rights to Flat Spin and German rights for the Terrell mysteries to Rowohlt, a major mystery publisher, because they “loved” the character.Additionally there seems to be a trend from other authors we’ve previously published who are now writing and submitting out-and-out mysteries for the first time. We’ve published seven previous novels of Howard Owen, a renowned Southern novelist, whose Oregon Hill, is his first straight ahead mystery. And a second novel (but first mystery) from Victoria Jenkins, whose An Unattended Death will also appear in 2012.

With increasing numbers of gifted novelists putting their skills into creating quality mysteries, it’s time, I think, for The Pulitzers, the National Book Awards, and the National Book Critics Circle Awards to stop treating those who write mysteries and thrillers as poor relations when it comes to judging the very best fiction being produced in America.

As always, I welcome your comments.

Marty

PIMPING FOR PENGUIN

2011-05-31T15:34:00.010-04:00

On March 11, eleven weeks ago, the latest nuclear disaster struck Japan when the Fukushima meltdowns occurred, spewing radioactivity into the air, the land and the sea. Six weeks later, April 26 marked the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, which continues to release radioactive material. In early April we updated and released a free downloadable copy of Karl Grossman’s Cover Up: What You Are NOT Supposed To Know About Nuclear Power, as a contribution to the debate about the viability and dangers of nuclear energy. Karl, who has been covering the nuclear power industry for nearly 40 years, had just received the 2011 Generoso Pope Foundation Award for Investigative Reporting along with a $10,000 check, based upon the 20 articles in his syndicated Long Island newspaper column—as well as pieces appearing on Internet sites, including The Huffington Post. The Generoso Pope Award followed his having won the George Polk Award for Investigative Journalism over a decade ago. Grossman is easily the most knowledgeable and widely read critic about the unholy alliance between the nuclear energy corporations, their lobbyists, and their allies in Congress and in the government.

Germany had just decided to start phasing out all their nuclear power plants, and Israel had abandoned the construction of their first plant—both nations concluding that this form of energy posed an unacceptable threat to human life. At the same time, Steven Chu, Obama’s energy secretary, a long-time nuclear advocate, was pushing for further development of this power source. Yet, on April 2nd the Business section of The New York Times, the headline on page 6 was this: Despite Bipartisan Support, Nuclear Reactor Projects Falter. According to this report “In an effort to encourage nuclear power, Congress in 2005 voted to authorize 17.5 billion in loan guarantees for new reactors. Now, six years later, with the industry stalled by poor market conditions [because the private companies were not interested in putting in 20% of their own funds to get this done—considering it a bad investment] along with the Fukushima disaster, nearly half the fund remains unclaimed. But Congress, at the request of the Obama administration, is preparing to add $36 billion in nuclear loan guarantees to next year’s budget.” Thus 44 billion of taxpayer money is being put aside to develop new nuclear plants, while Obama’s budget request for alternative energy sources, like wind and solar, came to only 3 billion dollars.

The New York Times ran a front page story on April 27, headlined Culture of Complicity Tied to Stricken Nuclear Plant, detailing the cover-ups that “allowed Tokyo Electric, to do what utilities least want to do: undertake costly repairs,” after a whistle blower reported serious defects at the plants. Instead the agency asked the company to inspect its own reactors, and that played a significant part in the tragedy that hit Fukushima, “A ten year extension for the oldest reactors suggests that the regulatory system was allowed to remain lax by politicians, bureaucrats, scientists and industry executives single-mindedly focused on expanding nuclear power… and who all profited from it, by rewarding one another with construction projects, lucrative positions, and political, financial, and regulatory support.…and that is the problem, critics say, that non-transparent, collusive interests underlie the establishment’s push to increase nuclear power plants.”

This, of course, is exactly what Karl Grossman documents in his book Cover-Up, as it applies to America’s nuclear energy proselytizers.

Given this mix of nuclear disasters, debates, and nations going in opposite directions concerning nuclear power, one might have hoped that Julie Bosman, the “book news” reporter at The New York Times might have taken note that we, as publishers, had just released Cover-Up as a free public service book. But that did not happen. Her column on April 26 proclaimed Aspiring Authors Get Help Online, announcing that Penguin was setting up a new website called Book Country, a place where “aspiring novelists” of “genre fiction” can post “writing samples or manuscripts” which could be read and critiqued by other users in this “community… a place for agents and editors to look for new talent; and eventually the venture will offer a suite of self-publishing services this summer that will include e-book and print publication. This will generate revenue for Penguin by those who want to self-publish their books for a fee by ordering printed copies. (The books will bear the stamp of Book Country, not Penguin, and the site is considered a separate operation from Penguin.)”

It sounded to me like a masterstroke of marketing: offering Online Help For Novice Authors in its headlines, but, by the end of the article, it just seemed like another empty promise; the setting up of a vanity press division of Penguin.

While I’ve sworn off criticism of The New York Times book reviewers (having made my points over the last year and a half and having grown tired of repeating myself), this vow didn’t include giving a reporter a free ride. Nonetheless, I didn’t want to fault Julie Bosman if what she covered were things assigned to her. And so I left a phone message, followed by an email asking her how it was that this Penguin piece came about and letting her know about Karl Grossman’s recent awards. She never did respond.

On May 7, Bosman struck again, writing an article in the Arts Section about Bookish.com. The “news” was that Publishers Were Making a Plan: A ‘One Stop’ Book Site. Turns out that Simon & Schuster, Penguin, and Hachette have their own web marketing sites “but few people go there, so they’ve banded together to form a new site, called Bookish.com—hoping it will be a catch-all for readers in the way that music lovers visit Pitchfork.com. But its one stop shopping only for books (and imprints?) of these three biggies and their XYZ imprints. “Said David Shanks, the CEO of Penguin, We think it would all be really good if we could come up with a site that embraced the amazing marketing materials that publishers have been doing on their own sites and put them on to one site…with the purpose of answering the question for the consumer, ’Which book should I read next?’.” They were also hoping to select books from at least 14 participating publishers.

How helpful is that to readers, learning from these three giant conglomerates what books of theirs they should read next?

I googled Bookish.com to ask some questions not covered in Bosman’s “reporting.” First I had to fill out a form requiring me to give them my email address and also list my favorite childhood book. I put in Curious George. Once I filled out the form I was promised I could now contact them with my question. What follows is my May 8th email to info@bookish.com

Reading about Bookish both in PW and in Julie Bosman's New York Times article raises questions that I hope you can answer.

1: Paulo Lemgruber was quoted as saying that you would be selecting books from at least 14 other publishers in addition to those from S&S, Penguin, and Hachette. In considering what these “14 other publishers” mean. Might they be imprints of one of these big three (such as Grand Central, Little Brown, Avon, Harper Collins, William Morrow, Dutton, Plume, Putnam, Viking, Free Press, Pocket Books, or Scribner—from among the 40 or more imprints they own)? And will all titles of your big three be listed? Or only select ones?

2: Might the "14" consist of titles or imprints from other conglomerates like Random House, Harper Collins or Macmillan for example. Or might they be from small independent presses, such as Graywolf, Beacon Press or Seven Stories Press, for instance?

3: What are the charges for an independent press, assuming they could come on board? Would they be based on the list or by particular titles?

4: David Shanks at Penguin said the intent of Bookish.com was to inform the reader "What Book should I read next?" Since Lemgruber said he took inspiration for sites such as Rotten Tomatoes (an invaluable site as it separates the good films from the ordinary and from the truly rotten ones), how do you handle a book that gets poor reviews? Just skip it? Or put a good face on it?

5: And what was the purpose of having anyone looking at your website, having to answer what our favorite book from childhood was in order to get your email address?

In any event, I look forward to hearing back from you by email or by phone.

Guess what? The email bounced back as undeliverable, because the address had yet to be set up.

What sort of “book reporter” writes a piece about a new site without even checking it out? The answer seems clear: a reporter who accepts self-serving press releases as news; a reporter who knows very little about investigative reporting and doesn't check her own sources. No wonder there was no interest in Karl Grossman’s book…but I venture that there surely would have been if Penguin had done a free download of this informative book.

On April 27, Publishers Weekly reported a Parker Series to Continue at Penguin With New Writers. “In a deal cut by Robert B. Parker's estate, Penguin's Putnam imprint will continue to publish two of the author's most popular series—Spenser and Jesse Stone—under the co-authorship of writers Michael Brandman and Ace Atkins. The Spenser series debuted in 1974 and is made up of 39 novels; the Jesse Stone series began in 1997 and is comprised of 9 more.” (This marketing ploy, hiring another author to continue writing a series under the name of a famous dead one, is nothing new. Five years ago, Harcourt Brace, under their Houghton Mifflin and Mariner imprints did the same thing with Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer series, using Max Allan Collins to write four more Hammer books). Another great marketing ploy.

Not reading Bosman regularly I don’t know whether she covered this story yet or not. I did read a lovely interview she had with Bob Loomis this past month, who was retiring from Random House. She also wrote a story about Philip Roth winning the Booker Prize, which gave as much exposure to Carmen Callil the founder of the UK based feminist Virago Press, who withdrew from the three judge panel in noisy protest after the other two judges decided to give Roth this major prize. Callil referred to Roth’s work “the Emperor’s Clothes. He goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It's as though he's sitting on your face and you can't breathe... I don’t rate him as a writer at all.” Callil sounds more like the founder of The Harridan Press. Personally, I think the story should have been about Roth’s remarkable achievements. But that’s another issue.

But back to the question of whether Bosman is in service of the Arts or Marketing. She writes frequently about things that appear in Publishers Weekly much earlier. Marketing stories like the ones I cite properly appear in Publishers Weekly, for they are interesting to other publishers, but have little to do with “Book Reporting” in the Arts section of The New York Times. If Bosman were writing these sorts of columns in the Business section of the Times, all well and good. But writing this sort of stuff for the general public (assuming it wasn’t assigned to her)—for book readers—would seem to me irrelevant, for these are really “marketing reports” at best, and “Pimping for Penguin” articles at the very wost.

I welcome your opinion.

Marty

WHAT WE NEED IS A NEW TSUNAMI

2011-04-25T22:34:00.016-04:00

I write this in an alternating state of anger and disappointment. It’s not the first time I’ve felt this way—having this same need to do something about deadly serious stuff earlier in my life. When the Vietnam War was in full stride, Lyndon Johnson presiding, I helped set up a national group called Citizens for Kennedy/ Fulbright—the first “Dump Johnson” movement—as a way of providing an alternative to end this deadly folly. It was easier to rouse people to action in those days because the war affected everyone. It was not only Vietnamese who were dying, but our own kids, fathers, and husbands. The draft affected families throughout the nation. Few at home wanted to be called up and risk being killed, and so the daily news reports and protests were on everyone’s mind and gathered storm and momentum

How things have changed! We tolerate our military involvements in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya because nobody is drafted. The war-makers hire private contractors like Blackwater (who have outnumbered the service men in Iraq), who enhance a smaller military of people who’ve enlisted as careerists, and the only people inconvenienced are National Guardsmen who never expected to be pressed into action.

As we mark the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown on April 26, we face a much greater threat to human life than the Vietnam War, and it’s RADIATION, which reared it’s ugly, hidden head once again, following the tsunami and the damage to Japan’s nuclear power plants. But since there is no draft or quick loss of life that keeps this in the foreground, it’s relatively easy for the energy companies, their spokesmen, their lobbyists, their minions in Congress (led by New Mexico’s Senator Pete Dominici, until he retired in 2009, as reported in my previous blog), and other representatives in government to soothe fears with deceptive statements. It’s already started to fade from the front pages of newspapers and newscasts. You don’t hear much about it on NPR, and there are few reporters who know enough about the history of the nuclear industry to want to present truth rather than perpetuate official fiction Thus, the current generation finds it relatively easy to go about their lives without questioning and demanding that we put an end to this continuing threat to life. The major focus of mainstream media are spokespeople repeating the mantra that “there is only a slight risk” of that happening here, or that “Japan was an aberration,” and discussions about “how we need this energy to sustain our economy.” Lots of dramatic footage about the destruction caused by the tsunami, but as for the nuclear meltdown the only widely covered human casualties were about a couple of workers who stepped into a pool of radioactive water and were seriously injured.

Yet during the week of April 11, The New York Times did report that the radioactive discharges coming from the nuclear plants in Japan will continue pouring millions of gallons of radioactive waste into the ocean and air for at least nine more months. It was a minor story, wasn’t picked up in any of the major TV networks or Fox News or MSNBC. Nor were there any daily follow-ups.

This attempt to soothe fears is not a new one. The IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency), set up as a proponent of nuclear energy, still claims that only 4,000 people died as a result of Chernobyl and, because of an agreement made with the World Health Organization, the WHO is not allowed to contradict the results of this claim. But Dr. Janette Sherman, from the Environmental Institute, Western Michigan University,, toxicologist and editor of Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, by Alexey V. Yablokov, Vassily B. Nesterenko and Alexey V. Nesterenko, in a recent 29 minute interview on You Tube, hosted by Karl Grossman exposed this lie. Published by the New York Academy of Sciences two years ago, this book estimates that more than one million people have died so far as a result of that 1986 explosion. Their expertise is beyond doubt (Yablokov, a scientist and prominent member of the USSR parliament, was the Environmental advisor to Boris Yeltsin, while Vassily Nesterenko, a nuclear physicist, who died in 2008, was the director of the famous Institute of Nuclear Physics in Minsk who, after Chernobyl, dedicated his life to exposing the Soviet cover up, setting up an Independent Institute for Radioprotection, BELRAD, with over 30 staff members, while devising spectrometers for body scans tracing radioactive cesium. His contribution to this book came from the data he began collecting in 1990. His son, Alexei, who worked with him took over the directorship of BELRAD after his father’s death). This video is MUST viewing, just as their book is MUST reading, though you are not likely to have heard about it or seen it discussed or reviewed in USA Today, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, or even the McClatchy newspaper chain, though it is surely a baseline of what can be expected from the Japanese disaster.

Three weeks ago, there was a press conference called by Friends of the Earth to hear Alexey Yablokov discuss the implications of the Fukushima meltdowns based on his research concerning Chernobyl. Many journalists from the foreign press corps attended, but none from our papers of record, The New York Times or The Washington Post. They missed hearing or reporting that Yablokov fears that deaths from radiation exposure will exceed those of Chernobyl because of the incredible population centers close to the melt-down sites in Japan.

What you are likely to read about is James B. Stewart’s new book Tangled Webs, headlined “How American Society is Drowning in Lies.”

On April 19th Stewart was interviewed on NPR’s Morning Edition, and his book is being covered everywhere: by the networks, by the newspapers, promotional tours, book readings, and book reviews. Stewart claims that he finds a surge of deliberate lying by people at the top of their fields, and says that these false statements undermine America. He writes, chiefly, about the damage caused by Barry Bonds, Martha Stewart, Scooter Libby, and Bernie Madoff: people who lied only because they thought they could get away with it. The Daily Beast, reprinting Newsweek editor Tony Dokoupil’s column, under the headline “America's Top Liars” writes that it’s “a good thing, then, that we have Stewart to play The Ethicist, retrying Bonds but also Martha Stewart, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and Bernie Madoff—and nailing some ears to the post. “Somebody has to,” says Stewart,” with modesty, I presume.

I can readily envision James Stewart appearing on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, or on the Colbert Report, or Diane Rehm’s Show or Chris Matthews or Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC shows. Or even on PBS or Fox News. But it’s hard to envision Karl Grossman, who has been exposing the most dangerous liars of them all—the nuclear energy advocates—for the past three decades on any of these programs. Certainly, we’ve contacted these major media bookers and producers, but none have even responded. Nor has Julie Bosman, writing about the book business in The New York Times, ever thought it was newsworthy for a publisher to give away free downloads of Grossman's Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed To Know About Nuclear Power, though she will report all sorts of stuff about reshuffles at major publishers, launches of new imprints and, before her time, the book news reporter would cover stories about Stephen King’s free downloads of his writing.

This is not to say that word is not getting out about Cover-Up. Since the tsunami and our offering free downloads of his expose, Karl has been heard on hundreds of independent radio stations, reaching tens of thousands of listeners. We’ve had nearly a thousand hits since first reporting that Cover-Up was available for free downloading on our website, and many people and anti-nuke groups have picked it up and circulated it. Karl appeared on Bev Smith’s show on American Urban Radio Network, the largest African American owned network with over 300 affiliated stations. He’s also been interviewed at the four major Pacifica stations (KPFK in Los Angeles, WBAI in New York City, KPFT in Houston, and WPFW in Washington DC) and these programs have been passed on to Pacifica’s network of 150 affiliated community radio stations. This also happened at Earthbeat Radio, an independent show produced by the Institute for Policy Studies (at Pacifica’s and The Real News Network’s studios at WPFW FM in Washington, D.C.). Earthbound Radio is syndicated to over 60 affiliates of their own in North America.

Then, there is "The Real Deal", an internet radio program broadcast hosted by James H. Fetzer, Ph.D., McKnight Professor Emeritus, University of Minnesota Duluth, a two hour show, to be broadcast on April 27th. This three night a week show also goes out to a host of other college stations. There was another extensive interview on another college station, with Tonya Brito host of "A Public Affair" on WORT, 89.9 FM in Madison, WI, which also circulates elsewhere, covering the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the situation at Fukushima nuclear plant, and nuclear policy in general. Tonya, as have many others who have booked Karl, mentioned that The Institute for Public Accuracy has identified him as an expert on these topics. I would say that he is THE EXPERT for this information. Karl also did a show on KGAB radio in Cheyenne, WY, whose coverage includes southern and central Wyoming, western Nebraska, northern Colorado (including the metro Denver area )and western South Dakota, with it’s programming going to more than 300 affiliated stations, as well as one with Donald Lacy, Producer/Host of “Wake Up Everybody” on KPOO 89.5 FM San Francisco.

Print coverage for Cover-Up: What You Are Not Supposed To Know About Nuclear Power, started with Publishers Weekly, which ran an excellent article on our decision to do a give-away edition of Cover Up several weeks ago, and has also hosted an ad in their online edition allowing people to click and download Karl’s book. And the IBPA’s (the Independent Book Publishers Association’s) forthcoming issue will be going out to a couple of thousand members and subscribers, covering this same news story with a link to the download (would that Dwight Garner, the excellent non-fiction book reviewer at the daily New York Times, be as interested in reviewing this vitally important virtual book as is blogger Amy Steele, who is downloading and considering it for review on her Entertainmen Realm.com site). Need I mention a host of articles in The Huffington Post and at other websites. Locally, an excellent piece appeared in the April 22 issue of Dan’s Papers by Elise D’Haene—a weekly widely read in the Hamptons and New York City—letting its readers know how to download a free copy of Karl’s book. And both Karl and I appeared on WPBB-FM (Peconic Public Broadacasting) for an interview hosted by Bonnie Grice.

Now here is the final irony of the past few weeks. Karl appeared on Iranian television (PressTV, an English language program based in Tehran, but with a recording studio in New York), taking questions, and decrying the use of nuclear plants and the Iranian government’s desire to keep producing nuclear material. Karl also had an op-ed piece in the Jerusalem Post making these same points(afterwards Benjamin Netanyahu said that he would cancel Israel's proposed nuclear plant to be built in the Negev because of the Fukushima disaster). It is quite amazing to me, that Karl’s expertise is respected abroad, but that he has not gotten any significant play in America on the Establishment media, nor from the major NPR radio programs and supposedly “progressive” television networks like MSNBC and the PBS stations. This, despite the fact that Grossman has pioneered investigative reporting and environmental journalism in a variety of media for over 30 years. The narrator and host of award-winning environmental TV documentaries and the author of three books on environmental and energy issues, his articles have appeared in The New York Times, Newsday, The Nation, Columbia Journalism Review, E, The Environmental Magazine, Covert Action Quarterly, Extra! and numerous other publications. Karl is the recipient of numerous honors, including the George Polk Award for Investigative Journalism. A full professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury he teaches Investigative Reporting and Environmental Journalism. Instead, the influential Diane Rehm had Steven Chu, a nuclear power advocate for decades before becoming President Obama’s Secretary of Energy on her NPR show on April 25 to talk about nuclear power plants in view of Japan’s meltdowns. On April 26, she is having James Stewart talk abut his book Tangled Webs. That same evening Chris Matthews is also interviewing Stewart on his MSNBC Hardball show.

Forgive this analogy, but it seems to me that when Rome was burning and Nero was fiddling, mainstream media would have devoted more space to the Emperor’s violin recital than to the fires themselves. This is why any truly civilized and concerned society—and its major news sources—need to have a discussion about which issues and which liars to cast a spotlight on. Are celebrity liars at the top of the list of liars posing a threat to us? What is wrong with a country where exposing already exposed liars is “news.” A country where Karl Grossman, who knows more about the lies, past and present, that led to making the public think this form of energy was worth having, has not yet been afforded the opportunity to present his case to a significantly larger audience.

Last week I focused on some new material from Karl’s updated edition: how Obama advisors Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod have profited from the nuclear industry, and how Energy Secretary Steven Chu came from being the director of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories as a forceful advocate for nuclear power, though I’ve yet to read about it in The New York Times or hear about it on national television or radio despite sending out a press release entitled “OBAMA BAMBOOZLED BY TOP AIDES,” This failure to report real news of this sort might account for why our President is still bullish on having taxpayers fund new nuclear reactors in the USA. Equally possible is that our President, who campaigned against nuclear power while running for office, is so busy raising re-election funds that he finds it necessary to cozy up to business and energy interests to show them how friendly he can be toward them. How else can one explain his appointing Jeffrey Immelt, General Electric’s CEO as chairman of this new Council on Jobs and Competitiveness? GE reported earning $14.2 billion in worldwide profits but, like Exxon, paid no taxes. Better yet, GE received a tax rebate of 3.2 billion. Additionally, since 2002, GE has laid off one-fifth of their American work force. Now this is very good for GE’s competitiveness when they pay no taxes, but very bad for job creation when all their jobs are being shipped overseas. It reminds me of the myth that Charlie Wilson, Eisenhower’s Defense Secretary propagated years ago, that “What is good for General Motors is what’s good for America.” And of course, there is still another tie here to the nuclear industry: GE has played a big part in building nuclear power plants around the world, including planning the ones in Fukushima, despite critics having opposed GE's design as far back as 1972.

I conclude this posting with testimony that has escaped memory or reportage, as cited in the first edition of Cover Up thirty years ago, which I paraphrase:

“Admiral Hyman Rickover, heralded as the ‘father’ of the nuclear navy, was also in charge of building the first nuclear power plant in the United States in Shippingport, Pennsylvania. But Rickover eventually came to realize the dangers posed by nuclear energy. In a farewell address before a committee of Congress in 1982, he said, ‘I'll be philosophical. Until about two billion years ago, it was impossible to have any life on Earth; there was so much radiation you couldn't have any life. This was from cosmic radiation around when the Earth was in the process of forming. Gradually, about two billion years ago, the amount of radiation on this planet reduced and made it possible for some form of life to begin. Now, when we go back to using nuclear power, we are creating something which nature tried to destroy to make life possible. But every time you produce radiation a horrible force is unleashed and I think the human race is going to wreck itself. We must outlaw nuclear reactors."

Again, I ask you to download Cover Up right here, if you haven’t already done so, and keep spreading-the-word…and the word is “Truth,” or “Truthiness,” as Steven Colbert would have it. Because what we need now is our own Tsunami, a better one which will wash away the biggest liars of them all and the so called “News Network” that provides cover for these Nuclear Pinocchios.

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Marty

FROM GLORY TO GHASTLY TO GOING VIRAL

2011-03-29T09:36:00.033-04:00

GLORY

Over the March 28 weekend, all of us at The Permanent Press (Judy, Rania, Cathy, and I) were aglow as we traveled to Boston for the PEN/Winship and PEN/Hemmingway Award ceremonies at the JFK Library to celebrate Kermit Moyer’s winning the Winship Award for his novel The Chester Chronicles. It was the third time in the past seven years that one of our writers won this prize, with Edward Delaney winning it in 2004 for Warp & Weft, and K.C. Frederick winning in 2006 for Inland. The glory started in the weeks leading up to this event when three other novels on our 2010 list were also cited for literary excellence. To Account for Murder, by William Whitbeck won the Michigan Notable Book Award while Liza Campbell’s The Dissemblers is one of the finalists for ForeWord Magazine’s Literary Fiction Award. And Georgeann Packard’s Fall Asleep Forgetting, was named one of five finalists for two Lambda Literary Awards: their Bisexual Fiction Award and also for the Lesbian Debut Fiction Award.

GHASTLY

At the same time that we were basking in this good news, it was hard not to think about the nuclear meltdowns and radiation dangers coming from the damaged nuclear reactors in Japan particularly since, in 1980, we published Karl Grossman’s Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed To Know About Nuclear Power, with a second edition in 1982. Karl personally gave the book to Governor Mario Cuomo who thereafter challenged—successfully—the opening of the Shoreham nuclear power plant on Long Island. Karl’s revelations resulted in a setback for the cozy relationship between the energy companies, governmental agencies, and officials that kept assuring the public that they were safe when their own memos made it clear this was not the case.

When Cover Up first came out, here's what Publishers Weekly had to say about it:
"Closing with testimony by leading environmentalists here and abroad, Grossman's powerfully documented book is tough-minded evangelism for the anti-nuke movement. A veteran reporter for newspapers, radio and TV in New York, winner of journalism's George Polk Award, Grossman crams into this text facsimile documentation ordinarily found in appendixes. A growing phalanx of writers, including Nader, John Gofman, Commoner et al, have developed the evidence that peacetime nuclear power presents great hazards, immediate and long-term, on a world wide scale. Grossman describes (with excellent photos, drawings, etc.) how nuclear power works and how disasters can happen. From inside sources including statements by federal and corporate officials, he makes a strong case for the view that giant nuclear energy corporations have taken extreme measures to hide the shocking facts about nuclear power, and are now stalling development of other energy sources in order to protect their huge investments."

We sold 18,000 copies of Karl’s book in a three year period and then, in the past decade, let it go out of print. The result is that all the reporting about the catastrophe in Japan focuses on the dangers posed by the current crisis, but few people under 50 know how this disingenuous and dangerous technology got started and why. And already, we are being assured that Japan’s plants are not like ours, and ours are far safer, when in fact none of them are safe.

When the meltdowns and radiation leaks emerged in Japan, I asked Karl if he wanted to do an update for a possible third edition, and he wrote a 14 page preface bringing things up to date, showing, for instance, how President Obama’s chief advisors, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, have profited financially from the nuclear energy industry and that his energy secretary, Steven Chu, emerged from the U.S. governments national nuclear laboratory system as an advocate for using nuclear power. My hope was that we could interest a large publisher to take a reissue on as a public service, but we could find no one interested in doing this as a quick and timely release.

A front page story written by Eric Lichtblau in The New York Times on Friday, March 25, told the story of how Pete Dominici, a four term Senator from New Mexico (with one of the worst environmental records in Congress), became the front man sponsoring the reemergence of the nuclear power industry after Chernobyl, when most lawmakers felt future plants were dead in the water. But with massive campaign contributions from the energy companies (always a source of his campaign funding), their lobbyists, and public relations people, Dominici became the political front man for a campaign to soothe public fears with the same tall tales and deceits that Grossman had earlier documented, and to keep taxpayer subsidy money flowing into these energy companies.

I sent an email to Lichtblau along with a PDF file of the projected third edition, telling him that the material Karl unearthed back in the late 70's proving industry and government collusion was worthy of a Pulitzer Prize if he, Eric, can keep digging and letting citizens know the full history of this energy source, how it began, and how it continues to lobby and lie about safety.

GOING VIRAL

I’ve not heard back from Lichtblau, but want to keep going forward. And it seems to me, and to Karl Grossman as well, that the best thing we could possibly do is to give Cover Up away immediately. It's that important and that timely! So here’s the deal: read this book for free on your computer or by printing out the PDF file, and send it along to everyone you know, by email, Facebook, Twitter, and blog, and encourage them to do the same thing. Just click on this link and let us, collectively, go viral with this information.

We’re not interested in making a nickel off Cover Up. Let William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, make a profit from 20-year-old Bristol Palin’s ghost written Not Afraid of Life due out this summer. Our passion in publishing has always been the good feeling that comes from doing worthy books, which trumps profits any time.

Hope to hear back from you.

Marty

SUCCESS STORIES

2011-02-14T10:45:00.022-05:00

I had intended to write about the thrill of being part of a community composed of people who are passionate about—among other things—artfully written fiction. But this blog was delayed by the riveting events in Egypt, playing out on television 24 hours a day for 18 days. It was a worthwhile distraction watching the passion and joy of those brave people who, communally, brought down a dictatorship. And what happiness so many of us felt seeing this struggle succeed!

Success stories abound in the media, with success being measured in many different ways. For some it’s gaining riches, for others surviving calamitous injuries or illnesses (Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords), achieving artistic stardom or acclaim (the premise of American Idol), having a break-out Best Seller, giving birth to a healthy child after being told conception is not possible, ending conflicts by diplomacy rather than warfare. The list is endless, but we all love it when, against great odds, someone succeeds. Remember the joy so many people around the world felt when an African American was elected President of the United States. But this Egyptian story certainly stands as one of the Ultimate Successes of our day, for it gives hope to so many others that things are possible despite the so-called immovable obstacles placed in front of people. It reminds us that, despite the odds, good things are possible.

How does one measure success if you are an author who has written an extraordinary novel? Or if you are the publisher of such a book? Take Charles Davis, for example, whose first novel, Walk On, Bright Boy, was released by us four years ago. I suppose Charles felt successful in getting his novel published, having it picked as a “Book Sense Selection” by The American Booksellers Association, and having had translation sales in Russia and Poland. ForeWord magazine described this short novel, that takes place during the Spanish Inquisition, as “A haunting, gothic novel that speaks to contemporary collusions of political expediency and religious faith.” And yet, when all is said and done, only 450 copies were sold. As his publishers, Judy and I are happy to have discovered and published Charles and to continue to publish him, for he is “the real deal.” Yet, from our point of view, it was not the sort of success we would have wished for him. This is the arbitrariness of this business. If there were a God who loved good fiction, these numbers would have been increased a hundred-fold. But I think He/She/It is indifferent to literary fiction.

Still, we’re releasing, with hopefulness, his next 160 page novel, Standing At The Crossroads, this month. I know of no one who can pack such power and suspense—while contemplating big issues—into so few pages, and once more the advance reviews were exceptional, with Kirkus calling it “An absorbing novel of evasion and pursuit,” and Library Journal describing it as “An exciting and thoughtful adventure story as well as a subtle political and philosophical meditation on Sudan’s long-term tragedy,” while The New York Journal of Books said it was “A remarkable journey through the real and imagined landscapes of civil war-torn Africa.” Perhaps the Gods will be in a better mood this time around...

For ourselves it is a joy to be part of the aforementioned community of lovers of quality fiction, among whom are the editors and publishers of Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Kirkus, and Booklist. And of bloggers like Sheila Deeth, Amy Steel, Ann Hite, Julie McGuire, Heather Teig, Wysteria Leigh, Allison Campbell, Amy Kersnick, Jim McKeown, Marc Schuster, Vera Pereskokova, Karl Wolff, Maggie Ball, Judi Clark, and others. And of columnists like Judith Applebaum, Ted and Rhonda Sturtz of the online New York Journal of Books, book critic Joan Baum, whose radio reviews originate on NPR Connecticut, and Jay Strafford at The Richmond Times Dispatch, who is particularly fond of good mysteries. All of these good people have consistently covered so many of our titles. As have critics at Library Thing and Good Reads. And at least 10% of all the writers we’ve published who keep reading our galleys and help “spread-the-word” about the other books we publish.

The latest examples of these reviews are those Marc Schuster wrote for Thomas Rayfiels’s Time Among The Dead. Wisteria Leigh’s review of Chris Knopf’s forthcoming Black Swan, and Amy Steele’s review of Joanna Higgins’s Dead Center.

Staying alive and being able to publish fine fiction for 32 years, is truly a blessing that this whimsical God has bestowed, and none of it would have been possible if this community didn’t exist.

Yet, between the last paragraph and this one, I watched Wael Ghonim on 60 Minutes. This 30 year old Google executive whose posts on Face Book served as the major catalyst in bringing about the Egyptian revolution was asked what he attributed the success of this movement to—other than the social networking that made it possible. Repeatedly he said it was “the stupidity of the regime. Without that none of it would have been possible” and that they never realized how disconnected they were from what so many people wanted.

His comments made me realize that we, too, owe a good part of our success to the stupidity of those running the six major publishing conglomerates who sell, through their various imprints, 85% of the books bought in the United States. So I thank them, as well, for rarely taking a chance on relatively unknown novelists, for failing to stay with writers whose early efforts didn’t sell at least 10,000 copies, and for pinning most of their hopes on fiction by name brand authors and on novels that might appeal to the widest audience instead of more demanding and sophisticated readers. Without your failures, dear people, even with our supportive community, we would never have had a chance of succeeding.

More success stores about out own books can be found in the Newsletter section of our our Website.

I look forward to reading your comments after February 28, when Judy and I return from our vacation on Virgin Gorda.

Marty

DEATH AND LIFE

2010-12-22T19:02:00.009-05:00

DEATH:

After watching an old Dick Cavett show, Judy recently asked me a question that Cavett asked of a guest, “What do you consider your greatest accomplishment?” My answer was “Living to be 76 years old.”

In my last blog I wrote about the passing of three of our authors. A week ago I learned that Phil Wood died at his home in San Francisco on December 11th after a long battle with cancer. He was 72. In 1971—after working as a salesman for Penguin—he started his own press with Anybody’s Bike Book, and named his company Ten Speed Press. It was followed by What Color Is Your Parachute which has sold 10 million copies world-wide over the past 40 years and still remains in print. With an eclectic mix of titles—including some wonderful cookbooks (we sold Phil four of them—agenting two and packaging two more), Ten Speed was an incredibly successful independent press until it was sold to Random House in 2009 where it is now an imprint of Crown.

A week earlier I discovered that Stephen Minot, novelist, teacher, short story and textbook writer died on December 1, in Riverside, California, of a stroke. He was 83. We published two books of his: a short story collection, Bending Time, and his famous novel Surviving the Flood, Ham’s “Official Report of the Book of Genesis,” described in The New York Times as a “lively, at times bawdy story.” Other common ground I shared with Minot is that during the Vietnam War he counseled young men in applying for conscientious-objector status.

As soon as I read about Phil Wood’s passing I told Cathy Suter, who works in our office, that I wanted to call my next blog Death and Life, and wondered when my own obituary would appear. Then I walked into the kitchen, opened the pantry door, found a fortune cookie left over from a take-out order two days earlier, broke it in half and started chewing as I looked at my fortune which read—I kid you not—“You will be blessed with longevity.”

This was very encouraging because Judy and I love what we do and want to keep it rolling as long as possible. There is nothing more exciting than finding a fine manuscript and sharing it with the larger world. And unlike Ten Speed, we never grossed enough income that would tempt a large corporate publisher to continue this work when time runs out for us.

LIFE:

So, being still blessed with sound minds and bodies, here’s a season ending toast to “Life” and to some recent things we’ve been doing to bring a fuller life to the novels we’re publishing:

I’ve mentioned in the past Leonard Rosen’s debut thriller, All Cry Chaos, which we are publishing in September. When we first read his manuscript we thought it had the makings of an international thriller, as this tale takes place in France, Bosnia, Belgium, the Netherlands, and America, while touching on so many of the chaotic events plaguing the world today. We printed 800 galley copies and, to date, have sold rights to five publishers who will be releasing this mystery with us: Flamma (Spain), Epsilon (Turkey), De Arbeiderspers (The Netherlands), La Courte Echelle (French Canadian), and Blackstone Audiobooks (U.S.A.). And since word-of-mouth is what stimulates both buzz and sales, we have made All Cry Chaos available on Kindle, iPAD, and NOOK—a full nine months in advance of the release of this book itself—in order to get the word-of-mouth going. More information about Len Rosen’s thriller can be found both on our website (Forthcoming Books) and on Len’s website .

We are doing similar electronic sales for Marc Schuster’s The Singular Exploits of Wonder Mom & Party Girl—another very special novel—five months in advance of this book’s release in May. This first novel, a hip, contemporary satire is perfectly balanced on the slim tightrope between comedy and tragedy. It’s about the perfect mother who, when her husband abandons her for a younger model, navigates the world of single parenthood and soon becomes a contemporary female Jekyll and Hyde, juggling cocaine and partying with motherhood, and not doing too well at either. Wonder Mom is also listed under Forthcoming Titles on our website. The novelist M.F. Bloxam describes it as “Part cautionary tale, part comic romp—a high speed trip through a funhouse suburbia of addiction and middle class angst.” Marc Schuster, is one of the most gifted book reviewers I’ve ever read as his postings on Small Press Reviews and the New York Journal of Books will testify.

We’re hopeful that these well-in-advance sales of electronic books will pay dividends and we will be monitoring them to see if we might expand this availability.

May the New Year be a good one for one and all!

As always, I welcome your comments. More information about our own books can be found in the Newsletter on our website.

Marty

TWO AWARDS YOU CAN'T BELIEVE IN...PLUS FOND GOODBYES

2010-11-08T15:48:00.013-05:00

On October 27 New York Times headlined 10 WRITERS RECEIVE WHITING AWARD HONORS. Julie Bosman, the latest reporter covering book publishing at the Times, wrote that “The Whiting Writers’ Awards are usually given to people who are not yet known even in literary circles. But the recipients are young and talented, and often go on to fame and acclaim, as did winners from years past like Jonathan Franzen, Sarah Ruhl, Colson Whitehead and Michael Cunningham.” This announcement, and a following letter we received from the Whiting Foundation, drew little more than a snooze for it was, as Yogi Berra famously said “déjà vu all over again.”

In 1989 Judy and I were hoping to get Berry Fleming, a masterful Southern novelist, fuller recognition for his life’s work, resurrected after we published 12 novels of his over a three year period of time. Why so many books so close together? Well, Berry was approaching 90 and didn’t have much time to enjoy these republications and original novels if we did a book a year. One of the things we thought would bring him even more attention was the possibility of winning an award given by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and/or gain membership to this 250 member society. However, nominations for these honors could only be made by members of the Academy.

Living and working here in the Hamptons, the only members I had ever met were Ed Doctorow and Kurt Vonnegut. I wrote to both and asked if I might send them some of Berry’s books. Doctorow said “Sure,” and I passed them on to him at the tennis courts in Sag Harbor. That didn’t work out, as Doctorow became irritable when I asked weeks later if he had started to read Fleming. “Not yet,” he said curtly. A month later I asked again and he became even more annoyed. “If you think badgering me will make me read him, you are sadly mistaken.” We never spoke or played tennis together again.

With Vonnegut the exchange was much more rewarding, for it made me realize how fruitless our attempt was. To quote from his letter:

Dear Marty—

I congratulate you on your efforts to get deserved recognition for Berry Fleming, so you and he are surely on my conscience. At the same time I feel helpless, since the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters is much like the Exxon tanker with the skipper dead drunk in the lavatory off the engine room. It doesn’t act the way it’s supposed to.

I myself no longer attend meetings because of its lack of maneuverability. Too many good writers (and no doubt painters and composers and historians and architects and so on) have gone to their graves believing that they lacked that indefinable certain something which kept them from joining the cream of the cream. Irwin Shaw and James Jones and Richard Yates have failed to get in for a couple of maddening reasons at least: first, poets campaign for each other like politicians, so that most of the writers honored are poets now, and second painters and musicians and so on get to vote on writers, too and have never heard of Yates and Fleming and are often log-rollers, too “If you vote for an artist you never heard of in my field, I’ll vote for one I’ve never heard of in yours,” and so on.

When Sinclair Lewis became the first American to win a Nobel Prize, the Academy and Institute asked him if he wouldn’t please become a member. To his discredit, he accepted.

I now say, and I am not alone, that the Academy and Institute should not exist, since its main achievement is broken hearts. Please give Berry Flemming my love.

Cheers—

Kurt

Vonnegut’s letter came back to mind when I read about this year’s winners of The Whiting Writers' Award, which are presented annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and plays. To quote from their website: The award, sponsored by the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation has been presented since 1985, with each winner receiving $50,000. This year three novelists won this award. Nominations come from an anonymous group of nominators, literary professionals across the country representing all literary genres who are likely to know about emerging writers at the beginning of promising careers. The majority are writers, often teachers as well, and the list has included editors, agents, critics, bookstore owners, reading series organizers, dramaturgs, and artistic directors of theaters.

Nominators are contacted by the foundation and are each asked to nominate one emerging writer of exceptional talent and promise. The roster of nominators changes annually, although some nominators have served more than once. I would also add that the judges, who receive these nominations, are also anonymous.

Having received this mail I called Kelly Rosenheim at the Whiting Foundation and asked her to remove us from their mailings, and in a follow-up email spelled out my reasons for this:

Kelly:

As said, it's my belief that The Whiting Awards suffer from a serious bias against small independent publishers, given the anonymity of those who refer novels to you and the anonymity of the judges who choose the winners.

Staring our 33rd year of publishing quality fiction we win more citations for our novels—per book—than any publisher in America, large or small. We've had Nobel Prize nominees, a National Book Award finalist, PEN New England and PEN Hemingway winners and finalists, Edgar and Hammett prize winners and finalisst, and a host of other citations. In 1988 we were a runner-up for the Boston Globe Literary Press Award. In 1997 we were honored with the Poor Richard's Award given by the Small Press Center for "having done much to advance the cause of small press publishing over a period of at least two decades." In 1998 we won the equivalent of a publishing "Oscar" for our previous year's list: The LMP Award for Editorial Achievement—a prize open to every publisher, large or small in America, and voted on nationally by our colleagues in the book industry. All you need do is go on our website to substantiate these assertions.

But here's the rub. We rarely sell more than 3,000 copies of any novel we do, and recognition within the industry is not the same as recognition among “the writers, teachers editors, agents, critics, bookstore owners, and reading series organizers” that you cite among the anonymous nominators you use. Additionally, nearly every other major or minor award allows publishers to submit titles. They all have transparency and list their judges. If all of the above mentioned awards were not open to publisher submission, we would likely have no citations to cite.

So my belief is that there is no reason to believe that few—if any—nominators and judges have likely read the books we and other small independent publishers produce. And if that is the case, your awards lose both luster and a certain credibility. Whiting is free to choose how they handle their awards. But to assume that their choices are the most deserving, given the secrecy surrounding the process, is arbitrary at best and folly at worst.

Marty

I never did get a response from Kelly. Nor find out what a ”Literary Professional” is.

Over and above all this, we honor three special people. Barbara Holland, the gifted writer and satirist whose Hail to the Chiefs: Presidential Mischief, Morals & Malarkey from George W to George W we published in 2003 and Jean Warmbold whose three Sarah Calloway mysteries we published between 1986 and 1990 (June Mail, The White Hand, and The Third Way) have both passed on recently.

Jay Landesman, who is still with us, but barely, is 93, confined to his bedroom and not available for conversation for the past few months has been inspirational: a valued friend, soulmate, and iconoclast who always went his own way. Born in St Louis, he first emerged as a night club owner (The Crystal Palace), went on to New York and started publishing the journal Neurotica and became a playwright (The Nervous Set—starring Larry Hagman, among others, with song lyrics written by his wife, Fran). He then moved to London, preaching the values of brown rice and organic food, and shortly afterward became a book publisher (we did co-editions together). In 1987 we published his autobiography Rebel Without Applause. Jay was the original hipster, a great raconteur and listener, someone I loved from the moment I saw him during my first visit to the Frankfurt Book Fair in the ‘80’s, where he was promoting The Good Dog’s Cookbook, wearing a chef’s hat, with a dog at his feet, ringing a bell and asking for contributions for the good dogs of London at his stand.

I think of him often, and how much he meant to me.

More to come next month concerning new approaches to marketing. Meanwhile a special thanks to Caleb Kercheval (caleb@kerchval.com) who has revised and redesigned our website. It is now a thing of beauty!

I look forward to your comments.

Marty

ENDING ANONYMITY and THE LUCK OF THE DRAW

2010-09-13T15:29:00.023-04:00

The pre-publication reviews have always been in the vanguard when it comes to providing opportunities for independent publishers and their authors, to succeed. Without Publishers Weekly, Kirkus and Booklist it’s highly unlikely that we—and others like us—would have ever been able to survive for three decades. Hundreds of good writers would have remained unpublished and anonymous, and what the public reads would be even more under the control of six major conglomerates, where profitability trumps quality as their primary concerns are publishing books for the widest possible audience.

All the more reason to applaud a new program that Publishers Weekly is starting called PW Select, which opens the door even wider by providing a service that promises to reduce anonymity to self-published authors as well. It will consist of quarterly supplements, starting in December, where, for a modest registration fee, their titles will be listed in a quarterly supplement (with a description of what their book is about), and the promise that at least 25 titles will be given a full review. Also provided is a six month online subscription to PW, which is invaluable to any writer who wants to know more about the business of books. There is little doubt that there are authors who will surely benefit from this coverage opportunity. For more information see the link to announcement made by PW President George Slowik.

Books are ultimately sold by word-of-mouth, and letting the wider reading public know about your book is only the first hurdle. So many factors—beyond talent—play a crucial part in determining success when a book is written. Good pre-publication reviews are essential for building a base of readers. That’s where fate comes into play. Call it the luck of the draw, or accidental. Depending on who is assigned to review any particular book plays a large role that can limit or enhance the possibility for success. Bad reviews nurture anonymity, while a series of good ones can make the author the talk of the town.

The late James Agee wrote that his concept of reviewing is to first understand what the author is trying to say and then judging how well he or she reached that goal (would that every critic could do this). The theater critic John Simon was famous for writing the most acerbic reviews. Critics come in with their own background. Some are published writers, others wannabes. Some are supportive or generally kind, others generally sour. Other threads affecting critical judgment might be related to finding some topics distasteful (such as unconventional love), disliking a particular style of writing, or having some personal enmity for author or publisher. Some reviewers have a literary background, others are more academically inclined. Various critics think that by being more critical they are demonstrating their erudition. As in theater, it’s easier to play tragedy than comedy. So it is with book reviewing: a critic criticizing, will find that job somewhat easier than praising. Still, taste is taste and one needn’t have to justify it. But I do believe that anyone writing a review should take responsibility for it, and that writing anonymously can affect what they say and how they say it. One can take issue with someone who has a byline, but this is impossible if the critic is anonymous.

Newspaper and magazine reviews invariably list the reviewer’s name, as do bloggers. Among the pre-pub reviewers Booklist always gives attribution, but Publishers Weekly and Kirkus do not. What follows are examples of the luck of the draw for four recent novels we published or are about to publish, and why I think every pre-pub review should be attributable to the critic who wrote it.

1. Margaret Hawkins’ second novel, How to Survive a Natural Disaster (pub date late September):
Donna Seaman, writing in Booklist, wrote that “Hawkins follows her winning debut, A Year of Cats and Dogs (2009), with an even more arresting work, a droll and unnerving novel of extreme familial dysfunction. Hawkins has created an unusually incisive, rapid-fire, percussively hilarious, caustically dark, and piquantly pleasurable tale of tragic domestic mayhem and incremental redemption.”
Charles Holdefer, writing in the Dactyl Review, said that “Hawkins’ offers a literary novel that is both sophisticated and accessible and, in the end, is probably best described, for lack of a better label, as adult entertainment. She shows that it is time to reclaim the term. How many serious novels are, well, entertaining? How many metafictional games à la Paul Auster or high church cultural memoirs à la Azar Nafisi can a reader be expected to absorb before longing for something else? Hawkins grasps this problem and, without mincing or apology, presses forward. In this respect, it is symptomatic of where contemporary literary fiction will have to go, if it is going to go anywhere.”
Marc Schuster, in Small Press Reviews, calls this novel “nothing short of excellent. A heart-wrenching tale not so much of the things we do for love, but the things we do when love runs dry. One thing that makes it so compelling is that Hawkins allows each of her major characters to shoulder the burden of narration. As a result, readers come at the truth (or “truths”) behind the events depicted from a number of different perspectives. In this respect, it’s reminiscent of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, though a contemporary setting and more conventional use of language lend themselves to greater emotional resonance in Hawkins’ book. All told, an expertly crafted and emotionally gripping read."
Jim McKeown, writing in Rabbitreader.blogspot.com, and also broadcasting on Baylor University’s NPR station KWBU-FM http://www.kwbu.org/index.php?id=66532 said that “This novel has an ensemble cast of quirky and wonderfully interesting characters. including animals, with secrets of their own. It is exactly the kind of novel I love reading. All the people that inhabit this first-rate story have a solid, realistic quality about them – some are better humans than others – but they all ring true as clear as a digital recording. Move Hawkins to the top of your reading and collection lists. 5 stars”
PW’s anonymous reviewer calls this “An unfortunate choice in structure makes this a slog to read: Hawkins dawdles her way through a narrative that is essentially a round-robin of backstory before arriving, very late in the game, at a plot development. Languid storytelling and uninspired plotting undermine what could be an enticing family drama.”

2. Georgeann Packard’s Fall Asleep Forgetting (pub date late August):
Joan Baum’s review on National Public Radio, Connecticut, set for November 18 (often rebroadcast on Morning Edition and All Things Considered), said that this “new novel about lesbian desire takes on an unusual resonance, since the story takes place in a trailer park, not your typical setting for a story suffused with poetry that’s about the need and nature of affection and love. Packard’s spare and lyrical narrative may not gain a wide readership because of its odd characters, including a Biblical spouting 9-year old named Six and a transvestite. And because of the novel’s shifting perspective and mix of styles. But for these very same reasons, it should attract readers interested in original and passionate fiction.”
Sam Millar, writing in the New York Journal of Books: “Georgeann Packard’s extraordinary debut is filled with such an array of original and motley crew of characters, we become almost spoiled for choice as we turn each delicious page of erotic food and heady sex. A master class in sparse, clear prose, this is a compelling and mesmerizing read, infused with an elegiac ambience. It will make you laugh and cry in equal measures. You’ll not fall asleep forgetting this book.”
Amy Steele, writing in Entertainment Realm.com: “Forget reading some mindless chick lit novel; take this one to the beach instead. Fall Asleep Forgetting is full of lust, heated sexual encounters and intense emotions that stem from fresh and recharged connections.”
Sheila Deeth, writing in Gather.com, called this “an absorbing novel and one I’ll find hard to forget. The loose-knit community of Cherry Grove trailer park, an odd group of misfits living on Long Island’s eastern tip, has welcomed me in. And everyone I’ve met has played their part.”
The anonymous PW reviewer concluded that this novel was “Slow moving and repetitive, especially in the sexual encounters and the story, while good in theory, needs more developed characters to create any prolonged interest.”

3. Conor Bowman’s first novel, The Last Estate (pub date late August):
The Kirkus review: “Christian Aragon, the narrator, is about to graduate from high school. It’s only two years since the end of the Great War, in which his older brother Eugene was killed. Their bullying, egotistical father had expected Eugene to succeed him as a wine-maker. Now that duty falls to Christian, but he’s resisting; he intends to make his own way in life. School is more inviting, for Christian has fallen in love with his beautiful 24-year-old geography teacher Vivienne Pleyden, who lives alone since her brutally abusive husband disappeared, to dodge the draft. Christian’s love for her is innocent, passionate and unconditional. Vivienne reciprocates it, as he discovers on an officially sanctioned school trip to Avignon where he loses his virginity to her in the confessional box of a church. There’s a murder, a crime of passion, followed by a courtroom drama and its lengthy aftermath. Bowman is a robust storyteller, and he keeps us hooked.”
Karl Wolff in The Driftless Area Review calls this “A rare miniature treat, little over 160 pages, contains multitudes. It focuses on the story of Christian Aragon, the last surviving son of a Provençal vintner. The hot summer has Christian conflicted by the opposing forces of lust and virtue, the former represented by his young geography teacher and the latter by the cantankerous Jesuit priest, Father Leterrier, who tortures his students with interminable lectures about Holy Purity while Christian yearns to escape the confines of his abusive father and inheriting the winery, which he sees as a curse.”
Sheila Deeth’s comments in Gather.com: “Written by an Irishman, set in the wine-country of 1920s France, The Last Estate combines the darkness and depth of Irish story-telling with the beauty of a French village, and the cruel history of the First World War. The story is beautifully crafted. It starts with a cut that slices a young boy’s face; one moment, one blade to change everything. Cut again by fate and his father’s scorn, Christian seeks an unlikely healing. Love blossoms unsanctioned, cutting its own sweet way through boundaries, and a delightful love story unfolds.”
Betsey Van Horn on MostlyFiction Book Reviews: “This is a short but pungent tale about crime, betrayal, passion, love, and a scar–both real and psychic. The narrative is told in a solemn style that fits the times and setting. There is a mournful rim, but the tone is blended with the compelling and muscular verve of the protagonist. The final scene is foreshadowed with a hint of danger and a tortured suspense, and the ending is satisfying and messy, but strangely immaculate. Conor Bowman is an Irish author who spent many summers in France. Like George Moore (1852-1933), he is a largely naturalistic writer that was obviously influenced by the French realist writers, like Émile Zola (1840-1902). However, there is a healthy dose of Romanticism in this tale that offsets the harsh darkness and pervasive pessimism of the former writers. This is his first novel published in the United States. I look forward to his next novel, The Redemption of George Baxter Henry. ”
And the anonymous PW review: “This trite romance never finds its footing. Scenes of passion that read like schoolboy fantasy. Each obstacle heaped on the lovers' struggle only makes their already thinly conceived connection less credible.”

4. Liza Campbell’s The Dissemblers (pub date November):
Patty Wetli, in Booklist, writes that “In her sure-handed, compact debut, Campbell offers a portrait of the artist as a young woman. Ivy Wilkes, born the same day that Georgia O’Keefe died, harbors the notion that she’s destined for greatness. Barely out of art school, Ivy traces O’Keeffe’s footsteps to Santa Fe, New Mexico (Campbell has a talent for setting and makes excellent use of her landscape), where she waits for inspiration and fame to strike. When neither occurs, she takes to copying O’Keeffe’s canvases, initially as a painting exercise and eventually as forgeries. Here’s where the reader might expect Campbell’s narrative to turn toward a crime thriller or artworld satire, but she opts instead for a subtle yet engaging study of her characters’ contradictions and the corrosive effect that discontentment has on their lives.”
These comments from Kirkus: “A brief, intensely introspective debut. An affecting novel about art and the ways it does and doesn't reflect life.”
Catherine Brady, recipient of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction writes that “With a painterly eye, Campbell tells a coming-of-age story that illuminates the ills of our cultural moment, in which it's so difficult to distinguish the genuine from the fake. She's also an astute and lyrical observer of the exacting demands of art, so that we see how easily a transforming impulse can become corrupted by the hunger for recognition.”
Marc Schuster in Small Press Reviews, again: “Campbell’s prose shines throughout. Whether describing the sweeping vistas of New Mexico or the longing of the human heart, she paints with words what pigments and brushstrokes might not so readily capture.”
And the final anonymous PW review: “Campbell's characters have brief moments of sparkling humanity, but too much of the story is given over to navel-gazing and overphilosophizing.”

As said, these reviews are good examples of the luck (or lack of it) of the draw and no criticism of Publishers Weekly is intended. Staffed by people who appreciate quality fiction and non-fiction, without their dedication to inform the reading world about forthcoming books, without distinguishing between those coming from large publishers and those from small presses like ours, I’d have been plying another trade years and years ago.

I welcome your comments.

Marty

To be alerted for future postings, send email to shepard@thepermanentpress.com

NOSTRADAMUS WANNABES AND OTHER FOOLS

2010-08-04T16:11:00.012-04:00
Once-upon-a time I’d get boiling mad at human stupidity, particularly when it involved issues of war and peace, wasted lives, and wasted resources. Like the war in Vietnam: a ghastly misadventure that was so easy to predict as Lyndon Johnson escalated our involvement in that conflict. And as badly as it went, additional lives and more resources were spent until we finally pulled out a decade later, in effect, putting “more money and resources after bad.” My own sense of activism led me to establish a dump-Johnson campaign, Citizens for Kennedy/Fulbright, with offices in a dozen states that, unfortunately, led to RFK’s entering the primaries and his subsequent assassination, followed by more “good money after bad” during Richard Nixon’s presidency. Of course, the same can be said about our misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. No matter the mistakes, more funds and troops are always pumped in, as opposed to just changing course, until the realization hits that this is all based upon stupidity, where the “experts” can’t acknowledge their mistakes.

I’ve made some peace with all this, telling myself that these endless official stupidities will hasten the continuing decline of the Anglo-American Empire, and that the quicker we fade from being the world’s policeman (and dominant colonial power), the better off life here at home will become. At this point in time, it comes down to realizing that getting continually roiled doesn’t necessarily work: that one can only raise one’s voice so often on particular topics and then shut up. So rather than continuing to rant on about any of this, I far prefer referring you to George Carlin’s Final Words to the World , as well as to Ivan Goldman’s July 21st latest posting, Digging Deeper, where he once again cuts to the heart of the body politic.

My bailiwick is more confined to the stupidities in the publishing business where sales and marketing “experts” at all the major conglomerate publishers—both here and abroad—continue to dictate what to do about falling sales. Their answer, not very different than our foreign policy advisors, is “Keep doing more of the same in ever increasing proportions.” The compensation to their fruitless escalation is that nobody gets killed and our tax dollars don’t support their erroneous assumptions. Also, it enables a small independent press like ours to have significantly increased book sales every year over the past three years by not following their strategy (with total cumulative sales rising over that time by nearly 90%).

And here’s the story of what made me focus on this particular absurdity: our efforts to launch an International Publishing Event in September, 2011, when we—and publishers abroad—will simultaneously publish Leonard Rosen’s thriller All Cry Chaos.

When I first read Len's novel it reminded me of John LeCarré's A Most Wanted Man (which I read this past winter), and a short review of it whose last lines called it “Poignant, compassionate, peopled with characters the reader never wants to let go… It prickles with tension until the last heart-stopping page. It is also a work of deep humanity, and uncommon relevance to our times.” These are the same qualities one finds in Len Rosen's novel, and then some. Every one of our overseas agents loved Len’s book which also reflects all of the conflicts going on in the world about us, many of them adding that Chaos has much in common with Sweden’s Henning Mankell, or predicting the same possibility of success Stieg Larsson enjoyed (though Rosen is a far better writer).

As Arthur Golden, author of Memoirs of a Geisha, which was on The New York Times best-seller list for two years, said, “Only the very best of writers can weave a compelling story from a maze of complicated ideas, and with this deftly crafted novel, Len Rosen has proven himself to be one of them. Drawing not only on crime and the human condition, but on math, economics, and religion as well, All Cry Chaos is both a thinking man’s mystery and a thrilling ride. I look forward to more from its talented creator.”

In any event, one of our agents quickly sold rights in Spain, and another received rave reviews from the Editor-in-Chief of one of Random House UK’s imprints who thought it was one of the most highly original thrillers he had seen and one which gathered considerable editorial support from others. He then came up against the prospect of getting it through the sales/marketing team which, to his great disappointment, would not let it pass (even though nobody on this “team” apparently read it). My suspicion is that sales of the last LeCarré or Mankell novels hadn’t proven wildly successful in England and—given falling sales at his imprint—he was instructed by sales and marketing to take only books that had bigger potential.

“One would think,” he told me, “that falling sales would make it even more imperative that an Editor-in-Chief pick books that he thinks will be successful, but that’s not the way it works any longer.” So, as in the USA, the big publishing corporations continue to chase illusory dollars by appealing to the widest common denominator and hope that it pays off better “next time” then it is paying off in “present time.”

Judy and I continue to believe that predicting success for any title is impossible (unless one publishes successful hacks like James Patterson), that there is a proven thirst for quality fiction, and that if the two of us are thrilled by a novel there are other people like us who will also want to read it. Nor would we ever trust a “marketeer" or sales person to tell us what would be successful. In our own way—validated by our own sales figures—we’re better judges of what has a likelihood of success.

I remain optimistic that when the August vacations are over in Europe and Asia, we will have a solid group of publishers around the world joining us in releasing All Cry Chaos.

I invite your comments, welcome your subscribing to this blog, and—until my September posting—hope you will check The Permanent Press web site, and our Newsletter, for reviews, news, and updates on our recent and forthcoming titles.

Marty
To be alerted for future postings, send email to shepard@thepermanentpress.com

SUMMERTIME READING

2010-06-30T16:51:00.017-04:00
Realizing that repetition becomes tedious, and that my criticisms of book coverage at The New York Times have already been made, I’m ready for a break, as there is nothing more to be added since my June posting. But I do want to share a letter I sent to Janet Maslin on June 8, along with the Donkey Award:

Janet: I send this plaque off to you with a heavy heart, because I so much enjoyed your movie reviews in days past. Nor do I enjoy hurting anyone’s feelings. As all of the judges for The Donkey Award have affirmed in private discussions, it almost didn’t matter who “won,” as long as this plaque served as a statement that the Times book coverage fails to fulfill a longing among a great number of book readers who want to know the “Best” of what is out there—and not the “Worst.”

One of the reasons I appreciated your film reviews is that, as a movie-goer, I wanted to know what to avoid and what to see, so negative reviews of overly hyped movies were of great service…as were reviews of things you recommended. But the feeling among Danny Klein, Bill Henderson, Dan Rattiner, Marc Schuster, Joan Baum, and myself is that we—given such limited review spaces—wanted to know about the good books. Which is why a critic can be appreciated as a film reviewer yet criticized for her book reviews. And since you can choose what to review, this award fits the description of Best Abuse Of Space For The Least Deserving Books.

What is interesting is that the feedback we’ve gotten from the public shows that they didn’t consider your double review of CAUGHT and NEVER LOOK AWAY a winner. But, in fact, your review of STAR tied with that of Stanley Fish’s GOING ROGUE for first place. So the general feeling has been that you are pretty consistent in your approach to book reviewing.

If I could have my wishes granted, I would hope you would only review books you liked, for I would hate to see you get another nomination for the 2011 Donkey Award (our version, I suppose, of the Razzies), which we’re likely to present at Book Expo next year. For now, you are in a class with Sandra Bullock, who won an Oscar and a Razzie last year for two different films. And I’ve always felt you did Oscar style film reviews, but that doesn’t cut it with book lovers.

My other wish is that you’ll hold on to this prize rather than destroy it. Or give it away to someone you like. It might have real value on eBay, being that you are the first recipient of this award. If so, I’d hope that would provide some compensation.

"Making-fun-of" is about the only tool left in one’s arsenal to possibly alter what may very well prove to be unalterable when it comes down to trying to change the state of mainstream media book coverage. Beyond staging another Donkey Award next year, I think it’s time to let the rest of it go for the foreseeable future. So what is there I’d like to share with you in this July blog? My own "SUMMERTIME READING" recommendations and unsolicted opinions about some writers who continue to command undying media respect for reasons that I can’t quite fathom.

Let’s start with Stieg Larsson, the trigger being Nora Ephron’s wonderful satire that appeared in The New Yorker on June 30: The Girl Who Fixed The Umlaut. It touches on everything in Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo that drove me nuts when I read it. And why this was one of those cases, where the film—which I thought was superb—was so far superior to the book, as all the superfluous, repetitive writing was eliminated. This article is a hoot and I urge you to start your summertime reading with it.

Then there is Sam Tanenhaus’s excellent article in The New York Times on June 20, written in response to another New Yorker article (June 14) hailing 20 writers Under 40…an erudite and well deserved criticism of the New Yorker piece. For all my criticisms of the Times Book Review, this is a piece that deserves to be read. If I had any criticism of the New Yorker article it would be how in the hell would they even know the best young writers under 40 since they do so few reviews, and those that appear are invariably from the major conglomerate publishers. As for publishing short stories, the scuttlebutt amongst many insiders is that a personal connection is needed to be accepted at The New Yorker. And that we lack. But I will send their book editor two novels by the under 40 set that we will be publishing later this year and next—not that I expect coverage (we don’t even bother submitting to The New Yorker any longer), but just so that they will have on record for their next “Under 40” story that there are two novelists I would consider atop any list: 29-year-old Liza Campbell’s forthcoming The Dissemblers and 37-year-old Marc Schuster’s The Singular Exploits of Wonder Mom & Party Girl.

Finally, my personal opinions about two perennial darlings of the British-American publishing scene: Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens. I read one of Amis’s novels years ago and found it okay but hardly overwhelming. Once was enough. As for Hitchins, I’ve never read him but have listened to him countless times on television where he is always treated as a celebrity auteur and racontour—a pal of Amis—who has wise, witty, entertaining, and controversial things to say. But every time I’ve seen him he came across as a supercilious, pompous, self-absorbed guy, constantly self-promoting, and no-one I’d want to know any better or read. To me, he’s a cunning linguist, having that gift in common with Gore Vidal. But unlike Vidal (a brilliant writer who talked about serious issues without being supeficial in his writing and not about himself when on air), Hitchens seems to me a shadow substitute. The last time I saw Hitchens was on The Daily Show where Jon Stewart had him on as a guest. Hitchens was mumbling and slurring his words and—given his reputation for hard drinking—it appeared that he was under the influence as he drank form a glass while on the show. While Stewart was laughing throughout as if this was a hilarious and terribly clever conversation, it didn’t do much for me.

As always, I welcome your comments and hope you will sign up for future monthly postings. If you have any topics you'd like me address, let me know and I'll make an honest attempt to do so in my next blog.

If you check the Permanent Press web site, and the Newsletter, you will see updates for our own titles.

Marty
To be alerted for future postings, send email to shepard@thepermanentpress.com

PIN THE TAIL ON THE DONKEY

2010-06-07T17:20:00.026-04:00

The Donkey Award (Equus Asinus) was presented at a Press Conference on Saturday, June 5. In attendence were, left to right, Marc Schuster, myself, Dan Rattiner, and Joan Baum. There were six judges in all. The winner of this year’s Award had three jurists voting in her favor. A fourth vote went to some one else, and two jurists didn’t care who the Award went to (so many were worthy but one had to be picked), but felt it important to make a statement about the increasing trivialization and asininity of coverage. Nor was it accidental that all five finalists had their reviews published in The New York Times in either the Sunday Book Review or in the daily reviews.

There is no better introduction to this initial Equus Asinus Award than that written by Daniel Klein, who could not be with us at the ceremony as his play, Mengelberg and Mahler, was still in rehearsal, as it receives its World Premier at Shakespeare & Company Theater in Lennox, Massachusetts on June 11. One other note about Danny Klein: his novel, The History Of Now was a finalist for this year’s 2010 Massachusetts Book Award and received the Silver Award for Literary Fiction given by ForeWord Magazine at this year’s Book Expo. He is also the best-selling co-author of Plato and a Platypus Walked Into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes. Here is Danny’s statement:

I did the math:
* Each year, 175,000 new titles are published in the USA.
* The New York Times receives upwards of 1,000 books for review each week.
* They publish reviews of about 30 of these each week (counting the Sunday Book Review). So we’re talking reviews of fewer than 1% of the books published.

This would suggest that the books selected for review should be in the top 1% of importance for the general reader. That, above all, they serve to alert the reader to new and significant ideas in print and major new works of literary fiction.

Not so. Not even close. Overwhelmingly, The New York Times chooses to review books of or about popular culture: celebrity biographies and mysteries by bestselling authors. Rarely reviewed are new voices in literature, philosophy, or translations by significant foreign authors.

Times reviewer Janet Maslin epitomizes this phenomenon. She moved smoothly from the film page to the book review page without missing a beat—her beat, pop culture. The print equivalent of “Entertainment Tonight.”

Thus do I choose Ms. Maslin and her double review of the pop mysteries, ‘Caught’ and ‘Never Look Away’ for this year’s Donkey Award. The books themselves are genre entertainments—I have no problem whatsoever with such books or their popularity. (There’s nothing wrong with reading for fun; I am not against fun.) But what is galling is that Ms. Maslin essentially criticizes these books for not being more literary. She has chosen to review pop genre books and then disparages them for not being more meaningful. Huh?

Maslin compounds this cognitive dissonance by writing her reviews in teen magazine prose, showing how dim the authors are by outdoing them in banality. She should receive a special award for The Worst Extended Simile for a section of that double review that begins, “When books start with such perfunctory tricks, their authors are in effect playing a classic version of Monopoly. Imagine a game board full of spaces on which the characters can land. The best destinations—Boardwalk, Park Place—are the ones that deliver truly startling plot twists.” It doesn’t stop there, or even with, “When a main character searching for a lost loved one becomes the main suspect in that person’s disappearance, the story is figuratively stuck on Monopoly’s low-end Baltic Avenue.” But enough. Enough!

As it turns out, Janet Maslin did win the 2010 Donkey Award for this double review. Yet when we asked those who read our news releases which of the finalists they would give the prize to, 50% were in favor of Stanley Fish’s review of Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue, 32% favored Maslin’s review of Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America, by Peter Beskind (once again trashing the book), and 18% voting for Nellie McKay’s review of John Lennon: The Life, by Philip Norman. I would also add that all of the judges thought that McKay’s review was unreadable, as she tried to parody some of Lennon’s writing. One item of note is that this musician/songwriter/comedienne was born two years after Lennon’s death in 1980. Her conceit reminded me of the 1988 Presidential elections when Dan Quayle and Senator Lloyd Bentsen were the vice-Presidential candidate on tickets headed by George Bush Senior and Michael Dukakis. In one debate Quayle compared himself to John F. Kennedy, and Bentsen shot back telling this half-wit that “I knew Jack Kennedy, sir, and you are no John Kennedy.” Nor is Nellie McKay John Lennon—a man I greatly admired and once, after meeting with Yoko Ono, wrote a letter on his behalf, in my capacity as a psychiatrist, to prevent the Justice Department from deporting John because of a marijuana conviction against him in England.

But here’s my own take on why all the finalists came from New York Times reviews:
I’ve had a long association with The New York Times, having read it for over 60 years, since attending The High School of Music & Art (one and a half hours of traveling each way, by bus and subway, leaving plenty of time to read it). In 1959 I actually worked there during my senior year in medical school as a “Night Intern,” seeing employees who had accidents or were ill. I believed then—as I still believe now—that it is the best newspaper in America. But that high regard does not extend to their book reviews, which have slid rapidly downhill over the past eight years, due to policies insisted upon by Bill Keller, a prize-winning journalist who, in July 2003, was appointed Executive Editor, the most powerful person at the newspaper after Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the publisher. In earlier blogs I traced the relationship between which books get reviewed and which companies do the advertising. And I talked about the imbalances between quality books and passing celebrity fancies—that Danny Klein talked about. In my March blog (Applauding/Appalling) I wrote about an interview that Keller gave to Margo Hammond and Ellen Heltzel (in January 21, 2004), where Keller and Steve Erlanger, another journalist who became Editor of the Culture Desk in 2002(and had overall charge of the daily book reviews), announced “dramatic changes” to come, “top to bottom,”

"The most compelling ideas tend to be in the non-fiction world” Keller said. "Because we are a newspaper, we should be more skewed toward non-fiction." More attention will be paid to the potboilers, we're told. After all, says Keller, somebody's got to tell you what book to choose at the airport. “Why take up 800 words when a paragraph will do? Contemporary fiction has received more column inches than it deserves. Of course, some fiction needs to be done.We'll do the new Updike, the new Roth, the new Jonathan Franzen or Zadie Smith. But there are not a lot of them, it seems to me." He gets no argument from Erlanger. "To be honest, there's so much shit," the new leader of the daily arts section observes. "Most of the things we praise aren't very good. We need to do more policy and history. We need to be more urgent and journalistic." Some of the non-fiction books he reviews for "urgency" are poorly written, he admits, but for him this is less important than the book's contents. He and Keller, both see books as a launching pad for discussion. "Book reviews are partly a consumer service," Keller says, but they also "should be written for people who don't have any intention of buying the book."

I remember how I enjoyed reading the Sunday Book Review years ago when Harvey Shapiro and Rebecca Sinkler and Charles McGrath headed it. But all that was before Keller laid down the new line…one of which was that he wanted to review books that people would buy at airports. Amazingly, when I took a flight from LaGuardia to Richmond to meet Doris Buffett two weeks ago, there was A New York Times Bookstore at LaGuardia selling books that the Times had reviewed. It was a pocket sized shop, and there are at least 7 others at airports around the country with expansion plans “selling the Times brand.” No wonder Bill Keller said he wanted to review books that people could order at airports. The Times has been selling them there! One internet report said that earnings at their Airport Bookstores were over 150 million dollars a year or so ago. At LaGuardia there was a full display box of at least 10 James Patterson thrillers, which made me suddenly realize why Patterson, a very successful hack, was given a major feature in the New York Times Magazine earlier this year. Also prominent were Harlan Coben’s Caught and a plethora of other books the Times reviewed.

I became increasingly aware of how huge the Times is, and how influential—and not just The New York Times newspaper. A bit of web research show that it is a very closed self-serving system, one that increasingly fails to cover high culture—book wise at least—for very strong self-serving economic reasons, restraining trade in subtle but substantial ways. I quote from a 2005 web site posting:

The New York Times Company is a leading media company that reported 2004 revenues of $3.3 billion, which included sales of The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, The Boston Globe, 16 other newspapers, eight network-affiliated television stations, two New York City radio stations and more than 40 Web sites, including NYTimes.com, Boston.com and About.com. For the fifth consecutive year, the Company was ranked No. 1 in the publishing industry in Fortune's 2005 list of America's Most Admired Companies. The Company's core purpose is to “enhance society by creating, collecting and distributing high-quality news, information and entertainment.”

This transition from reviewng “high-quality” books to low is striking. Moreso when you realize that their syndicated reviews go out to newspapers across the country, including those they own. I remember sitting in Becky Sinkler’s office years ago, presenting some titles to her, when she got a phone call from an irate publisher who was angered about a lousy review. Becky said “I agree with you, but that book was assigned and the critic wrote what he thought, and there is nothing I can do about it.” Some of the Donkey finalists were similarly assigned books for the Sunday Book Reviews and, mean spirited though these reviews were, they were honest expressions of what they felt. Can we fault a critic for this? Not really in this instance, but we can hold them accountable for terrible writing (as in the case of Nellie McKay’s review of John Lennon: The Life, where blame can only be truly placed at the feet of the editors who let her get away with this). But the daily reviewers, like Janet Maslin, are free to choose what they wish to review, and some of these choices are abominable.

Here’s another contrast: On June 7 the day of this posting, Doris Buffett came to New York to promote Michael Zitz’s biography: Giving It All Away: The Doris Buffett Story, a book we just released. She started off with a Good Morning America interview with George Stephanopoulis. It was so successful, feedback wise, that ABC radio scheduled her for a live one hour Radio Tour on Wednesday, June 9, with their Radio Network Affiliates, and shortly after this interview her biography jumped up to 600 on Amazon.com. Nightline, originally set to run their filmed feature on Doris this evening, has postponed its segment until the 9th as well because of another breaking news story. On June 8 Doris appears on CNN’s American Morning, Fox Business News' Countdown To Closing, at 3 PM, And she will tape the Charlie Rose show for PBS.

This biography received a starred review in Publishers Weekly (“Zitz, a journalist befriended by Buffett, lets the dynamic philanthropist—who he describes as "a combination of Gandhi, Santa Claus and Lucille Ball"—tell the majority of her own story, making this more an oral history than a conventional biography, and a lively, inspirational read for fellow philanthropists and those who depend on them”, another excellent one in Kirkus (“Inspiring story of a woman who is using her wealth for philanthropy. The author offers moving examples of Doris’s philanthropy and rightly praises her support of prisoner education at Sing Sing and San Quentin prisons, among other causes shunned by most of her peers. Having learned what matters the hard way, she is determined to give all her money away to others who have also been unlucky in life. This is a readable portrait of a remarkable individual.”), and was lauded this past Sunday in the Richmond Times-Dispatch (“Her inspiring tale is a stirring and profoundly moving story.”) And yet, this biography was turned down by The New York Times Book Review non-fiction editors as not being particularly noteworthy. Playing Nostrdamus, I predict that the daily Times reviewers will not see merit in it either, as it's just another product of a small press that doesn't advertise and yet challenges how they go about their assignments, though I'm sure they would have other explanations for noteworthiness.

And so I looked at the two past Book Reviews and took note of what they considered noteworthy. In the May 30 issue there was a page and a half About The Value of Silence, covering three books telling us that keeping excess noise out of our lives was important but difficult to achieve; another page and page and a half about a book written by David Lipsky (not that well reviewed), a Rolling Stone reporter, who accompanied David Foster Wallace when Wallace was on tour promoting his novel Infinite Jest in 1996 (not that well reviewed). In their June 6 Summer Reading Issue there was a full page covering two memoirs written by journeymen baseball players (not very well reviewed); a third of a page about a food writer looking to find the perfect steak (he couldn’t); a full page covering two sex-symbol actresses who wrote their memoirs: Raquel Welch (Racquel) and Pam Grier (Foxy) which unimpressed the reviewer; a full page covering two memoirs about shopaholics (The Thoughtful Spender and Spent), and another two pages covering four books about baseball and a fifth about Astroturf). All of these books were published by conglomerate publishers. Expect to see them at their airport stores.

So what has this to do with The Donkey Awards? And the five finalists? Plenty. It’s another way of pointing out the difficulties of spreading the word about quality fiction and non-fiction. Can one ever hope to make the Times coverage of books more balanced…as it once was? Who is to say? But we must continue to have hope, though it often feels like trying to divert a charging elephant with a pea shooter. We are giving an award to a critic, but then again the critics are chosen by the executives to carry out Bill Keller’s mandate. Keller does a good job of covering politics, news, investigative journalism, and has good columnists. If only he could reevaluate his book review dictates and allow the book review sections to be run by literary people, how much better things might be for readers who would like to know about new writers and new books that they might like to read or discover.
To be alerted for future postings, send email to shepard@thepermanentpress.com

George and Laura Bush, Doris Buffett, and the Donkey Award Finalists

2010-05-04T11:48:00.014-04:00
It was the date that caught my eye in a headlined story in the April 28 issue of Publishers Weekly: Crown Sets November 9 Pub Date for Bush Memoir, since that’s also my birthday. The article went on to say that Crown, one of many subsidiaries of Random House, announced that George W. Bush's forthcoming memoir, Decision Points, will hit stands that day and called it a "groundbreaking new brand of memoir” that will explore the 14 most important decisions in the author's life. Decision Points will be available simultaneously in hardcover and e-book (as well as audio) and be priced at $35. Crown is also planning to publish 1,000 cloth-bound signed copies of the book, available at $350. The book, Crown promises, not only “explores Bush's personal life—from the discovery of his faith to his decision to stop drinking—but also pivotal moments in his political career and presidency, from the tense time before the 2000 election result was announced, to the moments in the Situation Room before the start of the Iraq war, to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.” The publisher says Bush "writes honestly and directly about his flaws and mistakes, as well as his historic achievements."

MY QUESTIONS ARE why the breathless, redundant prose and promises that are not likely to be realized? Is there such a thing as a “groundbreaking old brand of memoir?” Doesn’t the Crown publicist realize that Laura Bush, in her just released biography, takes credit for getting George to give up drinking? As for George Bush’s “historic achievements,” it’s hard for me to think of one, let alone plural achievements. Okay, they can’t expect our former president to discuss his “historic blunders,” but surely some other pitch would be more palatable. And finally, who is going to write this book for him since his mastery of the English language has never been one of his strong points or historical achievements?

A similar question arises again in the just released Spoken From The Heart, by Laura Bush. At the end of April, Michiko Kakutani reviewed her biography in The New York Times (reprinted days later in The Houston Chronicle), describing it as “really two books. The first is a deeply felt, keenly observed account of her childhood and youth in Texas — an account that captures a time and place with exacting emotional precision and that demonstrates how Mrs. Bush’s lifelong love of books has imprinted her imagination. The second book is a thoroughly conventional autobiography by a politician’s wife — a rote recitation of travel, public appearances and meetings with foreign dignitaries that sheds not the faintest new light on the presidency of the author’s husband… filled with the sort of spin and canned platitudes common in political autobiographies.”

THE BIG QUESTION HERE IS WHOSE “LIPS” DID THIS “HEART” SPEAK THROUGH? No hint on the cover, but Kakutani writes that Mrs. Bush acknowledged that Lyric Winik “helped me put my story into words.” It so happens that Winik, a 44-year- old award-winning writer, is a Phi Beta Kappa magnum cum laude graduate from Princeton, has a Masters degree in history from Johns Hopkins University, was the Washington Correspondent for Parade Magazine for eleven years where she wrote major profiles of key Washington figures, including Nancy Pelosi, Dick Cheney, Laura Bush, Ban Ki Moon, Condi Rice, and others, as well as in-depth reporting from Washington DC. Winik is under contract to Crown for her next book about Magellen’s voyage. Hardly your run-of-the mill helpmate, one can’t help but wonder who should get credit for this “deeply felt, keenly observed account of her childhood and youth in Texas — an account that captures a time and place with exacting emotional precision and that demonstrates how Mrs. Bush’s lifelong love of books has imprinted her imagination.”

In the old days, autobiographies written with the help of accomplished writers, would read, on the cover, “as told to…” But truth in advertising is no longer required when it comes to memoirs by celebrities.

Another random thought—a deeply disappointing one—comes to mind concerning Random House which once-upon-a-time set the standard for quality fiction. But since Crown, their subsidiary, also has its own imprints, it was sad to read another headlined story in PW on April 29: Crown Restructured Into Distinct Groups; Shaye Areheart Books Closed (“restructuring,” being polite double talk for “not profitable enough”). On their website, Areheart described themselves as specializing “in quality fiction, both literary and commercial, and feature a list of seasoned authors including Chris Bohjalian, Alice Hoffman, Lisa Unger, Gillian Flynn, Mary McGarry Morris, Katharine Weber, Allison Winn Scotch, Alicia Erian, Keith Donohue and debut novelists.” Yet that’s the increasing story over the last few decades: celebrities, the all consuming meat and potatoes of what big time publishing (and most big-time reviewing is about).

It makes me think of the common root shared by “celebrity,” whose prime definition is “fame,” and people who are “celebrated,” in the sense that they are honored for accomplishments regardless of how well known they are. This distinction arises since we’ve just released Michael Zitz’s Giving It All Away: The Doris Buffett Story. Warren is justly famous, while Doris is not, though his older sister is celebrated by thousands of people whose lives she has changed. One of the great pleasures of publishing this biography is letting the larger world know how significant her contributions have been, how she not only Speaks From The Heart but Puts Her Money Where Her Mouth Is. There is a remarkable four minute and 40 second video featuring Doris taken at Davidson College this past January, and everyone I know who has watched it came to the conclusion that people like Doris represent the very best instincts human beings are capable of—and what can be accomplished if heart and mind are in synchronicity. I hope you’ll take the time to watch this video and share your thoughts with me.

You’ll also have a chance to see Doris on Good Morning America on Monday, June 7, and again on Nightline that evening. The National Enquirer issue that goes on newsstands on May 5 (but has an issue date of May 17) devotes a full page to Doris Bufffett in their bi-monthly “Acts of Kindness” feature as well.

This May we have a second book to celebrate: Chris Knopf’s stand-alone thriller Elysiana. Will Chris get the wider coverage he deserves after having written five previously acclaimed mysteries in the last six years (four in his Sam Acquillo/Hamptons series that we published and another mystery for Minotaur, an imprint of St. Martin’s). Or will reviewers, such as Janet Maslin, continue covering thrillers by better-selling authors regardless of quality— like Harlan Coben’s Caught and Linwood Barclay’s Never Look Away—two novels she disliked in her double review in the Times, back in March. Or perhaps that’s part of Maslin’s job assignment: whenever possible review fiction from one of the six major publishing conglomerates, craftsmanship be damned. But for any discerning mystery reader who is reading this blog, here are links to two fine reviews of Elysiana, one from The Richmond Times Dispatch in a May 3rd posting and another from Small Press Reviews.

Which brings me to The Donkey Awards (see January 1, 2010 posting ANNOUNCING THE DONKEY AWARDS). On Saturday, June 5, the first Award for the “Best Abuse of Space for the Least Deserving Book” will be given out. Our six judges (Joan Baum, Bill Henderson, Dan Rattiner, Marc Schuster, Daniel Klein,and myself), all of us writers of published books, three of us publishers, and one a critic for National Public Radio, have narrowed the list of deserving reviewers to five finalists. As one judge, Danny Klein, best-selling author of Plato and a Platypus Walked into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy through Jokes and other fiction and non-fiction titles, points out: “Each year, 175,000 new titles are published in the USA. The New York Times receives upwards of 1,000 books for review consideration each week and publishes approximately 30 reviews (counting the Sunday Book Review). So we’re talking reviews of fewer than 1% of the books published. This would suggest that those selected for review should be in the top 1% of importance for the general reader. They should, above all, serve to alert the reader to new and significant ideas in print and major new works of literary fiction. Not so. Not even close. Overwhelmingly, The New York Times chooses to review books of or about popular culture: celebrity biographies and mysteries by bestselling authors. Rarely reviewed are new voices in literature, philosophy, or translations by significant foreign authors.”

The Donkey Award (Equus Asinus) is intended to highlight this absurdity. The finalists include Nellie McKay for her review of John Lennon, Walter Kirn for Solar, Stanley Fish for Going Rogue, and Janet Maslin for two reviews: her double review mentioned earier and for her review of Star. All finalists will be issued an invitation to join us for the award ceremony here in Sag Harbor, where the winner will receive an inscribed donkey trophy from our jurists. A live donkey will also be present.

Be sure to check out The Permanent Press web site, where our Newsletter will have further updates, as well as information about other titles.

Marty
To be alerted for future postings, send email to shepard@thepermanentpress.com

WHAT MAKES A GOOD NOVEL...AND KINDRED MATTERS

2010-03-31T21:12:00.009-04:00
Posted April 1st

Before going to Virgin Gorda on our annual vacation in mid-February, I made a trip to the Sag Harbor dump (officially called a ‘recycling center’) to leave our house-sitter, Georgeann Packard, empty garbage pails. On a ledge were two Robert B. Parker thrillers—his first two Sunny Randall novels—discards from the Peconic Library. Since Chris Knopf’s Sam Acquillo series was frequently compared to Parker’s Spencer series, I wanted to read Parker and see what he was about.

It’s been said that vacations can give one perspective, and this trip was certainly true for me, insofar as getting a handle on what makes a book special. I found Parker spellbinding and could easily see the comparisons: start off with a three dimensional narrator, toss in a colorful cast of other characters, offer up great dialogue, add dollops of humor along with the tension inherent in any great thriller, make sure there are surprise twists, and there you have it. Knopf and Parker could have been brothers separated at birth. So now I’m adding his oeuvre to my reading list (having read more than three fourths of Elmore Leonard’s novels—the other writer critics frequently cited when reviewing Chris’ first four Sam Acquillo books: The Last Refuge, Two Time, Head Wounds, and Hard Stop).

Then I read Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo that Lon Kirschner, our cover artist, sent along for me to take. A bit of a slog (it could have been trimmed by 25% and been even more effective), long on sadomasochistic scenes—three of them, as gruesome as any James Patterson might concoct—and at the end of the novel there was a fourth one, advertising the next in his posthumous series, The Girl Who Played with Fire. Despite two interesting protagonists, Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Bloomkvist, I’m not likely to read the next in the series.

After going through and rejecting a manuscript, I ran out of reading material, yet had another week left on this island paradise. So I searched some other units at Mango Bay, where we were staying, and picked thrillers written by several best-selling writers. There was David Baldacci’s Divine Justice and Ken Follet’s Jackdaws. Baldacci’s hero was as two-dimensional as flattened cardboard, his thoughts and actions straight out of a third rate television film. As for Follett, an interesting plot premise but, again, the characters out of Hollywood casting: a handsome Nazi, a beautiful British resistance fighter dropped behind the enemies lines in occupied France, and her handsome resistance fighter husband. Baldacci I was able to put down after the first dozen pages. I went two dozen pages before returning Follett.

And then I was saved by discovering Carl Hiaasen’s Double Whammy. Again, a good protagonist, excellent side characters and villains, an improbable yet inventive plot, and very funny scenes, while Hiaasen’s environmental concerns came through.

When I was a psychiatric resident at Mt Sinai Hospital many decades ago, someone asked one of the attending psychiatrists what the difference was between psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. He replied, “Psychoanalysis is what I do. Psychotherapy is what you do.” I enjoyed the humor of his remark, and that same pecking order comes up when defining the really good books. It’s tempting to say “Good books are what we publish,” but what is the second punch phrase? Because every publishing house comes out with some good books. It’s just that the conglomerates do so many schlocky books as well. One of the paperback editors we deal with (I think it was Rebecca Hunt at Penguin) said that this second category is what enables them to do some literary fiction. How, then, does one define an exceptional book—a question Judy raised as we sat watching a sunset on the beach. The best I could come up with after reading these novels was this:

If the major character is someone you want to know better—admire, have compassion for, want to spend time with or even someone who simply excites your curiosity in some way—this is the bedrock for a good novel. The same holds true for certain non-fiction too. Surely, there are other criteria that come into play as well (a good plot, a way with words, good dialogue and, when possible, some sense of humor), but without this affinity for/admiration of a character, these additional measuring sticks count for little. While this is entirely subjective, I could not see myself spending time with John or Elizabeth Edwards, Sarah Palin, or Karl Rove. And certainly not with the major protagonists in fiction written by Follett, Baldacci, Patterson, or Larsson no matter how many mainstream media reviews they get.

Thus, when ForeWord magazine announced after we returned stateside the finalists in their 2009 Book of the Year Awards (the finalists representing 360 publishers, selected from 1,400 entries in 60 categories), it was most heartening to discover that seven of them were novels we published. In the literary fiction category there are 15 finalists—five of which are ours: The Year Of Cats And Dogs (by Margaret Hawkins), Houri (Mehrdad Balali), Seducing The Spirits (Louise Young), The Disappearance (Efrem Sigel), and The History Of Now (Daniel Klein). In the mystery category there are 17 finalists and two of ours are among them: Every Boat Turns South (Jay White) and Hard Stop (Chris Knopf). And the one thing that every one of these novels had in common was that not only did Judy and I feel this strong affinity for the characters in these books but, quite obviously, so did the jurists.

Which brings us up to the excitement of launching two books in May where these criteria also hold. First, there is Elysiana, Chris Knopf’s fifth mystery for us. After winning countless praise and awards for his Sam Acquillo/Hamptons thrillers, which have been translated around the world, this is his first stand alone novel that takes place 40 years ago, at a beach resort off the Jersey coast. A pre-publication review in Publishers Weekly noted that “Smart dialogue and sharp social observations distinguish this stand-alone thriller from Knopf.” A starred review in Booklist adds that “A full baker’s dozen major characters swirl and collide as if in Brownian motion, moved by elemental forces. Signs and portents hint that something life changing, if not quite apocalyptic, will affect them all. Elysiana is a departure for Knopf, whose Sam Acquillo mysteries have won reviewers’ raves, but he nails it.”

Then, there is Michael Zitz’s Giving It All Away: The Doris Buffett Story, which will come out on the first of May when brother Warren’s Berkshire Hathaway Convention begins in Omaha, where both Doris and Warren will be signing copies of her biography. How we obtained this book—and the unique way we are marketing it—was the lead article in Publishers Weekly on Thursday, March 25. As for Doris, she is someone Judy and I fell in love with after reading the manuscript, for she is a philanthropic alchemist who has turned personal pain into joy by virtue of her giving away her fortune to individuals who, through no fault of their own, needed help to overcome adversity. Doris is a great example to anyone who cares about the biggest things in life—compassion, caring, and helping.

Nor does this affinity for characters end here. Two exceptional first novels that we’re publishing this year, Georgeann Packard’s Fall Asleep Forgetting, which appears in July (the same Georgeann who house sat for us while we were in Virgin Gorda to work on her second novel), and Liza Campbell’s The Dissemblers, due out in October, are also rich in people we found fascinating. We’ve nominated both for the $10,000 Flaherty Dunnan First Novel Prize awarded by the Center for Fiction.

Kindred Matters:

Overprinting and Returns vs. Non-returnables:

One of the banes of the publishing business has been the fact that nothing “sold” to bookstores or wholesalers is actually “sold,” since returns are allowable. In no other manufacturing business is this allowed. Clothing, groceries, alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages, games, pharmaceuticals, appliances, cars, music, electronics—you name it: once a store has purchased your product, they sell it, discount it as it ages, or accept a loss. In book publishing in general overall return rates are close to 50%, which means that there is much wasted work (shipping books back and forth, crediting returns) and money. Among conglomerates, huge returns can mean that even a Best Seller can lose money because of overprinting. Notorious for returns are the chain bookstores. Barnes & Noble is happy to accept thousands of books knowing that there is no liability for over ordering. In a sense, they can “paper the store” with selections, filling up bookshelves as a decorator would paste wallpaper in a home. In an earlier blog posted one year ago (May 12), entitled, WHERE I LEFT OFF, I documented how Barnes & Noble returned 90% of an order they placed with us after they selected one of our novels for their Great New Writers Program—and did this as well with a book published by Jill Schoolman’s Archipelago Press. It was a wake-up call in two ways: making us decide never to try selling our titles to the chains and also planting the seed that one day it would be nice to test the non-returnable market.

With the forthcoming release of Giving it All Away: The Doris Buffett Story, I felt we had the ideal book to try this with. After all, the chains no longer hold sway. Most consumers go straight to Amazon.com for the best deals. Plus, anything kept out of the chains is a help to the independent bookstores that the chains have helped eviscerate. So we’ve set up a non-returnable system, in conjunction with Amazon.com, the wholesaler Baker & Taylor, and independent bookstores who order five copies or more—giving them a 60% non-returnable discount, while offering the chains nothing at all. So far, this experiment is off to a good start with over 5,000 copies already sold and paid for in advance of publication.

An Update on The Donkey Awards:

In my January 1st blog post, ANNOUNCING THE DONKEY AWARDS, I listed a distinguished panel of writers and critics who would choose a winner for the Equus Asinus Award , given for the “Best Abuse of Space for the Least Deserving Book.” Janet Maslin, one of the three daily New York Times reviewers had several reviews on the list of submissions, but has clearly catapulted into the lead based upon her review in the March 26 issue, covering not one, but two crappy thrillers—Harlan Coben’s Caught and Linwood Barclay’s Never Look Away (I assume they are crappy because Maslin had nothing good to say about either of them, yet still gave them ample coverage): Dan Rattiner, humorist, writer, and founder of Dan’s Papers commented “Snide, stupid, condescending. A winner.” A second jurist, Joan Baum (an NPR and newspaper book critic) wrote “I agree. JM gets the Equus Award—schlock and crock.” We still have three more jurists to hear from.

It made me appreciate the usefulness of this award, How does a book critic who takes herself seriously ignore a Chris Knopf and cover such common trash? Is it because these titles come from Dutton and Random House imprints respectively, while Chris is published by a small press? Or did her years of being a film critic just get her in the groove of seeing a very high percentage of bad films which she felt obliged to cover.

In any event, I don’t mean this as a further knock on The New York Times. There are, actually, some very good reviewers working there. Dwight Garner, in my opinion, is atop the three daily critics by far. He seems to choose books that are frequently off the beaten path, writes about them in ways one would want to read them, and doesn’t go off the deep end in savaging anything; he clearly chooses to review books he finds interesting. New novelists published by small presses would likely get a decent hearing from him were he not restricted to doing non-fiction reviews. Marilyn Stasio does an excellent job of covering mysteries she likes no matter who publishes them (she reviewed the first three Chris Knopf mysteries in her Sunday Book Review column). Nor does Amy Virshup, in her short review column, Newly Released, that appears periodically in the weekday Times, waste space on pop-trash either, choosing, instead, books that she also likes, including some from true independent publishers. My regret is that Amy doesn’t do full length reviews.

I look forward to hearing your definition of what makes a good novel, feedback on The Donkey Award, or any other topic expressed in this blog. If you haven’t yet signed up to receive notification for subsequent blogs, I hope you will do so now. And do check out our ever-evolving and changing website, where our Newsletter is also updated monthly.

Marty
To be alerted for future postings, send email to shepard@thepermanentpress.com

APPLAUDING/APPALLING

2010-03-01T10:56:00.011-05:00
Applauding: Herb Simon and Marc Winkelman

Much applause is due to Herb Simon, who has acquired Kirkus Reviews. Simon, who is the owner of the National Basketball Association’s Indiana Pacers, is also Chairman Emeritus of Simon Property Group, an S&P 500 corporation. It will operate under the name Kirkus Media and be led by Marc Winkelman—a colleague with an extensive background in the book business. Better yet, both Simon and Winkelman are co-owners of Tecolote Books, an independent bookstore in Montecito, California.

To quote Simon: “I love books and have long subscribed to Kirkus. At a time when even the definition of a book is changing, my love of books makes me want to be part of the solution for the book publishing industry.” Winkelman noted that “we want to serve the whole range of readers including librarians, booksellers, publishing professional’s, and entertainment industry insiders.” That the 77 year old Kirkus will be headed by these two people—where an interest in books is the primary reason for taking on this task—is cause for rejoicing for those who appreciate quality fiction and artful non-fiction. Other than Publishers Weekly, there are few publications left that are still functioning on that level, and Kirkus, with its 3,000 reviews a year—is vital in calling attention to new and talented writers who are largely ignored by mainstream media.

Appalling: Bill Keller

First, some background about 61 year-old Bill Keller, son of George M. Keller, former CEO of Chevron Corporation, the world-wide conglomerate formed after Standard Oil acquired several competing companies way back when. Bill became a journalist immediately after graduating from Pomona College in 1970, working for various newspapers as a reporter before coming to The New York Times in 1984 as a reporter in the Washington D.C. bureau. Then it was on to the Moscow bureau in 1986, which he headed by 1988. In 1992 he became Bureau Chief in Johannesburg. His next post was as Foreign Editor in 1995, Managing Editor by 1997, and then, after serving as Op-ed columnist and senior writer, he became the Executive Editor in July, 2003, where he still serves today. Clearly an impressive career. If you read the masthead of the Times, it becomes apparent that Bill Keller is the most powerful person at the newspaper, his name coming right below that of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the publisher. Keller also won the Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for covering the collapse of the Soviet Union. He’s obviously made many of the right moves, but his gifts as a journalist did not prevent him from making several clunkers to my mind—like being a “liberal” supporter of George Bush’s invasion of Iraq, calling for the resignation of Colin Powell for pursuing a diplomatic solution at the UN that he thought ineffective, and defending reporter Judith Miller for failing to tell prosecutors who, in the Bush White House, fed her a story that resulted in the outing of Valerie Palme—the CIA spy whose husband was a formidable critic of the invasion of Iraq.

Politics aside, less than six months after becoming Managing Editor, Bill Keller—a man with no known literary background—announced changes in the way that books would be covered at the Times. For those who value good books—and there are many of us out there—his decisions have had a profound effect on what is worth covering. I quote from an interview he gave to Margo Hammond and Ellen Heltzel on January 21, 2004. In his defense, I praise Keller for his honesty; far preferable to the run-arounds given by Jon Landman, head of the Culture Desk at the Times and Kate Bouton who, before retiring, insisted in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that the Times tries to achieve a balance between high culture and low. Still, I would have been embarrassed to talk so openly about disinterest in books of quality and to show such ignorance when it comes to his assessments of what is out there. The same could be said for Steve Erlanger, also quoted in this interview, who—like Keller—had journalistic assignments all over the world before he became Editor of the Culture Desk between 2002 and 2004. Here, too, I applaud Erlanger’s great honesty regarding the crap he reviewed positively.

I quote from the interview, which was entitled The Plot Thickens at The New York Times Book Review:
Publishing insiders have watched nervously since Steven Erlanger became cultural editor at The New York Times and began altering the focus of the daily "Books of the Times." Well, they ain't seen nothin' yet. When we sat down with executive editor Bill Keller last week, he promised "dramatic changes" in the Sunday section now that head honcho Chip McGrath is stepping aside. He also indicated that the top brass is rethinking book coverage top to bottom. And which way are the winds blowing?

Well, if you write non-fiction, review non-fiction, or prefer to read non-fiction, break out the champagne. "The most compelling ideas tend to be in the non-fiction world," Keller says. "Because we are a newspaper, we should be more skewed toward non-fiction."

What's more, if you're perplexed or simply bored with what passes for smart fiction these days, the Times feels your pain. More attention will be paid to the potboilers, we're told. After all, says Keller, somebody's got to tell you what book to choose at the airport.

And who will carry out this mandate? Regarding McGrath's replacement, Keller won't name names yet. But he did say that they're down to three or four finalists, none of them inside staffers. An announcement is just weeks away.

A big step in this process—and the one that may have sent the higher-ups into brainstorming mode—involved inviting about a dozen of the most promising candidates to write "diagnostic essays" on how the Sunday section ought to change. The consensus: Reviews need to be more varied in length, and more contentious. But that's just tinkering around the edges. The bigger news concerns what will be covered. Author interviews, a column on the publishing industry, a decrease in fiction reviews and more about mass market books—this appears to be the recipe for making the NYTBR less formulaic and more vital.

Although Keller's ascendancy has brought plenty of reshuffling at the Times, in the case of the Sunday book review, perceptions in and outside the paper seem to have meshed. Critics have dunned the section for dullness. Even while praising McGrath's exceptional editing skills, Keller made clear that he has different priorities. "I love that Chip championed first novels," he says, then offers the rhetorical question: But why take up 800 words when a paragraph will do? The conclusion was that contemporary fiction has received more column inches than it deserves.

"Of course, some fiction needs to be done," Keller says. "We'll do the new Updike, the new Roth, the new Jonathan Franzen or Zadie Smith. But there are not a lot of them, it seems to me." He gets no argument from Erlanger. "To be honest, there's so much shit," the new leader of the daily arts section observes. "Most of the things we praise aren't very good."

Traditionally, chief critic Michiko Kakutani has handled most of the literary fiction for the daily. Her star remains untarnished; Keller refers to her appreciatively as "queen of the hill." Former movie critic Janet Maslin has shown a predilection for commercial fiction, a taste the Times endorses. As with most newspapers, management is obsessed with attracting younger readers and sees mass market titles as one entry point—as long as they're done, Keller says, in a "witty" way appropriate to the Times' sophisticated reader.

Regarding daily coverage, under Erlanger "We need to do more policy and history," he says. "We need to be more urgent and journalistic." For him, this means assigning books with hopes of eliciting some sparks. Example: He asked Max Boot, a conservative on the Council of Foreign Relations, to review "Freedom on Fire: Human Rights Wars and America's Response," by Clinton Administration veteran John Shattuck. "I like to mix it up," Erlanger says. "If I could start another Mailer/Vidal fight, I'd gladly do it."

Some of the non-fiction books he reviews for "urgency" are poorly written, he admits, but for him this is less important than the book's contents. He and Keller, both prize-winning former foreign correspondents, see books as a launching pad for discussion. "Book reviews are partly a consumer service," Keller says, but they also "should be written for people who don't have any intention of buying the book."

So there's the recipe: Emphasize non-fiction books. Demote literary fiction. Promote (judiciously) commercial novels. Cover the book industry more and individual titles less.

Given its pivotal role in the marketing of books, the Times is likely to accelerate trends already apparent in book publishing. The potential implications are huge, suggesting bigger advances for blockbusters and celebrities, including those who wish to exploit their "public service" in the nation's capital, and scaled-down high-brow fiction lists, based on the assumption that if such books can't get ink in the toney Times, they won't have a prayer in USA Today or Entertainment Weekly.

Whether or not the Times' analysis of the market and its readers is correct, it's based on Keller’s reasoning. In the views expressed by its decision-makers, too few works of fiction rise to the level of a "novel of ideas"—that is, stories that express the concerns and issues of the day as Dickens did. And given these odds, the Times would rather devote resources to fostering debate than discovering and nurturing imaginative writing.

Enough quoting and time for reflection:

Finally, it’s become clear to me why the Times reviews books as they do, and why coverage of the Sunday Book Review has changed substantially since Chip McGrath left and Sam Tanenhaus replaced him. And why the book reviews in the daily Arts and Culture pages read as they do. Critiquing reviewers, their choices, or advertisers is akin to blaming a junior officer for the war in Iraq, when it’s the people at the top who give the marching orders.

My final questions are these: How have these journalists become the high priests of fiction? And do we not have novels of ideas, expressed cogently, imaginatively and skillfully that reflect life in our times? Or has this all disappeared with the death of Charles Dickens? I’d welcome your comments.

So might Bill Keller and the publisher of the Times, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. The phone number at the Times is 212-556-1234; the mailing address is 620 Eighth Avenue, New York City 10018.

Marty

To be alerted for future postings, send email to shepard@thepermanentpress.com

JAMES PATTERSON, DWIGHT GARNER, and DORIS BUFFETT

2010-01-31T23:28:00.016-05:00
Months ago, taking household garbage to the dump in Sag Harbor, I found a paperback of James Patterson’s 1ST TO DIE lying on a ledge for the taking, which I did. I’d never read him, and thought it might be worth reading on the plane when heading for our annual vacation in Virgin Gorda in February. Then, on January 24, The New York Times Magazine ran a cover story, James Patterson Inc., about the author who will be publishing nine books this year with Little Brown, an imprint of Hachette, one of the “Big Six” conglomerates. I was told by two people to read this article before posting this blog, and so I did. Rather than be put-off by this profile, I was impressed by it. Here’s a guy who started out wanting to be a writer and went, eventually, from a extremely successful ad man to an author whose first mystery won an Edgar Award. I liked the fact that he had a very rich reading background; that many of the writers he read as a young guy were the same ones I’d read and admired. I appreciated the fact that he’s written in many different genre’s, including books for kids, to help encourage reading. Also, the fact that he didn’t care what most critics had to say about his work, because his audience was vast: one out of every 17 adult trade hardcover books sold in America was written by him. I was intrigued by him saying that his thrillers were characterized by dialogue and action, as opposed to lots of background and painting scenery—that they were page turners, since the three writers of suspenseful novels I treasure the most—John le Carré, Elmore Leonard, and Chris Knopf—all write exceptional page turners that feature excellent dialogue and action. So what if Patterson employed 9 “assistants” who helped flesh out his plots and whose writing he supervised? Didn’t Michelangelo also employ assistants to paint the Sistine Chapel? And so I decided to start reading his recycled paperback four nights ago.

At which time the bubble burst and a different appreciation appeared. For the dialogue could have been written by an undistinguished high school junior, the characters had no depth, and the action was gore, violent and scary, like a Freddy Krueger film: slash, frighten, and terrorize… the very stuff of pop culture. What I came to appreciate was not Patterson’s writing (I put it aside at page 41, for it was a book that would have joined the other 5,000 rejects we turn away each year had we seen it in manuscript form), but how he fit so perfectly into what the largest corporate publishers have evolved into and increasingly desire; emphasizing the lowest cultural denominator—books that provide the largest audiences in both fiction and non-fiction that favor celebrities, gossip, scandals, and frivolous political coverage. The sort of books that are regularly reviewed by critics and are not very different than what one hears and sees on television’s nightly news cycles plus Entertainment Tonight. In America, the big political debate is about Main Street versus Wall Street, while in book publishing and publicizing there is no debate at all because it’s all about Madison Avenue.

There is a tale told about a middle-aged American from Kansas who, visiting Jerusalem set off to see the sights. When he got to the Wailing Wall he came upon something he’d never seen before: a thin young man in a black coat, with long curls growing where sideburns would be, wearing a yarmulke, rocking back and forth and bringing his head into contact with the wall while chanting in Hebrew. When he was finished, the American asked what he was doing. “Praying,” he answered. “Praying for what?”
“World peace,” came the answer. The Midwesterner asked if he thought it was working, to which the Israeli replied “It’s like hitting your head against a brick wall.”

It reminded me that in my last blog I noted that many guest reviewers started to appear in mid December in the daily Arts section of The New York Times, and that this might signify a change in coverage. But with the New Year it was apparent that Kakutani, Maslin, and Garner were absent only for a Christmas vacation and were now back in full force. In order to avoid a headache by praying for a different approach, I’m taking a bye from criticizing the critics. But I would like to send you one distinguished critic’s take on his profession that appeared in Salon.com in 1996, entitled CRISIS IN CRITVILLE: Why You can’t Trust Book Reviews. What follows are relevant excerpts:

In a tart and clear-eyed essay he titled "Confessions of a Book Reviewer," George Orwell once wrote that it is "almost impossible to mention books in bulk without grossly overpraising the great majority of them." And he added, perhaps unnecessarily: "Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.”
Q: If Orwell's thesis about critics "grossly overpraising" books is still true, how can I test it? The next time you bump into a book critic at a party, ask what he or she has read in the past six months that's really blown their hair back, that they've really admired. Chances are they'll be stumped—at least long enough for you to refill your drink— even if they've written a heap of glowing reviews during that time. (In print, they purred about the new Edwidge Danticat or Thomas Beller book. In person, they get cagey.) I propose a new rule: Critics may only praise books they're willing to force their friends to read.

Q: Why do I keep buying highly-praised books that turn out to really suck?
Three words: literary grade inflation. Critics read so much gray, mealy, well-intentioned schlock that anyone who is halfway readable—T. Coraghessan Boyle! Barbara Kingsolver! Gish Jen! —begins to seem like a Writer for the Ages. Another word: laziness. It's far easier to write a positive review than a negative one. (Think about the mash notes you've written. Now think of the break-up letters.) Certain plummy phrases—"deeply-felt first novel," for instance, or "one of the best young writers of his/her generation"—practically come pre-programmed on the junior reviewer's laptop. Dissent, on the other hand, requires a deft touch, a nice high style, and enough knowledge and vigor to make your opinions stick.

Q: Are there any great, eagle-eyed, up-and-coming attack dogs out there?
Not really. Walter Kirn, the regular book columnist for New York magazine, isn't exactly a critical hero of mine, but he had a nice run going last year, grandly letting the air out of a whole pile of overpraised novels (including Cormac McCarthy's "The Crossing" and Howard Norman's "The Bird Artist"). You felt that, among the critics writing in the glossies anyway, Kirn was at least reviewing as if books really mattered.

Q: So, then, are there any reliable young critics I can hitch my reading to?
Nope, sorry. Kirn's fine for high, inside hardballs, and he's always a pleasure to read. But he's not remarkably erudite—and he surely doesn't have the world of literature spinning in his palm the way, say, John Updike does. (Updike is, hands down, the most reliably probing critic currently writing for a popular audience.) Lit crit, sad to say, doesn't seem to be a real calling for young writers any longer. Maybe the potentially great book critics are out in the ether, writing music or film reviews. Or maybe what used to be called belles lettres simply aren't as valued as they once were. In today's literary culture, the authors of grindingly second-rate novels are far more revered than first-rate essayists. Wasn't always so.

Q: Is the literary fame game rigged, as James Wolcott implied in his bruising Wall Street Journal review of the "The End of Alice," the new novel from that New York media darling A.M. Homes?
Not entirely, but probably more than you want to know. Anyone who's toiled at a women's magazine (I have, briefly) knows that it's far easier to pitch a novelist's new book if that novelist happens to wear a size 6 and look great in Anna Sui. Similarly, if Richard Avedon has ever happened to photograph you, even if you just wandered into the background of one of his street shots in the '60s, your chances of being profiled in The New Yorker are immediately doubled.

Q: Should there be term limits for daily book critics?
Four years maximum, given the track record of the critics at the New York Times and most other dailies. Daily critics, with the Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley as a possible exception, have the half-life of snow tires. They calcify quickly. These days you can count on Michiko Kakutani to swat at anything (Phillip Roth, Nicholson Baker) that—sexually, morally—puts some sweat on her brow. And reading the Times' other critics, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt and Richard Bernstein, it almost doesn't matter whether they're writing pro or con; the tone doesn't vary. (Their earnest, straight-on, eight-paragraphs-of-plot-summary prose is the equivalent of what used to be called, in football, "three yards and a cloud of dust.") No one's regularly throwing sparks. Anywhere.

The entire article can be seen here. Two years later another Salon.com article of his appeared in Salon.com in which he had some not very nice things to say in a 1998 profile of Michiko Kakutani, where he quoted one book critic after another on how she didn't deserve her Pulitzer Prize. Months later this observant and sharp critic, DWIGHT GARNER, was appointed to join Kakutani and Janet Maslin as one of the three daily critics.

Ten years later Garner understandably recanted, denouncing his own articles in an e-mail to Media Mob, saying that "I wrote that article for Salon more than a decade ago, and its chest-thumping, know-it-all tone makes me cringe today. Michiko Kakutani is an enormously talented literary critic, and I'm honored to be writing on the same culture pages.” I can understand that, just as I can understand why Galileo Galilei recanted his belief that the earth revolves around the sun in his 1610 book THE STARRY MESSENGER (only 550 copies printed, by the way, which wouldn’t have made it in today’s publishing world, though it did get wide public acclaim) with evidence that the Copernican theory was wrong—when the Church insisted that the opposite was true. Galileo was also seen as having a youthful know-it-all attitude with his other observations before that time which had already cost him various teaching positions at universities. But, like Garner, I believe these first observations were the truest.

Before moving on to my heart’s current passion, Doris Buffet, let me add that I consider Dwight Garner by far the best weekly reviewer at the Times. Most everything I’ve seen him write shows a keen intelligence behind it, he isn’t focused as much on books by or about celebrities, and he doesn’t go in for covering so many books he dislikes—as do Maslin and Kakutani. My only disappointment is that he restricts himself to non-fiction.

I would also like to ask—as others have—that with such reductions of review space, why would the Sunday Book Review so often re-review books covered in January’s weekly Arts section—or vice-versa? Is there no coordination between the two? In their January 31 Sunday Book Review, there was a two page review, starting on the cover, of Patti Smith’s THE NIGHT BELONGS TO US, about the love between two celebrities—Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe (both Maslin and the Sunday reviewer, Tom Carson liked it). Then there was a full page review of Robert Stone’s story collection FUN WITH PROBLEMS, enjoyed by Antonia Nelson and dismissed by Michiko Kakutani in her daily review (Unfortunately for the reader, Fun With Problems is a grab-bag collection that’s full of Mr. Stone’s liabilities as a writer, with only a glimpse, here and there, of his strengths.)

And, finally, a full page review of 36 ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD: A Work of Fiction by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein (Maslin liked it but her review mimicked her criticism of the book, expressed by comments like The plotting is so irrational and structure is not Ms. Goldstein’s strong suit, and neither is narrative urgency, while Sunday’s reviewer, Liesl Schillinger, goes on and on about the plot, stating near the conclusion, that The chronology floats back and forth across two decades according to no particular scheme; some characters are less developed than others; and the insertion of e-mail correspondence and inside jokes strike the reader as unhelpfully random. Curiously, for a novel that asserts the irrelevance of God, the unifying thread that knots all pieces together, however loosely, is Orthodox Judaism. I personally, can’t see anyone rushing out and buying a copy of this book based on these reviews, so how does on account for this? Does the author, as in Garner’s Q & A article, “wear a size 6 and look great in Anna Sui?” Or are either of these reviews potential candidates for The Donkey Awards, announced in my last blog? (Incidentally, a fifth jurist is serving on the Awards Committee, the Best Selling writer Daniel Klein, and I particularly liked a comment posted on my January blog by Gayle Carline, author of FREEZER BURN, who wrote A very good, thoughtful post, albeit depressing, especially as a debut novelist with an independent publisher. I only have one complaint—sounds like the winners of the Donkey Award have done a disservice to donkeys everywhere.)

Finally, on to something bright and beautiful to talk about: Doris Buffett, a non-celebrity who deserves to be celebrated. We’re in the process of putting together a biography, GIVING IT ALL AWAY: THE DORIS BUFFETT STORY, written by Michael Zitz, an award-winning newspaper reporter and columnist for The Free Lance-Star, a Virginia daily, who has known Doris since 1992, before she started to do philanthropic work with her Sunshine Lady Foundation. To me, she is the epitome of Mother Teresa in sweat pants.

At 82 years young, Doris, big sister of billionaire Warren, is on a mission. When she inherited millions in Berkshire Hathaway stock from a family trust in 1996, instead of clinging to it like a security blanket, she dedicated the rest of her life to giving it away—all of it—mostly to individuals in trouble through no fault of their own. So far she’s given away $100 million of her own money. She says she wants to give it all away; that she wants the last check she writes to bounce due to “insufficient funds.”

She began the Sunshine Lady Foundation, helping battered women, sick children, and at-risk kids who otherwise would never have had the chance to go to college. She’s also funding college programs for prison inmates, lowering recidivism. And she does it through “retail philanthropy,” often making personal phone calls to those who need help, one by one. But she still has a lot of work left to do, because each person requesting help must be checked out by the small, but dedicated, crew of her foundation.

Brother Warren also asked her to help out with the thousands of letters he receives requesting help, and supplies millions that Doris can channel to the worthy among that group. “She’s good at this,” Warren said. “She really cares about the underdog.”

The book, written with her full cooperation, begins with her growing up as the primary target of an abusive mother’s rage, goes on to talk about her having to watch every penny to take care of her family as a young wife and mother, and how, years after becoming one of the first investors in an early Warren partnership and making a fortune, she found herself $2 million in debt and almost lost her home in the 1987 stock market crash. It’s a life of many trials from which she has only gained greater strength and more magnanimity, a life in which she’s been estranged from her three children and endured four horrific marriages and divorces.

So much bad luck and pain would harden most hearts, and Doris has suffered through bouts of depression. Yet, she has kept her heart open, focusing on the needs of others. In 2007, The Wall Street Journal quoted Melissa Berman, president and CEO of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, as saying Doris’ personal approach and reliance on friends and non-professionals is unique, adding that most private foundations keep those they are helping at arm’s length, never getting involved in people’s lives.

That same year, Harry Smith of the CBS Early Show called Doris and her crew of middle-aged women volunteers a combination of “social worker, private detective and life coach.”

While the Buffett name has not meant a life of ease for Doris, it has created a sense, not only of responsibility, but of urgency to help others, and to get involved in a very personal way. She’s been knocked down repeatedly, only to get up, brush herself off, and go on. So there’s no greater joy for her than knowing she’s given someone else a hand up.

This biography fell into our hands through “marriage brokers” Howard and Karen Owen. We’ve published six of Howard’s novels over the years and a seventh, THE RECKONING, is due in December. Judy and I have become close friends of the Owens, starting in 1992 when we published his first novel, LITTLEJOHN. Both Howard and Karen are editors at Fredericksburg’s Free-Lance Star, where Mike Zitz’s columns appear. Right now we are working hard with Mike and Karen at editing so as to get our print run underway in order to ship somewhere between 3,000 to 5,000 copies to brother Warren’s Berkshire-Hathaway Convention, beginning on May 1st, where 35,000 people will be in attendance.

The links below will tell you more about this remarkable woman (a Wall Street Journal article and two videos).

Wall Street Journal

CBS News

CBS Morning News - Doris Buffett Goes for Broke to Help City

One final bit of great news: Kirkus has survived!

I’m grateful to so many of you who have been spreading the word about this blog. Close to 900 hits on the January posting, Announcing The Donkey Awards, and nearly 3,200 for the last three blogs. If you haven’t signed up yet on Notifixious to receive notice when March’s blog is posted, I hope you’ll do it now. If you want more information about how our new fiction is faring, go to our website and click on the Newsletter.

Marty
To be alerted for future postings, send email to shepard@thepermanentpress.com

Announcing the Donkey Awards

2010-01-01T22:49:00.016-05:00
After posting my November blog, The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and Book Bloggers, I bought and read André Schiffrin’s The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read, published in 2000. Not only did I discover that Schiffrin’s charges preceded my own by a decade, but his account of how publishing changed, from the mid fifties when a plethora of small but prestigious houses that valued ideas and content as much as profit were transformed into five behemoths that by 2000 wound up sharing 80% of the market. The early acquisitions started innocently enough when the founders aged, fell ill, or died, as when Bennett Cerf at Random House acquired Alfred A. Knopf in 1960 because of Knopf’s deteriorating health. With that merger, Random House did not even control 1% of the market. Nor was it very different when, a year later, Cerf acquired Pantheon, after Andre’s father—a co-founder of Pantheon—passed away and the other partners fell into disagreements. By then André was asked to join this growing conglomerate and, for the next 30 years, as a corporate insider, witnessed the changes.

More amalgamations followed which were then swallowed by even larger media corporations. Random House, taken over by RCA in 1965, was later sold to Si Newhouse, who demanded an increase in sales and circulation by appealing to a wider, more common audience. Newhouse arranged for Random House to pay Nancy Reagan a three million dollar advance for her memoir. Like Rupert Murdoch, Newhouse was one if a handful of Multi-Media billionaires who owned a string of profitable newspapers of little editorial merit, enabling him to purchase the Conde Nast magazine dynasty, Vogue, The New Yorker, and valuable cable stations. Though these publishers and magazines never lost money, they were seen as not profitable enough. He also gave another huge advance to his old friend Roy Cohen, Senator Joe McCarthy sidekick, for his memoir, believing that celebrity would sell more copies. Never mind that millions were lost in unearned royalties. The solution for that was to push for even more titles by or about celebrities…and to insist that every book they printed should earn back its advance.

By 2000 Rupert Murdoch and his News Corporation, having purchased HarperCollins in 1987, went the same route. Commercial books were linked to Murdoch’s entertainment holdings and his conservative political beliefs. Harpers changed when the new non fiction lists, written by the likes of Oliver North, Newt Gingrich, and other figures who shared Murdoch’s conservative political beliefs, made their appearance.

Simon & Schuster was taken over by Viacom, owners of Paramount Pictures, and that imprint became increasingly tied to the entertainment industry, where the styles and values of Hollywood became dominant. Viacom also decided that celebrity books are the titles that will make or break firms, and both Michael Korda, at S&S, and his boss, Richard Snyder, were more than happy to carry out Viacom’s wishes.

Eventually, the multinationals stepped in: Germany’s Bertelsmann, Hachette in France, Pearson in the UK, and AOL Time Warner in the USA. By then the publishing world had largely rid itself of literary people from its golden age and replaced them with business men. Mass culture replaced literature and profit was paramount. Now every title was expected to make a significant contribution to both corporate overhead, profit, and growth leading everyone to seek the same “successful titles.”

Schiffrin said that by 2000, these corporate publishers had pretty much decided that if they couldn’t see themselves selling a base of 20,000 copies, it did not pay for them to take on a book. As he pointed out, when Pantheon introduced Franz Kafka to American audiences, it had a first printing of only 800 copies. As for Bertolt Brecht’s first work, only 600 copies were sold. In today’s market place, neither of these renowned writers would ever have seen the light of day in America.

By March of this year, this insistence on celebrity books became something the conglomerates were proudly raving about, when Harper Collins sent out this press release: HarperCollinsPublishers, one of the largest English-language publishers in the world, today announced the launch of It Books, a new popular culture imprint dedicated to entertainment, music, fashion, design, and sports. The first books in the new imprint will be published in September 2009. It Books will be directed by Carrie Kania, Senior Vice President and Publisher. The editorial team for the imprint will be led by Mauro DiPreta, Vice President/Associate Publisher, and Cal Morgan, Vice President/Editorial Director. Ms. Kania and Mr. Morgan are currently the Publisher and Editorial Director of Harper Perennial respectively, and will retain those roles. "It Books will be a new way for us to reach readers like us--people with an endless appetite for pop culture, who live for music and film and art and fashion and the Internet," said Carrie Kania. "An It book should be fun. It should be interesting. It should be cool. It should look great. Working with Cal and Mauro, we're going to have the chance to publish some great books and market them in new and interesting ways. I'm really excited about this opportunity."

It Books certainly made an impression on Janet Maslin, who reviewed her first one on December 28, Alanna Nash’s Baby Let’s Play House: Elvis Presley and the Women Who Loved Him. Fascinated by this “long, repetitive and dirt digging version of that dramatic tale… Some details invoke the bottom-feeding biographical style of Albert Goldman,” Maslin plowed on extensively about its 684 pages, with photos, which she pointed out was larger than most presidential biographies. When I read this review I thought of how deeply depressed the state of Culture was at the Culture Desk. Just as critics have their lists of Awards—best books of the year, etc. it led to a decision to start a new award for critics, called The Donkey Awards (Equus Asinus) for the “Best Abuse of Space for the Least Deserving Book.” I’ve placed Maslin’s review as the first nominee for this Award. Joining me on the judges panel are Bill Henderson of Pushcart Press (and author of Rotten Reviews), Joan Baum, a newspaper critic and commentator on NPR, “Baum on Books,” Dan Rattiner, founder and executive editor of Dan’s Papers and an author in his own right, and Marc Schuster, novelist, English teacher at Montgomery County Community College, and founder and editor of Small Press Reviews. I welcome any other nominations—from those of you reading this blog—of print reviews from the Times or any other newspaper or magazine. As with other Awards, we will choose five finalists, with the winner to be honored at an appropriate ceremony; date and place to be decided. To nominate all you need do is send me a printed or electronic version of the review you think hits new lows. No entry fees are required.

Which brings me back to my last blog which was highly critical of the crappy balance of coverage in the weekday Arts section at The New York Times, because of their near total abdication of reviewing books from small presses, discrimination against first novelists in general, their overwhelming preference for “pop” nonfiction over literature (in perfect alignment with what the largest corporate publishers were putting out), and the fact that nearly 90% of the books they reviewed come from the largest conglomerates. It apparently struck a nerve throughout the industry, for it more than doubled any previous posting with more than 1,600 hits—1,300 in the first three days—helped enormously by one prominent critic at a major newspaper who twittered many others about it, resulting in a GALLEYCAT article entitled Indie Publisher Dissects NY Times Critics Favorite Books List, as well as another article that same day in Publishers Weekly’s on-line issue. Among the many email responses I received on was one from Sallie Bingham, a distinguished writer who was once in charge of book reviews at another mainstream newspaper. Here’s what she had to say:

A further thought on your excellent and well-deserved criticism of the NY Times book reviewing: they are almost certainly choosing which books to review, and to review favorably, according to the amount of advertising they receive from the publisher. If you have the time to go through a few issues, you will certainly see the connection, and if you go further and tally the amount of money these ads cost, you will probably receive even more illumination. Local book pages, like the one I edited at the Louisville Courier-Journal, were killed because the publishers refused to advertise in them. The conclusion: whatever the arguments of the editors may be, they are simply covering for the fact that they are controlled by their advertisers. Of course the same kind of shenanigans explains the so-called Best Seller List. I wish I saw hope for change. With best wishes, Sallie Bingham

I took Sallie’s advice and discovered that the cost of running advertisements was astronomical. Hachette for example, ran two full page color ads that cost $36,100 apiece, plus an additional $8,900 for placement on a preferred page, the full cost coming to $45,000 for each ad. Random House took one full color page and five smaller ones in black and white. Penguin ran ten smaller ones, one in full color, while Houghton Mifflin also ran two full color pages. I’d say that Simon & Schuster were cheapskates as I only saw one ad that covered about a sixth of a page. But this, of course is just the tip of the iceberg for I never tracked the ads in the Sunday Book Review section, which are usually extensive, and all go into the same kitty. It’s very likely S&S spent more there, but I can’t vouch for it (if not, they may be in trouble). While their rate card indicated that if more than three ads are placed there is a 25% discount, I also realized that, not having a few hundred thousand dollars to spend, this would not be a likely approach to getting book coverage for the quality fiction we publish.

However, one of my beefs with the Culture Desk is not that they accept advertising from the people they are most likely to review. It’s that they don’t show sufficient respect for literature any more, at least by Webster’s definition of literature, which is: “Written works which deal with themes of permanent and universal interest, characterized by creativeness and expression, as in poetry, fiction, essays, etc, as distinguished from works of journalistic nature.” And literary is defined as “versed in or devoted to literature.” A careful reading of their book pages last month verifies these charges: there were 25 reviews in the weekday editions, 17 by the Big Three. Michiko Kakutani wrote five, one a novel, three of non-fiction, and another bogus novel, an Autobiography of Fidel Castro by a Cuban exile who wanted to paint an abysmal portrayal which Michiko didn’t like all that much (but it does fit in with Kakutani’s slippage from once being considered a literary reviewer to one who has devloped an obsession for reviewing political non-fiction as evidenced by her having written reviews for three books about Obama’s campaign in the later part of 2009 and another concerning Sarah Palin’s campaign). Janet Maslin wrote seven reviews: six of non-fiction and one autobiographical novel by a celebrity novelist. Dwight Garner reviewed five books, all non-fiction (just as his ten favorite books of 2009 were all non-fiction). Thus the Gang of Three reviewed three novels, one autobiographical novel and 17 non-fiction titles, clearly qualifying this group as “journalistic book reviewers,” and not “literary critics.” In all, the Arts section reviewed 25 books in that time, 17 coming from the six largest conglomerates that have 58 different trade imprints between them. Five more came from major independents. Of the other three, one came from Indiana University Press—The Years Work in Lebowski Studies (academic essays about The Big Lebowski, now a cult film). Another came from New Directions (not a small press on our scale, but certainly an independent committed to quality writing), and a third from Applause Theater & Cinema Books for The Play that Changed My Life.

Like Sallie Bingham, I too hope for change at the Times. Is it possible? Who knows? For change to occur, however, it has to start at the top. But who is in charge? Jon Landman is the overall editor at the Culture Desk, and while charming and whimsical in our email exchnages, I’ve no sense that he believes anything is amiss. He’s told me that they try to achieve a balance between widely read “popular” books and more serious stuff. But so far this has not been in evidence. In their restaurant reviews, the Times covers the good ones—large as well as small. When it comes to cooking as an art form, their reviewers appreciate good taste. If they decided it was more important to cover the most popular eateries in this country, good taste would go out the window and they would be writing about Burger King, McDonald’s, KFC, Jack in the Box and IHOP.

Katherine Bouton, who took a buyout last month, was the editor in charge of assigning books. I take that as a positive sign, in that she thought Minatour was a small press instead of part of Macmillan. Is it possible that other reviewers or editors at the Times have similar thought processes, believing that they are reviewing books from 58 different publishers when all are part of the largest six conglomerates? Before stepping down, she posted a comment on my blog that I was wrong about their coverage of first novels, claiming that in the preceding six months, 11 first novels were covered. In fact, she was likely referring not to any major reviews but probably to Amy Virshup’s column, “Newly Released,” which I hope Amy will be able to continue. It featured short, Publishers Weekly style synopsis. In her December 17 column Amy covered six books: five from the major conglomerates (two from Random House, two from Macmillan, one Hachette) one from a true smallish independent, Soho Crime, and five of them were fiction. These are better percentages than those exhibited by their major reviewers and, now that Amy has replaced Katherine Bouton, perhaps this might indicate positive changes to come.

I also noticed that, starting on December 21, the remaining eight major reviews were written by “outsiders”—Barry Gewen, Simon Winchester, Charles McGrath, Robin Henig, Larry Rohter, Patrick Healy, Edmund White, and Katha Pollitt. Among these reviews only five were non-fiction and three were fiction. Five came from the major conglomerates, another from Oxford University Press (a powerhouse in its own right as Oxford sells as many books as the rest of all the American University presses combined—and they also occasionally advertise in the Times). And two of these reviews were actually from smaller independents.

If this is an indication that the Gang of Three might be phasing out, that would be a cause for celebration. On the other hand, if Maslin, Kakutani, and Garner are the Chief Executives here (and only taking their holiday vacations), I despair of any improvements. Let’s face it: the New York Times is America’s only national newspaper that a thinking person can respect; their only major failure being in their book review policies and personnel. When GM’s management was canned for failing to produce quality cars, does it make sense to keep on a staff that fails to produce quality reviews?

If any of you share these opinions, there are two things you can do about it: pass this blog on to anyone you think of who might feel similarly (as well as registering for future monthly postings if you've not already done so) AND make your feelings known by contacting Clark Hoyt, the New York Times Public Editor (public@nytimes.com), just as Ivan Goldman did in his following email.

From: Ivan G. <catch20two@yahoo.com>Subject: 10 Best Books
To: public@nytimes.comDate: Wednesday, December 23, 2009, 11:53 AM
Dear Mr. Hoyt:I was distressed to see the Book Review section list what it called "The 10 Best Books of 2009" in its Dec. 13 issue. It was a claim that brings to mind such idiotic articles published from time to time in second-rate glossies that claim to tell us, for example, "The 100 Most Interesting People in America." Obviously you can't name them if you don't know everybody. Likewise it's a virtual certainty that you're missing some of the best books because you haven't read even a defensible sample, much less all of them. Is this semantics? No. These are hard facts, and your Book Review section is exaggerating beyond the range of acceptability. Liars often claim that their lies are close enough to the truth to approximate truth. Don't you think the Times should do better? Naming Notable Books is clearly acceptable, so why put your paper in the same category as run-of-the-mill liars? Yes, I had a novel come out in 2009 and so I have a personal stake in this. No, it was not reviewed by the Times. Yet it was nominated as a Notable Book by Booklist and the American Library Association and received fine reviews elsewhere. I presume no one in the Books section read it. It was deemed unworthy even of the negative review splashed all over Pages 18 and 19 of that same Dec. 13 issue, a book someone read but disliked.

On a closing note: In Motoko Rich's report last month in The New York Times that Kirkus Reviews would be closing down by year’s end, an editor at one of the conglomerates shed no tears because, as he told her, “reviews in Kirkus don’t move unit sales.” A close friend told me today that, while Kirkus’ parent company, Nielsen, in divestiture mode (the same folks who advertise themselves as “A Global Leader in Media Information TV, Mobile and Online Intelligence” and who also claim to track 70% of domestic book sales ...a great exaggeration that I've written about before), managed to sell off other papers, like the Hollywood Reporter and Billboard, and were willing to toss Kirkus into the deal for free, it wasn’t of interest to the buyer. Why not? “Because it only earned Nielsen $250,000 a year and that wasn’t enough profit to make it worthwhile.”

To me this underscores what the new publishing business is all about. If “unit sales” don’t increase, there is no respect given by the conglomerates to the fact that Kirkus—like Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Library Journal—provided vital information about good books that the mainstream print media regularly ignores. And if it doesn’t earn sufficient profits, it’s not worth the time it would take a new buyer to keep it going.

Let us hope that somehow Kirkus will survive and that we won’t need to report a burial come February. Like the other pre-pub reviewers, advertising was not a prerequisite for getting reviews.

Marty

PS: If anyone out there is looking for an extraordinary cover artist, Lon Kirschner, who has been doing book covers for us for over 15 years, is definitely the man to call. A creative guy who reads the manuscripts he's assigned, Lon invariably comes up with something that both captures the mood of the book and also references a key element of it. You can see examples of his work, and get in touch with him, by going to his website: www.kirschnercaroff.com
To be alerted for future postings, send email to shepard@thepermanentpress.com

The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and Book Bloggers

2009-11-30T18:37:00.018-05:00
Following my last blog, The Cultural Divide, where I faulted the weekly book coverage at The New York Times for lacking balance, I had some spirited email exchanges with Jon Landman, the editor of the Culture Desk, as well as with Katherine Bouton who assigns books for review and Motoko Rich who reports on the New York publishing world. They all talked about how they are very aware of trying to keep a balance between literary culture and popular culture, and between the dozen or so giant corporate publishers who dominate the market place and smaller independent presses that are largely ignored. As an example I pointed out that we’ve not had a review for one of our novels from them since the first one appeared in January, 1980, despite a plethora of awards and honors, listed in my July 13th blog, What Pisses Me Off. That was 7,000 reviews ago.

In our email exchanges my impression was that that they were pretty well satisfied with the job they are doing. Katherine Bouton mentioned, as an example of small press coverage, that they did a review of a Minotaur book recently, apparently not realizing that Minotaur is an imprint of one of the giants: Macmillan. Jon Landman wrote that they had given us coverage, citing an article about Judy and me and the Permanent Press which appeared 15 years ago, neglecting the fact that this was not a review for one of our books and that it appeared in the Metropolitan Section, which at that time was circulated only in New York City and Long Island. Motoko Rich suggested that she'd be glad to consider a news story, but couldn't guarantee she would do anything because there were so many suggestions she received. Having read her news stories, and finding many of them read like elaborations on press releases written by publicity directors at the major publishing houses, I greeted her offer with skepticism. Instead I told her that I posted a monthly blog where she might find things in it newsworthy, and mentioned that I'd be writing about a book blogger this month whose novel we would be publishing.

I can understand these responses on three levels: one being that it is hard to take criticism, and defensiveness frequently follows. The other being an attempt to "make nice" that lacked sincerity but might get someone off your back. And, finally, realizing that nobody likes being told by those outside the club how they should run their business. My initial response to outsiders taking me to task about our work would likely be similar. Still, it’s possible that starting a dialogue plants seeds that could, ultimately, take root.

On November 2, Susan Dominus wrote a column in the Times entitled “Lament on the Fading Culture of the Printed Word,” in which she talked about the changes in the literary world over the past couple of years—the loss of jobs, the inability of aspiring writers to find publishers, and what the future holds. “I went back and reread Joan Didion's essay “Goodbye to All That” the other day…a catalog of Manhattan’s enervating clichés, and, implicitly, a rejection of the New York literary scene she inhabited… Ms. Didion tired of the same faces at the same parties, the gossip about book advances, the uneasy courtship of press and publicists, the endless cycle of aspiration and pretense. [It’s] been reverberating through my mind on a regular basis. I hear it every time I go to a party and run into a writer or editor I admire who has recently been laid off. 12 or 20 years ago if anyone with a flair for stringing sentences together lost a job, it was a given that he would land quickly on his feet at another publication or a small publishing house. But now, goodbye to all that.

“Newspapers, including this one, are shedding jobs, too, but it is the world of magazines and publishing houses that constitutes a culture specific to New York. Part of what is gone, perhaps appropriately, is the glittering, gluttonous self-indulgence — content that took itself too seriously, or associate market editors who did the same, a bad case of the press believing its own press. But what is lost, along with a lot of image packaging, is that expansive home for good writing. Philip Roth recently predicted in The Guardian of London, that in 25 years, the number of people reading novels would be akin to the numbers now reading Latin poetry; it will be a curiosity, certainly not a profit center. This is painful gospel for anyone who reads Philip Roth, or other great writers, the way other people read religious texts — to make sense of the world, to be humbled or inspired by the power of language.”

Were this article in the Arts and Culture section of the Times, it might have caused some reflection on how they covered books. But Susan Dominus’ columns appear in the Metropolitan Section, to be read only in New York City and environs.

On Friday, November 27, the entire front page of the Arts section was devoted to books; the headline article penned by Janet Maslin, a “Holiday Gift Guide,” was entitled “Unforgettable Books For Those You Remember.” She started out by saying “There’s a good reason why the three daily book critics for The New York Times don’t make 10-best lists at the end of the year. None of us has read everything [italics mine]. None of us has an objective overview of the year’s best and most important books, but this is what we do have: favorites…books we have not only admired in the abstract but have also enjoyed, recommended, and given to friends. Of the tens of thousands of books published each year, the daily Times reviews about 250. Each of us chose his or her share of those titles for review. Now Michiko Kakutani, Dwight Garner and I further narrow down those choices and each of us can tell you which books we’ll remember best.” She also adds, before getting to these 30 favorites, that “It’s been a bit of an off year, and the must-read milestones have been rare…And if it’s been a disappointing year for certain major novelists, it has also brought a couple of unexpected career-capping accomplishments from fiction writers in the mainstream [italics mine].”

Obviously they can’t “read everything,” but do these three doyens ever choose to read a novel from a small press—or are they limited to those released by the biggest players? Do they assume that only the biggest corporations publish writers worthy of coverage? Might they consider the conglomerates as major leaguers and the independents as farm teams?
The IBPA (Independent Book Publishers Association) has over 3,000 members. Are any of them considered “mainstream?” Or are only the dozen or so conglomerates considered mainstream? When one examines where these 30 favorite imprints come from, lo and behold, they are all produced by eight conglomerate publishing houses; there is not a single small, independent press among them.

Listed below are the eight corporate giants that these “favorites” of Janet Maslin, Michiko Kakutani and Dwight Garner came from:
Random House published 10 favorites from among these imprints: four from Knopf, and one each from Ballantine, Crown, Dial, Doubleday, Pantheon, and Vintage.
Hachette had five: four from Little Brown and one from their Twelve imprints.
Macmillan had five: three from their Farrar Straus & Giroux imprint and one each from St. Martin’s Press and Metropolitan Books imprints.
Penguin had five, three from Penguin and two from Viking.
Simon & Schuster had two, both from their Scribner imprint
Harper Collins had one from their Harper imprint.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt had one under their own imprint
Perseus had one, from their Basic Books imprint.

Does one need more substantiation of the charges that small publishers are at a major disadvantage and are playing on an uneven field? And what is true at the Times is also true at nearly all other mainstream newspapers and magazines.

I think it’s time for readers who desire broader coverage and want a larger window to choose from, before deciding what books to read, to consider three things:

1. Subscribe to Publishers Weekly, a trade journal, but one which will appeal to any serious reader for it offers over 7,000 short, thoughtful reviews of books yearly in all major categories—along with publishing news, trends, articles, profiles, and interviews with authors and others in the business. There is no other publication in America of greater importance in this industry or to those who love books. Nor is there any discriminatory coverage between conglomerate and small independent presses. This lively, informative publication is also very affordable; it costs less than the Sunday edition of The New York Times. Dan Brown, Ed Doctorow, or books about Obama or Sarah Palin get no more review space than will a first novel by an unknown author from a relatively unknown press. It’s what librarians and bookstores read before placing orders for books. 51 copies of Publishers Weekly can cost anywhere from $3.29 to $4.32/copy by subscription. The Sunday Times costs $5, which includes their Book Review section, which last Sunday reviewed five novels and ten books of non-fiction, while Publishers Weekly reviewed 83 books in all: 50 novels (28 straight fiction, 9 mysteries, 6 sci-fi reviews, 4 mass market reviews, and 4 comics (previously known as graphic novels), 31 non-fiction titles, and 19 children’s book (12 of them picture books): 100 reviews in all. You can order from Amazon.com (click on magazine subscriptions) or from PublishersWeekly.com which offers subscriptions to the magazine itself or their online edition alone. I would add that if it were not for the thoughtful book people at PW, we would never have survived for 31 years. And I am sure that many other independent presses would say the same thing. So this is a publication well worth reading, enjoying, and supporting.

2. Write to the New York Times, and give your feedback to Jon Landman (joland@nytimes.com) and Katherine Bouton (bouton@nytimes.com) and let them know what you think you might want to see there. Jon did say in one of his emails that he was open to suggestions. One proposal I would make to him and Katherine Bouton would be to have a fourth reviewer added to the gang of three, a reviewer who has covered small presses and has the background to introduce a new and broader perspective. And my candidate would be Marc Schuster. His site is http://smallpressreviews.wordpress.com/

Marc is a 36 year old who earned his PhD in English from Temple University. His dissertation was on 20th Century American fiction. Since fall, 2005, he’s been on the faculty of Montgomery County Community College in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia, where he teaches College Composition, American Literature and Creative Writing. He’s reviewed about 100 books on his site since November, 2007. It’s a lot of work, reading and reviewing nearly a book a week while teaching full-time, writing his own stories, helping out at Philadelphia Stories, volunteering at Writers Conferences at his school and Rosemont College (also outside Philadelphia) where he recently interviewed Maxine Hong Kingston. Small Press Reviews is obviously a project motivated by passion, not income. Propelled by curiosity, I asked him how and why he started his book blog.

“I had a number of friends whose writing I respected and who were published by small presses—as well as admiring books from small presses that I bought at bookstores. All had trouble finding anyone to review their work. And so I decided to do something about it. For a long time now I’ve thought that the most interesting writing is coming from small presses, as they are not as concerned about the bottom line as they are about literary aesthetics. They accept books based on loving them. At a big press it’s because they think it can make money.” What started small, with Marc’s buying books to review, has caught on so well that he’s getting over 400 hits a month and is, at times, overwhelmed by the number of submissions he receives from small publishers.

3. Read good Blogs, for that’s where the action is. I’ve mentioned many of them before and will do a future listing on my next posting. The increased coverage one can get from these bloggers more than compensates for the decreasing space available from newspaper and magazine book reviews. In some ways I think newspaper reviews are in danger of becoming a dinosaur given the way they limit themselves to books written about celebrities or by celebrity authors, while avoiding the excitement and discovery of talented newcomers. As Rania Haditirto, our only full time employee who does so many things so well for us, puts it “GoodReads, LibraryThing, and independent bloggers have revolutionized the way in which books are talked about. Most people buy books because a friend talks passionately about something they’ve read, and these sites provide new friends who recommend books to one another. It’s like an on-line ongoing Book Club.”

Reading a good blog is how I met Marc Schuster. Charles Holdefer, a novelist we published, was a guest speaker at a Writers Conference at Rosemont in 2008. Charles had recently written "The Contractor." Marc had read and loved his novel, reviewed it, and was squiring him about. Afterwards he bought a couple of other Permanent Press books and enjoyed and wrote about them as well. I was always much impressed with his reviews; he had a knack for finding threads that escaped me and Judy, my wife and co-publisher, but were artfully observed. Since one of the joys of publishing is making contact with people who share your aesthetics and write beautifully—and since I noticed that on his website he listed a novel he wrote, "The Singular Exploits of Wonder Mom and Party Girl"—I wrote to him saying that since he’d read so many of our books, I thought it only fair that I read his. It arrived shortly afterwards, was published as a paperback by PS Books—a regional publisher and a division of Philadelphia Stories. Judy and I were impressed. It was both funny and dark, a tale for our times with unforgettable characters, narrated by a young super-Mom who, after her husband leaves her for a younger version, is introduced to cocaine and slides into addiction while her mothering goes haywire. What was also interesting is that it hadn’t been reviewed anywhere. We also thought it needed editing and I wrote back saying that if this book were available and if he wanted to do rewrites and some reorganization, we’d be interested in publishing it. “I’ll think about it,” he said, and two weeks later returned a masterfully reworked manuscript. While we’ve signed it up for mid 2011, we’ve already ordered bound galleys, a year and a half before publication date, as we want editors, agents, scouts, and film producers to see it well in advance of publication.

So hail to the book bloggers who have played a significant role in spreading the word about the novels we’ve published this year, which has resulted in a 66% increase in book sales over those in 2008…with still over a month to go. And to Publishers Weekly, who have always treated us so well.

Marty

P.S. If this blog proves of interest to you, I hope you will pass it on to others and also subscribe with Notifixious in order to be informed when next month's post comes out.
To be alerted for future postings, send email to shepard@thepermanentpress.com

The Cultural Divide

2009-10-29T13:39:00.008-04:00
Merriam-Webster’s dictionary has two distinct definitions of culture; the first being “acquaintance with and taste in fine arts; developing intellectual and moral facilities; enlightenment and excellence of taste acquired by intellectual and aesthetic training.” For my purposes, lets call this “Culture” with a capital “C.” The second has to do with “the customary beliefs, social forms of a racial or social group; the characteristics of features of everyday experiences.” Let me write about this “culture” using a lower case “c” for sake of argument in talking about this cultural divide

The International Divide:

After our first Frankfurt Book Fair nearly three decades ago, Judy and I looked at one another and asked “Does the world need another book?” This year there were 7,300 exhibitors from around the world, scattered throughout 10 three story exhibition halls, with 500,000 visitors reported. It was a good fair for us, with unexpected visits from German, Russian, Italian, French, Canadian, Turkish and UK editors who wanted to see some of the nearly two dozen novels we brought to the fair and they had heard about. It buoyed us, this cultural divide, reaffirming that there is keen interest in well written novels abroad, whereas editors at the major domestic publishers have, over the last three years or so, shown little or no interest in either reading or acquiring reprint rights for quality fiction.

The Domestic Divide:

Returning from Frankfurt we had dinner at the home of Warren and Barbara Phillips on October 23, who started Bridgeworks. The other guests were Bill Henderson of Pushcart Press and his wife, Genie, and the publishers of Oceanview Press—Bob and Pat Gussin—who started their imprint in 2006 and are now doing 12 thrillers a year. Four small publishers, talking books, and wondering about the shifting obligations and standards among mainstream reviewers and columnists, as they inexorably drifted away from “Culture” to “culture.” Bill thought that it had to do with the increasing cult of celebrity in America, aided and abetted by the print media, pandering to what they assumed the public was interested in reading about.

We were discussing The New York Times Book Review of October 11, where only three novels were reviewed. There was a front page (in all a two page) review of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, which was artfully eviscerated by Maureen Dowd. That was followed by a full page review of The Suicide Run by William Styron, a masterful writer who died three years ago, but remains a superstar even if this collection of five previously published stories about Marine Corps warriors were originally written years ago. The final novel, The Children’s Book, featured another full page review by another superstar novelist, A.S. Bryant, concluding that “the novel’s encyclopedic ambition slows even the most absorbing story line to a stutter.”

Yet, with all their financial pressures and shrinking space, The Times Book Review still remains somewhat open to smaller books and other issues do better, balance wise, between fiction and non-fiction. This is not at all the case in the Arts section of the weekday Times, where Jon Landman, the editor of the Culture Desk, is in charge. And so on October 28, I sent this email to Jon.

“As co-publisher, for the last 31 years, of one of the most respected literary presses in America, I wanted to share some observations about how differently your coverage of books varies from coverage of all the other forms of entertainment in the Arts section.

“In writing about or reviewing dance, theater, films, or music there is a fair amount of space devoted to off and off-off Broadway plays and small out-of-town theater, as well as showcasing new playwrights. Similarly, aside from big productions from major studios or films with star-power actors or directors, there are plenty of small independent films that are also showcased. The same is true of music and dance. And yet, the reporting about books does not follow that model at all, but is largely restricted to books written by celebrity authors or focused on sales figures reported by the large corporate publishers. In my last blog posting on September 29, Conventions, I raised these issues across the board—including the fact that the daily Times book review section will not, according to Katherine Bouton, consider first novels, as these authors ‘have not yet proven themselves.’ Among the comments I received from this posting was one from one of the best online critics I've encountered, Marc Schuster at Small Press Reviews:

"I enjoyed your recent blog post on book conventions, particularly the reference to ‘name brand’ authors. As you can imagine, I've long been of the opinion that the mainstream book market, such as it is, has a tendency to reduce authors to commodities and, in general, flatten the entire canon of popular literature into a dull smear of sameness. Which explains why, frequently, the only thing mainstream media outlets can discuss in relation to books is number of units sold (or something equally tangential to books themselves). As a result, we get stories about how Harry Potter and Twilight sold however many millions of copies in much the same way McDonald's boasts ‘Billions and billions served.’ In the final analysis, it's all hamburger.

“His comments were underscored in Motoko Rich's column on October 8, entitled Booksales Are Down Despite Push, which was all about sales and returns of celebrity authors and their books, from Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, to Ted Kennedy’s True Compass, and how book sales were down about 4 percent compared with the same weeks last year, suggesting that neither of these titles nor any of the other big fall books from heavyweights like Mitch Albion, Pat Conroy, E.L. Doctorow and Audrey Niffenegger were helping booksellers to overcome the sludgy economy. Motoko then went on to quote comments about sales figures from Ellen Archer of Hyperion, Suzanne Herz at Knopf Doubleday, buyers at Borders, Powells, and others with the focus, as always, on sales. Frankly, I think most of her articles on the book business belong in the business section, not the culture section of the Times. But, as Marc Schuster says, hamburger is hamburger. ‘How many thousands have we sold today?’

“Even when it comes to constantly decreasing sales figures among the dozen or so conglomerate publishers, there seems to be no awareness that there are things going on culturally among smaller presses—a fact I mentioned in an email to Motoko that was never answered—since our sales last year were 23% higher than those in 2007, and this year we are running 45% higher sales with two months still to go. I realize our sales are in the hundreds of thousands, whereas Random House's are in the multi-millions, but when you restrict yourself to a dozen artfully written novels of ‘Cultural’ interest, I do know there is significance here.”

I asked Jon if he’d care to comment before this blog was released. I was told by his assistant, Andrea Stevens, that he’s just back from traveling, and may not be able to respond in time. In which he can always post a comment or get back to me by email. which I’d surely feature in next month’s blog. Or, like emails I’ve sent to others at the Culture desk of the Times, he might not get back to me at all.

Sometimes I feel like I'm morphing into the Michael Moore of the book publishing world when it comes to raising issues of the sort I've been blogging about. The Michael Moore identification comes about because when I'd query Katherine Bouton to make sure she meant it (about not covering first novels) there was no response. And when I emailed Motoko after her October 8 column I accidentally hit the send button before I included the text (similar to what I just sent to Jon Landman). She immediately wrote back letting me know there was no copy to respond to. But after apologizing and sending her the text, I was ignored. Isn't it funny? When you say nothing you get an answer, but when you say something serious you are ignored. It's doubly odd since our executive editor, Rania Haditirto, pointed out that in Motoko's column she quoted "Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books, a chain of independent stores in South Florida and the Cayman Islands, who said the biggest successes were often books from unknown authors that built slowly by word of mouth." Ironic, since these are exactly the same books that are largely ignored in the Arts section. Well, Michael Moore has made many telling points in his films when he’s asked questions of officials at Guantanamo, or Health Care providers, of bank executives and is ignored. And, as Michael said at the end of his latest film, Capitalism, I'm not going away and am determined to keep raising questions of this sort.

Thus, it is a great comfort to know that the December issue of The Independent (the publication of the IBPA—the Independent Book Publishers Association)—will feature a column edited by Judy Applebaum that combines aspects of my last two blogs which should serve to enlarge this dialogue, for The Independent will be mailed to 3,500 IBPA members across the country (plus a few overseas) and also to wholesalers, retailers, librarians, media people and others interested in the book business. This will certainly expand the discussion of these issues.

A Last Minute Validation:

For those skeptics who doubt the claims I’ve made about the success to be had by doing fiction in the service of “Culture” as opposed to “culture,” I pass on this email, just received as I post this blog, from Suzie Tourscher at the Merchandising Department of Baker and Taylor, concerning the first three quarters of 2009:

“Hi Marty. I wanted to pass on your 2009 third quarter sales report as I realized that I hadn’t given you one of these reports in a while. So far you are up by 71% for the year, which is unheard of in this economy. You are experiencing the biggest growth in the Public Library market and Retail Internet markets; your sales are up by 82% and 36% respectively in those areas.” Also passed on was the fact that our returns rate over the past three years has been in the mid-teens…an exceptionally low rate among book publishers.

Coming Up Next Time:

I hoped to tell the story of how, after sending out countless copies of books to bloggers, we acquired a gem of a novel, The Singular Exploits of Wonder Mom and Party Girl written by a blogger, the aforementioned Marc Schuster. But rather than take up more of your time with this, let me start next month’s blog with this exceptional tale.

Marty
To be alerted for future postings, send email to shepard@thepermanentpress.com

Conventions

2009-09-29T10:24:00.005-04:00
On October 12th Judy and I head for Frankfurt and the Book Fair which runs from the 13th to the 18th. After giving up on the London Book Fair in the mid-90s and America’s Book Expo ten years ago, Frankfurt still remains vital. It affords us a chance to meet with all our overseas agents, several of our overseas publishing partners, and always seems to provide serendipitous encounters with foreign editors that often lead to translation sales.

We abandoned the London Fair for a variety of reasons. For one, if we could see the same people in Frankfurt in the fall, why bother attending London in the spring? And then there was the problem of the paucity of traffic. We’d spend days with only one or two visitors, and it seemed that those who attended were all chasing the “big book,” as opposed to seeking out good “little books,” which is what we offer. As for Book Expo, previously known as the American Booksellers Convention, it had deteriorated over the years. Once a convention that drew attendees from film people, book buyers and newspaper reviewers, it had morphed into a late spring playground for people who worked at bookstores and wanted to take their family on a domestic, tax-deductible vacation. These attendees traveled up and down the aisles with giant handbags or even carts, grabbing posters and free books, or stood in line for signings by name brand authors of their latest releases. It had become, in fact, a promotional event for the large corporate publishers, getting newspaper coverage for the big and famous, while the rest of the exhibitors simply served as background—fodder to fill up the stands.

All this frivolity, other than providing necessary income from exhibitor rentals and attendees at the American Booksellers Association (which, representing the independent bookstores of America, I have great respect for) led to an increasing decline in attendance among more serious book people, something the ABA tried to reverse by changing the venue: New York one year, Las Vegas, Chicago, Baltimore, Washington DC, San Francisco, and Anaheim—conveniently close to Disneyland. At one time they had settled on Chicago, a lovely city and central between the coasts, but found that attendance kept slipping. Booksellers just couldn’t bring themselves to vacation in the same place year after year. Still, attendance continued its downward slide even as exhibition space grew, limiting sites to only the larger cities. I remember back in 1998, when we went to the Javitz Center in New York for the first time as visitors to collect the 1997 RR Bowker/Literary Market Place Award for Editorial Excellence (the book industry’s “Oscar” at the time, voted on, electronically, by all those in the publishing world), that the number of attendees was almost identical to the number of people manning the exhibitors stands. Walking around the halls after Judy and I received this honor was a sad experience: akin to holding a sale at Saks Fifth Avenue sale during a hurricane, with hardly anyone else wandering the halls. Yet, there was also a feeling of joyous liberation knowing that after 20 years of exhibiting we could catch a Jitney back to the Hamptons and get back to work—and not be trapped in the Convention Center for another couple of days. It was clear that it was time to move on.

Given the current free-fall in the book industry, even large corporate publishers have been trimming staff—and even attendance—at Book Expo because they, too, see it as increasingly unnecessary: that the promotional value does not measure up to the expenses of money and time, as print media declines and so many of the newspapers still standing have trimmed book coverage substantially. How, then does one let the reading public know about your books?

If book conventions no longer supplied sufficient publicity, and if your primary goal is to sell books, you go to another tried and true “convention”: working even harder to select books written by public figures that can easily generate television and radio appearances, and also make news. Steve Rubin, former executive v-p and publisher at large for Random House worked this avenue by riding the success of decent writers with large followings, such as John Grisham and Dan Brown, as well as publishing Bill O’Reilly and “contributed to shaping Random’s global strategy and helped land several promising projects, including the book to be written by former President George W. Bush,” according to the September 24th daily online issue of Publishers Weekly, which also announced that Rubin was “leaving the company” after 25 years. A good idea, one would think. But then again, on August 31, PW had earlier reported that Random House profits were down for the first half of 2009, according to results issued that morning by parent company Bertelsmann. Profits fell 35.5%. So, perhaps Bill O’Reilly and George Bush were not the answers.

Or take the famed editor Judith Regan, whose imprint at Harper Collins managed to take on Toni Bentley’s The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir. A former Balanchine dancer, her memoir was named one of the “100 Best Books of 2004” by The New York Times Book Review, which extolled it as expressing “the joys, both physical and spiritual, of anal sex.” I’d read several book reviews Bentley wrote in the Times which I thought were quite masterful, but despite her bold willingness to write about her anal obsessions, I found the book lacked passion and was about as erotic as taking a cold bath. It reminded me of an article the great social critic Paul Krassner wrote in The Realist when he mocked a Supreme Court decision concerning pornography. His take was that the designation of pornography was dependent on whether or not the judge got an erection while reading. While The Surrender promised titillation, and coverage, it would never have been called pornographic if I were a Supreme Court judge. In 2006, Judith Regan was fired by her parent company, Harper Collins (and her Regan Books imprint shut down three months later) after she signed up another “newsworthy,” promotable book by O.J. Simpson: If I Did It, a hypothetical telling of how he would have committed the killings of his ex-wife and Mr. Goldman. Angry protests caused the book’s cancellation. Interestingly enough, Publishers Weekly reported on April 6 that Harper Collins also ended a difficult year on a down note, posting an operating loss of $4 million on a 20.6% decline in revenue in the fourth quarter ended June 30.

Since our interests are in publicizing fiction that has merit, these conventional strategies—whether they work or, as above, sometimes fail, are decidedly unappealing. My faith lies with internet reviewing by people who value substance over flash, who appreciate good writing and write well themselves. Did any of you notice that September 14th -18th was Book Blogger Appreciation Week? In recent past blogs I’ve referred to some of the extraordinary bloggers we’ve come in contact with this past year, and what an eye-opener it has been. More than that, its provided a high that I can only compare to the high I’ve gotten when jamming with other musicians when you are in sync and the music connects you in the most intimate way. It goes beyond words and becomes a spiritual thing, sending a message from your heart and having it returned by another.

Over our past three decades, our relationship with most newspaper or magazine book reviewers was largely one way. The publisher was a supplicant and the reviewer royalty who might grant a favor. Print media was overwhelmingly in favor of the well-known writers and the promotional efforts of conglomerate publishers and publicists who could curry that favor much more effectively that we could. In response to my August blog, Criticism versus Narcissism, there were numerous posted comments from book bloggers, many to the effect that few of them will cover a book they dislike; that there is so much stuff out there, why bother with negative reviews. There were also two email responses from critics who did not want to be identified, for fear of offending, but have allowed me to share these comments anonymously. The first comes from a person who is involved with a daily online book site, who says: “What I want to know is, why does The New York Times over-cover so many authors? I've seen, for one author, a review in the daily, a review in the Sunday section, AND a profile in the Lifestyles section. I realize that these are different departments, but you'd think that—ethically? morally?—in light of shrinking space for book news, that they'd stop doubling or tripling up. If reviewers/columnists are interested in devoting as much space as possible to talk about books, wouldn't it make sense to spread the largesse, so to speak, around?”

The other comes from a print and radio critic who had just finished reading Michiko Kakutani’s review of E.L. Doctorow’s novel, Homer & Langley, about the Collyer Brothers (“A B-plus novel reviewed by a B-minus reviewer”), with both parties being literary “Superstars,” deservedly or not. “Kakutani’s review violated a basic rule of reviewing. It was a summary of the plot with no assessment of whether she liked it or not and for what reasons. But then, of course, Kakutani is reviewing all of Philip Roth’s novels, which she shouldn’t be doing because she hates him. It’s another violation. One would think that if you detest what this writer has to say, why would you not recuse yourself?” But this, of course, is one of the perks of superstardom. Nor did this critic find favor with another article on Doctorow’s book in another section of the Times, “which was an essay, really, by the writer, who called attention to Doctorow’s book to basically make his own essayist points. That’s not what I consider a proper review either.” Incidentally, in the September 7 issue of The New Yorker Joyce Carole Oates called Homer & Langley “a subdued, contemplative, and resolutely unsensational recounting of the brothers’ fatally intertwined lives,” her abbreviated online review ending with “Doctorow has evoked an American folk-myth writ small.”)

Fortunately, for those interested in calling attention to creative writing by gifted but unknown novelists, bloggers don’t follow these superstar conventions. That’s why I passionately share the sentiments of those who started Book Bloggers Appreciation Week two years ago.

Final Words:

Two glorious blog reviews of Maud Carol Markson’s Looking After Pigeon appeared in mid September: Danielle Bullen’s was on Mostly Fiction.com and can be read in its entirely on Amazon.com when you click on the novel’s title. And Anne Hite's can be seen on the Internet Review of Books.

I also want to salute two mystery alumni who are finalists for this year’s Shamus Award, for Best Hardcover, the winner to be chosen at the Bouchercon convention on October 16. They are Reed Farrel Coleman’s Empty Ever After and Domenic Stansberry’s The Ancient Rain. We have four of Reed’s mysteries in our backlist and three of Domenic’s, and wish them both much success.

Lastly, we’ve had two very solid advance reviews for our Middle East novels: Mehrdad Balali’s Houri, which comes out in December and is set in Iran (“Journalist Balali’s bitter first novel about Iran, from which he is now banned, contrasts his native country before and after the Islamic revolution. Comparisons to The Kite Runner are unavoidable.”—Kirkus) and Anastasia Hobbet’s Small Kingdoms which appears in January (“Hobbet's extensive knowledge of Kuwait's people, customs and political landscape combine to make an immersive, authentic, compelling novel about Middle East life”—Publishers Weekly). Both are “must reads” for anyone desiring to understand these very different Muslim countries, for they tell you more about how people live, and the conflicts in their societies, than non-fiction reporting.

I also must add that Louise Young’s Seducing the Spirits (due in November) was featured on page one—the contents page, of Publishers Weekly on September 7, with a half page spread—as their Book of the Week. It’s the first time this has happened with one of our authors. Here's a briefest summary: "Young has turned decades working with the indigenous Kuna people of Panama into a compassionate, passion-filled novel. Enthralling, entertaining, exotic."

Marty
To be alerted for future postings, send email to shepard@thepermanentpress.com

Criticism versus Narcissism

2009-08-18T09:29:00.022-04:00
In July’s blog, “What Pisses me Off,” I talked about my disappointment with certain aspects of in-print book reviews. Much of it had to do with critics devoting time to trashing titles from writers while review space is shrinking. Since that posting I’ve received over a dozen comments—some on the blog, others by email—which addressed these same issues.

Christopher Brookhouse, whose first novel, Running Out, received the prestigious Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1971—and which Lawrence Sinclair (www.bestalltimebooks.blogspot.com), listed as one of his top 125 choices from the more than 1,000 books he’s read, placing Running Out at #124, sandwiched between Rabbit, Run by John Updike at 123, and Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace at 125. Anthony Burgess called it “A triumph of poetic economy and a powerful evocation of place.” We’ve published three of Chris’s novels since then, Dear Otto, A Selfish Woman, and, this spring, Silence. And here is what he had to say:

“I thought I’d take criticism of the critics a step further. Years ago I reviewed books regularly for the Greensboro Daily News, which had a good book page edited by Jonathan Yardley. Although I did pan a few books, I tried to find books to praise and simply to ignore those I didn't care for. The impulse, though, for many reviewers is to flatter the self at the expense of others.” In a later email he added that “certain critics I knew in those days were inclined to write a review so quotable that a publisher might put it on the back of a dustjacket so that they might see their own name in print.”

Then, there are these comments from three excellent on-line reviewers:

From Clark Isaacs (Clark’s Eye on Books (http://www.clarkisaacs.com/) “As I have said before, if you read a novel, non-fiction or whatever, and you cannot say anything nice, do not say anything at all. There are shortcomings in everything, but to say the work is totally abject is wrong. Critics do realize the blood, sweat, and often tears go into the work. It just does not make sense to slam someone's efforts when you have such a limited space and such a limited audience.”

From Wisteria Leigh (www.bookwormsdinner.blogspot.com/) “Why, in this age of reduced coverage, would critics bother to give scathing reviews when there were so many good books out there that never get covered at all. This practice pissed me off as well. Writing for my blog Bookworm's Dinner, I will not waste the time writing a review to slam a writer for a book I consider below par. It is just not worth the effort. I would much rather promote and feature those writers whose books rock my world.”

And from Chiron (http://www.rabbitreader.blogspot.com/) : “I agree with Wisteria. Why waste time reading lousy books, and even more time reviewing them. I occasionally get comments on my blog, that I only post positive reviews. Right! Too many (good) books; too little time!”

This leads me to attempt some analysis of this situation.

It seems to me that if a reviewer is assigned a book, there is only one thing he or she can possibly do: review it honestly, whether good, bad or indifferent. But for reviewers who are well established (like Michiko Kakutani and Janet Maslin, for example) and who likely can review any title they wish, what purpose is served by skewering a novel by a mid-list author? Further, how does the critic think about his or her role? Or do they think about it at all? And do the publications they write for believe in spreading the word about what’s best in our culture, or are they more interested in showing their readers how their critics minds work?

The more I think about this the more it seems to me that there is an inherent conflict between criticism and narcissism, and I would venture that too often critics who can pick and choose what they wish to review are caught up in the narcissism of showing you how artfully and dazzlingly they can take something apart. Anyone watching the news can appreciate that train wrecks and other disasters satisfy a morbid curiosity that all of us harbor and many relish hearing about. John Simon, the theater critic, had a wicked ability to trash actors, directors, and plays and parlayed his dazzlingly acerbic style into a grand reputation. But I would have hated to have him as a friend or to a dinner party, for fear of his verbal, showy nastiness when the party was over.

Contrarian thoughts:

FaceBook and LinkedIn: Someone told me that FaceBook was a worthwhile site for communicating with others. I tried it for awhile and recently dropped out. My epiphany came when a woman from Sri Lanka wrote to me saying she wanted to be my friend. I wrote back that, not only didn’t I know her, but she already had nearly 200 friends listed and hardly needed another one. While this may be a useful thing for adolescents and college students, or a way of staying in touch with a large group of people in one’s present or past when you don’t have the time to talk with them directly, I find no value in it at all. I’m not interested in what people have for dinner, or who they are dating, or any of the other items that occupy 95% of what you will find on this site. If I want to get in touch with a friend, or a friend with me, there’s nothing that beats a personal email or a telephone call. Same with LinkedIn; supposedly a network that establishes business connections. Like FaceBook, though, it seems like a game in which the “winner” has the most “links.” But these links are rarely in the service of anything I work at, and I no longer answer these requests either. Too little time to play with electronic crazes such as these. Nor do I understand Twitter mania for any purposes other than organizing street protests here and abroad. Writing Haiku is something I respect: disciplining one’s self to writing a poem in 17 syllables. But what is the big deal of sending messages limited to 40 characters (including spaces)?

Online coverage:

One of the joys in publishing is discovering the many excellent on-line reviewers who have taken up the baton that print reviewers have dropped. There is no bias here against first novelists (as there is in the daily New York Times reviews), no bias in terms of “brand-name” authors versus unknowns and no favoritism of non-fiction over fiction (as there is in the vast majority of other newspapers and magazines). There is also wonderful, articulate writing. The best we’ve met are simply searching for good books—including quality fiction—and, not being salaried; they do it out of love and passion. If you are a book review editor at a newspaper or review journal looking to supplement your free-lance staff, you’d do well to consider some of these people as well:

Wisteria Leigh (mentioned earlier in this blog), is also a frequent contributor to BlogCritics.com and on July 9th did the first advance review for Louise Young’s Seducing the Spirits (www.blogcritics.org/books/article/book-reviewseducing-the-spirits-by-louise/). And Louise Young herself posted an interesting blog on RedRoom “On Being Censored” (http://www.redroom.com/blog/louise-young/).

On July 28, Marc Schuster at Small Press Review, covered Amy Boaz’s Beat, in an analysis that no other critic (including the publishers) had ever come up with and which fit the novel like a perfectly sized-glove (www.smallpressreviews.wordpress.com/).

On August 7, Allison Campbell (hollybooknotes.blogspot.com), another wonderful on-line reviewer, posted her superb review (the first we've had) for Margaret Hawkins's A Year of Cats and Dogs.

On August 14, Amy Steele (www.steeleonentertainment.blogspot.com/2009/08/beat-book-review.html) posted a wonderful review of Amy Boaz's Beat. which also ran on the Herald de Paris website.

An excellent review by Teresa Aguilar on The Compulsive Reader for M.F. Bloxam’s The Night Battles: http://www.compulsivereader.com/html/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=2279

Book-Club-Queen.com has its own series, Life Between My Pages! It will feature a selected author each month who will share with you their personal story about how they got to where they are today. You won’t want to miss the August profile on Joan Schweighardt (We’ve published three of Joan’s novels over the years). Here’s the link:
http://www.book-club-queen.com/Book_Clubbers-book-clubbers-joan-schweighardt-feature08-09.html

Stephen March had a video interview for Strangers In The Land Of Egypt:
http://www.dailyadvance.com/photos-and-video/swampland-with-writer-stephen-march-720861.html

And, finally, a superlative review of Connie Dial’s mystery, Internal Affairs, in the Richmond Times Dispatch by Jay Strafford which was also posted in their on-line edition
(http://www2.timesdispatch.com/rtd/entertainment/books_literature/article/BDIAL16_20090812-163004/285548/)

Take note that Seducing the Spirits, The Night Battles, A Year of Cats and Dogs, and Internal Affairs are all first novels, and that Beat is a second effort. So if any of you are potential first novelists, don’t be discouraged. Though you will never see a daily New York Times review, as their policy now stands, there are some very welcoming online possibilities out there for you.

A final note:

Since starting this blog in January, we’re 18 visits short of 1,000 hits, and it has grown incrementally, with last month’s posting, supplying nearly 700 visits. If you haven’t subscribed yet, I invite you to do so. If you have any problems subscribing, send me an email (shepard@thepermanentpress.com) or phone.

I welcome your comments and hope to hear from you in order to best continue this dialog. Next posting sometime in mid-September...

Marty
To be alerted for future postings, send email to shepard@thepermanentpress.com

What Pisses Me Off...

2009-07-13T10:33:00.007-04:00
I consider myself to be a spiritual person, though not a member of any religious tribe. Among the great influences that have shaped my thinking (aside from frequent psychedelic trips in mid-life) is Buddhism and the Tao te Ching. The Buddha taught that desire is the cause of unhappiness: if one rids themselves of expectations, one rids themselves of disappointments. Lao Tse, in explaining the spiritual life says those who talk don’t know and those who know don’t talk. All of this is also summed up in the Desiderata, one of the dictums being that the universe is unfolding exactly as it should.
These thoughts are things I frequently fall back on so as not to get caught up in the frustrations life readily throws one’s way

Accordingly, I prefer serendipity to discipline when it comes to spiritual practice and believe that courses for self-improvement are doomed to fail. While sitting in a lotus position and meditating was worth trying, this practice was much more likely to make my hips ache than further enlightenment. And though I never considered myself “enlightened,” I do testify that I fully accept myself as who I am. Which means that while I can talk myself out of expectations, anger and disappointments, I also know that things come up that simply piss me off. So let me share some of them with you.

Today’s topic came about when I first read the Arts section of the June 26 issue of The New York Times. The lead story, written by Motoko Rich, was headlined "James Frey Collaborating on a Novel for Young Adults, First in a Series." Yes, that James Frey, who, as Ms Rich wrote, “was famously caught embellishing details in A Million Little Pieces.” And, despite the fact the Oprah disowned him for his deceits, “Two years ago he reportedly received more than $1 million as an advance for Bright Shiny Morning from Harper Collins. Although the book received mixed reviews, it garnered a notable rave from Janet Maslin in The New York Times. According to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of retail sales, Bright Shiny Morning sold 71,000 copies in hardcover and 10,000 in paperback.” What is this new collaboration about? Frey “is working with another writer and anonymously shopping around a young adult novel called I Am Number Four.” This collaboration between Frey (acting anonymously) and “an unnamed up-and-coming writer,” is being pitched by one Eric Simonoff, a literary agent at William Morris Endeavor. Frey came up with the idea of a “proposed six-book series,” about “a group of nine alien teenagers on a planet called Lorien, which is attacked by a hostile race from another planet. The nine and their guardians evacuate to Earth, where three are killed. The protagonist, a Lorien boy named John Smith, hides in Paradise, Ohio, disguised as a human, trying to evade his predators and knowing he is next on their list.”

Reading this article set off a connected series of things that pissed me off. But before firing artillery at The New York Times, let me also say that I love this newspaper, which I’ve been reading for 60 years now, starting as a teenager, commuting from my parents’ home in Queens to The High School of Music and Art in Manhattan. It has consistently given the widest, fairest and best print coverage of news, political skullduggery, and the arts. I also had the opportunity to work there one year, while attending NYU’s College of Medicine as a “night intern,” seeing people who were sick and taking splinters out of the eyes of pressmen who set hot type way back then. So, naturally, I've always had high expectations for this Grey Lady.

When Judy and I began publishing 30 years ago, we happily found extraordinary support in Sunday’s Book Review section. To start with, Thomas Lask, in his “End Papers” column, somehow picked up on a letter we wrote to the Authors Guild, announcing that we were starting an imprint called Second Chance Press, seeking to give worthwhile books, out-of-print for at least 20 years, a second chance. This resulted in our being sent 600 books, and the six we chose made up our first list. Later, under editors Mike Levitas, Becky Sinkler and Chip McGrath, we often had review coverage of three or four of our 12 titles a year, nearly all for Permanent Press releases. If coverage is far less now, I can’t bellyache, for review space has been so drastically reduced. Insofar as the daily Times was concerned (an entirely separate division), Anatole Broyard wrote an exceptional review on Thursday, January 31, 1980 for Richard Lortz’s The Valdepenas, our very first review from our very first list. I mention all this in order to set the table about expectations and the “pissed off” phase one goes through when such expectations are not fulfilled.

Reading Motoko Rich’s James Frey story made me realize how pissed off I‘ve felt in the past about the daily Times Monday through Saturday book coverage. Since Broyard’s review, there have been over 7,000 additional reviews in the daily editions over the past 29-and-a-half years, and not one other book of ours has gotten coverage: this despite the fact that in that period of time we published a Nobel Prize winning author (Halldor Laxness), 12 novels by a Nobel Prize nominee (Berry Fleming), had a National Book Award finalist (Sandra Scofield), Hammett Prize and Edgar Award finalists and winners (Randall Silvis, Domenic Stansberry and Reed Farrel Coleman) and, in 1998, won the equivalent of a publishing Oscar: Literary Market Place’s LMP Award for Editorial Achievement—a prize open to every publisher, large and small, in America, and voted upon by our colleagues in the book industry. This failure to reappear in the daily Times made me think of the remark by a frustrated Hollywood ingénue, who once said, “Who do you have to go to bed with to get into this motion picture?” Obviously I’ve never figured that one out, but if I have to sleep with Eric Simonoff, Frey’s agent, to command this sort of space for one of our authors, I’ll have to take a pass because—no offense Eric—I’m simply into women.

A few weeks ago I read a scathing Times book review by Janet Maslin. I remember when Janet went from film critic many years ago to being one of the daily book critics. I’d always appreciated her intelligent movie reviews and wrote to her, hoping that she might have an interest in some of our titles, while telling her about the drought we’d been experiencing. She responded positively and asked us to send her future releases, which again raised expectations, since Michiko Kakutani, the Critic Emeritus during this period of time would never answer queries. But nothing came of that, either. Which made me think “Why, in this age of reduced coverage, would critics bother to give scathing reviews when there were so many good books out there that never get covered at all.” This practice pissed me off as well.

In Motoko Rich’s James Frey coverage about I Am Number Four (with a plot that seemed perfect if you were either retarded or a teen-aged reader or writer), it’s important to note that no publisher in the United States had yet bought it. Therefore it was a non-story when it came to art and culture, though it might have made sense in the business section of the Times under a headline such as "Book Written by Two Famous Anonymous Writers Fails to Find a Publisher"… maybe a take off on "GM Fails to Find a Buyer for Pontiac." I was again pissed off that a guy who conned Oprah and the reading public with his first book was again getting so much coverage in the Arts section while far better and lesser known writers were getting no attention at all. One of my only compensations was reading that the million dollar advance paid for Frey’s Bright Shiny Morning would never be earned back by Harper Collins. Based on the sales Ms Rich reported, I would be surprised if it earned more than $150,000 to $200,000 dollars…an $800,000 plus loss for Harper Collins. And people in the business wonder why the book industry is in trouble?

Lastly, her article raised the question of why so many critics and columnists take the Nielsen BookScan figures seriously, despite their claim that they track 70% of retail sales. Last year, after one major publishing house expressed interest in reprinting one of Chris Knopf’s mystery novels, they told me that one problem was that, according to BookScan, we had only sold 400 plus copies, when in truth we were in a third printing and had sold 4,500 copies. It’s a fact of life that in today’s climate, reprinters only want to take on titles that have proved to be somewhat successful. When BookScan underestimates Chris’s sales by 90%, this poses an insurmountable barrier. So I called BookScan and spoke to one of their directors who informed me that they don’t track library sales or sales by small independent bookstores. They do track sales in some huge discounted superstores (think Target and Walmart), sales at airports, at the big chains like Barnes & Noble and others of that ilk, as well as Amazon.com. Since we never sell to any of the chains, for reasons explained in earlier blogs, nor airport shops, nor superstores, we are up the proverbial shit’s creek in getting accurate and substantiated sales figures out for our titles, as we rely heavily on library sales and sales to the small independent bookstores (and Amazon, too…which is where BookSpan probably got their 400 plus sales report from). I now think of BookScan as BookScam and get “pissed off” when their figures are taken seriously for anything other than blockbuster sales.

And here’s my final report, this having to do with having read a piece called Book Brahmin: Steve Hockensmith in Shelf Awareness, an online book industry daily newsletter on July 10. There was a huge photo of the cover of his novel The Crack in the Lens, accompanied by the following text: Steve Hockensmith is the author of the Holmes on the Range historical mysteries for St. Martin's Minotaur. The first book in the series was nominated for the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony and Dilys awards. The latest, The Crack in the Lens, hasn't been nominated for anything, but maybe that's because it won't be out till July 21. Hockensmith and the narrator of his books, cowboy detective "Big Red" Amlingmeyer, share a blog at stevehockensmith.com.

What pisses me off about this posting is that these distinctions Hockensmith has supposedly earned are misleading to the point of fraudulence. Being nominated for all these awards doesn’t mean a thing, other than the fact that the publisher nominated it (publishers can’t nominate for the Nobel prize, however). For the thousands of books nominated for most awards, the only thing one can honestly brag about are ones that are finalists or winners, and very few nominees gain that status. But a member of the public reading this copy would assume that Hockensmith was a marvelous writer. If this copy is written by the people who run Shelf Awareness, shame on them. If, on the other hand, it is a paid advertisement from St. Martin’s Press, it should be labeled as such. In any event, it makes me skeptical about continuing to read this newsletter. Chris Knopf has been a finalist for three book awards and a winner of one, and some of the folks at Shelf Awarenss know this, though there’s been no mention of his actual accomplishment. I’d say that if you want to tap into a good writer's web site, try our mystery writer instead; Chris Knopf at http://www.sameddie.com/.

If books sell by word-of-mouth and coverage—which they do—and if one values quality over celebrity and spin, it should be clear that the things that piss me occur when the undeserving get coverage while quality novelists get the short end of the stick.

I welcome your comments.

Marty
To be alerted for future postings, send email to shepard@thepermanentpress.com

Gobbledygook versus Substance

2009-06-15T14:17:00.006-04:00

Gobbledygook:
As in politics, so be it in the corporate world, where spokespersons continually put the best face on what they are doing. With respect to publishing, most anyone in the business of publishing books—from big-time to smaller houses, to agents and scouts, and even to printers—will acknowledge that things are crappy, with layoffs and shrinking acquisitions the rule. Independent bookstores will also testify to this, where their existence has been under assault for decades as the expansion of chain stores have put so many of them out of business. However, there is one player on this stage who continues to spin optimism as deceptive as what we witnessed from General Motors, AIG, and nearly all the investment and large banking corporations which, up until they folded, were assuring investors that things would be fine and not to worry. So it is not surprising that the biggest bookseller in the world would be singing this same siren’s song.

This déjà vu experience came to me again on May 21, when, in their online daily edition, Publishers Weekly featured an article with the following headline: Sales Fall Less Than Expected at Barnes & Noble; Has Improved Outlook. Reading the copy, however, puts the lie to this optimism from the first sentence on: “Sales fell slightly less than expected in the first quarter ended May 2 at Barnes & Noble, declining 4%...” but “since the retailer had expected a decline in sales of between 6% and 9%,” Len Riggio and the gang at B & N considered this a sign of “improvement.” Digging deeper into this article it appeared that B & N's net losses in the first quarter amount to $2.1 million (nearly four times higher than first quarter losses last year) despite cost-cutting efforts and plans to close 15 superstores this year. While lesser losses than predicted hardly indicates good times ahead, it's common practice on Wall Street to underestimate profits and overestimate losses. Then, when the actuality shows greater profits and lesser losses, one can claim things are turning around. In the end, though, this is simply another case of putting lipstick on a pig.

One need only add to this the fact that Barnes & Noble is also planning to take over the Borders Group (which also operates Waldenbooks and is the 2nd largest chain in America). However, sales at Waldenbooks fell 19.9%, there were 11 store closures, and a 5.5% drop in same store sales. “A series of one-time expenses ate into the company’s bottom line resulting in a loss from continuing operations of $86 million compared to a loss of $30.1 million in last year’s first quarter.” To lower costs in the quarter, Borders cut capital expenditures from $27 million to $2.4 million and reduced inventory by 22%.” This planned acquisition reminds me of G. M.’s acquisitions of Hummer, Saab and other auto companies which have since proved toxic and were soon sold off because of continuing losses. Nor is it impossible that America’s largest bookseller could go the way of America’s largest auto company. Perhaps not, but don’t bet against it. After all, Barnes & Noble stock has fallen from $44 a share in June 2007 to half that amount today—a statistic that is not mentioned in B & N’s rosy press releases. I’ve news for you, Mr. Riggio: the only good news in all of this, is that the vulnerability of B & N could auger well for the return of the local independent bookseller, an essential component to those of us interested in preserving quality fiction.

And here’s another bit of gobbledygook concerning the recent Book Expo held in New York City last month and, as usual, reported on dutifully by all major news media as an important cultural/business event that serves to publicize “What’s hot” and “What’s not.” While there were quotes from various editors about “Big Books” and “Buzzes,” the most important news was rarely mentioned: the fact that only one fourth of those attending were booksellers. Total attendance was 29,000 plus, of which 17,000 were exhibitors and only 7,000 book buyers; the remainder were mostly people working for the media who were covering this “important event,” and trying to find substance in a gathering that had little to offer. (Unreported in the media was our one little event of importance: that Chris Knopf’s Head Wounds won an important mystery award sponsored by the IBPA—the Independent Book Publishers Association.)

Substance:
Two weeks ago I read the lead review by Robert Pinsky, our former Poet Laureate, of Elmore Leonard’s 44th thriller, Road Dogs, in The New York Times Book Review, and then heard the two of them on an hour long NPR radio station. It was a thrilling review and interview and I had to get a copy. Ever since reading Leonard’s Cuba Libre, some dozen or more years ago, I was enthralled by his talent. I’ve since read over 30 of his novels and, like others, came to consider him the best crime writer ever. If, at age 83, his novels have lost a bit of punch, so be it; he’s still the real deal and deserves every bit of attention he gets.

Last week I read Road Dogs and once again Chris Knopf came to mind. I remember that when we received Chris’s manuscript for The Last Refuge five years ago, I found myself musing over how much Knopf and Leonard had in common; both being masters of dialogue who create memorable characters, add dollops of humor to balance tension in their plots, and have their own, though different, poetic sensibilities. I also felt Refuge to be more engaging than Elmore’s The Hot Kid, released earlier, which I had just finished. Again, this time, for all the praise for Road Dogs, I once more thought it not as tight and engaging as Chris’s latest release in his Sam Acquillo mystery series, Hard Stop, and the two other novels sandwiched in between. While Knopf has not yet hit the “Big Time” with three books under his belt and a fourth just released weeks ago, it took Leonard a good half-dozen attempts before he came to major prominence; a prominence achieved by turning out one wonderful read after another before his artistry became impossible to ignore. Here again the similarities are evident.

When we published The Last Refuge in 2005, it was greeted by critical acclaim, seven international sales, a rave review by Marilyn Stasio in The New York Times Book Review, and repeatedly drew comparisons to not only Elmore Leonard, but to John D. MacDonald, and Ross MacDonald. Plus it was a finalist for the 2006 Connecticut Book Award.

Chris’s second, Two Time (2006), again gained excellent reviews, more international sales, and now Sam, his protagonist, was being compared to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, and Robert Parker’s Spenser. Two Time was one of thirteen mysteries listed in Marilyn Stasio's "Recommended Summer Reading" column in The New York Times Book Review in 2006, and was listed in Entertainment Weekly as one of the 50 "Hot Picks" of that summer. Publishers Weekly chose it as one of the “Best 100 Books for 2006.” It, and Philip Roth’s Everyman, were runner-ups for the 2007 Connecticut Book Award.

Head Wounds (2008), the third in this series, again gained great critical acclaim, and on May 28 (during the poorly attended, and mentioned, Book Expo) was awarded the prestigious Ben Franklin Award for Best Mystery this year. It was also a finalist for the ForeWord Magazine Mystery Award. All three of these Sam Acquillo mysteries made the Book Sense/Indie Next Lists, all were recorded by Blackstone Audiobooks, all were taken by Wheeler in the US for large print editions, and all were done by Random House Canada. All told 21 international rights have been sold for this series with one or more taken in England, Spain, Japan, Turkey, Italy, and China.

We’ve already signed up his “stand alone” thriller, Elysiana, for 2010, and Chris is working on a fifth Sam Acquillo mystery for 2011. In addition, he’s signed a two book contract with St. Martins for a mystery series featuring Jackie Swaitkowski (Sam’s ditzy female lawyer)—both novels have already been purchased by Random House Canada and Blackstone Audiobooks (our partners since “Sam One”—The Last Refuge—was published). At this rate, his current productivity rate is akin to that of Elmore’s, insofar as he will have authored eight thrillers within a seven year period of time. And like Elmore (who worked as a copywriter at an ad agency for seven years while working on his fiction), that’s exactly how Chris began as well.

Is it little wonder then that I see Chris as following in the Elmore Leonard’s footsteps? If any of you have read both Knopf and Leonard, I would welcome your comments. If you haven’t read any of Chris’s novels, I’ll gladly introduce him to you at no cost: all you need do is email me (shepard@thepermanentpress.com) and ask for a pdf copy of The Last Refuge, and I will gladly send it to your computer for downloading.

Marty
To be alerted for future postings, send email to shepard@thepermanentpress.com

Where I Left Off

2009-05-12T21:10:00.008-04:00
In my last blog posting, Bad News/Good News, I promised to continue my comments on where the publishing industry stands right now. And the news, generally speaking, is glum indeed—particularly among the giants in the industry. Simon & Schuster’s parent company, CBS, announced that the publishing house had an operating loss of $2.1 million compared to operating income of $14.6 million in last year’s first period…a $16.7 million decline, as sales declined nearly 20%. Harper Collins reported almost the same sized drop in revenue and a $38 million loss. And Bertelsmann reported that total revenue fell 7%, with the company having a net loss of 78 million euros ($106.4 million) compared to earnings of 77 million euros ($105 million) in last year’s first quarter—a net decline of $211.4 million. Though no mention was made of Random House’s performance, Bertelsmann expects revenue and profits to decline for the year.

The good news, though, is that The Permanent Press is doing a hell of lot better than any of the giants, as our income from book sales have more than doubled from the same period last year. Of course, we’re not dealing in the millions, only in the tens of thousands, where total income from book sales came to $105,000 rather than the $42,000 posted for last year’s first quarter. The bad news, for us, is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to collect money from our largest wholesaler, Baker and Taylor, who owe us $101,000—$46,000 of which is more than 90 days overdue. This has produced a squeeze based on success, where our printers are eager for prompt payment and our major wholesaler seems intent on holding on to our funds for as long as possible. My guess is that this is due to the financial pinch everyone is suffering. Hopefully this will be resolved shortly, because B&T has been a much better wholesaler than Ingram, who we dismissed two years ago…along with attempts to sell books to the Barnes & Noble stores.

It’s peevish, I know, to hold grudges and delight when others in the business, who have treated us badly, suffer. But, hey, I’m neither Mother Theresa nor Gandhi, and so the declining fortunes of Barnes & Noble put a special smile on my face. Back in 2004 we published Kay Sloan’s The Patron Saint of Red Chevys, and it was made A Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection. That’s when the trouble started. We were told by Jill Lamar, who headed this program, that this would mean a large purchase, display space with other Great New Writers selections, and that B&N would discount all these books at 20% and put flyers all over their stores. But we were urged to reduce our projected $26 publishing price to $21.95 “so that we can sell-through and this should help a great deal.” Well, they were the experts. How could I resist. The upshot was that they order 3,300 copies directly from us which caused us to order 5,000 copies instead of the 1,500 we had planned on. When, four months later, they returned 3,000 copies I was shocked. “What happened,” I asked Jill. “You didn’t get enough publicity for it,” she answered, apparently oblivious to the “sell” that B&N would be supplying that very publicity.

I decided, after that conversation to speak with a publishing friend, Jill Schoolman, at Archipelago who, the year before had a book chosen for the Discover program. It turns out she had the same experience, being told by Jill Lamar to reduce her price, and how this would result in selling most if not all copies. B&N ordered 4,000 copies of her book and, four months later, returned 3,600.

Worse yet, these returns, though purchased from us directly, were returned through Ingram—ninety percent of them in unsaleable condition. The dust jackets were scuffed, or the edges of the spines or book covers were dented, and more than half of them had Barnes & Noble stickers on the front cover. Had B&N returned them to us, I would have rejected them, and so I called Ingram and complained on two grounds: one being that they hadn’t ordered through Ingram and also that the cartons Ingram returned the books in were poorly packed so that book shifted about loosely, causing additional damages. Ingram’s answer was that “We have an open return system and accept books back whether they are ordered form us or not,” and they took a credit for these returns of $33,000. “But they were poorly packed. Do you send books to bookstores loosely packed?” “No, we secure them in boxes with shrink wrapping around the lot of them.” “Then why don’t you do that for returns to publishers?” “It’s too costly.”

I demanded that they take back all the damaged books and credit us back for them. “Sorry, we only allow a maximum of 10% in credits a year no matter what the reasons. That’s just the cost of doing business with us (along with charging us for maintaining our books on Ingram’s website)” Well, the good news that came out of all this is that after a year in which Ingram ordered books from us, and paid us nothing until their chargeback was eliminated, we fired them. And, surprise, surprise, we found that our sales not only were unaffected, but that we were now able to sell to Amazon.com directly, who never over order and pay within 30 days time, instead of having Amazon order from Ingram.

Good riddance to these aggravations—which leads to this piece of advice to small publishers: avoid both Barnes & Noble and Ingram like the plagues they are. (Another ridiculous hurdle that B&N imposes on small publishers is that—unlike the way they treat the giants—their Small Press buyer will order only after seeing finished copy of the book, by which time one has already settled on a print run determined in part by advance orders.) Barnes & Noble is just another superstore, like Walmart, that likes to stock its abundant shelves with merchandise at no risk to them, since everything is returnable, even if it's left in shabby condition, while the Discovery program served their purposes of cloaking themselves, however falsely, with having "literary" sensibilities. But deep down, like Ingram, they treat their suppliers shabbily, for their overwhelming concerns are with their "bottom line" profits. Despite their public gloss and insider reputations, publishers deal with both of them at their own risk. To have any chance of long term success means dealing with booksellers in a mutually beneficial and respectful way, which is why we prefer the small, independent bookstores over the chains, and reject high-handed wholesalers like Ingram.

Okay, enough with the complaints. Here is the unabashedly good news from The Permanent Press:

Chris Knopf’s Head Wounds is one of three finalists for both ForeWord Magazine’s Mystery Award and the IBPA’s Ben Franklin Best Mystery Awards for 2009. Ceremonies in New York City by the Independent Booksellers Publishing Association on May 28 will announce winners in all categories. Also, Chris had a wonderful interview in The Hartford Courant in their Sunday, May 10 issue with Carole Goldberg, a member of the National Book Critics Circle, in which he had sage advice to give to writers. The link to it is well worth reading on line:
http://www.courant.com/features/booksmags/hc-curtain0510.artmay10,0,1830655.story

The American Library Association nominated Ivan Goldman’s novel The Barfighter (released in April), as a 2009 Notable Book. Ivan, besides his knowledge of boxing, was also a Rhodes Scholar and has a wonderful blog, “Digging Deeper” that nails it politically. His latest, a must read, is entitled Obama Lets Financial Dogs Out, is one of the best takes on Obama’s financial advisers. You can read it by clicking on to his site: http://www.ivangoldman.blogspot.com/

Here’s some other blog news: Louise Young, whose novel Seducing the Spirits will appear in November (one of two first novels we put up for the $10,000 Mercantile Center for the Novel’s First Novel Award and for the National Book Award —the other being J.P. White’s Every Boat Turns South, appearing in September) had her Red Room blog chosen as the best blog of the week a couple of weeks ago by this writers site (http://www.redroom.com/), and Charles Davis (whose classic first novel Walk On, Bright Boy, drew rave reviews, whose second, a satire, Walking the Dog, was published last year, and whose gripping third novel, Standing at the Crossroads will appear in 2011) had his blog chosen the week after that. On our recently updated website, http://www.thepermanentpress.com/, you can see and read about Louise and Jay’s novels listed under forthcoming books. Both are very special. Charles's fiction is in our Backlist.

A last word concerning Award nominations: M.F. Bloxam’s The Night Battles and Amy Boaz’s A Richer Dust are finalists in the ForeWard Magazine’s Book of the Year Awards in the Literary Fiction category.

And another bit of excellent news: Connie Dial’s Internal Affairs (due in July) received an unsolicited and powerful endorsement from one of America’s premier mystery novelists, Thomas Perry, an Edgar Award winning and national bestselling author who called it “A fascinating thriller in which the savage murder of a female police officer with an edgy personal life exposes an LAPD we haven't seen before: the gulf between careerists and crime-fighters; the half-supportive, half-cutthroat coterie of high-ranking women; the undercover surveillance specialists who are never in the news. Connie Dial brings a fresh, authentic voice to the genre… a talented writer with an observant eye and a good ear for dialogue. It was a pleasure to read her first book.”

Until the next posting and, as always, I welcome your comments.

Marty
To be alerted for future postings, send email to shepard@thepermanentpress.com

Bad News/Good News

2009-04-06T16:26:00.009-04:00
In the body politic there is bad news and good:
The bad news, as Robert Reich declared last week (underlining what many of us had already concluded), is that we are now in a “Depression” which will likely worsen in the immediate future. The good news is that we’ve got a president who combines warmth, wit, intelligence, and compassion and who is committed to changing the status quo. The up-side of all this is that this crises provides the impetus to establish a saner economic system to curb cut-throat capitalism, lower the gap between the super-rich and ordinary people and provide better social safety nets (including universal health care, and “green” legislation that can slow down the toxicity that is poisoning us all).

These same contradictions and opportunities apply to the business of books. The news here is incredibly bad, and worsened by the fact that there is no president who can reform this system—just a lot of large corporate publishers facing declining sales who are scrambling to avoid massive red-ink by laying off workers, putting moratoriums on acquisitions, and closing imprints. Last week Publishers Weekly, in an effort to help so many senior people who’ve been pink-slipped, added to their daily on-line edition, a free listing of those suddenly out-of-work and a way to contact them if openings developed elsewhere. Yet conversations with Rudy Shur at Square One, Dan Simon at Seven Stories Press and other publishers/editors make it clear that there is no new hiring going on.

General Motors made a case that if they disappeared, so would tens of thousands of others, like suppliers and dealerships. As large publishers continue to shrink, so do opportunities for their suppliers: new and mid-list writers (who find it extremely difficult to find their way into print) and literary agents, who repeatedly tell me how their business has fallen off because of unprecedented difficulties in finding spots for the writers they represent. Adding to this toxicity is the disappearance of newspapers and the drastic reduction of book review space.

The good news is that this collapse will necessarily change the paradigm of how the written word becomes a book and how these books become marketed. Clearly CEO’s of most major publishing companies did not anticipate these circumstances and the personal heartbreak that has followed. To expect change from above is the same as expecting executives at AIG or GM to reform the banking or automotive industry. As I see it, the operative term for viability and change in our business would be one coined in the 60’s: “Small is Beautiful.” And I believe that is already happening.

I take it as good news that the chain bookstores are in serious trouble. Decades back, neighborhood bookstores accounted for more than three quarters of book sales while employing people who enjoyed reading and could recommend titles to customers. The chains totally reversed these percentages by their own rapacious practices: buying in larger quantities while demanding bigger discount from publishers, charging publishers for display space, and offering steeper discounts to customers. Using their profits to open ever more stores, they drove countless independents out of business. In effect, like Citibank, Chase, and others in the banking system, the Daltons, Borders, Waldenbooks, and Barnes & Nobles (who even started competing with publishers by publishing their own titles that they would sell exclusively in their stores) came to dominate retail sales, while selling publishers on the idea that they were too big to ignore. But without dedicated staff who read and hand-sold, it did little to help bring new writers to the attention of readers. “Too big to fail” is the mantra of collapsing banks in seeking bailouts. But bailouts are unknown in the publishing industry. And, in truth, when entities become too big, as the chains have become, they become de facto monopolies. So let us rejoice in the troubles at the chains and welcome back the neighborhood book store.

Offsetting the bad news of disappearing newspaper reviews is the good news concerning the incredible proliferation of online and blog review sites. Books sell, essentially, by virtue of word-of-mouth. The question has always been, in this nation of 300 million people, "How do potential readers first discover a book?" Clearly, reaching pockets of readers around the country is much more likely through blog reviewers than getting a review in any big city newspaper, which only attract a local audience at best (and a limited one, too, since only a minority of newspaper readers actually read book reviews: another reason why papers are cutting down on them). The only national newspaper that still has a separate book review section is The New York Times, but their shrinking Sunday book section typically restricts themselves to 5 fiction reviews and 10 non-fiction reviews—hardly a way of spreading much word-of-mouth for relatively unknown novelists. Therefore bloggers and online reviewers, who have far less interest in celebrity authors and books about celebrities, far more interest in discovering new talent than repeating coverage of old talent, and who seem at least as interested in fiction as non-fiction, are a welcome transformation.

All of the bad news for conglomerate publishing should spell good news for small publishers who are sent more and better manuscripts from authors and agents and who can gain far better access to reviews because of the internet. I know that despite all the gloom and doom, our good news is that sales of our fiction were higher in 2008 than they were in 2007, and that this year—with the publication and fine pre-pub and widespread online reviews of Efrem Sigel’s The Disappearance, Daniel Klein’s The History of Now, and Ivan Goldman’s The Barfighter—they have started off significantly higher than our 2008 sales. And, being small, we have not had to lay off any staff. The bad news is that sub-rights income has declined significantly, for there is no market for selling paperback rights in the United States and a declining market for translation rights sales abroad, since large European and Asian publishers are having the same economic problems as the major American publishers. But, overall, this is something we can live with far better than the Monsters of the Midway.

Years ago I came to realize that the corporate publishing practice of tossing out several hundred titles a year and hoping that some of them will stick to the wall was not a sound business model. Economically speaking, it's far more effective to put out a dozen or so books annually while paying attention to promoting each and every one, for it requires less staff and office overhead, allows the selections to be more focused and refined, and offers greater protection against the vicissitudes of the larger economy and the marketplace. Given the current climate, I would say that the concept of "Small is Beautiful" provides a better template for the future of book publishing than the one currently in place.

Part Two to follow in my next blog posting. Other news on our website www.thepermanentpress.com.

Marty
To be alerted for future postings, send email to shepard@thepermanentpress.com

An Auto-Interview (which has nothing to do with cars)

2009-03-21T19:28:00.013-04:00
I've thought it might be interesting to post a blog from time to time where some of our writers were interviewed. But rather than fall into the James Lipton trap where he would always ask his actor interviewees the same questions, I thought it might be more rewarding if the authors could interview themselves. Since Daniel Klein's The History of Now has just been published, without further ado, here is his Auto-Interview:

Walter Ygo: So tell me, Danny, what’s an old guy like you--and I don’t mean just chronologically old, I’m talking dentures, hearing aids, Viagra in the medicine chest old--so what’s an old guy like you doing writing his first literary novel?

Danny Klein: Well, Walter, truth is I wasn’t ready to write something like The History of Now until now because I’m a slow learner. It took me all these years of writing humor, philosophy, detective novels, and thrillers to learn the craft of long fiction. How to organize it, how to write it fluently, and perhaps most importantly for me, how to rewrite it patiently.

Walter: So what’s the deal with Permanent Press? It ain’t exactly Penguin Books, you know. And I can’t imagine they gave you much of an advance.

Danny: How true. The advance just covers a round-trip to Boston (taxes not included.) But these Permanent Press people liked the book for all the right reasons, they got it out before I bit the dust, and the principals there, Marty & Judy Shepard, are cute…Oh, and anyway, Penguin isn’t in the market for new fiction these days. But the good news is that Penguin bought the paperback rights to Tom Cathcart’s and my bestseller, Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar for big bucks and then gave us a huge advance for another, Heidegger and a Hippo Walk through those Pearly Gates, so I could afford to go with Permanent.

Walter: I see that you call The History of Now a philosophically inclined novel. That sounds like hype to me. And a little pretentious on top of that.

Danny: Yeah, well, maybe I overdid that philosophy angle in the publicity. But philosophical ideas of historical cause and effect did play an organizing role in my mind when I began thinking about the book. Not heavy philosophy, just a guiding principle. Mostly it’s a story of life in a small town.

Walter: I see you live in a small town--Great Barrington, Massachusetts. So is this a roman a clef?

Danny: Jeez, Walter, are you talking French? Sounds a little pretentious to me. Anyway, no, it’s not a roman a clef--the characters are one hundred percent fictional. The geography and demographics of the town--plus a bit of the history--is patterned after Great Barrington, but not the characters. They could be from any town.

Walter: Okay, they always make me ask this one: Why did you become a writer?

Danny: My mother used to say it was the only work I could get where I could make a living telling lies. That was as close as she ever got to approving of my vocation…What can I say? I like making up stuff, love the English language, and in particular, I like working for myself…Anyway, at my age, it’s the only thing I do better than I did when I was younger. For everything else, it’s the other way around.

Walter: Fair enough. Okay, finally, how would you rate The History of Now in terms of contemporary American fiction?

Danny: It’s probably closer to old fashioned story-telling of the Richard Russo variety than, say, what younger writers are doing, say the late David Foster Wallace. I think it’s well written, for what that is worth, and the characters believable. But do I think people will be reading it years from now? No way, Walter.

Walter: Okay, I’ve had enough.

Danny: Me too.

That's it for Danny's interview, which I hope you've enjoyed. I'd be glad to receive other Q&A interviews from authors we'll soon be publishing (send to shepard@thepermanentpress.com). Also welcome are any proposals for other formats...or topics you'd like to talk about or have me address.

Marty
To be alerted for future postings, send email to shepard@thepermanentpress.com

Zeitgeist

2009-03-04T21:21:00.009-05:00
One of the great joys inherent in our annual Virgin Gorda vacation is letting go of schedules, waking when the mood suits us, reading on an uncrowded beach, snorkeling over one of the finest reefs in the Caribbean, watching incredibly beautiful sunsets and naming what we see in the cloud formations. The biggest decisions to make concerned where would we go to eat each night and what would we order. Judy and I could get away and know that The Permanent Press was in excellent hands, with our dream team of Rania Haditirto at the helm, aided and abettted by Susanne Gustafsson, our extraordinary intern from Sweden, and Stefanie Beroes, who heroically kept up with orders and collections. But I must say after 12 days of rest and recuperation, returning home and getting back to work was equally exciting.

Rania, who is 31, and Susanne, who is 27, provided a file containing more more than a dozen new reviews for upcoming titles, including two fine pre-publication reviews in Kirkus and Publishers Weekly for Hard Stop, Chris Knopf's fourth Sam Aquillo mystery due in May (to see these latest accolades and others go on to Chris's website: http://www.sameddie.com/), and filled us in on the continuing success of Efrem Sigel's The Disappearance (now in its third printing) and Daniel Klein's The History of Now (ranked at 20,000 at Amazon.com earlier today). They also decided we weren't "hip" enough, so they've put The Permanent Press on Face Book. Frankly I don't understand the benefit of all this, but I'm not autocratic enough to say "Enough." Maybe they are on to something that I fail to see.

This possibility occurred when I read in today's New York Times that HarperCollins--a month after closing down their Collins imprint due to the implosion facing all of the conglomerate publishing giants--was starting a new imprint, It Books, that would focus "On pop culture, style, and content derived from the Internet, like a planned collection of Twitter posts called Twitter Wit." Another title for their 21 title fall list includes "The Style Strategy by Nina Garia, a judge on Project Runway." If that is "hip," I want no part of it.

It seems to me that "publishng" is a broad term that consists of two very different approaches that are increasingly apparent during this economic mess: a situation more aptly called "The Great Depression 11," rather than pretending we are in a "Recession." In one corner are those marketeers who seek to commission or hook on to something they believe to be trendy. And in the other corner are those who prefer to discover exciting writing that is more timeless. If I were a betting man, I would predict that It Books, headed by Carrie Kania will fail despite the blessings of Michael Morrison, president and publisher of HarperCollins, who said that "I think we've pulled together the best people wihin our company who are really interested in this and are targeting them to all work together to tap into the Zeitgeist."

Please, Michael, let me give you Webster's definition of Zeitgeist: The spirit of the time, the intellectual and moral tendencies that characterize any age or epoch. If Twitter and Style represent the moral and intellectual tendencies of today, I think you are simply trying to dress up dross with the lipstick of a "hip" German noun. Listen, if you are simply seeking to boost income, why not try starting a "Zeitgeist" greeting card line, like Hallmark, charge $5 for an envelope and a folded card, and stop pretending that It Books is some sort of novel approach. Here's another approach: Why not just try to discover more original books?

Whatever you do, Michael, here's my blessing for you: gesundheit! Or, as Danny Klein quipped, "There's nothing so dated as avant garde passe."

Marty

To be alerted for future postings, send email to shepard@thepermanentpress.com

The Network is Growing

2009-02-15T23:42:00.006-05:00
It's ironic in that tomorrow, the 16th, Judy and I leave for our annual warmth, water, and sunshine vacation in Virgin Gorda--one of the most beautiful places left in the Caribbean (we return on March 1). And yet, for the first time in 13 years, I have a reluctance to go, because the work here has been so exciting over the past month and a half that a good part of me doesn't want to leave. I fear I am becoming a bookaholic.

This excitement is fed by many streams. In early January I emailed 109 writers we've published asking if they would be interested in helping form a "collective" of sorts by joining together to spread the word about the quality fiction we publish. I offered them advance copies of any book we're going to publish or have published in the past, at cost ($8/copy, including mailing)--or $88 for all 13 novels coming out this year, with some bonus books thrown in. (This same offer, incidentally, is open to any of you reading this blog). My hope was that they would talk up the books they liked, post reviews on blogs or Amazon.com, suggest them to book clubs at a 50% discount, and think of other avenues for spreading-the-word. The results have been heart-warming: 34 of them wanted to be on an email list where we would send them pre-publication reviews so that they could order any titles of interest. 24 chose to be on this "pick what you want" list; 8 subscribed for everything, and one--Joan Schweighardt--signed up two of her writer friends so that we have a small nest of these "word-of-mouthers in Albuquerque, and 10 full year subscriptions. Joan, who wrote Virtual Silence, Homebodies, and Island, which we published between 1992 and 1995 (and who has also worked in publishing as an agent) developed her own word-of-mouth network several years ago. "I stopped relying on print reviews a long time ago," she said. "The best book recommendations always came from friends who know me. One of the things we do over Christmas is give one another three of the books we read in the past year that we were most excited about." Great appreciation as well to Charles Davis, a Brit who lives in France, who downloaded Daniel Klein's The History of Now and whose masterpiece, Walk On, Bright Boy, we published last year. The review he wrote--a brilliant analysis of Klein's novel, would make him a finalist for a reviewer's "Oscar" if they ever had such awards.

Another stream has had to do with discovering some extraordinary non-professional reviewers through places like Library Thing, where we've offered 20 free copies of recent and future titles which are quickly snapped up. 15 may never see the light of day online, a few others may write reviews that are positive or negative, but the writing isn't something that thrills or captures my imagination. But every now and then, I read a review that is so articulate, so richly expressed and profound that one wants to embrace the reviewer as a literary soul-mate. Bloggers like Wisteria Leigh, Allison Campbell and Heather Tieg come immediately to mind, and I welcome being able to share good books with them. Then there are people like Rebecca Durfor who published a modified version of my third blog, "Saving Quality Fiction" on RebeccasReads, featuring it as an editorial. Or Clark Isaacs, who is a fellow literary junkie and blogger.

A final network stream had to do with writing to over 50 print reviewers who we'd been sending advance copies of every book we've published for the past 10 or 15 years, with diminishing returns, telling them that this process was like treading water in a rip tide, and proposing the same email system as we started using with our supportive authors. 24 of them responded affirmatively, and after sending them our last 6 reviews in Publishers Weekly, several asked to see specific titles (including a reviewer who hadn't covered us for a half-dozen years who now guaranteed coverage for two titles). So all this adds to my excitement. It's a privilege to be in touch with print reviewers with whom you can have an exchange; a sharp contrast to people like Michiko Kakutani at The New York Times, who we've sent books to for 15 years without ever getting a response to a letter, an email, or a telephone call. It's liberating to send selectively to two dozen reviewers and stop knocking on the doors of people who will neither review your books nor talk to you.

Given all these changes, some pretty terrific things have been happening with or February, March and April releases. Efrem Sigel's The Disappearance sold out one week after publication and another printing will be delivered by February 25. Efrem's novel and Danny Klein's The History of Now have both made upcoming Indie Next Notable Lists from the American Booksellers Association (which picks the top 40 titles published every month by virtue of booksellers' nominations). Both were also purchased by Blackstone Audiobooks, for those who like to "read" while driving. And our April novel, Ivan Goldman's The Barfighter, has been getting pre-publication raves both here and in the U.K. Reviews for all these books can be seen on our website: http://www.thepermanentpress.com/ .

Lastly, some years ago a visitor at the Frankfurt Book Fair mentioned that China would be increasingly open to Western literature. Now, with excellent representation in China by Jackie Huang and Daisy Wang at the Nurnberg Agency, these women have, over the past three weeks, made 5 subrights sales for our books, consisting of The History of Now and all 4 of Chris Knopf's Sam Acquillo mystery series (The Last Refuge, Two Time, Head Wounds, and the forthcoming Hard Stop due in May).

So it's off on vacation later today. But I can't wait to get back home at the end of February, hear from you, catch up on work, and post another blog during the first week in March. I would hope, if you find these blogs worthwhile, that you will subscribe to them if you haven't already done so, and pass them on to others who might have some interest. It all helps us expand the network.

Marty
To be alerted for future postings, send email to shepard@thepermanentpress.com

Today I'm a Cockeyed Optimist

2009-01-31T18:07:00.006-05:00
Writing in Publishers Weekly on January 5th, Peter Olson, the former CEO of Random House, painted a bleak picture for book publishing in 2009 and beyond, citing the economy (still referred to as a “deepening recession” in the media—who seem skittish about calling it “the early stages of the second Great Depression”), with closing bookstores and publishers cutting back on staff and content. The New York Times on January 28 had a headline on their front page echoing Olson’s article, pointing out that “Almost all of the New York publishing houses are laying off editors and pinching pennies,” trimming their lists and relying “on blockbuster best sellers,” while the only people in the industry making a profit are self-publishing companies [IUniverse being cited] who charge authors for things like cover design and printing costs.”

The realization that big corporate publishers and chain bookstores would fall on hard times shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. In fact, one can draw an analogy between large corporate publishers and chain stores with the large commercial banks that need bail outs. And in this nose diving economy and negative balance sheets, these houses of cards are collapsing and, unlike failing banks, there are no book bailouts.

How, then, to account for my optimism today? Actually it’s been going on since Barack Obama’s inauguration. Starting then I realized that by downgrading serious fiction, the conglomerate publishers have opened the door ever wider for a small press like ours. Never looking for best-sellers, but just having a passion for discovering 12 manuscripts that excite both Judy and me (from among the 6,000 submission we get every year), and then wanting to share these novels with others who also enjoy discovering quality fiction by gifted newcomers and relative unknowns who, as my musician friends say, “have the chops” for it, has become much easier. At about the same time, the response to my last blog posting, SAVING QUALITY FICTION, has increased our awareness of the tens of thousands of people served by some exceptional online bloggers and internet reviewers who share our aesthetics. What this means is that there is an alternative route to “getting-the-word-out” for quality fiction that need not rely exclusively on traditional newspaper and magazine coverage.

Then, today, there was an even bigger boost to optimism when, at the time of this posting, I discovered that Efrem Sigel’s The Disappearance (a novel about a couple whose lives are shaken when their 14 year old son disappears one day) -- which will not be delivered from our printer until February 2 -- has skyrocketed in ranking to #715 at Amazon.com by virtue of advance orders. This is a milestone that we’ve never experienced before. My publishing partner at Blackstone Audiobooks, Haila Williams, tells me this is an incredible number and that we should start reprinting immediately.

I believe I will remain a cockeyed optimist at least until my next blog posting in mid-February.
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Saving Quality Fiction

2009-01-14T23:48:00.007-05:00
It seems to me that reading quality fiction is going the way of opera, a vice engaged in by an ever shrinking American audience. Opera couldn't compete with musicals, attendance-wise, where listeners could hear the lyrics in their own language. And creative novels have been getting the short end of the stick ever since publishers realized that a dumbing-down educational system meant that there was more profitability in creating fiction for the widest possible audience, that has even led to the resurgence of what is now categorized as the "graphic novel," which in my adolescence was called a comic book.

There are other pressures on good books. In the course of a 16 hour waking day, how much time is left to read after work, meals, films, television, and web surfing? Not to mention a crappy economy, which in the book business manifests itself with chain bookstores like Borders being on the verge of bankruptcy, Barnes & Noble trying to avoid a similar fate, and several large publishing houses not taking on any new submissions. Worse yet is the shrinking review space available in the print media, with many newspapers folding and nearly all of them downsizing book coverage.

This was brought home to me today as we prepared to send out galley copies of two forthcoming novels, Daniel Klein's The History of Now and Ivan Goldman's The Barfighter (both well reviewed in pre-publication journals like Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Kirkus) to 60 newspaper and magazine reviewers, a monthly ritual for the past 30 years. It suddenly hit me that that the majority of these papers were rarely, or no longer, covering these submissions as in the 'good old days.' Can a tree that falls in a forest be heard any more than a book that has limited coverage succeed in finding readers? I think not.

What to do about this situation? Might Barack Obama's idea of saving a failing economy also apply to rescuing the "novel" novel? To paraphrase Obama, you can't fix the problem from the top down, but from the bottom up. Can a network of word-of-mouth readers be formed from the bottom, instead of exclusively relying on those vanishing reviewers at the top?

Here's the concept: the best people for talking about and sharing opinions on books are good writers, and over the decades we've published over 250 0f them. Along with that are book clubbers and friends who read a lot. Instead of sending out galley copies exclusively to reviewers, who usually don't read them, we plan to offer these well produced trade paperback precursors of forthcoming hardcovers to one and all at our cost for for producing and shipping (roughly $8/copy).

I welcome your thoughts, comments, and/or interest in participating in this program, as well as any other ideas you have on how to best go about creating an alternative on-the-ground network of discerning readers. My email address is shepard@thepermanentpress.com.
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Pay for Play Book Scams

2008-12-29T13:30:00.001-05:00
Drawing parallels between selling books and selling senatorial seats has led me to certain conclusions, since "Pay for Play" exists in both instances. When it occurs in the political realm, it creates Moral Outrage, and justly so. But when it occurs in selling books, it never causes indignation, for it's simply seen as Good Marketing. Yet, it seems to me, that anyone interested in making sure that good candidates and good books rise to the top of the charts will conclude that Pay for Play does society a disservice.

Walk into any of the chain stores and you will find up-front tables and counter space filled with large displays designed to catch the eye of wandering customers. "These are the worthwhile books," is the implication. Well, perhaps that might be true on occasion, but much more often than not, these titles are prominently displayed because the publisher "pays to play," by paying money to Borders or Barnes & Noble. This is a significant expense and forecloses exposure for titles published by any small press (of which there are thousands) who, if they are lucky enough to have a book in stock at a chain store, will have it on a shelf, spine showing, under whatever category it fits into.

The moral outrage frequently found in the book business usually has to do with how the chains have forced independent booksellers out of business. Or how Amazon.com has also put pressure on all bookstores. But I would like to offer a different point of view, namely applause for both Amazon.com and the independent stores for leveling the playing field, and welcoming the fact that Borders is close to bankruptcy and hoping that Barnes & Noble, which is also facing financial pressures, will not be far behind. Nothing would please me more than seeing a consumer boycott of these chains to hasten this process. It would also help restore the ailing independent bookstores that now account for less than 25% of book sales, where a few decades ago they accounted for approximately 75%.

When a book buyer goes to Amazon.com and hits a button for a book they've heard about, there is no pile of up-front competing books to distract them, nor are they tempted to buy something else because Amazon always has stock of titles that are not widely known even if they are well and widely reviewed. Also, the independents--members of the American Booksellers Association--are far more likely to cater to a more demanding clientele, reflecting the taste of both owners and staff. The "Indie's" have also set up their own program to bring quality books to the public through their Indie Next List (earlier called the Book Sense Picks List)--titles chosen from pre-publication copies made available to these stores from which they select 40 books a month from the hundreds submitted.

For the past 30 years we've been publishing one book each month, and in that time have earned as many honors per book as any publisher in America. Since October we've had a series of six excellent reviews in Publishers Weekly--the bible of the book business. Three were for novels already released: Roccie Hill's tale of the rock scene in the early 70's, Three Minutes on Love ("A wonderful debut"), Lucia Orth's starred review set in the Philippines, Baby Jesus Pawn Shop ("A stellar first novel"), M.F. Bloxam's eerie The Night Battles, set in Sicily ("Fine literary horror") and for three yet to come: Efrem Sigels tale of the parents reaction to the disappearance of their fourteen year old son, due out in February, The Disappearance ("A powerful and elegantly crafted novel"), Daniel Klein's The History of Now, due in March ("A charming philosophical lesson of destiny and history colliding"), and Ivan Goldman's The Barfighter, due in April ("Brings to life the sleazy underbelly of professional boxing"). You are not likely to find them in Barnes & Noble, however, for we haven't paid that piper his fee for playing. But you will be able to see them and order from Amazon.com and, perhaps, your local independent, or read about them and order directly from The Permanent Press website http://www.thepermanentpress.com/

And here is my take on the economy: Last week the Federal Reserve said they would be printing money, as much as needed, to stimulate the economy. This goes beyond borrowing through bonds or from China, for why would anyone lend money to a country that is constantly increasing its astronomical deficits and whose politicians insist on tax reductions that only worsen the situation?

The problem with this latest "fix" is that it's reminiscent of what happened in the Weimar Republic in Germany between the two World Wars, where printing money without real reserves led to hyper-inflation, with citizens having to take wheelbarrows full of German marks to the grocery story to buy a few bags of food. Or, more currently, the run-away inflation in Zimbabwe. This printing of money without backing-up its value is fraught with danger. If one dollar in today's currency will be valued at $500 some time in the future, it's easy for the government to pay back its loans: $200 dollars--value-wise--in today's currency would have a face-value of $100,000, an easy way to pay off debt. But it will be hell for those citizens who thought their money was safe if they put it in a bank as opposed to buying securities.

One can only hope that the incoming Obama administration will do something to rectify this situation as, for all the talk about our being in recession, the fact of the matter is we seem to approaching the cusp of the next "Great Depression."

Marty Shepard
To be alerted for future postings, send email to shepard@thepermanentpress.com

My wife made me do it!

2008-12-14T11:07:00.000-05:00
Judy, my wife and co-publisher at The Permanent Press, has been after me for months to start a blog--something I have always resisted doing. My reasons? With a million blogs out there, why would anyone be interested in reading the millionth and first?

"You could talk about our books," she says. "Okay," I answer," but The Permanent Press already has a website." "Then talk about politics." My answer: "Why bother: Frank Rich at The New York Times does that better than I can."

So far, so good in avoidance techiques. But then she trumped my objections by declaring: "Here's what I want for Christmas: paint the front of the silverware drawer in the kitchen, which looks too shabby, and start your blog," following which she called our son, Caleb, who lives next door -- and who is most knowledgeable about setting up these things. Half-an-hour later he was here, so there were no excuses left.

To find a title, I phoned Daniel Klein, who co-authored the Best Seller Plato and Platypus walked Into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes. We're publishing his novel The History of Now in March. He came up with The Book Stops Here for a header, and when that was unavailable for a URL, Chris Knopf, who has written the acclaimed Sam Acquillo/Hampton mysteries (his fourth in this series, Hard Stop, comes out in May) came up with TheCockeyedPessimist. Which brings me to the "Book Part" of this initial blog: sharing a series of coincidences that reads like the beginning of a Rod Serling Twilight Zone episode:

On Monday, December 8th, Publishers Weekly reviewed both Danny's novel and our February novel, Efrem Sigel's The Disappearance to excellent reviews, which you can view on The Permanent Press website, http://www.thepermanentpress.com/ . It also turns out that both Danny and Efrem went to Harvard, both live in Great Barrington, both novels are set in Great Barrington, and both have wives named Frederica... and neither had ever known or heard of one another. Of course, if the stars are so much in line, might both books also gain wide readership? Who is to say in The Twilight Zone, though I can tell you that both are eminently deserving.

One last book comment before going on to politics: I plan on asking individual authors to write columns on future postings.

And now on the the surreal aspects of politics, brought on by reading the Sunday, December 14 issue of The New York Times. The first page alone would warm the heart of Will Rogers or Lenny Bruce. If you haven't seen it, here's the essence of it all: Chuck Schumer, a member of the Senate Banking and Finance Committes, a so-called "populist" Senator from New York has clearly been the front man for Wall Street interests going back for 13 years, pushing for less regulation, lower taxes, less oversight, preventing limits on executive pay, blocking the policing of the credit rating agencies that overestimated the strength of corporations and banks, and has worked his magic in ten major bills over this period of time. "A Champion of Wall Street Reaps the Benefits" was the headline. And, in the text, it reported that Schumer reaped more money in donations than any other Senator, with the exception of, surprise, surprise, another "populist," John Kerry. The further irony is that members of the George Bush's Securities and Exchange Commission were pushing for regulation as they attempted to protect investors and the public from potential fallout.

What does it all look like from here? Take nothing for granted! The Democrats, supposedly that party of Main Street, protected Wall Street while some Republican appointees, from the party of Wall Street, were trying to protect the public. So here's another question to ponder. Who is more venal, Governor Rob Blagojevich with his penny-ante, crude attempts to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars with his personal "pay for play" demands, or Senator Schumer's raising hundreds of millions of dollars from Wall Street for his own campaigns and those of Democratic Senatorial candidates? While Schumer has not, as far as we know, pocketed this money for his own personal nest egg, he far outranks the Illinois Governor on the damage done to this economy and the costs to tax-payers for his support of Wall Street deregulation and bail-outs.

It seems to me that Schumer is part of a grander "Pay to Play" system, and that the major differences between him and Blagojevich have more to do with style than substance.

Marty Shepard
To be alerted for future postings, send email to shepard@thepermanentpress.com