Roy Miller's Blog, page 297
January 17, 2017
I Can’t Believe I Didn’t See That Coming
Write a story that starts with the line “You’ll never get me to tell you where the jewels are,” and ends with the line, “I can’t believe I didn’t see that coming.” Be as creative as you can.
Post your response (500 words or fewer) in the comments below.
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The post I Can’t Believe I Didn’t See That Coming appeared first on Art of Conversation.
The First Truly Blockbuster Audiobook?
If you’re excited for the February release of George Saunders’s very first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, let me just pile onto that excitement a little bit for you. Recently, TIME reported the insane cast of the audiobook version of the novel, which features some 166 characters. Accordingly, the audiobook will feature a large number of very notable persons: actors (Nick Offerman! Bradley Whitford! Julianne Moore! Jeffrey Tambor!), musicians (Carrie Brownstein! Jeff Tweedy!), and even writers (David Sedaris! Miranda July! Mary Karr! Saunders himself!). If the talent at hand here is any indication, it’s going to be incredible, and this is a particularly good thing, because this novel deserves it—and not only that, but it could have been easy to get wrong as an audiobook.
That is, it’s the unique format of the novel itself that makes this kind of out-of-the-box audiobook necessary. The story, which centers on the death of Willie Lincoln and his experience in the afterlife, watching his father’s visits to his grave, is told in a cacophony of voices, some presented as excerpts from actual texts (many of these texts are invented), and others as voices of the ghosts hanging around the graveyard, in general denial about their dead-ness (these, I feel safe saying, are all invented). It’s a feat of literary engineering, that, while I note subtle hints of David Markson, is mostly unlike anything else I’ve ever read. People say that all the time, I know, and they’ll say it extra about this book, but this time, they’ll be right.
Perhaps there wasn’t any other way for the wonderfully experimental Saunders to write a first novel. After all, as he described it, “I felt as if I’d spent my life making tiny custom yurts and then got a commission to build a mansion. At first, you think you’re going to need a whole new set of skills. But at some point you realize that your skills are your skills. And you think, ‘Well, maybe I can make a mansion out of a series of linked yurts.'” Except that the novel that came out is less like a mansion and more like a swimming pool, or a spaceship, or an enormous conch shell. You might be able to live in it, but you’re going to have to learn new ways to survive, new paths to meaning, a whole new methodology for cleaning the floor.
The audiobook, with its star-studded cast, seems primed to join the ranks of the those that are works of art in and of themselves—like Jim Dale’s reading of the Harry Potter series (or Stephen Fry’s, if you prefer) or the many-tentacled The Death of Bunny Munro. After all, Lincoln in the Bardo is, essentially, an oral novel—almost all of the text is voice. I would have expected a single talented narrator—or maybe two—to tackle the whole thing, modulating for different speakers (by the way, the world record holder for the greatest number of “distinct and distinguishable” voices performed in an audiobook is Roy Dotrice, who voiced A Game of Thrones, with all its 224 characters). That might have been a work of art in its own right too, but this is even better. “I love the way that the variety of contemporary American voices mimics and underscores the feeling I tried to evoke in the book: a sort of American chorale,” Saunders told TIME. It might have been even more indicative of America if those voices weren’t actually celebrities—but then again, I really can’t wait to hear Nick Offerman as Hans Vollman, so I’m not complaining.
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THE CAST
Nick Offerman as Hans Vollman
David Sedaris as Roger Bevins III
Carrie Brownstein as Isabelle Perkins
George Saunders as The Reverend Everly Thomas
Miranda July as Mrs. Elizabeth Crawford
Lena Dunham as Elise Traynor
Ben Stiller as Jack Manders
Julianne Moore as Jane Ellis
Susan Sarandon as Mrs. Abigail Bass
Bradley Whitford as Lt. Cecil Stone
Bill Hader as Eddie Baron
Megan Mullally as Betsy Barron
Rainn Wilson as Percival “Dash” Collier
Jeff Tweedy as Captain William Prince
Kat Dennings as Miss Tamara Doolittle
Jeffrey Tambor as Professor Edmund Bloomer
Mike O’Brien as Lawrence T. Decroix
Keegan-Michael Key as Elson Farwell
Don Cheadle as Thomas Havens
Patrick Wilson as Stanley “Perfesser” Lippert
Kirby Heyborne as Willie Lincoln
Mary Karr as Mrs. Rose Milland
Cassandra Campbell as Your Narrator
The post The First Truly Blockbuster Audiobook? appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Literary Sleuthing
In 1941, a 29-year-old aspiring poet named Hyam Plutzik sent a soul-baring 72-page letter to his old college mentor about his struggles to find his voice. The letter must have been cathartic, and Plutzik went on to a distinguished career as a poet and academician at the University of Rochester. He would be a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize three times before his untimely death at 50, in 1962.
For many years, though, the letter was lost. Thanks to the tenacity of Tanya, Plutzik’s widow (now 96); his son Jonathan’s googling; and some solid gumshoe efforts by librarians and scholars, the letter has been found and is about to be published. It’s a letter that resonates today for young artists struggling with the creative process.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that the phrase “long-lost manuscript” usually conjures up images from the remote past, as when some literary sleuth discovers a Shakespeare folio hidden for centuries under the floorboards. But sometimes the discovery is more recent, as in the case with Plutzik’s letter to his Trinity College mentor, the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Odell Shepard.
Like the papers of many other academics, the letter might have been lost to oblivion were it not for two decades of efforts to bring it to a new audience. In the years that followed Plutzik’s death, Tanya nurtured fond memories of his life and writings, regaling Jonathan with stories about that legendary 72-page letter. Though neither Tanya nor any of the four Plutzik children had seen it, they knew it was something special if only because it had become part of the family lore.
About 20 years ago, after hearing the story for the umpteenth time, Jonathan happened to be sitting at a computer and typed “Trinity, Odell Shepard, Plutzik” into one of the then-newfangled search engines. To his surprise, up popped a hit indicating that the Shepard papers were housed at the Watkinson Library at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. After searching further, Jonathan located the box in which the letter was stored and requested a photocopy, which was promptly sent him by the late Peter Knapp, Trinity’s archivist. As a postscript, Knapp added a bonus of his own: a two-page response to Plutzik’s letter, which Shepard wrote but never mailed during Christmas week of 1941.
The story does not end here. In 2006, the University of Rochester put out an RFP for someone to digitize audiovisual materials in the Plutzik archive, including the family’s home movies and old magnetic-tape recordings of Plutzik reading his poetry. I had recently completed a six-year stint as associate editor of H.W. Wilson’s World Authors reference series, which included brief biographies of thousands of writers. I had also edited the autobiography of Oscar-nominated filmmaker Christine Choy.
I got involved in the Plutzik quest when Choy phoned me after seeing the RFP and asked, in her usual brusque style, “Who the hell is Hyam Plutzik?” When I told her, she suggested we approach the family about doing a full-length documentary of his life and work. Released in 2007, it included interviews with several poets who admired Plutzik’s work, such as 99-year-old Stanley Kunitz, in his last filmed appearance. Jonathan made a cameo appearance, reading an excerpt from his father’s newfound letter.
Finally, in 2013, Richard Ring, curator of the Watkinson Library, invited me to curate a postcentenary exhibit titled Hyam Plutzik ’32: Connecticut and Beyond. A centerpiece of the exhibit was the original letter, retrieved again by Knapp from the Trinity archives. For the first time, Tanya was able to hold in her hands the legendary letter her husband had written some 70 years earlier, before their marriage.
This May 2 marked the 75th anniversary of the day that Plutzik began writing the letter, which took him seven months to finish, just after Pearl Harbor. Though it was written by typewriter and sent by snail mail, the issues he writes about—self-disclosure, the struggles of an artistic calling, keen observations of people and events—are as fresh as today’s Facebook postings. Thanks to that motley crew of sleuths—family members, archivists, librarians, filmmakers, literary historians, and the publishing arm of the Watkinson Library—this remarkable letter is now available to a new generation of readers.
Edward Moran is a literary historian who wrote the afterword to Letter from a Young Poet (Books & Books). He was literary adviser to the 2007 documentary Hyam Plutzik: American Poet.
A version of this article appeared in the 05/09/2016 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Literary Sleuthing
The post Literary Sleuthing appeared first on Art of Conversation.
Viet Thanh Nguyen: From both sides
Photo: BeBe Jacobs
Viet Thanh Nguyen recently won the Pulitzer Prize for his debut novel, The Sympathizer. Fiction writer, nonfiction author, scholar, and professor at the University of Southern California, Nguyen was only 4 years old when the Vietnam War ended, and yet he has given voice to a generation of Vietnamese people caught up in the war. His body of work constitutes an alternate version to the American story of the war “over there,” however critical the various books and movies on that conflict have been. Nguyen’s story is not only that of the 3 million Vietnamese lives lost in that war and the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese boat people who were lost at sea, but also the lives of surviving refugees in their American diaspora.
The Sympathizer is told from the point of view of a young Vietnamese
captain who is ostensibly on the side of the South but is actually a communist sympathizer – a “man of two minds,” as the Pulitzer Prize committee put it. When Saigon falls, he and other refugees find a safe haven in America. Dense with prose, the novel is thick with interiority, fleshing out the unnamed narrator’s complex stance on the war and his attendant guilt when he’s required to kill two suspected communist sympathizers in America. The war, we discover, is not over for him or his fellow refugees. The Vietnamese General, whom the narrator served under in South Vietnam, remains his superior in the United States and hopes still to continue the war back home by gathering a voluntary army. Meanwhile, we watch the anti-communist political turmoil that remains a constant among Americans who are unhappy with the way the war turned out, most notably Nguyen’s unforgettable blustering American Congressman.
In his nonfiction book Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, Nguyen spares no punches in letting readers know that the Vietnam War, like other wars the United States has fought, is part of a history of U.S. imperialism. The Vietnam War didn’t go well. The American soldiers buried in Arlington National Cemetery and honored on the Memorial Wall constitute an attempt to give meaning to the deaths of American soldiers. Yet memory is a politicized construct, Nguyen says. In America, there is no wall to remember the Vietnamese. If one were built, it would be nine miles long. In Vietnam, those who opposed the winning side are left to decay unmemorialized and forgotten.
Hollywood especially receives Nguyen’s penetrating criticism. As he states in “Our Vietnam War Never Ended,” which serves as an afterward to his novel, Hollywood war films seemed to be all one-sided, and that side wasn’t the Vietnamese: “I watched Apocalypse Now and saw American sailors massacre a sampan full of civilians and Martin Sheen shoot a wounded woman in cold blood. I watched Platoon and heard the audience cheering and clapping when the Americans killed Vietnamese soldiers. These scenes, although fictional, left me shaking with rage. I knew that in the American imagination I was the Other, the Gook, the foreigner, no matter how perfect my English, how American my behavior. In my mostly white high school, the handful of Asian students clustered together in one corner for lunch and even called ourselves the Asian Invasion and the Yellow Peril.”
Just like in his nonfiction, Nguyen’s fiction is hard-hitting and spares no punches. At times, The Sympathizer is raw with black humor: The narrator’s political assassinations are both savage and over-the-top, reminiscent of black comedy in Tim O’Brien’s work. Nguyen’s novel is also satirical. The blustering Congressman calls to mind Ben Fountain’s Texans sold on Iraq in his recent novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. But Nguyen’s voice is distinctive, and clearly a new American voice. And it must be said that The Sympathizer can’t be categorized simply as a war novel. It’s much more universal than that. On a larger scale, it’s a novel full of humanity, laying bare a dark side easier to ignore than contemplate.
What drew you to write a novel about the Vietnam War and its aftermath?
Although hundreds of novels had been written about the Vietnam War in several languages, none had done what I wanted to do. That was to write a novel that addressed the viewpoints of all sides, and to be critical of all sides. The war was a tragedy and a horror that everybody who fought in it was responsible for, and while some previous books had recognized that, they focused only on the experience of one side. Inevitably this produced some limitations in perspective and in understanding the war, its participants, and its observers. My goal was to encourage a re-examination of all the viewpoints of war through centering an approach from Vietnamese perspectives, which have been overwhelmed by American stories in the postwar period.
You’ve said elsewhere that you did some research for The Sympathizer. Did you conduct your research before or during the writing of the novel? Which method do you think works best with historical novels (or does that depend)?
Much of the research was already done because I had read books and seen films about the war all my life. I also drew on my life experience growing up in a Vietnamese American community. Even so, I still needed to do additional research for the novel, in particular for the fall of Saigon and the making of Apocalypse Now. Since the fall of Saigon is the opening sequence, I researched that before I began writing, and read every book and some articles that had been written about it. I found many useful anecdotes and vivid details, and I was able to compose a timeline of the fall – or the liberation, depending on one’s point of view – down to the minutes of the last days. That timeline was critical for the pacing of the sequence. As for Apocalypse Now, I researched that while I was writing the novel, in anticipation of that sequence, and again read all the books about the movie and Francis Ford Coppola. In addition, I did a considerable amount of online research to fill in many finer details of the novel – street names and maps, logistics of military organizations and bureaucracies, the plot to take back Vietnam, CIA torture techniques, and the like. I think doing enough historical research to stimulate one’s writing is necessary, but writers shouldn’t wait to write until they think they’ve researched everything. In that case, you’ll never write anything at all. Do enough to start, and save the rest as necessary while you write.
How long did it take you to write this novel, and what was your overall
process?
A little over two years. The context, however, is that I suffered for well over a decade writing a short story collection before the novel. That was a miserable experience, but it apparently taught me a great deal about literary craft. It was like the wax-on, wax-off training sequence in The Karate Kid, which Daniel (Ralph Macchio’s character) hated but which paid off in his sudden ability to defend himself. Coming to the novel was like ceasing to do chores and getting to do the fun stuff. I was lucky that I had two years off from teaching due to a fellowship and sabbaticals, and I wrote four hours a day every day of the week, in the mornings and early afternoons. Then I’d go to the gym and run on a treadmill for an hour, which was a very important part of the process. I was inspired by Haruki Murakami, although he runs marathons outdoors. I like air conditioning. After 15 minutes or so, the runner’s high would kick in and all kinds of ideas would start emerging in my mind about the next day’s writing. That’s how I plotted the novel, because I only had a two-page synopsis when I began. I had the broad strokes, but the details came from the running and the momentum of writing. I wrote a chapter a month, which included a first draft and a revision. By the end of the second year, I had a full draft that had already been revised once. I did one more revision in a few months, and that was what was sold. It was 170,000 words. Working with my editor, I cut it down to 145,000 words in a matter of weeks. That involved trimming back language and cutting a few scenes, but keeping the structure intact.
What motivated you to write your nonfiction book Nothing Ever Dies?
I’m a scholar. I had spent a decade researching Nothing Ever Dies while I was also writing short stories. All that research about the Vietnam War – and all the thinking about theories of representation and ethical memory that I processed during that time – fed into the novel. The novel’s explicitly political and philosophical, and that came from my academic work. Some readers don’t like that, but to me, most contemporary American fiction seems to lack any kind of serious politics or serious ideas. The novel likewise influenced the writing of Nothing Ever Dies, injecting it with fictional strategies of rhythm, emotion, and narrative. Fiction and nonfiction accomplish very different things, but they can overlap. I wanted my fiction to seem nonfictional, and my nonfiction to seem fictional. At the same time, in fiction I could say things I couldn’t get away with in nonfiction without footnotes. And in nonfiction, I could make things explicit that I couldn’t say in fiction because of the viewpoint of my protagonist.
How do you view The Sympathizer in the tradition of war novels, not only in American literature but other literature as well?
When most people think “war novel,” they think of soldiers’ stories. The Sympathizer has those. But it also has the stories of civilians. Implicitly, the novel insists that a true war story has to take into account not just combat and soldiers, but civilians, the home front, and the military-industrial complex. For me, war is more than guns and shooting. That’s the spectacle that distracts us from how pervasive war is throughout a society and how it makes all of us complicit through things like paying taxes and watching horrifying images on TV without doing anything to stop them from happening. I was inspired by unconventional war novels like [Kurt Vonnegut’s] Slaughterhouse Five and [Louis-Ferdinand] Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, which begins in World War I and then goes all over the place. And António Lobo Antunes’ The Land at the End of the World, about Portugal’s Angolan War and how it never ended for its protagonist. Wars don’t end just because politicians say they do – that’s another key point of The Sympathizer.
How did you decide on your protagonist and his political leanings?
Making him a spy, and choosing the spy novel as a defining genre for my book, came immediately to me. I wanted to tell a serious story and an entertaining story, and spy novels have a long tradition of being able to do both through authors like Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, and John Le Carré, to name just three. To make my narrator a mixed-race person of French and Vietnamese heritage was also logical, because part of the seriousness of the novel was about the conflict of race, culture, nation, and difference that involved Vietnam, France, the United States, and all of the East versus West stereotyping that has saturated European and American thinking about Asia. So my character as a spy was going to be involved in many major political events, and as a Eurasian was going to be constantly dwelling on his duality, which would stand in for a universal sense of duality. Part of that duality extended to his politics, which were, on the one hand, a commitment to communism, and on the other hand, an infatuation with American culture and capitalism. He would be very capable of criticizing American culture and capitalism, but he would love them, too, and that capacity would influence his views on the failures of communism. I wanted this novel to be very political but not dogmatic, and making my narrator ambivalent in this way helps to prevent that slide into dogmatism.
What are some major literary influences on your fiction? Can you comment on specific evidence of influences, if any?
From American literature: [Herman] Melville and [William] Faulkner’s interrogation of flawed American character and ambition, especially around racial sin; Joseph Heller’s satire and humor; dashes of [Nathaniel] Hawthorne’s allegorical sensibility and [Edgar Allan] Poe’s haunting; [Ralph Waldo] Emerson’s philosophical gaze on the American self; the whole tradition of African-American literature and its vital sense of anger and sorrow and its deep critique of the American horror, especially as found in Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison, whose Invisible Man I am deeply engaged with and against in The Sympathizer. From European and Latin American literature: Gabriel García Márquez’s use of history and national culture as his palette; [Fyodor] Dostoevsky, who influenced Ellison, and whose focus on insanity, interiority, and interrogation, and on crime and guilt, in books like Notes from the Underground, The Brothers Karamazov, and Crime and Punishment were fundamental to me; [Louis-Ferdinand] Céline and his willingness to reject realism, sending his protagonist from the trenches of World War I to Africa to Detroit and back to France in the span of a hundred pages, which inspired me to think I could cover vast territory as well; Günther Grass’s The Tin Drum did similar work for me and made me want to come up with a protagonist who could be at the center of war and history, too; [Charles] Baudelaire’s images, which I read to fire up my own imagination as I reworked every single sentence in search of an image; W.G. Sebald, whose melancholic meditations on the inescapable tragedy of the past are very important to me, as is his digressive, sprawling style; and finally [António] Lobo Antunes and his dense, imagistic prose, which served as the catalyst for my own. I read a few pages of his novel every day, and when I started to get hot, I began to write.
Your novel is certainly heavy with prose, and yet quite scenic. Why did you go with a relatively experimental method of no punctuation of dialogue?
I like high modernism and low genre. I’m bored by middlebrow literary realism, which seems to be the dominant mode of contemporary American fiction. I don’t care about quotation marks and directing the reader and making things easy for the reader. I don’t want my fiction to be an example of the MFA style of “show, don’t tell,” of giving the reader a window onto reality, of lending a sense of transparency to the prose. Stylistically, I wanted something dense, image-heavy, and digressive, because I like those things. But I think they also serve purposes in relation to my narrator and my subject. He’s writing under interrogation, and he’s defiant. His interrogator wants straightforward, simple writing, and our spy won’t do that. He’s trapped in his own head, his own memories, and the style expresses that sense of being trapped, in this case in words and images. At the same time, I also wanted the novel to be constantly moving forward, and that’s why I use the generic conventions of [a] spy novel, hardboiled detective story, political thriller, immigrant saga, historical fiction, black comedy. The dense words are moved forward by the plot, or so I hope. The density of the words, meanwhile, serve as a screen over the actions of the plot, a filter that the reader notices and through which he or she must see.
Setting is very important in this novel. Can you tell us how you went about creating setting?
I wanted settings to be clear but not overly described. Not Dickensian. Not concerned with very fine details you might find in realistic fiction, like long descriptions of scenery, or furniture, or food, and so on. I think the description of settings tends to be cinematic, because I use details sparingly, and focus not only on material or geographical things, but also on people and moods. One example is the General’s liquor store and the gathering of exiled southern Vietnamese veterans. I spend little amounts of time on the neighborhood; on some of the store’s contents; on the clothing and comportment and mindset of the veterans; and then move towards the General and his wife, Madame; and onwards to the reporter interviewing them, Sonny; and then finally to Sonny and our narrator meeting. The camera, in other words, gradually moves in from outside to inside, from wide angle to close up. Each part of this move isn’t oversaturated with details, but the accumulation of a few details for each move adds up to describing the entire setting and atmosphere.
What tips do you have for beginning fiction writers?
Plan for the long haul. If you’re extremely talented and lucky, you’ll be famous in a few years. Most of us, including me, are neither that talented nor lucky. It took me 20 years of writing before I could write The Sympathizer. I got to that point by writing a lot, reading a lot, and enduring a lot. The practice of writing is a kind of self-instruction that no number of writing workshops can teach you. You have to learn how to do it yourself. The writing makes you a writer, it builds your discipline, enhances your talent, and draws forth the reserves of your character. Reading deeply in your preferred genre or style is very important, because there you learn the tradition you want to belong to or go against. Reading deeply in one category also reveals a basic truth – most of any one thing is bad. Knowing what’s bad and what’s been done before allows you to be good and original. Read widely to learn from people far afield from you, in genre, style, concern, culture, national origin. Become tough through exposure to the opinions of others, through which you will eventually learn your own genuine opinion of your writing. Rejection is hard to deal with, but so is the persistent sense that no one cares about what you’re doing. Learning your own opinion of your writing is saying that you have to learn what you want to write and who you are as a writer. In the end, writing because you care about writing, and writing to be true to yourself, are the only things that matter. And that is how you survive the long haul to becoming a writer, not because of the lures of publication, fame, or profit.
Jack Smith is author of numerous articles, reviews, and interviews, three novels, and a book on writing entitled Write and Revise for Publication.
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Pronoun Sets New Self-Publishing Author Royalty Rate
Pronoun, the self-publishing platform acquired by Macmillan in May 2016, announced new author royalty rates for e-books sold in the U.S. and Canada, in addition to launching Pronoun Author Pages, a feature that will allow Pronoun authors to create customizable web pages free of charge.
Beginning on January 17, authors publishing books via Pronoun can earn 70% of the list price as a royalty on books sold in the U.S. and Canada, priced at $9.99 or less, and can earn 65% of the list price for a book priced above $9.99. Previously, Pronoun authors selling books for less than $2.99 received a 35% royalty, similar to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program.
Pronoun president Josh Brody said: “We’ve spent the past year listening closely to authors and are proud to announce better royalties as part of our continued pursuit of publishing success for authors.”
Although Pronoun launched in 2015 with an offer of “a 100% author royalty rate,” the company has ceased that claim, calling the language “confusing" and noting that "there is a clearer way to communicate the new benefits." Pronoun head of marketing Justin Renard said the offer actually meant “no charges on each e-book sale.” Authors, he said, can still produce their e-books via the Pronoun platform free of charge.
Pronoun also offers authors distribution to one or more of the major e-book retailers, among them Amazon Kindle, Apple iBooks, Barnes & Noble Nook, Kobo, and Google Play. Although Pronoun-published e-books must be distributed to Amazon, either by Pronoun or separately by the author, Pronoun authors can designate to Pronoun where their e-books should be sold.
Pronoun also allows authors to give away free books (such as the first title in a series) and offers pre-ordering for new titles. Pronoun Author Pages are customizable web pages that allow authors to post photos, author biographies, and links to social media accounts, and to add other consumer info. Details about the book are automatically added from the Pronoun book database.
Originally founded as Vook, an early e-book and multimedia technology platform, Pronoun was formed in 2015 by CEO Josh Brody after the acquisition of a number of e-book and e-book data–collecting companies. Among the acquired companies that formed Pronoun are Booklr (a data analysis service for e-book sales founded by Brody), Byliner (a literary e-book publisher), and Coliloquy (a choose-your-own-adventure platform using enhanced e-books and apps). Pronoun was acquired by Macmillan in 2016.
In an interview at the PW offices, Pronoun CEO Josh Brody said the company has spent the past six months integrating into its new parent company. Brody claimed the new royalty rates are among “the best in the market” and offer “flexibility on pricing and distribution.” He described Pronoun Author Pages as “an easy to use tool that allows authors to be professional without being an expert [in web development].”
Brody said Pronoun also derives revenue from a variety of publishing and data analysis partnerships with such companies as Forbes, the New York Times, and others. Brody declined to give out a figure for the current number of authors making use of the Pronoun platform.
“We’re taking a longterm view of the self-publishing market in an effort to attract authors to our platform," Brody said. "We think developing a vibrant user base will provide better opportunities both for us and for our authors."
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Collecting Poems into a Book: 5 Poets Share Their Method
I’ve been enjoying going through previous poet interviews to see how poets have shared common experiences–often in unique ways. So here’s one more directed around the concept of collecting poems into a book.
*****
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In addition to the listings, there are articles on the craft, business, and promotion of poetry–so that poets can learn the ins and outs of writing poetry and seeking publication. Plus, it includes a one-year subscription to the poetry-related information on WritersMarket.com. All in all, it’s the best resource for poets looking to secure publication.
*****
Ha Ha Ha Thump, by Amorak Huey
Amorak Huey for Ha Ha Ha Thump
“I had written an earlier manuscript of poems about blues music and blues musicians that for a long time I truly thought would be my first book. I sent that out repeatedly—55 times over two years—and it came close several times, but never found a home. That’s probably for the best, as such things usually are in hindsight.
“Anyway, while I was sending that out, I was also writing new poems, and eventually, I had a lot of them, and I put together a manuscript and started sending out that one, too. It didn’t land, either, but I kept writing poems, and eventually had so many that I split that manuscript in two, and one of those was Ha Ha Ha Thump. It went through a number of revisions along the way, and eventually Sundress took it.”
(Read complete Amorak Huey interview.)
Megan Volpert on assembling poems for collections
“Yes, I’ve basically stopped thinking about each piece in isolation. They each have to stand alone, of course, but more and more often I am beginning with the big idea then drilling down to determine its component parts. I know what sort of machines I’m after, so I really proceed more from what the total function of the book will be and then write bits and pieces as I stumble across applications of the project’s main functions in my daily life.
Only Ride, by Megan Volpert
“Only Ride, in particular, is based on a series of constraints. It’s all prose poems between 95 and 110 words, with titles that are complete sentences. My previous collection was the Warhol thing, which was so sprawling and research heavy that I really wanted to work on something more compact and minimal next. I typed most of them on my phone, on the train during my morning commute. I’d let a batch sit in my notepad for a month or so, then revise the whole pile over a couple hours on a weekend. I knew my subjects, so when I reached my target of 66 pieces, I laid them all out on the floor and organized first based on chronological order of the events in the poems then for the right emotional arch within each subject or time period.
“Other stuff can present itself for more obvious arrangement, for example, the 1976 book will report historical events in a straightforward chronological order, one month per chapter. I do prefer organic methods like that. My first two collections still feel well organized, but I agonized over those little piecemeal frankensteins, which in hindsight seems unnecessary.”
(Read entire Megan Volpert interview.)
Todd Davis on assembling poems for collections
“I’m very much a daily writer and thinker. My mind tends to gravitate toward certain subjects based upon my experiences—in the woods, on the rivers, with the books I’m reading.
“For example, yesterday I was deep in on a small stream in the 41,000 acres of game lands above the village where I live. My son and I were taking a long hike and fishing for native brook trout. I came across an amazing caterpillar on the walk—it was lime green with what looked like small spines or quills covering its body. At the end of these spines where bright, vivid colors—red and yellow and blue. I hadn’t seen this caterpillar before, and when I returned home, with the help of the photos I took, I was able to spend time looking through my field guides, discovering that this was the caterpillar that would later turn into a cecropia moth (Hyalophora cecropia), the largest native moth in North America.
“Several years ago at the top of the mountain above our village, I was hiking on an extremely foggy morning. Mornings like this many flying creatures settle to earth because nature’s “ground traffic control” has cancelled their flights. I’ve come across a kettle of kestrel and other beautiful raptors on mornings like this. That particular morning, however, it wasn’t raptors that I found but a cecropia moth clinging to a long blade of grass in a meadow. I spent more than 30 minutes photographing it, studying it, trying to express how enamored I was by its beauty. (Yes, I tend to talk to the natural world!)
“I tell you this story because, like William Stafford whose example means a great deal to me, I go daily into the world simply to be with the miraculous range of human and nonhuman creatures, to observe what is unfolding, to attend to what is too often ignored. Out of this act of paying attention, I write my poems, trying to spend a few hours at my desk each day.
“After a few years I begin to see the patterns of what the act of paying attention has afforded me. Once I feel the body of a book beginning to take shape, I place poems on the floor of my office and start to see what happens when a poem makes neighbors with another poem. It’s a bit like chemical reactions. Just as individual images or sounds in a poem, when juxtaposed with other images or sounds in the same poem, cause a reaction between them, so do individual poems in a collection. It’s fun to see how a poem will be transformed when it finds a particular place in a collection.”
(Read whole Todd Davis interview.)
Hive, by Christina Stoddard
Christina Stoddard on assembling Hive
“I’m not sure the process was at all typical. Most of the poems in Hive are written in the voice of a teenage girl who’s coping with a lot of violence, which in turn leads her to push against the confines of who her family wants her to be and the existence of the God she’s been raised to believe in. But that girl is a persona I discovered halfway into writing the book, not something I was consciously trying to create when I started.
“The truth is that I had actually written two other poetry manuscripts before Hive. I tried sending those manuscripts out to book contests and never got anywhere, so in 2011 I sat down to interrogate and overhaul them after getting some good advice from a mentor. As I did that, I realized there were a few recurring themes and decided to concentrate on those. This adolescent girl kept showing up, too, a voice who would eventually become the speaker in Hive. It’s amazing what you can learn about your writerly obsessions by reading hundreds of pages of your own work in one sitting.
“So when I put together the collection, I did it by choosing poems from my entire body of work over the past ten years. In a way, you could say that the earliest versions of Hive were curated rather than written, but it didn’t stay that way for long. Although I cannibalized my other manuscripts to get material for Hive, as things evolved and I figured out what Hive wanted to be, I ended up throwing out most of those older poems and writing new ones. Only five of the 40 poems in Hive’s table of contents were written prior to 2011, and all of them have been reworked considerably.
“If you’re wondering what happened to the first two manuscripts I wrote, they are moldering away in my file cabinet where they’ll probably never see the light of day again. But I’m okay with that. Even though it can feel impossible to let go of something that isn’t working, especially when you’ve put so much effort into it, sometimes letting go is the best choice. In economics, that phenomenon is called the sunk cost fallacy; people are extremely reluctant to give up on anything they’ve already invested in or purchased, even when it’s unwise or unhealthy not to.
“Hive is a significantly better book than the others. I couldn’t have written it without having first done those practice runs, even if I didn’t realize at the time that they were only practice.”
(Read full Christina Stoddard interview.)
Traci Brimhall on assembling Our Lady of the Ruins
“I feel like the poems cohered as I chose a final ordering for the book, though I didn’t write the poems with a certain structure or overarching narrative in mind. I knew all my poems were about a mid-apocalyptic wandering, but the nature of the poems ranged really widely as I wrote. I cut over a couple dozen poems from the final draft because they didn’t fit with the narrative that emerged through ordering.”
(Read complete Traci Brimhall interview.)
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Robert Lee Brewer is the editor of Poet’s Market and author of Solving the World’s Problems. Follow him on Twitter @robertleebrewer.
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LitHub Daily: January 17, 2017
The Best of the Literary Internet, Every Day
TODAY: In 2002, Nobel Prize-winning novelist, essayist, and short-story writer Camilo José Cela dies.
“The role of stories to unify—as opposed to divide, to engage rather than to marginalize—is more important than ever.” President Obama discusses books and his love of reading with Michiko Kakutani. | The New York Times
“Language is the tool we use to build our political and democratic structures.” How writers are resisting Trump (and suggestions on how to give back). | Boston.com, GOOD Magazine
I think genre is as much a lie as gender is: An interview with Eula Biss. | Fiction Advocate
Following Trump’s attacks of him, Rep. John Lewis’ memoir Walking With the Wind and National Book Award-winning graphic novel March sold out on Amazon. | The Washington Post
You’ll be so fancy, sending your e-mails: An adapted excerpt from Elif Batuman’s The Idiot. | The New Yorker
Svetlana Alexievich and 30 other writers have quit the Russian PEN center to protest the expulsion of journalist Sergey Parkhomenko. | The Guardian
Zhou Youguang, the inventor of Pinyin—which is responsible for both “boost[ing] literacy rates in China and bridg[ing] the divide between the country and the West”—died on Saturday. | NPR
Valeria Luiselli, Edwidge Danticat, and more: Exciting books from indie presses in 2017. | HTMLGIANT
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Promoting The Backlist
Few terms are more discouraging to authors than backlist. If a book is backlisted, that means it has slipped to the back pages of the publisher’s catalogue, it now gets little or no attention from booksellers, and (worst of all) there is no longer any budget for promotion.
I’m very familiar with the problem. My most recent book, Soup Night, was released in October 2013. It was Storey’s lead title that season, on the cover of the catalogue, and thoroughly and successfully promoted by hardworking publicists. Then, six months later, a whole new crop of books came along, and the cycle started anew for those books. That’s reality. Now, two-plus years later, my book is firmly backlist. I’m faced with two choices: (1) let the book ride on its own momentum, live with the declining sales, and whine, or else (2) do something about it.
I chose the second option. I decided to create a program that I hoped would be irresistible: I would offer to do events in public libraries in small towns.
Why libraries? Because they’re a natural place to find book lovers. Why not bookstores? Because we all know they are doing fewer and fewer author events these days. Why small towns? Because they are much more excited about hosting visiting authors, and because their local newspapers are much more amenable to feature stories.
The program I developed is called Soup and Books. I do a show-and-tell for three of my books (all now backlisted): how I got each initial idea, how I developed that idea into a book, and how I found the best publisher for each. The third book is Soup Night, and at this point the presentation segues into the main portion of the program, the part that everybody likes: we actually host a soup night right in the library. Folks sample homemade soup and bread while I talk about the soup night tradition and tell stories of soup groups all around the country.
I pinpointed libraries in small and midsize towns within a four-hour drive of my home in Portland, Ore. From a list of 72 libraries in Oregon and Washington, 38 said yes. That’s a return rate of almost 53%; by comparison, direct marketers consider 1%–2% a good response.
My idea worked because libraries these days see themselves as community centers, and it helped that my soup book is all about creating community. It also helped that my books are in print. Thank you, Workman and Storey!
But the main reason my proposal was so well received, I believe, is that I offered a full event: not just a reading, not just a talk, but a complete package. And free food never hurts! I made it easy for the libraries. I created a checklist to summarize the specific arrangements with each library and sent it to them three weeks ahead. (Turns out, librarians love checklists.) If the travel distance was minimal, I provided the soup and all the service items. I came early to help set up and stayed late to help clean up. Some libraries opted to provide the soup, using either a local caterer, staff members who enjoy cooking, or volunteers. I made sure to introduce the volunteer cooks to the audience and thanked them at the end with a small gift bag. And I sent a handwritten thank-you note to each librarian the very next day.
I also helped with publicity. After checking with each librarian, I contacted local media in the town, offering an interview (and photos) to supplement the standard press release that most libraries do. The response was astonishing: a half-dozen full-page, full-color feature stories, plus many smaller articles. Now, these are small-town papers, often weeklies, but everybody in town reads them, and they generate lots of buzz and bring in very enthusiastic audiences. Thirty-eight libraries and nearly 1,000 miles later, I can say unequivocally that it was an amazing experience. I won’t deny this: it’s a lot of work—but well worth the effort, in every possible way.
It’s impossible to quantify future bookstore sales triggered by promotions like this, but I have no doubt that it helps. My reward, though, is more immediate. Seeing people respond so warmly to the idea of soup night and being inspired to start a program of their own is rewarding. Many librarians told me that people came up to them afterward and said: “This was great. The library should do a regular soup night.”
I agree. And please invite me—I’d love to come.
Maggie Stuckey is the author of 11 adult trade books, most about cooking or gardening.
A version of this article appeared in the 05/16/2016 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Promoting The Backlist
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January 16, 2017
Adult Nonfiction Stayed Hot in 2016
Even though no adult coloring book sold as well in 2016 as the bestsellers in 2015 did, the adult nonfiction category, which includes those titles, posted the biggest unit gains among the major print categories last year, according to data from Nielsen BookScan. Units in the crafts/hobbies/antiques/games segment led the increase, with units jumping 75% over 2015. That increase was due mainly to the sheer number of new adult coloring books released in 2016; there were 3,500 adult coloring book ISBNs issued in 2016, a 108% increase from 2015, and unit sales rose 48%.
Other genres within adult nonfiction that had double-digit unit gains in the year were self-help and religion/Bibles, which both had 13% increases, and the relatively small arts segment, in which units rose 12%. In self-help, the increase was due in part to the tremendous success of You Are a Badass by Jen Sincero, which sold almost 458,000 copies last year. The religion/Bibles area was led by two Sarah Young books, Jesus Calling and Jesus Always, which sold a total of more than 961,000 copies last year. The segment also benefited from the inclusion of sales from Family Christian Stores, which did not report results to BookScan in 2015.
The art/architecture genre had the biggest unit drop of the year within adult nonfiction, with units down 18% from 2015. The area is home to many adult coloring books. In both 2015 and 2016, the #1 book in the category was Animal Kingdom: Color Me, Draw Me; in 2015, it sold more than 331,000 copies, but the book only sold 133,000 copies last year.
Unit sales rose 4% in the juvenile fiction category in 2016, led by a 17% increase in the science fiction/fantasy/magic genre. Sales in that segment were dominated by J.K. Rowling titles. Her script book, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, was the top title of the year, with 4.4 million units sold, and five other Rowling books were among the segment’s top-10 sellers, with a total of about two million copies sold last year. Units fell in three other genres within the category, with the most significant decline coming in the social situations/family/health area.
The juvenile nonfiction category managed to eke out a 1% unit gain last year, even though units in games/activities/hobbies fell 21%. That decline was partly due to two Johanna Basford adult coloring , which were part of the segment in 2015, when they sold about 1.5 million copies. The drop in sales in this area was offset by double-digit increases in three others: holidays/festivals/religion, education/reference/language, and animals. My First Read and Learn Bible was the top-selling title in the holidays/festivals/religion genre, selling almost 156,000 copies. The #1 seller in the education/reference/language segment was The Pokemon Deluxe Essential Handbook, which sold more than 407,000 copies. The animals segment was topped by, appropriately enough, Animals, which sold more than 224,000 copies.
Print unit sales fell 1% in adult fiction in 2016, as a number of genres had double-digit declines. While most of the declining areas were those most affected by sales of e-books (such as romance and mystery), unit sales of classics fell 19%. In 2015, the classics genre benefited from the release of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, which led to a surge in sales of her To Kill a Mockingbird. Offsetting the declines were a 12% unit sales increase general fiction—the largest fiction area—and an 11% gain in graphic novels.
A version of this article appeared in the 01/16/2017 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: Adult Nonfiction Stayed Hot in 2016
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Ottava Rima: Poetic Form | WritersDigest.com
For the first poetic form of 2017, let’s take a look at ottava rima.
Ottava Rima Poems
With an Italian origin, the earliest known ottava rima were written by Giovanni Boccaccio. In English, Lord Byron used the form to write Don Juan. More contemporary English poets to use the form include William Butler Yeats and Kenneth Koch.
Ottava rima are 8 lines with an abababcc rhyme scheme, most commonly written in iambic pentameter (or 10-syllable lines). The form can work as a stand alone poem, or be used as connecting stanzas.
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Learn how to write sestina, shadorma, haiku, monotetra, golden shovel, and more with The Writer’s Digest Guide to Poetic Forms, by Robert Lee Brewer.
This e-book covers more than 40 poetic forms and shares examples to illustrate how each form works. Discover a new universe of poetic possibilities and apply it to your poetry today!
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Here’s my comic books inspired attempt at an Ottava Rima:
Baton Passing, by Robert Lee Brewer
Once upon a time, or so it is said,
there was a comic hero named The Flash,
and on every cover he appeared dead
or on the cusp of dying as a rash
of crimes broke loose with no one in his stead
until they finally unveiled Kid Flash
who appealed to younger generations
with his bright colors and observations.
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Robert Lee Brewer is Senior Content Editor of the Writer’s Digest Writing Community and author of Solving the World’s Problems (Press 53). Follow him on Twitter @RobertLeeBrewer.
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