The state of publishing

At the Guardian, Sam Leith argues that we're living in a golden age for the university press. I agree with everything he says - also I want to read some of these UP books he singles out for praise (might have to read a manuscript for the U of Chicago P so that I can get these for free - often honorarium from a press is a choice of a very modest sum of actual dollars or twice that amount in books! The Francis Barber book is already on my list and I am about to go and get it from the library):

In natural history and popular science, alone, for instance: Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell’s amazing book The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins or Brooke Borel’s history of the bedbug, Infested, or Caitlin O’Connell’s book on pachyderm behaviour, Elephant Don, or Christian Sardet’s gorgeous book Plankton? All are published by the University of Chicago. Beth Shapiro’s book on the science of de-extinction, How to Clone a Mammoth? Published by Princeton. In biography, Yale – who gave us Sue Prideaux’s award-winning life of Strindberg a couple of years back – have been quietly churning out the superb Jewish Lives series. Theirs is the new biography of Stalin applauded by one reviewer as “the pinnacle of scholarly knowledge on the subject”, and theirs the much-admired new life of Francis Barber, the freed slave named as Dr Johnson’s heir. Here are chewy, interesting subjects treated by writers of real authority but marketed in a popular way. The university presses are turning towards the public because with the big presses not taking these risks, the stuff’s there for the taking.

Amazonia

More coverage of Ed Park's departure from Amazon:

Bezos’s last line of defense against the ire of the literati had been Park, the lone survivor of Amazon’s initial push into publishing of the big-time, hardcover variety. Three other promising hires out of “legacy” publishing, including former Time Warner Book Group CEO Larry Kirshbaum, all preceded him out the revolving door. In the intervening five years, genre books have done well — sometimes very well — over at Amazon’s West Coast operation, while big fiction and nonfiction have floundered, partly due to the bookstore boycott. Genres sell briskly as e-books, while the literary mid-list is still largely hand-sold in physical bookstores, so the Amazon authors hurt most of all by the lit world’s hostility are those it might like the most. Out of the earshot of the hosts, one agent at the party told me that for his kind of work, “Amazon is the publisher of last resort.”

When I signed a contract with Amazon for my last novel (Ed was my editor, and he was the most amazing person to work with obviously - he really should have been credited as a full-on collaborator, the book changed so much for the better as I worked for him!), a friend in publishing asked me, "But won't it be strange not to see your book in bookstores?" I had to say that it would not be much different from my previous experience with traditional publishers! My YA books, though they were published by HarperTeen, were not ordered by B&N and other chains, and had truly abysmal sales (the first one didn't clear the limit for republication in paper, so the sequel was released as if in all appearances it was a standalone, hardly surprising that readers found that frustrating). If you are a small midlist book at a traditional publisher and don't catch the world's attention particularly, it is not as though your book really will be in stores in any systematic way.

In general, I am really moving away from novel-writing: in any line of work, you will need to spend a good bit of time publicizing your own stuff and being out on the road, and it is really bad enough having to do that for ONE writing career let alone two. Increasingly sure, and happy about it, that I am a scholar and nonfiction writer in my heart of hearts - that said, future projects will include more crossover work a-la-Geoff Dyer (it is easier for me to force convergence between roles as professor of eighteenth-century British literature and author of literary nonfiction than to shoehorn in the novel-writing thing)....

In defense of the corporate behemoth

Neal Pollack in defense of Amazon:

When Amazon picked me up off the slush pile in 2011, my decade-long, five-book career was effectively dead. I had a modest contract with a legacy publisher for a pseudo-self-help book, but I didn’t want to write it, they no longer wanted put it out, and I’m pretty certain nobody would have wanted to read it. My antiquated dream was to write novels, but my previous and only novel had sold so poorly that I wouldn’t have been able to give away the next one for free, to any publisher.

Instead, through Amazon, I’ve published three full-length novels—a historical action comedy set in the very specific world of 1930s Jewish basketball and two detective stories set in the L.A. yoga scene, originally written in serialized form—as well as three 10,000-word novellas, including an extended piece of Kurt Vonnegut “fan fiction,” all in the last 30 months. I have another novel, a time-travel romantic comedy, coming out next March and I’m under contract to write still another novel, subject yet to be determined. It’s been the most enjoyable creative burst of my career, a gleeful hack’s sprint toward nowhere in particular.

As a reader, I have to say that Amazon has been an incredible boon to me. And what Pollack says seems to me very true - for what was formerly known as a mid-list author (and for readers who want to have access to books that are written to "commercial" standards of excellence but are not sufficiently commercial/mainstream in their appeal to hit the buttons for the big publishers - I am thinking of Neil Smith, Charlie Williams, et al. - often these books are just too demented and violent for, say, readers of conventional police procedurals, but they are absolutely brilliant!), Amazon's publishing wing - and what it can do in terms of making backlist titles easily available to ordinary readers - has been a force for good....

Print problems

A great piece by Matt McAdam on why it's a problem that deans love books:

[B]y clinging to the outdated notion that scholarship must be published in print, deans and scholars hurt university presses. They tie the legitimate responsibility of determining and distributing quality scholarship to a costly, inefficient, inflexible, and unsustainable publishing model. By insisting that print is a necessary condition for scholarly quality, deans and scholars make it more difficult for university presses to stay in business, thereby making it more difficult for them to publish print books! At the same time, scholars insist on having their own work published in print while they increasingly engage the work of others online. And deans demand that scholars publish print books while not giving their libraries enough money to buy them. They insist on print while undermining the demand for it.

Closing tabs

Tiny books of the Bronte children: digital facsimiles here. These are so amazing (I think the link came via Becca?)....

Also:

The Lawn Road Flats chronicled (truth is sometimes more interesting than fiction!).

Jim Holt on the conundrum of personal identity.

Abandoned settlements of the far north. (Via Anna.)

Self-promotional

First of four posts at the Columbia UP blog: I answer some questions about how I came to write Reading Style: A Life in Sentences:

Sentences are my obsession—I linger on them compulsively, it is the feeling of words in the mouth that got me hooked on literature in the first place as a very young child and I wanted to write a book that conveyed some of the magic of that way of reading.

Little a

Meet Ed Park!

Order wrangling

How Thomas Piketty's book was really marketed. Don't believe what you read in the papers! (Link via Ken Wark.)

Great books

At the New York Times, thoughtful pieces by Pankaj Mishra and Daniel Mendelsohn on how Harold Bloom's Western Canon book might have been received today.

"This is what God put me on earth to do, to bring Benjamin to America"

At the Chronicle, Eric Banks on the life and afterlife of Walter Benjamin. A great piece to read (Lindsay Waters is an intellectual hero!) - a reminder of how contingent the survival and dissemination of someone's work may be.

Have been thinking a lot recently about what it means to be an academic insider/gatekeeper (this has been much on my mind over the past week - also reported here). And from another standpoint, the lack of clear correlation between brilliance and success in a fairly remorseless pipeline....

Tentacles of filth!

"Lilia Ford" on the fallout of traditional publishers' failure to understand the erotica market. "Lilia" is an old friend of mine who was kind enough to answer interview questions here last year; her new story The Slave Catcher is now available at Amazon.

Orange soda

Out of all Mimi Lipson's stories, this is one of my very favorites. (Mimi's book has a page on Amazon and an ISBN! Such is the grandeur of modern-day publishing - but truly, the day I saw my first ISBN online was one of the greatest days of my entire life....)

Tuxedomania

The trailer persuades me that I must get this book! (Links courtesy of my mother.)

Catch-up

Have had some extremely good light reading in recent days - I tend to fall behind on logging it when I am in Cayman, it is too relaxing here!

Best of all, Wayne Koestenbaum's My 1980s and Other Essays - it is a super collection in any case, but I am also happy because it includes a couple pieces I've been assigning regularly and it is useful to have them between covers. Also, an amazing piece I hadn't read before about Lana Turner, and a "Play-Doh Poetics" that struck me considerably. (Adam Kirsch didn't like the book as much as I did.)

Warren Ellis, Gun Church (odd and rather haunting - I liked it); Kimberly Rae Miller, Coming Clean: A Memoir (interesting counterpoint to Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean About Her Mother's Compulsive Hoarding, but enough of these punny names, they are good books and don't need that sort of gimmick!); Erin Kelly, The Burning Air (I didn't believe at all in the characters - like, at all - but it is very readable); and David Mark, The Dark Winter, which is a bit melodramatic (compounded by being narrated in the present tense I think) but otherwise not at all bad.

Closing tabs:

Anne Fernald's reminiscences of John Hollander. Professor Hollander's death has given me much thought about teachers and teaching, and what we get from our teachers and leave behind of ourselves with our students....

The rise of the mini-monograph.

Against "strong" female characters. (Via Jane.)

40 trashy novels that are worth reading. (It is a good list, with considerable overlap to my own version of similar, only I would have less "women's fiction" and more science fiction and fantasy.)

Tim Maly on NSA-proofing your email.

Walton Muyumba on Albert Murray. I hope Paul Devlin does write Murray's biography....

4 shots

from Thursday's event at Books & Books. It is a truly beautiful store, you get a good glimpse of its glories here! (Thanks to Danielle Ebanks and colleagues for hosting and pictures - click for a bigger image.)

Closing tabs

Sleeping subjects.

5000-year-old games.

Unremarkable men walk 40 miles for no particular reason. (Via Liz.)

Like Colleen, I'm excited for Sara Ryan's upcoming graphic novel!

Life v. literature

The weeks where I am most copious here are weeks I am spending a lot of time at home on my computer. What is good for life is not necessarily good for blogging! I've been busy with all sorts of enjoyable things, including a fantastic party Tuesday night at the Algonquin Hotel for Amazon's little A fiction imprint.

I'm writing this Friday evening on my Kindle Fire (links a bit of a pain to paste in, so I may be selective) in a Vermont bed and breakfast; tomorrow Liz and I will race the Kingdom Even-Up Triathlon, and last night we stayed here on her aunt and uncle's absolutely lovely farm. Both of those links are highly worthwhile, and we had an amazing morning visiting calves in the barn (one of them sucked on the heel of my palm in a most endearing fashion), walking the hyper-energetic and muscular black lab blend down and up a very steep dirt road, looking at chickens and pigs and generally enjoying a magical agricultural interlude. There is also a cat, and another dog (a golden retriever that's considerably less active than the lab)! We will go back there tomorrow night for post-race feeding and recovery, and then drive home to New York on Sunday.

(Liz was telling me recently about this, and the family syrup site has just gone live - order some here! I am definitely intending to take a quart home with me: it is perhaps dubious, but I am thinking that it might make good endurance sport fuel....)

Closing tabs

I have said this before, but when I was a little kid, I wanted to be famous when I grew up. I wanted to have an interesting life, and I thought you had to be famous for that to be the case. Little did I know that I was grossly mistaken. Many famous people have what I would consider very boring lives, and some of the most interesting days of my life have been spent in libraries and classrooms!

It is a good week that sees the successful completion of the Syracuse half-Ironman, the final revisions completed on the style book (I sent the file to my editor earlier this afternoon) and news of the official confirmation, by the trustees of Columbia University, of my promotion to full professor! Not so status-oriented myself, but it means a decent raise and I have also been irked for some years that my lovely doctoral advisees have to have their primary letter of recommendation written by an associate professor - I am particularly glad to have set that straight...

Some very enjoyable light reading: two novels I absolutely loved by Alex Bledsoe, The Hum and the Shiver and Wisp of a Thing; Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane (gave me a keen desire to reread the tales in Joan Aiken's A Touch of Chill - also, Pobby and Dingan!); installments two and three of the Expanse series, Caliban's War and Abaddon's Gate (it really is a super trilogy - the characters are much more fully and appealingly rendered than in standard space opera); and Iain M. Banks, The Quarry.

Next work thing I have to do is a reader's report on a book manuscript for a university press - haven't cracked it open yet, but am rather looking forward to it, if not easier then certainly more intellectually engaging than putting final touches on one's own book. Looking forward to much (warm) triathlon training, yoga and reading in the days to come - I'm here in Cayman through Monday the 8th.

Closing tabs:

My former student Sarah Courteau on the self-help movement and the logic of affirmation.

A friend is recognized for excellence in book design.

Ian Bogost's principles for university presses (I am very strongly in favor of most of these, though I think the tenure question is more complicated than this format permits delving into).

Last but not least, sconic sections.

Timothy Leary's Nintento Power Glove

Sent corrections on final pages today for The Magic Circle. Fingers crossed that everything goes smoothly now towards publication.

I am doing a thirty-day yoga challenge (thirty classes in thirty days), but I may not have given my lungs quite time enough to repair post-ailment! Will see how they are doing tomorrow....

Closing tabs:

The value of authorial clutter. (Via Jim Caudle.)

John Tierney on why teachers secretly hate grading papers. (Via Lisa Cody.)

Charlie Jane Anders' list of some desirable science-fiction and fantasy titles forthcoming in 2013.

Crime and punishment

Diana Athill on working with Gitta Sereny.