C.P. Lesley's Blog, page 47

Chasing the Fog Machine

Until I opened Susan Follett’s novel, I had never heard of a fog machine. In the 1950s, apparently, they were widely used, particularly in the Deep South, to kill mosquitos. A specially fitted truck drove through town spewing clouds of insecticide, and the local children chased the trucks, weaving in and out of the clouds of sweet-smelling poison, heedless of the danger.

As Susan Follett notes in her interview for New Books in Historical Fiction, this image of carelessly self-destructive innocents lured by something that only appears to be harmless is a perfect image for the deadly effects of prejudice—both for those discriminated against and, less obviously, for those who discriminate. This deeply thoughtful novel about what causes societies to accept and to resist change has a perhaps unanticipated resonance in the wake of the racial unrest that has afflicted the United States  this past year. But it addresses the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, now half a century old but neither finished nor forgotten. Through the lives of its three main characters and their friends and families, the book explores the segregated South, the in some ways no less segregated North, and the efforts—most notably during the Freedom Summer of 1964—to guarantee liberty and justice for every citizen of the United States of America.

The rest of this post is from New Books in Historical Fiction.

Even without the almost daily headlines reporting racial injustice in Ferguson, New York City, Cleveland, Madison, and elsewhere, it would be difficult to grasp that fifty years have already passed since the March from Selma to Montgomery to protest discrimination against African-Americans. Events that take place in our own lifetimes or the lifetimes of someone we know do not seem like history, and recent Supreme Court decisions combined with the incidents that populate those headlines raise questions about the stability of the gains made during the Civil Rights Movement as well as the long path that the United States has yet to travel before it achieves its dream of equality for all.

In The Fog Machine (Lucky Sky Press, 2014), Susan Follett recreates the years before the March from Selma, before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Her book begins in the Deep South, still clinging to its Jim Crow laws, then moves to the Midwest in an exploration of prejudice both overt and covert and of the forces that promote change in individuals and in societies. The novel opens with Joan, a seven-year-old white girl in Mississippi desperate to fit in. Part of fitting in involves humiliating C. J., who cleans Joan’s family’s house and babysits once a week. When C. J. then leaves for Chicago, Joan is devastated. Surely her cruelty must be to blame.

But C. J. has her own reasons for leaving. Chicago welcomes her even as it confines her in a box labeled “live-in maid.” C. J. can’t imagine protesting this treatment; her parents have convinced her that safety means keeping her place. But as the 1950s give way to the 1960s, her friends from home question the wisdom of accepting the status quo. A man named Martin Luther King, Jr., is preaching civil disobedience. A boy named Zach is urging C. J. to help him change the world. And when Zach decides to take part in the Freedom Summer of 1964, C. J., too, wonders whether safety is the only thing that counts.

In Eternal Memory

Two weeks ago today, the Harvard historian Edward L. Keenan (Ned to his family, friends, and students) died. He was almost eighty, and most readers of this blog will never have heard of him, but for those of us who specialize in Muscovite history, Ned was a major figure in the field. Even historians of Russia who did not have the opportunity to meet him, let alone study with him, knew his name. As Gregory Afinogenov states in his memorial, “Breaking Muscovy’s Silence”: “When Keenan began his blistering career of skepticism and historical heresy in 1971, only two grand narratives existed in the West to explain Russia’s history to students, policymakers, and experts from other fields.” With help from his students, Ned created a third. Afinogenov lays out the details of all three with admirable aplomb, so there is no need for me to repeat them here. But I will reiterate his conclusion that all of us owe Ned a great debt for stirring up the long-dead bones of Muscovy and wiring them together into a new, more intellectually satisfying skeleton.

Ned’s understanding of sixteenth-century Russian society, as developed by his many students, forms the background to my Legends of the Five Directions novels. Indeed, one might say that my series exists in part in response to the uncertainties produced by Ned’s attack on conventional wisdom: since my day job doesn’t permit the extended archival visits and manuscript analysis necessary for academic history writing post-Keenan, I decided to turn what I knew into stories that would communicate the essence of that long-ago society to people both inside and outside the field in ways they would not encounter in textbooks and general literature. I don’t know that Ned ever read The Golden Lynx or The Winged Horse—I suspect not—but he did know about and approve the effort. As he once put it in an e-mail, expressing a passing frustration with the reception of his views, “You may be better off writing honest fiction.”

Ned, you see, was the great gadfly of the field, a self-proclaimed radical skeptic who forced every source to produce its papers and probed the genetic heritage of sacred cows, throwing everything we thought we knew into chaos. In print he could be scathing about the intellectual flaws of his predecessors, but in person Ned was charming and supportive, an amusing raconteur with a phenomenal memory and a grasp of languages that left the rest of us in the dust. He adopted me the year I arrived in Boston, a grad student not yet thirty and fresh from archival research in what was then the Soviet Union, guiding my dissertation and finding a way to get me access to Widener Library at Harvard, where I roamed open stacks filled with the dusty aroma of books, armed with a straight ruler to cut the pages of 150-year-old tomes that no one before me had seen. I couldn’t have finished my doctorate without him.

At the time, he presided over a monthly lunch/study group of historians who specialized in medieval Russia (Harvard must be one of the few places in the world where you can scare up enough pre-Petrine scholars to form a study group). I thought of him as elderly because he had gray hair, but I later realized he must have been in his mid-forties. While one local or visiting historian after another laid out his or her ideas, Ned held court, pointing out questions the speakers had failed to ask and subjecting their arguments to insightful, unsettling comments. Years later, when I went to see him in his office at Dumbarton Oaks, his breadth of knowledge remained impressive, although by then he occasionally missed a reference or a source. When I heard he had retired to Deer Isle, one of Maine’s most beautiful spots, I was saddened but not surprised. When I heard he no longer had the energy to argue, I knew to expect the end.

So, as the Orthodox say, “May his memory be eternal.” And life to us, who remain behind. Our field is richer, our appreciation of the need to distrust received wisdom greater, and our understanding of the past more complex because he moved among us asking questions. For a scholar, there can be no more fitting tribute than that. 

Image: Konstantin Makovsky, Blind Man’s Buff (1890s), via Wikimedia Commons. This image is in the public domain in the United States because of its age.

Webs and Wings

As you know from last week’s post, I moved my author website from Google Apps, where it has lived since its inception, to Wix.com. At the time I posted, I expected it to take me much longer than it did to migrate the site address to the Wix servers after clicking on the button that said “Publish.” For this unlooked-for simplicity, I have Google to thank—although, as is not uncommon with Google, finding the right button to click required far more raw luck than one would expect from a site that markets itself as user-friendly.

Still, I didn’t, in the end, have to deal with logging in to GoDaddy, where I don’t actually have an account except through Google, a detail that has caused me endless angst every time I’ve had to modify the directional settings for the site. Oddly, Google still threw up a user ID and temporary password for GoDaddy (that’s where finding the right button became a challenge) before I discovered the magic link that switched me to my own Dashboard and let me type in the server numbers provided by Wix. The same Wix that had promised to handle the connection for me if I could only provide my GoDaddy ID and password, which GoDaddy then refused to recognize.... This is why I will never give up the humanities for a life in tech.

But no matter. The new system is much easier, and I know what to do next time (meaning if we decide to move the Five Directions Press site as well—I’m sure that if I ever need to relocate my own site away from Wix, the procedure will have changed again). My blog is still where it was; I did discover, eventually, that there is a way to convince the website to pick up the RSS feed, or even to set up the blog as a subdomain on Wix, but by then I had repurposed the blog page on the new site to host a collection of excerpts, including an audio clip, and videos. I was also, shall we say, wary after the last broken promise. So what Wix thinks is a blog actually does something else, but if you land on that page by mistake, you will find a link to the real blog posts. (Confused yet? Never mind, so am I.)

Most important, I love the professional look of the new site. Visiting it makes me happy. You can visit it, too, at http://www.cplesley.com, and I hope you will. One of these days, I may even figure out how to add an iTunes button, so that people can subscribe to my New Books in Historical Fiction podcast directly from my site.



All that happened last weekend. More good news followed. On Tuesday, I learned that The Winged Horse had made the first cut for the M.M. Bennetts Award for Historical Fiction. If you’re interested, you can find out more about the award at the committee’s website, including a list of the semifinalists. This is the first time I’ve entered any of my books in a contest, so being selected feels like a real validation. The short list will be announced in mid-April, but I am already delighted. M.M. Bennetts, a specialist in early nineteenth-century British history, wrote novels set during the Napoleonic Wars and was highly regarded for the quality of her writing before her tragic early death in August 2014. The committee seeks to commemorate her by selecting for compelling, well-told stories. I feel honored to be included in the list of twelve.

Perhaps best of all, I am finally through with the many tasks that have kept me away from Legends 3 for almost three months. This weekend—tomorrow!—I reenter my time machine, bound for the Russian North in 1536 and the world I have abandoned so long while still (half-)created. Are those swans I hear flying overhead?


Image: Shelf with M.M. Bennetts books, © Andrea Killam

Location, Location

As you will know if you’ve been following this blog from its beginning, I’ve used Google Apps to host my author site since I published The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel in mid-2012. It’s been great—not least because I signed up while Google still allowed people to join for free—but I’ve always been frustrated by the small number of templates available, the absence of any that strike me as truly professional, and the difficulty of creating my own. (The last says more about my deficiencies than Google’s.) So now that my books are starting to make a little money, I decided to look around for alternatives. After a bit of trial and error, I settled on Wix.com, where I have spent most of my spare time this week pushing elements around a page.

The site is not yet ready—in part because of my obsessive attention to detail, in part because I haven’t had much spare time, and in part because one of the nice features of Wix is that after I tweak every space and comma and image placement for the computer screen, I can redo the design to display well on mobile devices. After that, I have to figure out how to connect my domain name to the Wix site, a procedure that nearly drove me crazy the last time around due its pure, unadulterated, unexplained techiness. Even the thought of those CNAME registers gives me the shivers. In fact, the thought of logging in to GoDaddy for the first time in three years makes me cringe and whimper.

Maybe it won’t be as bad as I fear (and if it is, you can bet that I’ll blog about it!). The Wix support team makes the process look as simple as clicking a button that says “Connect” and specifying the current host. Let’s hope they’re telling the truth, because the instructions on correcting the CNAME register look as impenetrable as ever they did.

The last step is to figure out what happens to this blog when I move the website. With luck, it will stay exactly where it is, at least in the short term. Blogger has image-handling and tagging capabilities that Wix does not, and this template suits me fine.

For all these reasons, I expect it to be a few more weeks before I can announce that the new, spiffed-up website is ready for its public. But stay tuned. Change is on its way! 

And here's a sneak peek at the new Home page, although I can’t swear that every one of these pesky details will stay the same.

 

Bearing Witness

“A prophet is never respected in his own country,” people say. How much more true that must be within the prophet’s own family. It is a conceit of the human experience that we all imagine ourselves on the right side of history, whether by that we mean speaking truth to Stalinist power or choosing to embrace the philosophy of a little-known and by the standards of the time seditious Galilean carpenter.

Alas, most of us are not so gifted as to recognize the Messiah in our midst. But this month’s interview at New Books in Historical Fiction—with Ann Swinfen, author of The Testament of Mariam and many other books—addresses exactly this question. Suppose the prophet is your brother, known to you since birth? Suppose his best friend is your fiancé? Would you follow him along his journey? Could you bear to watch him on the cross? Or would you, like other members of your family, declare him mad and wash your hands of him, only to change your mind after the fact?

The rest of this post comes from New Books in Historical Fiction:

In a town in eastern Gallia, circa 65 AD, an old woman learns that she has lost the last of her siblings, a man she has not seen for thirty years. The news propels her back into memories of her past as Mariam, the rebellious young daughter of a carpenter in Galilee and her experiences with her family, including her oldest brother, Yeshûa—the New Testament’s Jesus of Nazareth.

Yeshûa struggles to find his place and his mission in Roman-occupied Judah, a hotbed of unrest where Galileans are especially suspect. For a while, he lives among the Essenes, where he masters their medical knowledge, but after a year he realizes that his low social standing limits his advancement within the order. The Essenes’ philosophy is, in any case, too restrictive for him. Yeshûa returns home, determined to aid the poor as a healer and a teacher. But his neighbors, and even his own family, have little sympathy for Yeshûa in this new role. So he sets off on a journey that will lead him to the Sea of Galilee and on to Jerusalem and a fateful confrontation with Roman power. Throughout this journey with all its doubts, failures, and successes, he is accompanied by Mariam and her betrothed, who is also her brother Yeshûa’s best friend, Yehûdâ Kerioth—Judas Iscariot.



In lucid and captivating prose, Ann Swinfen traces the story of Yeshûa the Galilean as he and his sister Mariam travel through the first-century Levant in pursuit of his destiny. The Testament of Mariam (Shakenoak Press, 2014) contrasts this story with the heroine’s life in old age to present new and compelling insights into the familiar Gospel story.


Come back next week, when I will post more about Ann Swinfen’s books and her journey toward self-publishing as ShakenoakPress.

Audio book fans, note that The Testament of Mariam is now available as an audio book as well as Kindle and paperback.

The Magic Middle

Part of improving as a writer involves reading books about writing as a craft. Not all craft books are created equal, by any means, but sometimes it’s useful to have someone pull back the curtain and talk about what makes a story work.

One of my favorite books of this type is John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story—which, when I encountered it a few years ago, managed to get the concept of story structure through my head without making it sound like a checklist. Other favorites of mine include Lisa Cron’s Wired for Story—about the unconscious expectations in readers’ minds, information that lies behind much of the writing advice in other books—and Jordan Rosenfeld’s Make a Scene, which clarifies fundamentals such as when to show and when to tell. And I must not forget Nancy Kress’s Dynamic Characters, which captures the basic task of all novelists: “In our lives we want tranquillity; in our fiction we want an unholy mess, preferably getting unholier page by page” (159).
I could go on to list other favorites, but in the realm of writerly advice I think many people would put James Scott Bell in a class by himself. So when I saw he had a new book called Write Your Novel from the Middle (all these books have long subtitles, by the way), available on Kindle for $2.99, I decided to give it a try.

The basic idea, although it pays to read his elaboration, is that in a well-structured novel, the main character has a “mirror moment” right in the middle of the book. This mirror moment encapsulates the protagonist’s character change: she looks in the mirror, literally or figuratively, and sees what is holding her back and what she must do to solve her problem. That moment marks the heart of the story, as distinct from the plot. From there, the writer can move forward to show the character changing—or, in the case of a tragedy, refusing to change—and backward to see where the character starts the story and to imagine what happened before the novel begins to make him that way. (The last step, although crucial for the writer, need be shared with the reader in dribs and drabs, if at all.)

It’s a good idea, and it neatly explains the most important requirement for a novel: a character who changes, or should change but doesn’t, thus dooming herself to physical, psychological, or professional death. But is it really true that the mirror moment occurs right in the middle of the book? Isn’t it later, I wondered, closer to the resolution of the novel?

To check, I picked one of my own novels at random and opened it halfway through. I was amazed. At the very middle of The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel, to the page, Nina has a flashback to her childhood self that reveals how she has distorted the truth about her family and undermined her romantic relationships, a factor that threatens her survival in the computer game that forms the backdrop to the story.

I picked up my other books and checked them, one by one. Two pages before the exact middle of The Golden Lynx, Nasan acknowledges the costs and the joys of her decision to defy convention and takes responsibility for her choice. The events at the middle of The Winged Horse take place outside the main action, but the immediately preceding scene among the nomads shows Firuza deciding for the first time to place her own needs ahead of her father’s and brother’s. Even in Desert Flower, a novel I wrote long before I had a clue that stories had structure, the exact middle of the story shows the hero, Danion, coming to terms with the fact that his life has changed irrevocably and he has no choice but to deal with it. The middle of Kingdom of the Shades again marks a major turning point in Danion’s relationship with his wife, Sasha, as he strives to balance commitments made at different times of his life.

None of this was deliberate. At no time did I sit down and decide that on exactly page 160 the hero should face down his or her demons. Nor do I plan to do that in the future. It just happened, the natural result of writing stories about characters who grow.

So, do you need Bell’s book? I can’t say. That depends on how much writing experience you have. But he’s clearly on to something. Find the middle of your novel, and you will have located its heart. The rest is, in a sense, just filling the blanks.

Of course, if you’re a seat-of-the-pants (pantser) novelist like me, filling in the blanks is where the fun comes in. But knowing there’s a tape at the finish line keeps me on track, no matter how much my plot zigs and zags along the way.


Image © 2003 Cgs, via Wikimedia Commons. Reused under the GNU Free Documentation License version 1.2 or later.

Cover Craziness

As I’ve mentioned before, I can be a bit—well, let’s be kind and call it obsessive. I edit and typeset for a living: every comma counts, every font choice matters. And I blow off steam by attending classes in classical ballet, an art form dedicated to attaining perfection in every tiny detail of placement and line. So it’s no big surprise that when it comes to something like cover design, I tweak endlessly, moving elements up and down and side to side, switching out fonts, applying drop shadows and beveling and embossing and so on until I’ve driven either myself or everyone round me mad. At this point in my life, I probably can’t help myself. But in the last week or so, I have realized that sometimes I’m so busy pruning the branches that I forget to step back and look at the forest.

It all started innocently enough. As I mentioned in my last post, Five Directions Press has decided to reissue The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel in a new, smaller trim size. That gives us an opportunity to update the cover design for this, our first book, to match the evolving standard that we have developed as a cooperative. I had a couple of ThinkStock credits that were about to expire, so I used one of them to purchase a lovely picture of Widener Library (where the book opens) in winter. So far, so good. But the rapier on the front cover had never had a high-enough resolution for print, and it no longer showed up on the site where I had recorded downloading it, so I decided to use my one remaining credit to replace it.

I won’t drag you through the ins and outs of what happened next, except to say that I ended up with a different rapier with cleaner lines, purchased from Shutterstock. But it was only after I had expanded and reduced and feathered and rotated the image, then tested the double pimpernels representing Ian and Nina in every conceivable configuration, then uploaded it as final and posted it on this blog that I noticed that the sword had a spur jutting from its hilt that suggested an erotic component more suitable to Fifty Shades of Grey than to my romantic but far-from-explicit novel. Wrong message!

To ensure I wasn’t overreacting, I enlisted Sir Percy, my faithful spouse, as arbiter. He took one look at the cover and confirmed my worst fears. Oops. I went back into Photoshop and removed the offending spur, twisted the flowers to a new angle, and re-uploaded the file. Then I went and removed the earlier version from wherever I could (Facebook stuck to the darned thing like glue), including this blog, and replaced it with the new one.

Naturally, when I received the proof of the book (with the problematic cover), I found a bunch of other errors that needed fixing, including an unrounded apostrophe and missing book title on the back cover. So the saga continues, even though the front cover is now ready for prime time. And since we may as well update the covers on the e-books, too, we will correct any “fleas” that I find in the proof in those files as well (these are tiny corrections, an “into” that should be “in to,” for example—I told you I was obsessive).

But the moral of this story is clear: don’t become so focused on the branches that you forget to look at the trees. Even the most perfectly shaped leaves won’t do much good if a whacking great skyscraper is standing in the midst of the forest.

Checking Off Boxes

A month or so ago, I came up with the idea of reprinting my first novel, The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel, in a smaller trim size. Trade paperbacks are typically 5.25 by 8 inches, or at most 5.5 by 8 inches. But CreateSpace, which Five Directions Press uses for our paperbacks, has a particular affection for 6 by 9 inches, the size of a typical academic journal issue. I don’t know why, but I guess that this preference has more to do with the efficient use of paper than with the standards of the printing industry—although it’s true that 6 by 9 books are becoming steadily more common as the number of self-published and indie-press-published books issued through CreateSpace grows. But I figured that out only later: because Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel was my first journey into the online world of print-on-demand, I picked the option pushed by CreateSpace despite my inner sense that it would be too large.

Now, in practice there is nothing particularly wrong with the 6 by 9 inch size: the reading experience resembles that for a hard-cover book without the extra weight. Still, the usual trade paperback size looks better, in my view. I need the larger size for the Legends novels, which are long enough that a smaller size would force me to price the books higher than I’d like, but The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel runs under 300 pages. Why not make myself happy, since the costs in time and money for converting an already edited and published title are small? I had already published Desert Flower and Kingdom of the Shades in the 5.25 by 8 inch format, so the new Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel would not even stand out like a sore thumb on my bookshelves.

All was going well until I had to specify the BISAC code for the book. This trips me up every time, because my novels rarely fit neatly into single subject headings, but the others can be identified primarily as historical fiction or science fiction romance, even if they don’t have enough characters tearing each other’s clothes off to satisfy a large segment of today’s romance readership. But The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel is truly betwixt and between.

The point of BISAC, which stands for Book Industry Subject and Category headings, is to tell the owners of physical bookstores where to file a particular book. Mysteries go in the Mystery section, even if they include a romance; romances in the Romance section whether they take place centuries ago or centuries from now, and so on. In a post-brick-and-mortar world, the categories become the basis of the rating system used by online bookstores. If you have a neatly enough defined book, you can become no. 1 in the category of “science fiction romances featuring oysters” or some such thing. Obviously, the larger the category, the more books fit into it and the harder a given author has to fight for a top spot.

Fortunately, I don’t worry much about rankings. Even so, The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel gives me fits whenever I have to pick a BISAC for it. Is it historical fiction? Not really: it begins in the present, and its past comes from a novel, reproduced in a computer simulation. Is it time travel? Not exactly: the characters don’t leave the present; they just think they have. Is it romance? Absolutely—in fact, a double romance. But it is very “sweet” (i.e., low heat) by today’s standards, which explains why I avoided the romance category for the first couple of years. Is it science fiction? No: although we don’t have this technology yet and may not for some time, it’s on the horizon, and no alien planets or dystopian futures play any part in the plot. Is it a techno-thriller or an action adventure tale? To some degree, but people who love classic examples of such books probably won’t like this one, and readers who would love it are unlikely to seek it out under that classification. Besides, the technology is a means, not an end. The book is about the contrast between past and present ways of looking at the world, especially for women. It is, in fact, a classic historical adventure romance with a modern twist—not unlike its inspiration, Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905). But BISAC has no category for that.

In the end, I picked Fiction > Romance > Time Travel and changed the first edition (that is, the same text in a larger print format), which I had previously listed as Fiction > Historical, to match. (I don’t want even a detail as small as a BISAC category to confuse the computers into thinking these are two different novels, not two editions of the same book.) It’s not a perfect fit, but it seems closer than the alternatives. With luck, the “hot romance” readers won’t be too disappointed.

The new, smaller Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel should be released by the end of February. Until then, the 6 by 9 inch book will remain on sale. And if anyone ever decides to expand the BISAC list, you can bet they will have my vote!

Life Imitates Art

Readers of technically sophisticated science fiction are, I assume, accustomed to having life catch up to the ideas in their favorite books, even if it takes decades or centuries. Typically, the final form of the invention, be it a submarine (Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea) or Dick Tracy’s watch, does not exactly match the writer’s initial concept. Some ideas seem so far-fetched and difficult to achieve that we would be foolish to hold our breath waiting for them: a Dyson sphere, for example. Others are flat out impossible, as Lawrence M. Krauss had great fun demonstrating in The Physics of Star Trek. 

But that is by the way. The job of science fiction writers is to imagine potential futures, not to create them.
 
Although I have written two novels classified as science fiction and a third that blends contemporary graduate student life with a computer-generated literary/historical world, I never expected life to catch up to my imagination, especially within ten years of my developing the original idea for Dreamlife Productions and its Scarlet Pimpernel game. So I was first amused, then astonished, to hear that Microsoft had developed a new virtual reality headset that allowed users to manipulate their environment (by smashing the coffee table in their own living room with a hammer and watching it fragment before their eyes while remaining quite untouched in reality, for example). Three days later, the New York Times declared virtual reality “on the verge of taking off” and announced that “the virtual reality content race has begun.” What happened?

Now, the virtual reality of the present is not the seamless, wireless, instant-transmission-to-the-brain process described with minimal detail in The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel. It involves clunky headsets and in some cases a smartphone that serves as a screen. At best, the experience resembles a three-D movie up close and personal; Microsoft is so far unique in overlaying virtual reality on actual objects within a room and allowing users to act on those objects. It will be a while, I’d guess, before we can follow Ian and Nina into our favorite novel and feel every minute as though we are caught up in a story world where we can interact with and influence the developing plot. But it’s a beginning, and we have reached it surprisingly fast.

This image, although now available on the Internet, is © 2006 C. P. Lesley.
I created it in Photoshop as part of the original cover for The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel using public domain images from Wikimedia Commons.

The Winnowing

In “Indie Publishing: Boom and Bust” the novelist Deb Vanasse, quoting fellow-writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch, notes that “the gold rush is over.” Their point is that the days when a beginning author could throw up an e-book (well-written and well-edited or not), manipulate the Amazon.com algorithms by distributing thousands of copies for free, and still make money have ended. The big publishers are in the game now, and they too have learned the power of free and discounted e-books. In addition, because e-books never go out of print, the supply side of the market is expanding faster than the demand side, and we all know where that leads. What the future holds, no one can tell, but it seems fairly certain that a winnowing will take place: either unsuccessful authors will choose to leave the arena, or readers will push them out by favoring traditionally published books—or at least high-quality self-published and small-press books.

Now the winnowing among authors no doubt deserves a blog post (or ten) of its own. Today’s post is actually about something else, based on a comment that Alix Christie made during my interview with her last week for New Books in Historical Fiction. We were talking about the long-term effects of the shift from print to e-book publishing, and she asked me if I’d noticed that print books are becoming more beautiful. In a sense, of course, I had. I even wrote a post on “The Beauty of Books” in November 2012. But until Alix mentioned it, I hadn’t really thought about books becoming more beautiful.

As soon as she said it, though, I knew she was right. The 75-cent copies of Georgette Heyer and Barbara Cartland that I devoured in my misspent youth were not beautiful, although sometimes they had nice cover pictures. Their mass-market successors, although they cost ten times as much, are not beautiful either: cramped text on a page. It’s easier to read those books on a Kindle or an iPad, where at least you can adjust the font type and size and see clear dark type against a white screen.

No, the beautiful books are the hardcovers and trade paperbacks. The publishers are separating their products from generic, customizable e-books by showcasing the design capabilities of print—not so much winnowing the market as creating two distinct sectors within it.

Christie’s own debut novel, Gutenberg’s Apprentice, is a good example of this trend: the book is gorgeous, as befits a novel about the invention of the five-hundred-year-old technology that the authors and publishers of e-books are doing their best to supplant. The book has large initial capitals on the chapters that look like printed versions of a manuscript book, as well as the kind of heavy rough-edged paper that I used to find in nineteenth-century tomes on the dusty shelves of university libraries, their pages uncut until I came along with my metal-edged ruler and peered at text not seen since it left the letterpress 150 years earlier. The cover combines a portrait of the three main characters in the novel—Johann Gutenberg; his financier, Johann Fust; and Fust’s adopted son, Peter Schöffer—with a stylized color image of fifteenth-century Mainz. The cover shows to advantage on an e-reader, too, if it’s a color tablet, but the design of the text is lost except in PDF format, which is not an e-book so much as an electronic rendition of the print. If you’re trying to read fixed-page-layout PDFs on a tablet, you might as well indulge yourself with the pleasure of turning physical pages.

There are two directions in which this post can go. The first and most obvious is to underline the importance for indie (self-published, coop, and small-press) publishers to take the question of beauty seriously if they wish to see their stories in print. Indie writers rely on print-on-demand technology, which is not suitable for mass-market production, so their print books must compete with trade paperbacks. The alternative is to focus on e-books and forget print, but that means abandoning the hefty chunk of the market that still prefers books on paper. Some of these readers own e-devices but have returned to print because they find it a more satisfying experience. Writers who can’t balance these competing demands are likely to find themselves among the “winnowed.”

But Alix Christie makes another important point as well. Winnowing threatens not only writers but print books themselves. Gutenberg’s Bible was a manuscript produced by machine; fifty years passed before Aldus Manutius shrank books down to something that would fit in a pocket, turning them into everyday objects that many people could afford. At the moment, writers and publishers aim to turn e-books into computerized versions of their print counterparts. “Enhanced editions” with trails of hyperlinks leading to pictures and explanations and online videos offer one alternative, but the flitting hither and yon interferes with the sustained attention that draws a reader into a story world, disrupting the emotional attachment that is the reason most people read fiction in the first place. Something else is needed. I don’t what it is, but I agree that when we find it, print books will join manuscripts as rare and precious relics of a long-forgotten past.

I may not live to see that day. I’m not even sure that I want to. But it is going to be one interesting ride.

Image: Jean Grolier in the House of Aldus Manutius (1894), via Wikimedia Commons. This picture is in the public domain in the United States because of its age.

And in a sad farewell that is associated with the broader topic here of the upheaval in publishing, I found out this week that Folium Book Studio, which we have used to obtain ISBNs and work with the e-book versions of all the Five Directions Press books to date, is closing its doors as of March 2015. Not sure what happened: perhaps it was an idea ahead of its time, in that older e-readers often could not handle the fancy formatting. But it is a service that we will miss.