Randy Susan Meyers's Blog, page 45

The (Low) Cost of Reading

[image error]Books are my life. Without reading, I'd be lost. Perhaps that's why I'm baffled about the rampant indignation about the price of e-books. Are readers being forced at gunpoint to buy these books? Is there a cabal I haven't heard about? Are publishers from Little Brown to Graywolf Press in cahoots to rob readers?

According to the NYT, "Over the last year, the most voracious readers of e-books have shown a reflexive hostility to prices higher than the $9.99 set by Amazon.com and other online retailers for popular titles." Authors dread the not uncommon one-star reviews given by those who've never read a page of the title they're slamming, reviews based solely on the fact that they consider the price to high. Others dread sniping from authors who choose to publish their own work—authors who rather than talking about the worth of the read they offer, denigrate the price of books offered by established publishers.

Ah, can't we all just get along?

I'm weary of hearing e-books are too expensive, that their value should be based on no more than the barest bones. Some disparage money going to authors (is there any more intrinsic part of a book than the creator? Unlike cooks, designers, engineers, should we work for free?) with remarks made by "The Cheapskate" on CNET: "Now, I understand books cost money. There's editing, publishing, and distribution. Paper, ink, trucks, gasoline. Storage, shipping, shelf space, sales staff. And the countless people involved in all those transactions. E-books, on the other hand, consume zero trees. They weigh nothing, occupy no physical space, and don't get shipped in the traditional sense. Middlemen are few and far between. So you're left with, what, editing costs and the pittance you pay the authors?"

The average price of a restaurant meal in the United States is roughly $10 per person. The cost of individual meals range from $5.00 to $25.00 per person. My guess is the average person eats a meal in less than an hour and spends far longer reading any given book. (The average cost of a meal at a NYC restaurant is 41.76 per person.)

We have food choices. Duck into McDonalds and get a filet-o-fish for three bucks (sometimes 99 cents during Lent.) Shell out $10.99 for a mid-price entrée at a neighborhood restaurant. Anniversary? Get the equivalent of the hardcover and spring for the $30.00 lobster.

Should these meals all be priced the same? Do you see lines of foodies screaming that at the bestselling filet mignon should cost the same as a Big Mac?

In 2010 the average cost of movie ticket (according to the National Association of Theater Owners was $7.89. How long does a movie run? (And don't you usually go with someone else, thus doubling the cost?)

The average cost of e-book on Ipad is $8.00 and though I couldn't find an average across-the-board e-cost, I'm certain that it's close. Some self-published books are available for 99 cents. Others, like the Janet Cromer's heartbreaking chronicle Professor Cromer Learns to Read cost $9.99. The exquisitely written memoir In Her Wake by Nancy Rappaport is $11.92. State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett, a wonder to behold, is $12.99 for how many hours of riveting pleasure?

Average no-frills manicure: $10-$30.00

Average cost of a package of baklava: $20-50

Maple syrup can cost anywhere from $3 to $32 a jug.

Around the web there's agreement that the average person takes 8-10 hours to read a book. Even taking into account length of book, varied reading skills, yada, yada, yada, for me the enjoyment received from a good book is longer-lived than the very best of meals and lives on in my soul rather than my waist. For me, books are probably third to food and shelter for what I need to survive and I'd forgo fancy food for books if asked to make the choice.

When my daughters were small, when they were in college, when I was a single mother, when I had two jobs so I could pay for college tuition, at that time I couldn't afford my reading jones—I read too fast to keep up with my need. So I went to the library, gratefully lugging home 10-20 books a week for my daughters and me. I was then, as I am now, indebted to the taxpayers who provided libraries, the publisher who sold to them, and the authors who didn't begrudge hundreds of patrons sharing one copy of their book.

And now, able to buy the books, I don't complain about the money I spend on them: hard covers, paperbacks, or e-books. Instead, I am thankful beyond belief that these books are out there to keep me going, just as they always have.

There's a good chance I'll get some unhappiness from this. I'll be told that I don't understand. I'll get tons of charts and analysis. And I hate to make folks unhappy, so I'll need to relax. The average price of a massage is $60.00. Or I can get another book.

Oh, most of those books above? Bought about half of them twice. Had to have them both ways. Mr. President, I'm working for economic recovery.

 

 

Children Living in Violence: We Can Make A Difference

[image error]Living in a violent home is like growing up in a war zone. When a woman is battered, images of their mother being beaten will be imprinted on them forever.  Children witnessing abuse are at serious risk for developmental delays, post-traumatic stress disorder, and irreversible psychological damage. It's likely they'll also be physically, emotionally, or verbally attacked.

Intervention can help. We need to help. We need to support these kids. Whether it's with ten dollars or a thousand, we make the difference.

This past April, I gave a reading of The Murderer's Daughters at the Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley, MA.  Book sales at the reading benefited Safe Passage, the sole provider in Hampshire County of comprehensive services for women and children who have experienced domestic violence. Safe Passage provides one-on-one emotional support to children of all ages, and parenting support to help families heal from abuse, but they are having difficulty maintaining their funding for children's programs.

I have donated to Safe Passage and I urge you to do the same. I guarantee that we'll make a difference in a frightened child's life. You can donate online at safepass.org/donate, or donate by mail or phone:

Safe Passage

Attn: Sarah Smith

43 Center Street, Suite 304

Northampton, MA 01060

Phone: (413) 586-1125 x19

One strong adult in a child's life can make all the difference. I believe this and I believe in this program. To learn more about Safe Passage visit

www.safepass.org.

Help Stop The Cycle of Violence

The Day Princess Kate Helped Me Wear Sheer Pantyhose

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I belong to what might be one of the longest running women's groups in the country. We began during the era of consciousness-raising (mothers in our early 20s, we discussed nursing bras as much as bralessness) and supported each other through divorce, death, and contemplations of cosmetic surgery. (So far it's a no.)

We have eternal loyalty and ferocious debates.

We've argued over Hilary vs. Obama. The safety of hormone therapy. And whether to go barelegged with business and fancy dresses. What to do in the summer? Winter, thank goodness, is tights season — and tights season seems to stretch longer and longer. Don't you think there is a reason? Few will admit it, but there is a growing group of us who want to say 'hell yeah' to pantyhose. Sheer, lovely, shimmery pantyhose. Yes to hiding the signs of aging that, unlike wisdom and increased empathy, do not delight: Veins waving hello. Leg 'freckles'. Creepy bits of crepe.

By simply slipping on sheers, even the cheapest Brand X, our legs could match our Spanx-smoothed torso. If only the fashion police would allow.

And yet… (back to the women's group and our argument soon) in the past decade or so, freedom from pantyhose somehow segued into an iron-clad rule against wearing panty-hose, unless one wanted to mark oneself as 1) elderly to the point of coffin-bound, 2) prudish as a Victorian, or 3) so fashion-dumb as to likely be wearing an un-ironic beehive.

continued on Huffington Post

 

This Week's Reads: Memoirs on the Fourth

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Memoirs—my theme for July fourth. Perhaps it was my sprained arm (I fell while walking with writer-friend Jessica Keener. I suppose we were so immersed in shoptalk that I simply tumbled off the cliff of the Brookline sidewalk where we walked. Or perhaps it was the beauty of the hydrangeas we passed) that send me into a mood for the memories of others. Pain physical=wanting-to-read pain emotional.

Slow Motion by Dani Shapiro was a re-read. Going back in time and re-reading a remembered favorite can mean re-discovering why I found a book so engaging, bringing shivers of re-delight, or it can engender a huge 'huh?' of what was I thinking? Slow Motion brought pure pleasure. The delight of as-remembered page-turning, as the book forced me (even the second time) to race to the end in a frenzy of must-know. (When re-reading, though I might remember what happens, it's never enough to ruin the surprise of exactly how it happens. And isn't the 'how' always as interesting as the 'what?')

I admire Shapiro's writing to a point of gritted-teeth jealousy. Without lily gilding, she tells her story with understated elegant honesty. There is no 'reaching' for good writing, no trying; it's simply there.

The memoir, in brief, tells of a time in Shapiro's life when, lost in an affair with an older married man, drowning in alcohol and cocaine, she saves herself when she is forced to rescue her parents. Writing about her father's funeral, where she is horrified by the presence of her married lover, despite having fought for his presence, Shapiro captures the head of the pin we dance upon too often:

"Huge sobs rack my body, and I feel Lenny's hand tentatively pat my back. I hate him, and I hate myself. Some small part of me knows that I will always be horrified by Lenny's presence here. That he will be forever wrapped up in my memory of this day, like a blurry face in a grainy old group photo, under which a caption reads: Unidentified man, second from left."

The raw honesty of Shapiro's work awed me. I'll next put all her novels on my re-read list: I remember devouring them the first time. I expect to do so again.

[image error]The Anti-Romantic Child by Priscilla Gilman spun me into an entirely different world and point-of-view. While Shapiro shook me into a journey from obsessive connections to finding ground, Gilman's story is of letting go her dream of recreating an idealistically remembered childhood, to heroically living in a complex real world, including facing the choice to leave a marriage that she wanted desperately to want:

"The failure of a marriage, which had once held so much hope and promise as a balm, a restorative force, was devastating to acknowledge. The fantasy I'd harbored my entire life that I could makeup for the feelings of vulnerability and pain that characterized my own childhood with a secure, loving, intact family of my own was shattered."

This passage struck me with the sort of knock of recognition that sincere and candid writing offers as a great gift to the reader.

Gilman's story (like Shapiro's captured with a simple eloquence) fascinated me in an opposite manner from Shapiro's—reading them back- to-back worked. Gilman's storied memories of her childhood led to expectations to a romantic motherhood, filled with the same imagination and creativity that made up her girlhood. The overwhelming differences and needs of her first son (eventually diagnosed with a developmental disorder) forces Gilman to draw on different set of strength than she'd ever imagined and she becomes and she becomes an amazing warrior and mother.

Gilman's quiet force awed me. Knowing the vast stores of patience all mothers must tap to raise their children, reading the ways Gilman helps her son not just cope, but shine, reminded me of the hushed heroism all around us.

The Anti-Romantic Child is wrapped in the poems of Wordsworth, whose 'romantic view of children' she embraced. How she comes to re-understand children, motherhood, and the poet made for memoir woven of elements one would never expect and is grateful for once finished.

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Beyond The Margins

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As I dive deeper into my next novel and take a break from Word Love. I invite you to visit Beyond The Margins, the multi-writer blog to which I belong, for daily posts.

Beyond The Margins offers essays on the craft of writing and the business of publishing. There are tips on creating memorable scenes and great dialogue. Interviews with authors, editors and agents. Humorous pokes at the craft, the industry and at ourselves. A literary magazine run amok. Beyond the Margins was created by a dozen writers, many of whom met or taught at Grub Street, a nonprofit creative writing center in Boston. We have published novels, short fiction, poetry, newspaper and magazine articles, informed—or not—by backgrounds in medicine and social work, journalism and law, graphic design and bartending.

 

 

Book Trailer Week: THE LOST SUMMER OF LOUISA MAY ALCOTT

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Book trailers are such a brave new media. Some are awful droning talking heads (you know what I mean) where the author looks like he'd rather be shoveling coal in Siberia than filming the interview. Some are almost good–but too long. And some, like Goldilocks found, are just right and manage to capture the spirit and genre of the book.

"In her debut novel, The Lost Summer of Louisa May Alcott, Kelly O'Connor McNees deftly mixes fact and fiction as she imagines a summer lost to history, carefully purged from Louisa's letters and journals, a summer that would change the course of Louisa's writing career—and inspire the story of love and heartbreak between Jo and Teddy "Laurie" Laurence, Jo's devoted neighbor and kindred spirit." (from the author's website)

First Pages Friday: ALL CRY CHAOS

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First Pages Fridays offers a taste of an author's book—from ones long on the shelves to those newly launched, because while you can't judge a book by the cover, you can tell plenty from the first pages.

Thriller All Cry Chaos by Len Rosen turns on the death of a mathematician who studies patterns in nature—for instance, the similarities one finds when observing lightning, tree limbs, sidewalk cracks, and veins in the human body. Aside from solving a whodunit, the main character, Interpol agent Henri Poincaré, meditates upon a question: If there are patterns in nature, is there a Pattern Maker?

Nothing to do but walk. He turned his collar up, hands thrust deep into his jacket, and roamed the streets of the old city. He was hours at it. He walked through the old Saint Just and Saint Irenee quarters, the former necropolis. He sought out the old places, the traboules, the narrow, covered passageways built so many centuries ago, which Claire adored. He walked through neighborhoods that layered Renaissance palaces upon medieval bulwarks upon Roman baths, past the fountains and shuttered markets, up the cobbled streets and familiar alleys until he stopped, finally, before the Cathedral of Saint Jean.

When Etienne and his family visited from Paris, Poincaré would take the twins and Chloe on walks that would often as not end in the nave of Saint Jean, where they would sit as quietly as children could, contemplating the vast empty spaces and stained glass until the sun set. At six, Emile and Georges were young for religious sentiment; but like their grandfather they were drawn to the vaulted darkness of cathedrals. Chloe, by contrast, sat listening as if she heard spirits conversing in the shadows. The four would sit on simple caned chairs and, by unspoken agreement, not stir until the red of the apostles' robes winked and went dark—at which point the squeals of Papi, ice cream! would coax from Poincaré what no house of worship, on its own, ever had: a prayer.

He walked inside. Though he had tried over the years, he never understood Claire's faith. He attended church occasionally because she asked and because he was comforted, for her, as she slipped a hand into his when the priest, in defiance of orders from Rome, reverted to the Latin mass. She had insisted Etienne be baptized, and

he agreed though he thought the ceremony little more than voodoo. How surprised he was, then, at the emotions rising in him when the priest offered a blessing and sprinkled holy water on the forehead of his son. That some could consider water holy; that Etienne, who was holy in Poincaré's sight, would be blessed by another in the name of mysteries larger than them all; that this sacrament could take place in a cathedral built when oxcarts plied the muddy streets of Lyon; that his wife and her family, without embarrassment, could welcome Etienne into a fellowship two thousand years old; that he, Poincaré, a rank non-believer, could be moved so nearly to tears at the ceremony that he forced himself to turn away, sharply, in search of control—all this stood as evidence to a single fact: that Henri Poincaré was a man who longed to believe, a man who was moved by mystery and beauty but a man for whom belief was impossible. He was too much a scientist, ever the investigator in a world bound up in webs of cause and effect that had served him well in every regard save one: that at the hour between dusk and darkness, when the sky slid from deepest cobalt into night, he suspected something large, momentous even, was out there just beyond his reach, the shape of which flashed into his awareness now and again but vanished whenever he tried to grasp it.

He stood and nodded to a priest, whose footsteps clicked in the great silence. He had time enough to return home and shower before catching a train south. There was time, yet, before he would face the ones he loved to explain the chaos that he, in an effort to do a difficult job well, had heaped upon their innocent heads. What would he say? He thought of the man in the old story who had wept himself dry and, in the process, filled a lake with his tears. A child of the district woke the next morning and approached the man: "Monsieur," she said, "this is a wonder. Why are you sad?"

Seeing the goodness in her, he told the truth: "Because life is so sweet."

The child tugged at his sleeve. "Monsieur, I don't understand."

And the man, weeping anew, said: "Neither do I."

 

 

Leonard Rosen is a best-selling and widely respected non-fiction author among educational publishers (including Pearson, Allyn & Bacon, Little Brown, and Nelson Doubleday). He has written Radio Essays broadcast by NPR's Morning Edition, Only A Game, and All Things Considered, as well as op-eds published by the Boston Globe. He has taught writing at Bentley University and Harvard University. He lives in Brookline, MA.  His debut novel All Cry Chaos (The Permanent Press, September 2011), the first installment of the Henri Poincaré series, is being published in five languages and as an Audiobook.  Visit and leave a comment at www.lenrosenonline.com.

All Cry Chaos is available electronically via Kindle, IBook, Nook, and MOBI; print publication is scheduled for September 2011 (The Permanent Press).

 

 

 

Book Trailer Week: DRACULA IN LOVE

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Book trailers are such a brave new media. Some are awful droning talking heads (you know what I mean) where the author looks like he'd rather be shoveling coal in Siberia than filming the interview. Some are almost good–but too long. And some, like Goldilocks found, are just right and manage to capture the spirit and genre of the book.

Author Karen Essex explains how her family memories entered into her book, Dracula In Love in this trailer.

"Dark, gothic, and utterly sensual, Dracula in Love is the novel for Twilight's grownup fans. The character of Mina Murray leaps from the pages in an extraordinary confession of what truly happened between her and Count Dracula. In this novel of forbidden desires and secrecy, purity is an overrated virtue." —Michelle Moran, bestselling author of Nefertiti: A Novel

Wednesday Launch: THE NOBODIES ALBUM

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Today's launch is the upcoming release of THE NOBODIES ALBUM by Carolyn Parkhurst. "Bestselling novelist Octavia Frost has just completed her latest book — a revolutionary novel in which she has rewritten the last chapters of all her previous books, removing clues about her personal life concealed within, especially a horrific tragedy that befell her family years ago."

Not only did I love this book, this is the funniest book trailer I've seen in a long time.

 

Book Trailer Week: BEST STAGED PLANS

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Book trailers are such a brave new media. Some are awful droning talking heads (you know what I mean) where the author looks like he'd rather be shoveling coal in Siberia than filming the interview. Some are almost good–but too long. And some, like Goldilocks found, are just right and manage to capture the spirit and genre of the book.

Bestselling author, Claire Cooks gives a sneak peek of her novel, by reading from it, with illustrative images.

"Claire Cook's characters aren't rich or glamorous — they're physically imperfect, emotionally insecure, and deeply familiar." Tom Perrotta

"Claire Cook has an original voice, sparkling style, and a window into family life that will make you laugh and cry."  Adriana Trigiani

"Claire Cook…is a master in creating funny, warm relatable characters you root for from the very first page." – Allison Winn Scotch