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Thursday, March 18, 2010

Today's fake: Author who admitted to plagiarism last month is caught again

From the increasingly invaluable MobyLives blog, which is the house blog of the Melville House publishing concern: author Gerald Posner, who wrote for Slate.com until he was caught plagiarizing, is once again the subject of plagiarism charges. Apparently he scanned in lots of sources for a book on Miami vice -- organized crime, that is, not the TV show -- and neglected to clearly mark in his files the material that was from other authors.

That's his explanation, in any case... He also says the stuff he was found to have lifted constitutes "a unique case," and will revise the book, and wasn't that just what Charles Pellegrino said a few weeks ago when questions first arose about "Last Train from Hiroshima"?

technorati: fakes, writers, plagiarism

Labels: Bad Behavior, books, fakes, publishing, writers

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Augusten Burroughs on tenacity

I had an agent for a few years, and she did a wonderful job getting my novel Make Nice in front of publishers. (Unfortunately none of them bought it, but that was my fault, not hers.) As most of my friends know, last year she quit the agent business, so I'm trying to find a new agent for my novel Mango Rain (which has had other titles in manuscript, including "Bangalored").

As I start the process of trying to find an agent again, these words from Augusten Burroughs are encouraging.

As a writer, you can't allow yourself the luxury of being discouraged and giving up when you are rejected, either by agents or publishers. You absolutely must plow forward. I believe that if you have real talent as a writer, a true gift, you will eventually be published. But it may not happen according to your schedule. And it may not happen with the first manuscript you create. Or the second. So you have to be, if not patient, at least endlessly tenacious.

Once I decided to write, to be published, I knew it would happen. I knew that if I wrote a new book every six months or every year, if I continued to read great books, eventually I would write something worthy of publication. I understood I might be in my forties or my fifties or even my sixties, but I felt confident that it would happen. The reason I was so confident is because I knew I wouldn't stop trying until it happened. And this is the secret. You don't need to be confident. You just need to be stubborn.

technorati: writing, rejection

Labels: publishing, writers

Thursday, September 17, 2009

What agents want: memorable 'stories or characters that gnaw at me weeks later'

Interesting exchange in an interview with an agent:

Q: What types of books are you looking for that you haven't found yet?

A: Despite the fact I read so much, I rarely find stories or characters that gnaw at me weeks later, and good literature should have that sort of staying power. Writing something memorable requires originality in voice, style and plot, but it also means tapping into the human consciousness and making readers feel something outside themselves. Cultivating that emotional investment simply requires a lot of talent, but real, relatable, and lovable characters are a good start.

That's about the size of it. But what alerted me to this interview was a statement the same agent made a few moments before:

2666 by Roberto Bolaño is a masterpiece -- but I wouldn't necessarily recommend emulating it. It's a novel that wouldn’t seem like it could work on paper -- I'd certainly have my doubts if it were pitched to me -- but it does because the writing is so strong. It is important to point out that even when dealing with higher concepts and more elusive goals, Bolaño's characters are still accessible, and that connection to the reader is the most important element.

technorati: literary agents, publishing, fiction

Labels: 2666, agents, Bolaño, characterization, fiction writing, publishing

Monday, April 13, 2009

Amazonfail being put to bed for the moment

A day after learning, along with most of the rest of the English-speaking world, about Amazon de-listing LGBT and erotic books, I see that the rankings on my own books have been restored. Not that they're much to brag about -- they are numbers 704,277 and 1,436,221 at the moment -- but at least they're there.

Someday we'll know what it was all about. The technical explanation, that some guy in amazon.fr fucked with the code, makes sense -- but only if you ignore the explanations about "policy" changes that some inquisitive authors got. Man, what a clusterfuck this whole thing was.

technorati: amazonfail, books

Labels: amazon, amazonfail, books, bookselling, publishing

Sunday, April 12, 2009

Amazon pulls functionality for 'adult' books

Amazon.com arbitrarily de-listed hundreds -- possibly thousands -- of books for so-called adult content. They're still selling them, but no longer including the de-listed books in sales rankings. The de-listed books include award-winning gay-friendly books and general erotica. My own books are included, and they're definitely "gay friendly," but Stephen Elliott"s "My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up" is also affected, and it has practically no gay content.

Good coverage, comments on jezebel.com, Publishers Weekly.

Update: Associated Press is reporting that Amazon is now saying "There was a glitch in our systems and it's being fixed."

People on Twitter are putting up reaction using the #amazonfail tag.

technorati: amazonfail, amazon.com, books

Labels: amazon, amazonfail, books, bookselling, gays, publishing

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

$2 million for celebrity memoir, as male novelists grow limp

Glum observers of the publishing scene who want to reinforce their view that the industry is as broken as an over-extended mortgage lender need look no farther than the $2 million deal for Kathy Griffin's memoir. How many copies of a doorstop like that will Ballantine have to sell just to break even? And for what? (And no, the deal wasn't done by Molly Jong-Fast.)

At Salon, Laura Miller suggests that women are ready to dethrone men as the primary writers of American novels, saying "in my (admittedly limited and anecdotal) experience, literary men under 45 are as likely to idolize Joan Didion or Flannery O'Connor as Norman Mailer or John Updike." (I'm not under 45, but for the record, I do idolize Flannery O'Connor [but not Joan Didion].)

A related clue might be found in my interview with YiYun Li last month. When she wanted to think of an American novelist critical of American society, the first name that came to her mind was Toni Morrison.

Whatever the achievements of women novelists, it's definitely true that women buy more books than men, especially novels. This 2007 NPR story quotes British novelist Ian McEwan as saying "When women stop reading, the novel will be dead."

technorati: Kathy Griffin, publishing, novelists

Labels: novelists, publishing

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

'Lost' Kerouac novel to be published

Publishers Marketplace reports that Harpers has agreed to publish "The Sea is My Brother," a "lost" novel by Jack Kerouac, written in 1942 and based on his experiences in the Merchant Marine. According to the book "Desolate Angel" by Dennis McNally, Kerouac wrote the work while on the Dorchester, where he served in the galley.

A review in Jack Magazine of "Atop an Underwood," the 1999 compendium of Kerouac's early and unpublished writings says that "Underwood" contains "a substantial chunk of the third version of 'The Sea is My Brother'." The biography "Jack Kerouac" by Michael Dittman quotes Kerouac as describing "The Sea is My Brother" as being about "man's simple revolt from society as it is, with the inequalities, frustration, and self-inflicted agonies. Weley Martin loved the sea with a strange, lonely love; the sea is his brother and sentences. He goes down. The story also of another man, in contrast, who escapes society for the sea, but finds the sea a place of terrible loneliness."

Sounds like Kerouac was pretty horny and miserable aboard the Dorchester.

technorati: Jack Kerouac, publishing, book deals

Labels: book deals, Kerouac, novelists, publishing

Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Eight years' work on her book paid off

On the SF Metroblog, I just posted an interview with novelist Nami Mun, whose work I was alerted to through the blog of another Korean-American writer, Alex Chee.

I hadn't heard of Mun, but she is a Pushcart Prize winner. According to the book deals log on Publishers Marketplace, Mun's book sold in a "significant" deal, which is between $250K and $500K, but she did work on it for eight years. Say she got $250K for the book, that's about $30,000 a year.

Her multi-city book tour has just started, and I hope it goes better than that other guy's.

technorati: writers, book deals, Nami Mun

Labels: book deals, books, publishing, writers

Sunday, December 28, 2008

Publishing and pain

A very good article in the Village Voice looks at the state of publishing from the perspective of a successful mid-list author. The hook for the story is how the guy, exhausted and disillusioned on a book tour from hell, managed to piss off some anonymous bloggers who proceeded to french-fry him online until he backed down. But the larger, more interesting issues addressed by the piece have to do with the desperate, almost flailing actions of book publicists, who don't understand the general uselessness of book tours for novelists, and the sad delusions of the novelists themselves, who think their book tour will be like a victory lap in front of informed crowds of fans and then find it amounts to appearing to empty rows of chairs in small towns where... but read for yourself:

Then comes the Friday night in Winnetka, Illinois, when you pull up to a street where the only light is coming from the bookstore, and you realize this won't be good. There's one customer inside, and the reading is canceled, but you talk him into buying a book anyway... There's the afternoon in a small, depressed Arkansas town when... the promised crowd and the television film crew have all been canceled, preempted by a big football game. Three middle-aged women walk in, escorting their senile grandmother, who they've brought back to town after an absence of 70 years to see what she remembers, which is nothing. The bookstore owner flips a thumb at you: "Why don't you do your little show for them?" And you do, dear reader, you do.

The piece captures the reality of what being a "successful" author -- one with good reviews and middling best-sellers to their name -- must really be like. For all those (like me) with unpublished novels who imagine (as I used to) that their lives will change when they're published, it's a good reality check.

Still, I know getting published means something. I have books on the shelves with my name on the spine. That doesn't mean I never have to work again, but it's something.

technorati: publishing

Labels: bloggers, publishing

Thursday, December 25, 2008

Xmas forecast

It's cold and rainy and intermittently sunny and blustery here at the House of Cats and Rhinos. We're gettin' up slow, having crossed the Bay Bridge after midnight on our way back from Xmas in Walnut Creek. Fortunately there was no backup at the toll plaza, since only about 4 lanes were open and most of the drivers took about a minute and a half each to grok the concepts of "toll" and "four dollars."

For Xmas, I think I'm going to give myself the present of self-publishing my Rat Pack novel. Why not let people read the damn thing. It'll take a while to get that into the pipeline, though, since the formatting has to be right or the resulting book will look like crap.

Looking forward to a week off, too. That's the scene here. Back to regularly scheduled programming soon.

Labels: publishing, weather

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Immature content only

On Friday I mentioned the CNet editor who self-published his novel and then wrote a long column about doing so. Now it seems (courtesy Galleycat) Apple won't allow his book to be sold as an e-book for the iPhone because of a single line in which "a teenage girl telling a detective that she overheard her friend asking a gentleman caller to '(love) me like you mean it,' just with a slightly more emphatic verb." The story goes on to speculate just how this phrase came to the attention of Apple, quoting a developer: "What would happen if I (a Romanian) would publish an e-book filled with Romanian obscenities? -- would Apple's staff need to learn Romanian... and read the entire ebook ... to make sure this doesn't happen?"

But the part of the story that caught my attention was lower down, in a section recounting Apple's struggle to keep iPhone apps SFW:

Apple's definition of "objectionable" has been questioned before. After initially balking, Apple finally relented to the extremely influential fart joke lobby last week and permitted applications such as Pull My Finger and iFart Mobile (ranked 3rd and 10th, respectively, among paid App Store applications at the moment) under what was described as a "Mature" section.

Really? Sounds like apps with names like that should be in an "Immature" section.

technorati: books, Apple, censorship

Labels: books, novelists, pornography, publishing

Friday, December 19, 2008

Two articles about the state of publishing

Two articles/blog postings caught my eye today.

Courtesy Galleycat, a long, almost obsessively comprehensive article by a CNet editor about self-publishing his novel. He compares services, makes strategy suggestions, and comes to the conclusion that you have to spend the money a real publisher would have spent on your book if you want it to be good at all. But at least it's published then.

Then in Huffington Post, someone writes about the publishing industry's seeming disinterest in publishing books male readers would want to read.

Since the novel I wrote for a local small press was designed specifically for the male market, but turned down by the publisher and dumped back in my lap for a small kill fee with the restriction that I can only self-publish it, these two articles coincide with my own writing career, such as it is at the moment.

That's right -- the novel I signed a contract for in 2007 and wrote in six months, more or less to order, was rejected, and I'll wind up self-publishing it. I'll be sure to publicize it here, once I go through many of the steps outlined by that self-publishing article (but without spending all that money on the book).

technorati: books, publishing, self-publishing, reading

Labels: books, publishing, reading

Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Nine-year-old gets a book deal

A nine-year-old boy who wrote a book titled "How to Talk to Girls" is the toast of the internet this week, and on top of it all, he now has a movie deal. 20th Century Fox will adapt the how-to advice into a charming comedic vehicle for its next doomed child star.

Perhaps the young man can follow up his success with "How to Talk to Publicists," "How to Survive the Onset of Puberty While in Rehab," and "How to Sue Your Parents For All That Money They Said You Were Getting."

technorati: books, publishing, book deals

Labels: book deals, publishing, zeitgeist

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

It's Bad Behavior Wednesday™!

In a shameless bit of online theft, a Chinese publisher took interviews and illustrations from a comix fan's website and packaged them into a $100 coffee table book, even including a CD with digital copies of everything -- "They didn't even bother to change the filenames." And a famous romance author has been caught stealing as well.

In other news from Galleycat, Generation X is now feeling angst about not being the newest, hottest generation anymore. They're "caught between the boomers and the millennials." But the millenials don't have it so good: just look at this epic whine from a Harvard freshman.

technorati: whining, plagiarism, authors, Chinese publishing

Labels: Bad Behavior, publishing, writers

Monday, March 03, 2008

Today's fake: she wasn't half-native American or a gang chick

A woman who wrote a memoir about being a half white, half Native American gang chick who worked as a drug courier for South Central L.A. gangs made it all up, and the publisher is pulling all unsold copies and cancelling her book tour. Her rationale?

I was in a position where at one point people said you should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk. Maybe it's an ego thing -- I don't know. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it.

She was found out when the New York Times published a profile of the author last week; her sister read it, agog, then called the publisher to squeal.

I wonder how many of these the publishing industry will take before the entire memoir genre becomes a thing of the past.

technorati: hoaxes

Labels: fakes, hoaxes, publishing

Monday, January 28, 2008

Out-of-work screenwriters prepare to flood market with that novel they've been meaning to write

Sunday's LA Times had this story: idled by the protracted screenwriters strike, Hollywood scribes are using the downtime to "write in the morning and picket in the afternoon." It quotes them as saying:

"The process (of screenwriting) is less than satisfying... You get tired and burned out, and I always wanted to write novels anyway."
and
"Scripts are all about economy and forward momentum, whereas novels can be big, baggy receptacles for a story. When I go back to screenwriting, I feel like I've been put back in my cage."
and
"The Writers Guild is gonna kill me for saying this, but a script is nothing more than a blueprint for a film... It's a road map and can't stand on its own; it needs others to make it a movie. Books are more holistic. They're less about plot and more about character, emotions, nuance. It's refreshing to just write about people for a change."

As someone who's been trying to get a literary novel published for years, I cringe at the notion that the market is about to be flooded with tight, competent, professional dreck by people who are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to think up the next big thing. Just what I needed.

Labels: films, novel writing, publishing

Tuesday, December 25, 2007

Economics of publishing, part CXDVIII

First, the good news: "There are more agents than writers."

Now, the bad news: "And there are more writers than readers. I'm convinced of that."

That's from an interview with big-time New Yawk Litarerry Agent Lynn Nesbit, whose clients have included Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, and Donald Barthelme, whose short story "The Big Broadcast of 1938" got him representation by newly-minted agent Nesbit and occasioned the above reflection on the economics of publishing.

She goes on:

I tell Tina [Bennett] and Eric [Simonoff], "You missed the good days." When I worked for Sterling Lord, I had a loft, a sort of duplex loft apartment on Barrow Street. And Michael Sissons, who's now the head of Fraser & Dunlop, and Peter Matson, who's also an agent, used to give these parties at my house. They would make these drinks of half brandy and half champagne, and people got so drunk. One night Rosalyn Drexler, the lady wrestler and the novelist, picked up Walter Minton and just threw him against the wall. I'll never forget that. There was just more of a sense of fun.... It's the corporate thing. People are too scared. It doesn't attract eccentrics anymore.

technorati: publishing, literary agents

Labels: agents, publishing

Monday, December 24, 2007

Something short of sock puppeting

Is it sock puppeting or sock puppeteering? Sock-puppet mastering?

Anyway. A writer who self-published the first in a series of fantasy books invented a publicist and sent out releases about himself. The ruse worked to attract the attention of a major publisher, which signed him to a six-figure contract.

There is an interesting distinction there between the practice of sock puppeting, or whatever you'd call it -- that is, writing glowing reviews about yourself on websites and writing comments to your own blog postings, using alter egos -- and pretending to be a publicist for yourself. A publicist is paid, while a sock puppet, or the persons purporting to write those glowing reviews and appreciative comments, are not. For some reason it is regarded as an embarrassing act of vanity to write a glowing review of your own book on Amazon, but not to act as your own publicist under a pseudonym.

The way around this problem, of course, is to make an arrangement with another writer to act as each other's publicist. Pay each other one dollar per year, and then flog the other person's book with such enthusiasm that he'd look like an asshole if he didn't pump yours with equal fervor.

Or you could, you know, just spend money and hire a publicist. I did this for my very first book with free money I'd gotten off stock options, thus keeping the strange little book from disappearing without a trace. The publicist's efforts even garnered a few reviews.

technorati: publishing, publicity, book publicity

Labels: book deals, publishing

Saturday, December 08, 2007

The Ghost Writers

Think Tom Brokaw and other celebrities actually write those books that appear with their names on the cover? As Forbes says: "Surely you jest."

Why this is described as "ghost writing" and not as a hoax is beyond me. (Courtesy MediaBistro.)

technorati: writers, hoaxes

Labels: publishing, writers

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Authors getting '10 percent of nothing' for foamer books

Five right-wing authors have sued their publisher for marketing huge lots of their books to book clubs and other outlets it owns at vastly reduced prices, meaning that instead of getting the usual 15% royalty on cover price, they get 10% of the publisher's net profit on the internally-marketed books, which is virtually nil.

Said one disgruntled writer: "You get 10 per cent of nothing because they basically give them away." Another complained:

The difference between 10 cents and $4.25 is pretty large when you multiply it by 20,000 to 30,000 books. It suddenly occurred to us that Regnery is making collectively jillions of dollars off of us and paying us a pittance. Why is Regnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company?

I'm not sure where the Marxist part comes into it, unless he's referring to the fact that these writers are already wealthy and the publisher, using the dictum "To each according to his needs," figured they didn't need the money.

Anyway, fun for all. Once you see what books they're talking about, you'll quickly lose any sympathy. The titles include such shit-bombs as "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry" and "Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Compromised America's National Security."

technorati: conservatives, Republicans, right wing

Labels: crypto-fascists, politics, publishing, Republicans

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Lit liars in the news

Coincidentally, two of last year's most disgraced authors were in the news today. The filthy rich parents of Kaavya Viswanathan, whose name was attached to a largely plagiarized novel "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed" etc., bought a $3.2 million condo in Manhattan. And Galleycat reports that James Frey has recovered enough from his national humiliation on Oprah to pen a novel. Man, that's one book that's going to be combed for lice like a first grader's head.

technorati: James Frey, Kaavya, hoaxes, writers

Labels: book deals, fakes, hoaxes, publishing, writers

Thursday, August 30, 2007

In publishing, everyone knows you're a dog

Yesterday I received a preliminary verdict from my agent about the book I finished writing in June: she's not too crazy about it. The success of Steve Martin's novel "Shopgirl" notwithstanding, I wonder if there's a problem with a middle-aged man writing a book about a woman half his age.

Then I saw this article in the Boston Phoenix (courtesy Publisher's Marketplace) about how publishing is no different than anything else: it sure doesn't hurt to be young and pretty. Sample quote:

"It's easier in life to be attractive. That's reductive but true," says HarperCollins editor Gail Winston. "On the other hand, a brilliant book by an author who is not young and not attractive isn't going to fail. It's just, I think that those other books -- for those reasons, those authors maybe get a little bit of an advantage."

Oh, good! At least "a brilliant book is not going to fail." A ringing endorsement.

Frankly, my book is probably not brilliant. It probably does need tightenting -- as does my abdomen, come to think of it.

technorati: publishing

Labels: publishing

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Borders shops for new authors among staff

This Galleycat post says Borders is holding a contest for the best manuscript(s) written by its 30,000 employees, "anticipating multiple winners and hop[ing] to publish fictional works ranging from mysteries and thrillers to romance and historical novels" in its house imprint.

I'm sure they'll find some winners. But if I were one of them, I sure would make sure a qualified agent or lawyer looked at the contract being offered. What are the chances it will contain unusually explotative terms -- and that employees might feel too intimidated to object?

technorati: publishing, bookstores

Labels: books, publishing

Thursday, July 12, 2007

Strange book deal of the week

From Publisher's Marketplace:

Jill Myles's SEX STARVED, the humorous adventures of a newly-fledged succubus as she copes with her new "life," the need for sex, and the dangerous vampire and sexy angel she's torn between; and SEX DRIVE, featuring a succubus road trip to New Orleans, [sold] to Pocket Books.

That's classified as "Women's Romance/Fiction." I guess succubi are the new vampires -- well, that's all that vampire thing was about in the first place, right?

Labels: book deals, publishing