Christopher Meeks's Blog, page 14
May 28, 2011
A FAN OF ROBERT KRULWICH
If you listen to NPR, you know the voice: the upbeat, inquisitive, even comical voice of science correspondent Robert Krulwich. I recently heard his story about honey bees. He explains well--as he always explains everything well--how when bees are in search of a new hive, it's an absolute democracy. A lone bee, aware that his greater bee friends and workers need a new home, may find a hole in ...
May 22, 2011
Bruce Springsteen - Inspiration and Creative Control
There's a recently installed bust of Bruce Springsteen in Asbury Park, New Jersey, that's getting the wrong kind of attention. That's because the bust is just garish. The concrete statuary has a red bandana painted on it, and if people don't know who he is, the placard says he's a "soulful humanitarian." As numerous blogs have pointed out, Springsteen isn't into this kind of ...
May 16, 2011
SETH GODIN'S LIBRARY OF THE FUTURE
In doing research for the post I put up yesterday on "How to Market Your Book or Watch It Die," I came across the name Seth Godin a few times, and I'd heard of him before. He's worth knowing. He's a futurist in ways that remind me of Alvin Toffler (remember 1970's Future Shock?—we're in that future now.) As he describes himself, Godin is "a writer, a speaker, and an agent of ...
May 15, 2011
MY REALITIES OR "HOW TO MARKET YOUR BOOK OR WATCH IT DIE"
Today is my new novel's publishing day, so I thought I'd write about the marketing it took to get here.I won't bullshit you. The publishing industry is changing fast, and what to do is confusing. Like a bar magnet, the industry has two strong poles: traditional publishing and self-publishing. If you're antsy for what to do, skip over the following history. If you don't know the history, ...
April 18, 2011
HOW TO GO BANKRUPT THANKS TO REALLY GREAT REVIEWS
This is a story about book returns. It's also a story about the bookstore system and what's not working. You'll also hear how success can crush the self-publisher.It's not my story. I didn't go bankrupt--but I could have. What I aim to do here is tell you my experience of publishing well-reviewed books and what you might do in this ever-changing publishing world to get ahead.Here I can't get ...
April 5, 2011
WHERE LITERATURE MEETS SCIENCE—SUCH A PLACE?
Think of a great literary novel that has science or a scientist as background. I'm not talking science fiction, but rather a contemporary novel where, say, the protagonist is in search of love, and rather than his being a boarding school student as in Catcher in the Rye or an architect as in The Fountainhead or even an obsessive record collector as in High Fidelity, he or she is into science.This ...
April 1, 2011
LIKE JACK IN "TITANIC"
Wednesday night: My daughter's Siamese Fighting Fish, Sammy, is dead. She's had the exotic fish with its curtain-like fins for nearly three years--bought it when she was ten. The fish has been rather lethargic for two weeks. Then again, yesterday, it zipped all over its little bowl, more than I've ever seen it move. "Hey, you're all right," I'd told it. "Won't Ellen be ...
March 20, 2011
Stieg Larsson and L.A. Traffic
Long ago, I'd read The Laughing Policeman, a great novel by Maj Sjöwall & Per Wahlöö, Swedish journalists who married and started writing great crime fiction together. Later the book became a movie starring Walter Mathau. Thus, when Stieg Larsson, another Swedish journalist, came along with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I was primed to love it. I didn't. It had so much exposition and ...
March 13, 2011
Las Vegas Reverie
I swear, what you see in Las Vegas can't stay there--you have to talk about it. Or at least I do. My wife Ann and I took a trip there right at the end of the year, and its pleasures and oddities have been on my mind. It's as if Las Vegas is our country's canary in a coal mine, and we have to watch it carefully."Why Vegas?" is the first question to answer. I've never thought of the town ...
March 9, 2011
Literary Prizes--an approach to book marketing?
Last Wednesday in a New York City ceremony, short story writer Anthony Doerr of Boise, Idaho, took the stage and accepted The Story Prize for his collection Memory Wall, a book of six stories set in locales across the globe and sharing memory as a key element. The $20,000 award Doerr received, in addition to an engraved silver bowl, is the largest first-prize amount of any annual U.S. book award ...
