Richard S. Wheeler's Blog, page 21

Down With Remotes

On my chairside table are three remotes. The cable company remote is supposed to be universal, and has 60 buttons. The one for my DVD player has 45 buttons. The one for my TV has 42 buttons. I have little idea what most of these are for. The instruction manuals only add to the confusion. I do know that I sometimes can't sort out which ones to press, and when, and get either no results or wrong results.

I don't know why we have 60-button remotes, and they offend me. I fantasize about them. I think that the lunatics who designed these devices should be rounded up and made to pay a price for their madness. My fantasy is to give each of them a 60-button remote, and then they should be told to select a certain ten buttons and press them in the proper sequence, and if they get it right they live, and if they fail, off with their heads. There would then be some justice restored to the world.

The Gift Publishers Gave Us

The are called "Legacy Publishers" these days for reasons that escape me. But I've known them all my life as the traditional publishers who created our literary world. They were, and are, mostly in New York, and many were there when I was a boy, long ago. I'm talking about Alfred Knopf, Simon and Schuster, Doubleday, William Morrow, Viking, and many more of that sort.

They had a number of functions. One of these was the selection of material. They, along with literary agents who did their own selecting, rejected countless manuscripts while selecting only the few that any house could produce. I once read that Doubleday alone received 50,000 manuscripts annually, most of them "over the transom," that is, unsolicited and not submitted by an agent. Doubleday employed a corps of readers, most of them young ladies from the Seven Sisters with appropriate backgrounds, to examine these submissions, weed out a few good prospects and return the rest with rejection slips.

Of course the selection process with imperfect. There are many stories about the novels that were published with great success after having been rejected by other houses. That is the nature of art. But many of the rejections were simply based on mismatches. Hopeful authors had submitted their manuscripts to houses that had no interest in publishing the sort of material they were offering.

The selection process was long, and often tied up a manuscript for years. It sometimes took three or four months to have a story accepted or rejected. But that is a mark of the value of the process. It meant that the publishers really did look at the material. It meant that busy editors did find time to evaluate the stories in the "slushpile" as the stack of unread manuscripts was called.

The result was that the reading public was spared the ordeal of reading one mediocre story after another. But the publishers did much more: They also edited and copyedited and packaged the novels. And by editing I don't mean merely checking the spelling. Most of my early novels were returned to me by editors who asked for revisions, some of them major. Maybe the story was slow and needed cutting. Maybe a character wasn't believable. Maybe a scene failed. Maybe the beginning didn't hook readers well. Maybe the ending didn't work. Whatever the case, gifted editors devoted a lot of time to improving the stories, cutting here, adding there, until the end product was far superior to the original manuscript. Then the copyeditors set to work, not only dealing with spelling, punctuation, and sentence structure, but also with style and meaning of words. And while all this was going on, gifted people were packaging the story, designing covers that would sell the book, writing flap copy.

In short, what the "legacy publishers" did was create a good literary project to offer to the reading public. Obviously, art being art, there were bad choices, but most of what was produced was remarkably good, and fostered a golden age of American fiction.

When I look at the sea of self-published material that has never been vetted or improved, I wonder how often readers of that stuff have been disappointed, and having been burned a few times too many, now prefer to buy novels that have a publisher's pedigree.

Cover Art

Back in the eighties and early nineties when I made my living from traditional westerns, New York cover illustrators and designers would package my mass-market novel s in ways that they knew would sell well. Later, of course, I began writing big historical novels, and the New york illustrators would put entirely different sorts of covers on them. In artistic terms, they were all very conservative.

My Santiago Toole westerns were traditionally packaged by Ballantine and then Fawcett Gold Medal. Eventually, I got them back and arranged with Sunstone Press in Santa Fe to reprint them. The press is a distinguished publisher of regional western material, and usually contracted with local artists to do their covers. They employed a gifted Santa Fe artist to do the covers for this series.

The difference between illustrator work and art has always fascinated me. New York publishers design their covers for sales, and have deep experience generating cover illustrations that move the books off the racks. They designed a cover for my novel, The Final Tally, that helped it sell very well, and pushed into into subsequent printings. The art for the Sunstone Edition is vivid and evocative-- and did nothing for my sales.

People looking for a western on the mass-market racks need certain visual prompts, and pass over any books that don't meet their preconceptions. Here is the very traditional cover for the novel, as generated by Fawcett:


And here is the Sunstone Press cover, with truly evocative and elegant art:


In a better world, the best art would sell the most books.

I discovered that the cover art I displayed at my blog didn't transfer here. To read this post with the illustrations in place, go here:

http://wheelertitles.blogspot.com/

Amazon's Lending Library

I believe that Amazon's lending library scheme is seriously undermining the economic value of all literature. The company induces authors to submit their books to the company's lending program, by offering an arbitrary sum based on each borrowing. The author must remove the title from all other venues, such as the competitive Nook store at Barnes and Noble, and thus forgoes that income for at least three months.

Amazon's purpose, of course, is to build the loyalty of Kindle owners, by offering them freebies. They can "borrow" a title from the lending library with no due date. In other words, they get a book free, and supposedly become committed to Kindles, where there are endless books available for nothing at all. Why buy books at all?

There are numerous effects here. One is that this vast library of free books lessens demand for other books, thus lowering their value. Why buy anything if one can read endlessly for free? The other aspect is that the program milks the value of the title. When an author removes the title from the lending library and tries to sell it once again, he won't be able to do much with it, and may end up lowering the sale price down to virtually nothing. In other words, once a title is retrieved, it's more or less dead.

Unless an author is greatly in demand, or the book is a rare top-seller, the chances will be that the title is history, and has no value. Even though authors are making a few bucks out of the fund set by Amazon (and subject to change), they are ultimately facing the devaluation of their product.

We live in a time when intellectual property is losing value, in part because technology makes copyright nearly worthless. A book can be copied, transmitted, stolen, ripped off, and so can other sorts of intellectual property, such as music. But Amazon is worsening the process, using its almost monopolistic power in the digital world to lower the value of our products.

I am weighing whether or not to pull all my digital titles from Amazon, and thereby save their value to some extent for future sales. It may be too little and too late. Many authors have found that they can't sell their stories for a buck, or even for forty-nine cents. The economic value of most titles is effectively zero, and Amazon's doing its best to deprive authors of their long-term living.

Decline

Authors my age worry about decline. We wonder whether we're heading downslope, long past our peak, and whether we should quit writing before we wreck whatever reputation and readership and loyalties we have won over the years.

There are the telltale signs. The work goes slower than when we were young and quick. We forget things. We don't have the critical sense we once did. We're so used to pounding out stories that we write by rote instead of employing originality. We have a billion or so fewer brain cells than we once had.

It is also true that some writers much older than I are churning out fine novels, with no decline at all. Elmore Leonard comes to mind. The late Elmer Kelton was producing fine novels into his 80s. Philip Roth generates one fine novel after another, and he's two years older than I am. So there's always hope. Some old guys and gals are doing just fine at an advanced age.

I had thought I was doing very well. My Butte novel, out last fall, got a starred review from Kirkus, and a slew of superb reviews in various venues. But maybe not. I have written a few novels for a western author franchise in the last few years, the novels appearing under the byline of the late author. One appeared recently that has been trashed beyond anything I've ever encountered. It is, according to reader reviews, dull, boring, stupid, unreadable, badly written, and on and on, with most of the reviewers giving it one star, or maybe two. In 35 or so years of writing fiction, I've never experienced anything like that.

That, to put it plainly, is a red flag that says something about my late-life writing skills. And it makes me weigh the prospect of putting my writing aside, and living the rest of my years in quietness. I'm overdue to step off the train.

Writing a Mystery

I'm working on a new mystery, and it is not exactly writing itself. A mystery depends heavily on characterization. Mysteries are, in fact, character-driven. The sleuth's own character is critically important, and so is the character of the criminal, as well as his or her victims. What's more, murder mysteries are built on relationships. In most mysteries, the killer has had some sort of relationship to the victim or victims, and these relationships supply motives and rationales. The sleuth must have a shrewd grasp of how the world works, and how people get along or don't get along.

Writing a mystery is many times harder than writing western fiction, which is largely plot-driven and devoid of character. I find, as I evolve the mystery, that I really need to know my characters, including their history, attitudes, and understanding of life. That is one reason some people tend to favor mysteries and ignore westerns. Ask the faculty members of any university English Department what they read and many will say they enjoy mysteries.

In the current story, the victim is a criminal herself, and her crimes are motivated by a twisted fanaticism with roots in religion. In fact, the story begins with a shooting in a church basement, where a potluck supper is in progress. My detective hero, Lieutenant Joe Sonntag, has to work through all these obsessions and discover why several people have died mysteriously, and what belief has to do with it all.

I'm working in a fertile field, and believe it will be a good novel.

The Last One

I realized recently that I've written my last Western. I've drifted from them for a long time, preferring historical fiction, but still wrote one now and then. No more.

The Westerns I grew up with, read constantly, and later wrote, were profoundly different from the ones on the racks now. There is a widening gulf between early and modern westerns. Much of it has to do with violence. The coarsening tastes of our times demand more violence, depicted graphically, and without the moral or social restraints of the past. In the older westerns, heroes resorted to their weapons reluctantly and only in grave circumstances and the violence itself was veiled. Today's heroes have an entirely different attitude.

These modern novels are gun porn. The plot and characters are largely props to display the real meat of the novel, which is killing by various means. These modern stories have much to do with male rivalry, and less to do with character. I have always preferred character-driven stories, but those are mostly absent now on the Western racks.

The new, violent sort of Western story is popular, and its authors are earning good money writing them. I've read the reviews they give one another, and there is no doubt in my mind that they earnestly believe they are writing excellent novels. I won't argue that with them. If they believe a fast pace with "action" on each page is the definition of good storytelling, that is simply how it is. I think this shift of values is somewhat generational, though not entirely. And if, in turn, they find my somewhat slower, character-driven stories unsatisfying, that too is understandable. We inhabit different literary worlds.What it means, for me, is that I have no wish to write stories that might please jaded contemporary readers of genre Western fiction.

My other problem with the contemporary variety is staleness. The names and places change, but the stories are much the same, a ritualized form of male warfare. The sameness that grips Westerns is not true of mysteries. Even though the basic format of most mysteries is the same-- the protagonist must find out who did the killing, and bring him to justice--mysteries depend heavily on human nature and its infinite variation. So most mysteries are fresh. The complex characters, their relationships, and their behavior, keep the stories fresh and absorbing.

So, I'm done with Westerns, which have been an important, and treasured part of my life. And in spite of my disappointment with the stories on the racks these days, I wish their authors success. It takes skill and courage to survive as a professional genre novelist, and these younger people have that in abundance.

The Gentle Giant

Gary Svee is a retired opinion page editor with the Billings Gazette. He's about six-feet-seven, and has fingers as thick as garden hoses. I marvel that he can use a keyboard. He's written several novels, most of them set in the mid-Twentieth Century, from the Great Depression into the sixties.

His favorite subjects involve the poor and downtrodden, and maybe that has to do with growing up in Columbus, Montana, with parents who struggled to stay afloat. His novels deal with subjects such as the landless Indians living on the outskirts of Montana towns, or finding work during the Great Depression, or living under the cloud of a bad reputation. Often his novels are about finding hope, or rescue, during hard times. There are powerful ethical themes running through his stories.

These are all innately literary novels, written to depict the human condition as deeply as possible. They are uniquely Montana stories, drawn from the heart and soul of the people of this state. Most of the novels were initially published in genre western fiction lines, where they don't belong, and that is why they have been overlooked all these years. But they are all much larger than routine western fiction. Two of them have won Spur Awards from Western Writers of America.

He has also written short stories, and one of them, Henry's Christmas, I regard as the finest Montana short fiction I've read. It is eternal.

He is one of Montana's top novelists.

The Telltale Subjects

Yesterday I surveyed several websites and blogs devoted to Indie Publishing, the current definition of self-publication, or rather, printing material one has written. Lightning Press, CreateSpace, etc., are not really publishers; they are printers.

At any rate, I was interested in the content on these "indie" sites. There was plenty about the process of getting printed; the techniques of publicizing your work; promotional tricks of the trade. You can learn about garnering attention at events. Creating covers that help make the book look professional. Collecting endorsements and making them sound important. Looking for ways to start an avalanche of sales. There were hopeful essays about the steps to take to become successful. I found a certain amount of hostility toward "legacy" publishers and their gatekeeping.

There was something missing from these "indie" sites. There was little about how to write better. No discussion of art and craft. No lore of writing. No discussions of how to open a story. No discussion of how to write real dialogue. No discussion of the ways to build character, or show character in relationships. No discussion of endings. No discussion of economy of language, moving a story along, cutting every spare word, rewriting awkward sentences and paragraphs. No discussion of structure, or chapter length, or book titles, or surprise, or uniqueness. No discussion of voice, or mood, or ways to reach deep into a reader's heart. No discussion of the ways an author can evoke a Yes! response in a reader. No discussion of elegance, gracious language, grammar, metaphor, clarity of language, or vocabulary.

In short, none of the "indie" sites was the slightest interested in the creation of good literature, beyond figuring out what might sell well. It dawned on me that these people don't even know what constitutes powerful fiction. They write their stories in the dark, without possessing the means to evaluate or improve their material. Good writing, for them, is writing that replicates something they have read and liked. They apparently have no other model.

It is a miracle that once in a long while, a good novel does arise from the "indie" world.

The focus of the "indie" websites is damning. Well, all these "indie" writers will sell a few to friends and relatives, and their material will vanish into a black hole. Have any of them written anything that will endure for generations?

What Publishers Did for the World

When I was a book editor, I plowed through hundreds of stories. That was my job. I was looking for good stuff. Nearly everything that crossed my desk was competently written, both the material submitted by agents and the manuscripts that came over the transom. Virtually all of it was publishable. I could have taken a handful of manuscripts at random, published them, and added them to the line of novels I was editing.

My publishers imposed no criteria on me: I was free to publish first novels, or even novels I supposed might not sell well, or novels that might not be bought by mass-market houses. Of course my success as an editor depended to some extent on how well my choices did in the marketplace. Mass-market publishers, in particular, were inclined to publish only the sort of story they thought would walk off the racks. But there was room for me to look for stories that were outstanding. Sometimes it would be the author's voice that would persuade me. Sometimes a unique plot, or memorable characters, and often sheer freshness. There was always room for a bright new story in my stable. I tended to turn down derivative stories, same old, same old.

At any rate, I could publish a fraction of one percent of the stories that came my way, even though, as I said above, nearly all were entirely competent and publishable. I think my selectivity was much the same as the selectivity at other print publishers, the ones that modern people for some reason call legacy publishers, a designation I don't fathom.

What we did, actually, was perform a major service to the reading public. The weeding process winnowed out the humdrum stories, and kept them on authors' bedroom shelves where they belonged. They weren't bad stories. Many were pretty good. But we spared the public the problem it has today, wading through mountains of self-published stuff that is okay, but not even worth the $2.99 price.

We editors made our mistakes. Books I rejected became successful sellers and won fine reviews. Conversely, once in a while a self-published, self-edited novel is well worth reading. I certainly would not deny that. But I stoutly insist that our weeding process greatly benefited the whole world of literature, including the authors who were rejected. There is nothing like a pile of rejection slips to inspire an author to try harder, and produce better material.