Midge’s blog about writing . . . reading . . . and everything in between

I recently did a guest blog on writing routines (specifically, on my very random writing routine, along with a few tips for similarly scattered writers) for Seattle’s Crab Creek Review.

Check it out here.

This one comes thanks to the American Short Fiction blog, on which I discovered artist Mark Menjivar’s intriguing photo project: a collection of photographs of what’s in people’s refrigerators, appropriately called “you are what you eat.” From the freezer filled with nothing but meat and tequila to the fridge containing only two items, it’s an interesting look at the way people live. And it’s definitely thought-provoking for writers.

So here are two exercises for you to do after you’ve checked out the photos:

1) Open your fridge. Take a photo. Write about what you see: why it’s there, what you’d like to be different, what it says about you, and anything else you can think of.

2) Choose a photo from Menjivar’s project — but avoid reading his description of the fridge’s owner. Instead, make up a character based on what you see in his/her fridge, including backstory, relationships, work, passions, the whole thing.

Enjoy.

Today is the big day: Apple will unveil its new tablet, which will be interesting not only for those who love Apple toys but for everyone involved in publishing as well. As this NY Times article observes, “Apple may be giving the media industry a kind of time machine — a chance to undo mistakes of the past.”

That is, whereas print media has been suffering as more and more readers resist paying for content, the Apple tablet will introduce new ways to market — and charge for — digital content. As the Times notes, such devices make consumers more willing to pay for content: “In the last decade, while people downloaded music illegally to their desktop computers, they happily paid small amounts of money on their cellphones to download ring tones and send text messages.” So far, at least three magazine publishers are preparing to distribute content on the new tablet.

The iPad will also have an effect on Amazon’s Kindle. As the Daily Beast reports, “Only two years ago, [Apple founder Steve] Jobs contemptuously predicted that the Kindle would flop.” And now that readers have embraced the Kindle (and its very low prices, set by Amazon to the dismay of publishers), Apple will come out on the publishers’ side by allowing them to set their own prices. This will be a relief to those in the industry who worry about readers getting accustomed to paying $9.99 for Kindle versions of hardcover bestsellers.

And so the rules of the game are changing once again. The Daily Beast notes, “In anticipation of Apple’s tablet launch, Amazon announced that it would begin giving a more favorable split of Kindle sales dollars to publishers and authors. Amazon also decided to allow outsiders to create software to run on its device.”

I’m eager to see the tablet, not only because it’s a cool new toy but to see what effect it ultimately has on publishing. Even though it’s Amazon that is taking a loss by pricing books so low, this does affect the entire industry, and it’ll be interesting to see whether this new device levels out the playing field a bit.

I found this NYT article about James Patterson fascinating: the story of this author’s spectacularly successful career, from the struggle to get published in the 1970s, when he sold 10,000 copies of his first book, to today (last year he sold 14 million, outselling Stephen King, John Grisham, and Dan Brown). It also shows how, depressingly, the publishing industry has changed: “Thirty years ago, the industry defined a ‘hit’ novel as a book that sold a couple of hundred thousand copies in hardcover. Today a book isn’t considered a blockbuster unless it sells at least one million copies.” (No pressure, writers.)

The article offers a little background on the history of the blockbuster, pointing out that Patterson is not only a beneficiary but a catalyst (he’s described in the piece as “Little, Brown’s most prized possession”). These days, bestselling authors are not writers — they’re brands. (And, like a handful of other bestselling authors, Patterson doesn’t write his books himself but with a series of co-authors.)

The piece reminded me of something a writer friend of mine recently heard at a conference: a literary agent, when asked what she was looking for in an author, replied, “A franchise.” For most writers, this isn’t great news.

But as always, I try to look for the silver lining. As the article notes, “Patterson built his fan following methodically … like a politician aspiring to higher office, he was shoring up his base.” He also discovered the joys of reading later in life than many writers and blew off a chance to go to graduate school. And yes, his first book was rejected more than a dozen times.

I got a kick out of the story’s glimpse into Patterson’s book tour — he calls a gathering of 300+ people “a fairly respectable crowd” — and it shows well the bond between author and reader, no matter the genre (or brand, as the case may be). Of his own work, Patterson says, “this is not high art,” but his devoted fans don’t mind: the woman who read his books with her grandmother and wanted to bury a signed copy with her; the trucker who has listened to every book while on the road.

A writer can’t have everything — and in Patterson’s case, it’s the love of critics (the Daily Beast’s William Boot calls Patterson’s detective Alex Cross “a moron”). But as Patterson tells the Times, his readers are happy: “So what’s the big deal?”

Even when I worked in publishing back in nineties, the slush pile (i.e., that pile of unsolicited manuscripts sent in directly by authors and put aside while agented manuscripts were given priority) was rapidly becoming a thing of the past. (And yes, it literally is a “slush pile”: towering stacks of manuscripts all leaning and falling into one another until you can barely tell where one ends and the next one begins). In fact, as this Wall St. Journal article notes, the last time Random House found a book from the slush pile was in 1991.

These days, the article also notes, “most unsolicited material has gone unsolicited for good reason … Book publishers say it is now too expensive to pay employees to read slush that rarely is worthy of publication.” Yet back in the day, this was how authors were discovered — Philip Roth and Judith Guest among them — and even screenwriters could send a script directly to a studio (now, most studios won’t even accept emails due to concerns about being sued for plagiarism).

Now agents are the ones discovering new writers — but that doesn’t mean it’s easy for emerging writers to be discovered: finding an agent is “harder than ever to accomplish in the wake of agency consolidations and layoffs.”

While this may seem depressing, what always saves these tales of publishing woe are the exceptions, the success stories that are too few and far between but nevertheless give emerging writers just enough inspiration to keep going. One story is familiar by now: “In 2003, an unknown writer named Stephenie Meyer sent a letter to the Writers House agency asking [about] a 130,000-word manuscript about teenage vampires.” Normally this sort of query would’ve been tossed out — but assistant didn’t know that a typical YA book came in at 40,000 to 60,000 words, so she asked for the manuscript. And we all know how that turned out.

As always, there are rules in publishing that writers are wise to follow — but remember that it’s just as wise to break the rules on occasion. See the WSJ’s list of slush pile Dos and Don’ts for tips. But most of all, keep writing — becoming a better writer will help your chances — and keep submitting.

As many of you know, I send out a writing exercise in each issue of my free e-newsletter for writers.

In the spirit of the new year — looking back, looking ahead — here it is:

Write a review of your current project (i.e., your novel, a poem, a story, etc.).

Take a step back from the work and try to see it objectively. Write the review as if the piece is already published, and be honest in terms of what works and what doesn’t (adopt the style of your favorite book reviewer if this helps you get some distance). Be specific — cite examples, quote from the work itself — and then put it away. Wait a week, then take out the review and look it over. Pay attention to what it tells you about your project: first, where you are, and second, where you’d like to be.

Enjoy — and let me know how it goes!

I enjoyed this NYT piece, “The Perils of ‘Contact Me,’” on authors being all-too-accessible to their readers. Ben Yagoda writes that for him, being contacted by a reader is “flattering, and it’s actually kind of fun” — though some authors get stranger messages and are a little more wary (Mary Karr, for example, says, “I get a handful of jailhouse marriage proposals every time I publish a book”).

These days, it’s hard to imagine a time when, as Yagoda notes via this excerpt from Catcher in the Rye, authors weren’t at all accessible, when a reader of a good book once wished “the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.” Now (with the well-known exception of J. D. Salinger, of course), most authors go out of their way to be accessible, whether they write for a magazine or newspaper or whether they’re writing books. It’s what we have to do.

The writer Laurence Leamer tells Yagoda he always answers notes and queries from readers: “Every author I have ever known answers the phone the same way — on the first ring. We’re all so desperate for anything to intrude on our solitude and to take us away from that blank screen. E-mails do the same thing, and I’m embarrassed to say how quickly I read them.” This is so true.

But in addition to getting a reprieve from one’s own writing, it’s great to build relationships with readers in general. Perhaps because email makes this easier now than ever, I loved hearing this story on Larry Dark’s blog in which he shares his experience receiving a note back from Raymond Carver after Dark sent him a letter expressing his admiration for Carver’s “A Small, Good Thing.” Dark writes: “I had just quit law school to pursue writing fiction, and getting a response from the great man himself thrilled me, almost seemed to validate my choice. I swore that when a fan wrote to me, I’d write back, just as Carver had.” I think hearing back from a favorite author meant even more back in those days, when a response took so much more than hitting the Reply button.

But the point is: Write to authors whose work you like. (And rest assured that if you don’t like the work, the author has likely heard about it from a zillion others already.) Ask questions. And if you’re a writer on the receiving end of a kind note, always write back.

Here we are in 2010, and with that comes more predictions about the publishing industry.

The IdeaLogical Blog‘s Mike Shatzkin has posted twelve predictions for publishing this year, much related to digital content as well as a couple interesting predictions about authors and retail.

The Huffington Post offers 10 more predictions, and these too focus on e-books as well as on the publishing houses and what’s likely in store for editors as well as authors in the new year and beyond. A few takeaways: six-figure advances will likely be a thing of the past; publishers will take on fewer titles; demographics will favor books for young adults.

Richard Curtis offers a few predictions on GalleyCat, among them that e-book enthusiasts will return to print books and that at least one major publishing house will be acquired by a retailer.

Robert Gray offers Publishing Trends of Futures Past, a look at predictions and insights from 1850 (when Harper’s quoted the North British Review likening publishers to “a kind of moral vampire, sucking the best blood of genius, and destroying others to support themselves”) to 1985 (bringing another Harper’s piece, titled “Will the Book Survive?”).

And this CNN article notes that Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, simultaneously released in hardcover as well as in e-format, “offered a peek at the future of bookselling”; in other words, it’s a cautionary tale about digital piracy. The challenges mostly surround the mega-bestselling authors, the ones who need to worry about their books being pirated on a large scale. Some writers, such as J. K. Rowling, simply avoid digital format — but few emerging writers will be able to have this luxury.

In fact, for emerging writers, times are going to be tougher than ever (even in good times, the writer’s life has never been for the faint of heart). But persistence is everything: The writers who end up with book contracts are going to be the ones who don’t give up. They’re also going to be the ones who, if need be, take matters into their own hands and self-publish — in a smart way: good editing, good design, good marketing.

So if your New Year’s resolutions include writing, keep this in mind: 1) make sure your resolutions are things you can actually control (i.e., not “publish my novel with major publisher” but “submit my novel to agents”), and 2) to be open-minded about the myriad possibilities for emerging writers in a time when just about everything about publishing is up in the air.

Okay, it’s now that time of year when we look ahead (and make New Year’s Resolutions) and look back (at all the things we accomplished — or not, hence the New Year’s Resolutions).

On the publishing front, literary agent Nathan Bransford looks back at 2009 in his blog … while this Booksquare post looks ahead by forecasting publishing trends in 2010. It’s going to be another interesting year in publishing — and this post covers everything from rights to pricing to independent booksellers. (Yes, e-books “will be huge.”) And it’s hard not to love this Guardian blog post: 2009 was the year of the short story, which proves that “reports of the short story’s death have been greatly exaggerated.”

I also took a few moments to look back on the most popular posts on this blog, and among the top five were posts about social media: Twitter and Facebook. It was great to see readers checking out the Forgetting English Reading Guide and my Q&A with essay writer Brenda Miller, and rounding off the top five were the Stuff for Writers posts. Thanks so much for reading last year — I hope you come back often in 2010!

And finally, there’s nothing like a new year to inspire new writing goals. I recently met with a wonderful group of fellow writers to set goals for 2010, and it was incredibly inspiring (especially hearing about those writers who set and met their 2009 goals).

If you’re ready to do the same, I suggest a three-step process:

- What were your goals last year? If you don’t usually write down your writing goals, this year would be a good time to start. The years  have a way of slipping by if we don’t articulate our goals, and whether this is the year to write your novel, to find an agent, or to start journaling, putting it down on paper will hold you accountable. Better yet, find a writing buddy or writing group so you’ll be able to share the joys and challenges, as well as stay inspired.

- Did you meet last year’s goals? Whether you wrote them down or just had a vague idea of what you wanted to accomplish with your writing, how’d it go? If you achieved your goal — finished a first draft, submitted a story for publication, took a writing class — then think about what enabled to you do that: What had to align in your personal and professional life to make that happen? Take note of what worked, and make it happen again in 2010. If you weren’t able to meet your goals, why not? Take a look at what got in the way, and work to resolve this issue so you’ll have a better chance of completing what you set out to do this year.

- What are your writing goals this year? Finally, make that list. It doesn’t have to be grand, like Writing the Great American Novel — it just has to be something you’ve always wanted to do but have never made the time for. When you outline your goal(s), think about how you can use time to your advantage — this is the one time all year in which you’ve got 12 months (52 weeks, 365 days) in which to work on your goal. Don’t waste a single day. If you start out strong, you’ll find yourself inspired, you’ll get into a routine, and you’ll accomplish more than you ever thought possible.

Happy new year.

The New York Times recently profiled Open Letter Books, a small press affiliated with the University of Rochester that has found itself a nice niche in translation.

Open Letter Books has published only sixteen titles so far, but some have made it onto the 2009 Best Of lists, and Amazon recently awarded the publisher a $20,000 grant for a new anthology by East European writers.

Like any small press, Open Letter focuses on quality, not marketability, when it comes to what it publishes. As University of Rochester professor Joanna Scott (faculty members help comprise the publisher’s selection committee) told the Times, “What we are looking for is excellent work, from any language, eclectic modern fiction that is overlooked. Commerce does not enter the discussions; I wouldn’t know a commercial book if I saw one.”

What I find most interesting about this publisher is its subscription service. For $100 a year, or $60 for six months, readers receive a copy of each book Open Letter publishes during that time period, with free U.S. shipping. This comes out to about $10 per book. (Archipelago Books, a nonprofit press also specializing in translation, also offers a subscription service.)

After the last distressing couple of years — as this article notes, “the publishing industry is in a tailspin” — it’s nice to hear about the continuing good work of small presses. And here’s hoping 2010 is a much better one for publishing.

So I have a few more things to share with you.

One is Letters of Note, a site of “correspondence deserving of a wider audience.” So true. Here you’ll find reproductions of letters from Clyde Barrow (of Bonnie & Clyde) and Bill Watterson (of Calvin & Hobbes) as well as treasures from J. D. Salinger (on why he wouldn’t sell the film rights to Catcher in the Rye) and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (writing home during the war).

I’ve recently tuned in to Betsy Lerner’s blog on writing. An editor, literary agent, and author of The Forest for the Trees, Lerner tackles writing, agenting, and publishing in this relatively new (about a year old) blog; she also answers reader questions.

I’ve also been enjoying the blog of University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign professor Philip Graham — who also teaches in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program in Writing and is fiction editor of Ninth Letter — a great blog to visit for writing info and new ways of looking at your work.

This self-publishing site focuses on photo books, and it looks really fun for anyone who wants to create a polished travelogue or a baby book.

If you’re on Twitter, you must follow FakeAPStylebook (with many thanks to Evan, for pointing it out to me and thus giving me so many more ways to procrastinate…). But it’s worth it, with such cheeky “style guidelines” as Do not use the phrase “sources have said” unless you can’t get any real sources to say anything and Avoid reader confusion about whether Africa is a country or a continent by never writing about it. Enjoy.

And check out the Weird Book Room at Abe Books, which features all sorts of literary oddities, from The Teach Your Chicken to Fly Training Manual to Natural Bust Enlargement with Total Mind Power to The Who’s Who of British Beheadings. Believe it or not, some of these books are still in print/available.

As some of you know, I have another life as a globalization editor/writer — and right now I’m working on a report that takes a look at what’s new in globalization and languages over the past year. This, plus my fascination with Facebook, inspired me to check out my Forgetting English page in several different languages.

Here it is in Spanish:

And Chinese…

And, my favorite, “Pirate English”:

Thanks largely to volunteer translators, Facebook has localized from one to 70 languages in two years. (Personally, I think we need more of the goofy ones — I’d so much rather “Adjust me riggins” than “Change settings” or change the “Settins o’ me piracy” than my “Privacy Settings.” I’m thinking of volunteering to do “Snarky English” myself.)

If you’re a translator, there’s a link on Facebook (on the language setting page) where you can find out more. And if you’re interested in language and globalization in general, check out our new report, coming in 2010.

Here are a few of my new favorite toys, procrastination tools, and helpful resources for writers (though not in that order) …

Seattle-based writer Angela Fountas runs Quoterly, a wonderful site that “hopes to inspire you to forget every rule you’ve ever learned about writing, because the writing process is bigger, and more mysterious, than any set of rules.” Visit often for new and inspiring quotes from writers’ interviews and readings.

And I love this new application, Omm Writer, which is meant to keep you from distraction while writing. It gives you a lovely page (see below) with a text box in the middle (not pictured), and you can choose from several different soothing melodies if you’d like some background music. Just looking at it makes me feel relaxed.

I enjoyed seeing Charles Dickens’ revisions to “A Christmas Carol” here (though how he read his own handwriting I have no idea). But it’s a nice reminder that every writer not only writes but rewrites, and a lot. Check out this NY Times blog for more on Dickens the editor.

For writers who tweet (or would like to), check out Jane Friedman’s post on Twitter Tips for Writers.

Speaking of social networking, try (for material as well as procrastination) Lamebook, in which — you guessed it — lame and often hilarious pictures, status updates, and other items are posted (anonymously, of course).

And finally, one thing I love about inventing new characters is exploring who they are and what makes them tick. I just discovered this site, which is designed to “explore your morality” and features tests that cover everything from personality to work ethic to vengeance. The site notes, “Many aspects of personality are related to morality. Many aspects of behavior are influenced by moral motives. And many conflicts and misunderstandings are driven by differences in morality” — and what better ways to explore a new character? Keep in mind that while the site is designed to help you explore these issues, the five social psychologists who created it hope to expand their research … so for the sake of scientific accuracy, you may want to avoid registering for ten different fictional characters and instead just use their questions as a guideline.

Enjoy!

The New York Times reported that The Atlantic will publish two short stories (by Christopher Buckley and Edna O’Brien) today on the Kindle. The stories, which will be offered at $3.99 each, will be available only on Amazon’s e-reader (not in the print version), and they’ll be the first of many more — about two Kindle stories every month, says The Atlantic.

It’s not the first time individual short stories have been made available on the Kindle — for example, my husband, John Yunker, made his award-winning short story, “The Tourist Trail,” available on the Kindle after it first appeared in Phoebe — but it’s great to see that The Atlantic, which stopped publishing monthly fiction in 2005, is embracing a new format.

The format is a bit limiting, since one needs a Kindle to access these stories. The authors will split earnings with both The Atlantic and Amazon and are restricted from publishing these stories in other e-formats. But publishing in e-format is still attractive; as author Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep and American Wife) told the Times, she didn’t mind selling a story to The Atlantic for the Kindle only because “had she sold it to a small academic journal, it would have had ‘limited distribution anyway.’”

We still have to support the small journals — both by reading them and submitting to them — but it’s great to see The Atlantic take this step, as it allows the magazine to publish stories that may not be affordable to publish in print form. How many readers will pay $3.99 per story is what I’m eager to see; I hope readers will embrace e-stories as they do e-books.

What I learned from John’s adventures with the Kindle and “The Tourist Trail” is that he had to charge $1 because Amazon won’t allow anything to be posted for free; this is why he also made the story available for free as a PDF … and while not all writers are willing to give away content for free, it’s a reminder that, in the end, what’s most important for writers is having readers.

After reading this article, “A Good Author Is Hard to Find,” in this week’s Stranger, I realized it’s been a while since I posted anything on query letters — and while I don’t want to be redundant, writing queries can be almost more challenging than the book you’ve just finished — and in many ways, more important: If you don’t have a great query, agents won’t be asking to see your great novel. So let’s chat about query letters.

The best thing I can do is point you to the experts. The Stranger piece, written by a literary agent’s assistant, is a lesson in and of itself, basically teaching what not to do: “The world of the unsolicited query is a strange one … Potential audiences in the millions are cited (e.g., ‘There are 3,456,787 people who like horses in the United States, all of whom will read my book Love on Four Hooves‘). The query’s author is regularly the next Dan Brown/Stephenie Meyer/William Faulkner or some combination of the above.” (If you want to get past the agent’s assistant, don’t do these things.)

Another great resource for what not to do is Janet Reid’s Query Shark. For fiction only, Reid will post and critique queries on her blog; she’ll tell you when she stops reading (at the first misspelled word, for instance), what word count is appropriate (160,000 words is too long), and whether she’d send you a form rejection, read a few of your pages, or ask to see the whole manuscript. Even if your query doesn’t get picked up for her blog, you’ll learn a lot from the way she shreds others’ queries. (She’ll also point out what works in a query, though she doesn’t seem to get as many of these.)

AgentQuery also has a basic how-to for query letters, always helpful and a great place to start.

Yet sometimes the trouble begins even before the first line of the query does. Many writers, when they write The End, want to get their books out the door as soon as possible. This is exactly when you need to slow down, take a short vacation from your book, and revisit it with marketing in mind. Here are a few things to keep in mind before even thinking of sending queries to agents:

- Have someone (besides you) read your book. You’ll always want to have a friend, partner, writing buddy, or even a professional editor read your book (or proposal) before you send it out. You’ll likely have only one chance with your first-choice agents, and you don’t want to send a typo-ridden manuscript, or to have a major logic flaw in the first chapter that you’ve somehow overlooked (and this can happen). Make sure your project is solid before querying.

- Do your research. It’s often a great idea to research agents while you’re writing — a perfect task for when you need a break from the work but still want to be doing something for your project. Create a list of agents that represent the type of book you’re writing; check out their sales histories; visit Writer Beware to figure out which agents you don’t want to query. When you’re done, you’ll have a nice long list of reputable agents to choose from. (How long should this list be? One never knows. You could get representation from the first agent you query; it could take fifty queries before finding the right fit. So be optimistic as well as realistic.)

- Proofread, polish, prepare. You’ll want your manuscript to be clean (by this I mean free of typos and coffee stains), in the best shape it can possibly be, and you’ll want to be happy with it (while at the same time remaining open to changes). You’ll also want to follow each agent’s guidelines carefully so that a simple mistake doesn’t send your manuscript straight to the recycle bin.

For more insider info on agents and what makes it past the slush pile, check out The Rejecter, who blogs about working at a literary agency and answers queries about queries (but not queries themselves); and The Rejectionist, the agency assistant and author of the aforementioned article, who writes great experience and insight when it comes to the slush pile.