A Thousand Splendid Books

Finishing a new book and see it go out into the world should be a time of great relief and excitement for me as an author. But as is often the case when I begin the promotion part of authorship, I go into a deep depression. I am drug down by the sensation that I'm beating my head against the Great Wall of American popular culture, which seems absolutely impervious to books about serious subjects.

Yes, I confess, I'm one of those. I am a writer of "serious" non-fiction. Worse, I labor in the trenches of the "midlist," which is book-talk for relatively unknown authors who toil for modest advances and modest sales, who write books that, maybe, ten thousand people on Planet Earth will read in a good year. I could write a bestseller, though, yes? Well, probably not. I'll put it this way. The other day I received an email message from my publicist setting me straight when I noted that our radio campaign needed to hit bigger markets in order to build momentum. "As they say in the New York Lottery," she reminded me, "you gotta be in it to win it!" I thought that was awfully sweet of her to point out after I'd spent three years of my life working eighty hours a week on my book, giving a pound of my flesh in the process. It was no sweat, like a casual stroll down to the 7-Eleven to buy a lottery ticket.

I write books basically for free. In fact, when you consider that pound of flesh I lose each time I produce a well researched, engagingly readable 350 page book, giving my heart and soul to something I believe deeply in, I am in essence paying for the privilege of giving the world that book. I wish I could justify this insanity by confessing that I'm a vanity author, who pays publisher money to produce and market a book that no real publisher would want. No, it's worse, really. A real publisher -- a highly respected one, at that -- thought so highly of my book that it decided to publish my book and promote it. My new book has been out a couple of months, and it's not a bestseller. In the brave new world of book publishing, for me to concede that my book has not become a bestseller feels like a confession of abject failure. When some of my clueless friends ask me about my book, they rarely express interest in its substance. But they're dying to know whether it's a hit. I get the weird impression that, if it's a hit, only then would they actually consider buying it. If Oprah likes it, then it must be worthwhile. If it's on the New York Times Bestseller list, it must be good. The winner takes all.

Reading, and reading what strikes one's idiosyncratic fancy, is a declining art. Reading books is even more endangered. A recent AP-Ipsos poll found that almost one of every three Americans hadn't read a single book in the past year. And, except for history, about which there seems to be an endless supply of bestsellers, reading serious non-fiction books about current and pressing issues -- apart from name-calling books by political hacks and right-wing bitches with flowing Breck-girl hair -- is on its deathbed.

Ok, I'm sorry about the bitch remark. I take it back. But I am troubled (actually, I'm rather pissed about it) that the inflammatory garbage being written these days can pass for a "book." Such "books" have no detectable ideas or thoughts, and yet these so-called books seem to be what many readers want. Like political campaigns, negativity sells books, and the more inflammatory, thoughtless, and ideological the better. The more that authors of such "books" disregard facts or logic, indeed flout the very notion of truth, the more successful such "books" are.

When I get into one of my post-publication, book-promotion funks, it's easy to fall into the existential black hole that writers, artists and other creative people get sucked into. In that dark space, we come to believe we are failures. We think we talentless hacks and clueless goobers. But the pain of authorship is all the worse when I know in my heart of hearts that I have written a very good book. I know that I have done justice to my subject. I have done justice to the ordinary people whose stories I have told. I have done justice to the notion that some readers really do care, and are willing to open their eyes wide to reality rather than be put to sleep by the Huxleyan drug of American Idol and Paris Hilton.

Oh, by the way. I use big words sometimes and what some might call obscure literary references. I occasionally write in complex sentences, too. Maybe that's part of my problem. I refuse to dumb it down, and I'll persist in the belief, until the day I give up writing altogether, that readers are smart, that Americans want to read, and that they have attention spans of more than 30 seconds. But don't tell that to Amazon. Recently, the online bookseller installed a new feature on its website, presumably to allow its more anti-intellectual customers to keep their book purchases to a 6th grade reading level. Thus, I have learned from Amazon that my new book has 1.7 syllables per word, and that 61 percent of the books in its system have fewer syllables.

Alas reading is a declining art, and it's giving way to the great postmodern tidal wave in advanced societies. In the postmodern world, we are all producers now. We are all bloggers who produce "content," and content is now a commodity. You don't need much talent to produce a commodity. You don't need to be particularly creative or to have an original idea. When you produce content, you feed a machine, which chews upon your commodified words for a few fleeting moments until it spits them out into the void of digital hyperspace.

Meanwhile, a thousand splendid authors, working in relative obscurity, have written a thousand splendid books that you will never hear about. We splendid authors dwell on the dark side of the publishing world, clinging to our precious bones of good news -- a possible review coming up in a small magazine, a publicist who continues to answer our emails, a slight bump in our Amazon rankings. We wonder what it might be like to live on the light side, where A Thousand Splendid Suns shines so brightly that few inhabitants of American culture could possibly be unaware of it. For those of us on the dark side, however, we endure, hoping for just an ember of that warmth. That would be enough. That would keep us going.

Comments

[jimmythetrucker]

Welcome to Grub Street. It's a place we graduate from (I'm told) when we write something truly extraordinary. "Splendid" just doesn't get it.
All in all, Grub Street is a place real close to "Sixteenth Avenue," of which Lacy J. Dalton sang:

"From the corners of the country
From the cities and the farms
With years and years of living
Tucked up underneath their arms

"They walk away from everything
Just to see a dream come true
So God bless the boys who make the noise
On 16th Avenue

"With a million dollar spirit
And an old flattop guitar
They drive to town with all they own
In a hundred dollar car

"‘Cause one time someone told them
About a friend of a friend they knew
Who owns, you know, a studio
On 16th Avenue

"Now some were born to money
They’ve never had to say “Survive”
And others swing a 9 pound hammer
Just to stay alive

"There’s cowboys drunks and Christians
Mostly white and black and blue
They’ve all dialed the phone collect to home
From 16th Avenue

"Ah, but then one night in some empty room
Where no curtains ever hung
Like a miracle some golden words
Rolled off of someone’s tongue

"And after years of being nothing
They’re all looking right at you
And for a while they’ll go in style
On 16th Avenue

"It looked so uneventful
So quiet and discreet
But a lot of lives where changed
Down on that little one way street

"‘Cause they walk away from everything
Just to see a dream come true
So God bless the boys who make the noise
On 16th Avenue"

[3fingerbrown]

As one of the ten thousand readers of serious nonfiction you refer to, I truly sympathize with you and admire your commitment. But is your plight really anything new? Was there ever a time in publishing when one could get rich, or even turn a tidy profit, with a book subtitled "Confronting the Class Divide in American Education"?
In my work I visit the Gutenburg Project online. It's loaded with lots of entertaining and very useful nonfiction titles from yesteryear that no one ever heard of, not today or in their own time, and certainly no one got rich from their publication. But they were written by people just like you for people just like me, and they are a vital resource for researchers of all kinds of things. Remember that you write the books read by the people who will write our history. Keep writing--the "ten thousand" of tomorrow are depending on you.

[jeskiley]

Hmm, it's all starting to become clear. This work, and your previous work Standardized Minds: The High Price of America's Testing Culture, are culminating into your final manifesto.­..Grassroo­ts Education: Refining America's Vision for the Next Generation...or, known on the street circuit as, Educate Your Kids, Educate Yourself: The Lost Years.

Good luck, and if you need anymore advice, or inspiration for your book, feel free to contact me.

[jeskiley]

That was a fantastic read, and I gobbled up every word of it. So, please, tell me what your new release is called. As a busy homeschooling mom, I have zero time for fluffy fiction, and I devour only the truth. My life is short and I have alot to do!

There's got to be a way out of the tunnel that you speak of, that is awaiting the end of your process. Talking openly about it can sometimes cast the demon away. And I'm not talking about depression, but the metaphysical block to your book reaching the top of the stack.

Can you please write a quick reply telling me what your book is about?

[megaptera1969]

The book title is: Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education. You can read the description and reviews here:

http://www.amazon.com/Tearing-Down-Gates-Confronting-Education/dp/0520245881/ref=sr_1_1/002-4999770-9015253?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1189288539&sr=1-1

[jeskiley]

Thanks!