Not yet anyway, not until the printer can get the cover of Seeing Red, red. Right now, I am SEEING PINKY ORANGE.
December 4, 2010
Hey Andy, your email is just extraordinary and the timing of it couldn't be better, or worse. Well, it is a bit eerie actually - you are writing so thoughtfully about publishing issues at a very difficult moment in my writing and publishing life.
I know you and Kellie are impatiently awaiting Seeing Red - well, so was I. And then the cartons of new books arrived two days ago, and I am trying to figure out whether to accept the shipment from the book-making company because the cover of the novel is seriously flawed.
The "why's" of this very depressing situation have everything to do with your thoughtful questions about the state of publishing, and the situation with a shrinking reading audience. No, the sad fact is that most people are not like you; most readers today want as you say, "candy," and that's making it harder and harder to write and and publish and sell serious fiction.
Where do I begin?
When I launched my tiny publishing company, Star Root Press, to publish Dreaming Maples in 2002, it was after several extraordinarily difficult years trying to get a contract with a mainstream publisher. I am not sure if you know this, but when I finished the first novel in 1996, I had Joyce Carol Oates' agent (with the John Hawkins' literary agency - the one Jack London used way back when) trying to sell it.
My agent Ellie - and the second NY agent who tried to sell my book a couple of years later -- used to tell me that a decade before, Dreaming Maples would have sold in a heartbeat. (I did get a Pushcart Prize nomination from Ballantine Books after it was all over.) As it happened, though, I was attempting to sell my first novel -- a good read but still, literary fiction -- at a gruesome time in the book publishing industry. The book business was going through huge upheaval; the nosedive has only accelerated since. As consolidation in the publishing industry intensified, and the number of publishing companies kept shrinking and readership continued shriveling, publishers began frantically hunting for more blockbusters (the rise of Barnes and Noble and Borders only hurried that situation along.)
In the old days, publishers would keep in their "stable of writers" all kinds of serious authors who were so-called "mid-list" writers. These authors sold tens of thousands of books, not millions. Starting about two decades ago, though -- just about the time yours truly began writing fiction -- publishers began avoiding the serious but moderate-selling authors; bottom-line economics drove publishers more and more frantically toward publishing the big BIG books that the reading public likes to gobble up the way they gobble up Burger King whoppers.
Today, the blockbuster thing has just taken over. Publishers drool for big sellers like John Grisham and Steig Larsson and Tom Clancy. They yearn for novels like Lovely Bones and The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo even though you, and many many serious readers like you, aren't interested.
Publishers -- trying to boost their frightfully sagging bottom lines -- are desperate to appeal to the lowest common denominator. They know what the reading public wants. They are marketing to your dad (who I'm sure must be a great guy if he's YOUR dad. ☺ But here is what you write about your Pop:
"I think of my dad, for whom we bought a Kindle because he loves the blockbuster best-sellers. He'll throw me a title (James Patterson, Stieg Larsson, Tom Clancy, et. al.), and tell me it's great, but I just can't get into it. (Didn't you have a dilemma with "Eat, Pray, Love" that you blogged about?) I'll throw him some authors, and he just can't get into them because "I just want a good story."
The publishers see what you see among your friends and family: "most people unfortunately have no patience for complex character development and what I like to refer as "look-in-the-mirror" reading: how many of this character's traits do I share and do I like/loathe that part of my psyche?! And how can I alter my behavior to fix those parts I don't care for or accentuate those I like?"
I sit here shaking my head when you ask this simple question: "I guess what I'm asking is, how do we raise the bar on what constitutes good literature?"
In my classroom, of course, I raise the bar by requiring the students to read "good" books, just like you say you "try to expose "good" music to my students." But I am not at all hopeful that I am turning out a ton of sophisticated readers. Once these kids leave the University, they have little or no interest or incentive in reading, and certainly not in reading the likes of David Markson. The internet, while amazing and fabulous for connecting us to each other, and putting any piece of information we want immediately at our eyes and fingertips, is also encouraging a kind of dumbing-down effect. Let's put it this way, the brief exchanges that pass for communication don't help develop deep critical-thinking skills. This semester, in one freshman English literature class, I had only three students who scored above a C plus on a simple essay that required them to compare two characters. This sorry grade spread is the worst thing I've seen in a dozen years of teaching at the University!
So, on a more positive note, David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress sounds like a fabulous and thought-provoking novel and as soon as this crazy semester ends, I will give it a try. It's really so wonderful that you are such a serious reader. I sure wish we had a lot more readers out there who want the kind of demanding complex literature that you enjoy! How do we develop them? Sigh. I am not really sure.
And I'm not really sure how we should save the publishing industry either!
With all the self-publishing options out there today, you would think it would have been a cinch to produce Seeing Red at a reasonable price.
It wasn't at all. After researching the self-publishing market, I found a local company to produce the book, and now it looks as though they really were not capable of handling the job. As I said, the cover is a real problem; not only is the color a bit pukey, but the covers on the handful of books I took home are, after only a day, starting to curl! Bad deal. Bad choice of paper, I guess. Hard to say what exactly the problem is, but it's a big problem for me, because I was expecting to launch the book this week in a big pre-Christmas marketing effort. (Seeing red is what, after all, we do at Christmas, right?! :)
In April of 2002, when I published Dreaming Maples, I got up at 6 a.m. and drove 40 miles to Albany just to stand beside the huge Heidelberg press at Digital Page to watch that beautiful cover image come into being. It was thrilling (a bit like one of those exciting birth scenes in Dreaming Maples :). But it was also important to be at the press check -- it gave me a chance to tell the printer how to tinker with the ink colors so that the image would perfectly match my cousin, Pat Rotondo's dazzling forest painting.
This time around it wasn't possible to do a press check. It was just too expensive for me to work directly with a printer, so I chose another route; I worked with a book-making company that brokered (sub-contracted) the printing out. They did a lovely job designing the book, but when it came to printing it, well, we haven't got a book yet :(
Meanwhile, the economics of this little enterprise are dicey too.
I was forced to price Seeing Red at $19.95 per book, four dollars more than Dreaming Maples. And the saddest part is that: I am going to lose almost $2 for EACH BOOK that I sell on Amazon!
That's because Amazon splits the cover price of the book with the author on a 50/50 basis.
Each copy of Seeing Red costs me a whopping $11.70 to produce, but would only generate $9.98 from an Amazon sale. So you see now why I intend to BEG people to buy Seeing Red from my website (where I am selling the book for $17.95!!)
If I had chosen to publish on iUniverse or on the other biggie, Xlibris, the economics were much, much worse!
I think this sad state of self-publishing affairs is part of what is driving me to experiment so intensely with my new blog books, Sister Mysteries and my crazy nun novel, Castenata! (I think Markson would have loved what I am attempting to do, blur the line between truth and fiction, a line that the internet is blurring more and more effectively every day!)
So it's perhaps a crazy idea I have, but I feel that there has to be a way to get good imaginative literary writing out there to the reading public who wants it. Maybe my new writing - full of lush images and links - will appeal to readers on-line? Maybe I can figure out a way to sell the writing at some point perhaps?
Will I make money? Probably not a lot. But I've got to write, I can't live without writing. I just hope that one day there will be a way to encourage good writing for the e-book market, which is booming.
By the way, I am looking for an app writer, if you happen to know one, who could write code that would package my new books, Sister Mysteries and Castenata in a format for say, the Ipad. Then I could bypass the paper cover printing world and get my lushly-illustrated books out there to folks who, like you, really do appreciate good writing.
I've been getting up at 4 a.m. every morning to write these new books. I wasn't going to do that today, but when I woke up at 3:30 this morning I started tossing and turning. I started fretting about those awful Seeing Red covers. I got up just to check my email, just to see if my painter cousin Pat, the woman who did the image for the first cover, and who knows the printing business inside and out, had had a chance to look at my sorry book cover. I am awaiting her opinion before I decide whether to tell the book-making company that I won't accept the books.
Well, so it's five a.m. now, so I still have time to go back to sleep.
I can't thank you enough Andy for your amazing letter. At a time when I am feeling discouraged about the publishing THING, it helps enormously to have a reader (and friend) like you dive into the issues that are making life so tough for serious writers like me. And no, you don't owe me "at least one semester's worth of tuition" for addressing your "quandaries."
I owe YOU for a paragraph like this one:
"Could you imagine Shakespeare being translated into "text-language...James Joyce redone by David Baldacci??! Monet redone by Thomas Kinkade??? Michelangelo's David redone by a craft-fair hack potter? An all-Bach night on American Idol??"
My heavens, Andy, if these are the issues that Markson's book raises for you, then you have done me an enormous favor by suggesting my first vacation read!
By the way, it would be so much fun to have you and Kellie out to the house for dinner. It would be even more fun if one of the kids were back home, so that they could visit with the man who was their absolutely favorite music and band teacher of all time. :)
I'm sure Rich would love to cook up one of his enchilada dinners. And I will make the guacamole and dessert. So consider this an invitation over the holidays! (Maybe by then I will have solved the Seeing Red dilemma!)
Happy healthy holidays to you and the familiy!
Claudia
P.S. I just went to Amazon.com (yes, of course I love Amazon :) and read the first page of Markson's book and I ordered it with one click, it's astonishing, and quite coincidentally, he is writing about someone living in a MUSEUM AND THAT WAS AN IDEA I HAD FOR A NOVEL. I love painting, I hung my first show last night in Great Barrington, and as you know, my first novel, Dreaming Maples is all about a young painter. In fact, she delivers her BABY beneath the famous "Blond Bather" -- a Renoir at the Clark! While we are on the subject of connections, I noticed that another of Markson's books is called This is Not a Novel, which could very well be the title of Sister Mysteries, which for years I TRIED to write as a novel. Now I am writing it as a multi-genre piece of fiction. I will order THAT BOOK BY MARKSON SHORTLY! Before his death, he was apparently really big into genre-bending writing.
ANDY DO YOU REALIZE THAT YOU HAVE HELPED ME DISCOVER A NEW MUSE? A NEW INSPIRATION? wow. Something is in the air lately. Every time I turn around, I get another email communiqué from a friend who makes me see new connections in my writing. The connections -- all courtesy of the internet -- are perhaps coincidental, but they just keep happening. Read Sister Mysteriess to see (and maybe we are headed for another chapter on the matters here!) THANKS A MILLION ANDY!
Andrew LaCoppola, a high school music and band teacher at Johnstown High in Johnstown, New York, was a teacher at Chatham Middle from 1993-2000. My children were there during that period, they never had a better and more fun-loving, upbeat teacher! Thanks Andy LaCoppola, for all you do to make music come alive in the classroom and in the hearts and lives of young musicians!