Publishing. It’s strictly business by Gabriel Valjan

 

There were two pieces of music playing inside my head while I was writing this short essay on what I LOVE and HATE about the publishing industry. 

 

LOVE and HATE. These two words denote extremes. In my mind, they are the color red. Then because I live in the United States, which has the world’s most boring currency, publishing introduces the color of money, green. Mix red and green and you get brown—the perfect metaphor for turbidity and turpitude.

 

‘Do what you love, and it won’t feel like work.’ When writing doesn’t pay the bills and you persist at the endeavor, it must be LOVE. The experience feeds you somehow, and that sustenance means something and everything to you. Agented or not, when what you’ve written is published, it’s a milestone. You have arrived. There is nothing like holding your book in your hands. It’s your sweat equity, your child, your everything until you write the next one.

 

Then comes Reality. I hear the music, the sound of those violins that are the theme song to The Godfather. I hear Michael Corleone say, ‘It’s not personal—it’s strictly business.’ Call yourself an author, an auteur, a scribe, or a storyteller, but you are now a professional in the world’s second oldest profession. It’s a business. You are as good as your last book.

 

The allusion to organized crime is intentional because that’s how I view publishing. It’s a business, and it’s organized (very well, I might add) at deception and coercion. I’m not talking about the merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. I’m not talking about the multinational monopoly that is Amazon. What I’m talking about is the lack of transparency from the Big Five.

 

I’m talking about appearances. You browse a bookstore that proudly proclaims that it supports indie authors and publishers. You leaf through a book that you think is from an indie publisher, only to discover that it’s an imprint of one of the Big 5. Just look at this chart. It’s not Bartles & Jaymes, two old dudes with wine coolers on their porch. It’s the slick sleight of hand from the Mad Men of Marketing whose business strategies and successes in the marketplace would make Don Corleone envious. This is what I HATE.

 

The rationale I’ve read online is that the Big 5 wanted to meet the market’s appetite for genre. It’s code for two words I loathe: consumers and segmentation. YA is hot, so the mother ship creates a YA imprint. No harm. No foul. Not so fast. When Hyman Roth says in The Godfather, ‘We’re bigger than US Steel,’ he was alluding to the corporatization of criminal behavior. A white-collar version of Luca Brasi kills the competition with a pen, not unlike the traders at the financial firms that sold subprime mortgages. It’s not a crime, they said, when the customer knows the terms.

 

I daresay that with imprints, the customer does not know. The victimization is subtle but insidious. Small bookstores have to survive, so they’ll stock the imprints. The small presses and their authors are left outside looking at all the shelves where their books will never sit. It’s Capitalism, and survival of the fittest, you say. My response is that the chart on the web I showed you is not unlike the wall chart of the Five Families, except it’s more detailed and dangerous. We know money and morals mix like oil and water, but it’s a rigged game when there’s little choice with whom you do business.

 

It’s second nature for me to think of the mafia because I write crime fiction. Writers, specifically writers of mysteries, are my tribe. Cue the song from The Romantics: ‘What I Like About You.’ I know of no more supportive group of people than my fellow writers of mysteries. The camaraderie is real and genuine. It’s family, and the numerous conferences we hold throughout the year and all over the country are where we celebrate our successes. I can talk to another author about the problem with my latest Work in Progress and hear her suggestions for a solution. I can attend panels or be on one. It means something when a writer says they like your work. As for business, I can ask for a blurb on my next novel or agree to give one to an up-and-coming writer or an established one. I can ask in confidence about this agent or that publisher.

 

I’m with two publishers: Winter Goose Publishing and Level Best Books. Because I’m with two small presses, there are tradeoffs. The good kind. I have a say in cover art. The editing process is a two-way street. I’m grateful because I know authors with the Big 5 who have no control over cover art, and editing is as tense as negotiating with Putin.

 

Yes, I’ve devoted only two paragraphs to what I LOVE about publishing. It’s human nature to see the darkness drown the light. All my writer friends are with all kinds of publishers: Big 5; imprints of Big 5; or non-5, yet none of that diminishes that we are all bound by a fever in the blood to tell a story.

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 You Are Invited....

-from Susan

I couldn’t resist answering the same question as last week’s: Dinner party for eight, seven of them characters from crime fiction, me the eighth? 

I love planning dinner parties, hoping to spark good conversation among people who may not think alike, but who think, and can talk, and are fun. Usually, there’s some constraint on the ideal guest list: someone will be out of town; person A has a boring partner who can kill conversations with a single syllable; person C doesn’t drive at night any more. But for this – no bounds!

No killers at my party, sorry. They may be fascinating but my guests have enough of crime in their daily fictional lives, and this is a night off. Everyone speaks enough English to participate in the evening, but it’s quite an international crew. Oh, and one more thing: I’d be tongue-tied with awe and fangirl crushes, so I’m sending Dani O’Rourke, my smooth fundraiser and witty observer, in my place. She moves in these social circles better than I do.

Yes, yes, it’s one more than the suggested eight, but that’s how my dinner parties usually work – too many delightful people so I squeeze someone in, spoiling the symmetry but assuring a great evening. I’ll stay in the kitchen, cooking and eavesdropping.

Archie Goodwin, who can slide into any group and operate with charm while getting people to tell him just about anything. Women love him. Ask him anything about New York City.

Lady Victoria Georgiana Charlotte Eugenie, a.k.a. Georgie, a British royal with no money but lots of class, perfect for Archie to flirt with. Get her to talk about the Irish aristocracy if you want to see her blush.

Aimee Leduc, whose baby will probably be asleep in my guest room along with Aimee’s little dog, Miles Davis, and who gives off waves of Parisian glamor and can talk European politics with expertise and verve.

Elouise Norton, who will probably be wearing her gun even though she’s far away from her LA comfort zone and who can get the women laughing at some male foolishness (to which Archie will merely raise an eyebrow and smile).

Guido and Paola Brunetti, because you shouldn’t even think about one half of this happily married, multi-lingual, brainy couple without the other, even if it means you can’t serve Italian food because Paola is the best home cook in Venice, maybe anywhere.

Precious Ramotswe because she will add the sugar and sweetness, offered in a lilting Botswana accent, that makes her a great storyteller, and because she is always the guest people fall in love with when they get to know her.

Rumpole just so all that sweetness and charm is counter-balanced by a cynical, acid-laced view of the world from an old Brit with a rumbling voice (and freed for the night from She Who Must Be Obeyed).

Bon appetit!

Images courtesy of my friend Mark Jordan, 

whose table designs are famous among his many friends.

Guests courtesy of:

1.     Rex Stout

2.     Rhys Bowen

3.     Cara Black

4.     Rachel Howzell Hall

5.     Donna Leon

6.     Alexander McCall Smith

7.     John Mortimer

Kicking and Screaming into the Social Media Mosh Pit

Do you use social media to market your books, and if so, do you think it’s made a difference?

by Paul D. Marks

Yes. And Oh yes.

Facebook:

I went kicking and screaming onto Facebook a few years ago. Publicist and friend Diana James “gently” suggested that I should go on Facebook.

“I don’t want to see pictures of what people had for breakfast…or worse,” I said.

So, after much cajoling from Diana I took the dreaded step and signed onto FB. At first I didn’t know what to do, how to use it. I was an evil lurker. Of course, since I had few FB friends I didn’t have much to lurk at. So I’d check in every few days or so, still not knowing what to do, but gaining a few friends here, a few friends there.

And eventually I started posting. Don’t remember what those early posts were. But not too long after I started on Facebook I began to find my way. I began to post things that meant something to me or that I related to. Things like pix of my breakfast: cereal can be fun and entertaining pop art. And pix of my scars – want to see them? Just kidding.

Actually, I started posting things about noir and film noir and putting up “Film Noir Alerts” when I knew a noir movie was coming on television. Also stuff about mystery and noir writing, Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson, et al. And I started posting about Los Angeles and LA history, something I’m very much into on many levels. I began to be known as the LA Guy or the Noir Guy. People I’d never met in person would come up to me at conferences and other events and say, “You’re the Noir Guy”. I had to plead guilty.

And then when White Heat came out I put up some posts about that. And other people shared them. And I think it did help get the book known, get reviews and make sales. But the key is, as everyone says, not to only push your books. People get majorly turned off by that. Be a friend. Be part of the community. Comment and share other people’s posts. Participate.

Twitter:

Twitter’s another ballgame altogether. A ballgame where it’s impossible to see the ball and more impossible to know the rules. Like: Don’t use more than three hashtags. Fine. Uh, now what the hell is a hashtag? And where do I find the hashtags that apply to what I’m posting? Can I make up my own hashtags? Would you like some ketchup with your hashtags?

Twitter, to me, was a mess when I first signed up. Tweets would fly by faster than a speeding bullet. I couldn’t figure out how to use it. How do I make – uh, get – friends? I mean followers. Who/how do I follow someone? How to do I participate in a conversation? And HOW THE HELL do I say anything in 140 characters? And DOUBLE HOW THE HELL do I say anything at all when I’m retweeting and now I have 3 characters left to add my own comment to? It’s enough to make you batty.

And then I heard the bugle. The cavalry was on the way led by Captain Tweetdeck and Colonel Hootsuite. Oh no, more things to worry about. But no, these were good things. And the light shined down.

Hootsuite and Tweetdeck are “social media management systems” – say that five times with a mouth full of cereal. They help you organize Twitter, the tweets, the followers, everything. So I signed up for both and magically Twitter became manageable. And I began to use it.

You can create lists and put different people or groups (like magazines, writers, friends, publishers, etc.) on different lists and then put them in different columns.  These columns allow you to see things more clearly and at a more even and manageable pace. And it makes all the difference in the world (at least to me) in terms of being able to use Twitter (though you can manage other programs on these systems as well).

A small part of my Hootsuite Dashboard.

I find that Tweetdeck is good for some things and Hootsuite for others. So I use both. But it’s too much of a “lesson” to go into here and explain the intricacies of each. Suffice to say, they both make Twitter much more user friendly and once you get the hang of them you’ll be able to use Twitter to much better advantage. But like with FB or any social media, you shouldn’t use it only to promote your books. But that doesn’t mean you can’t do some promotion. Just have fun with it.

In closing – other social media & tying it up:

There’s about 33 million different social media. I’m also on Tumblr, Google+ and Pinterest, and use them to varying degrees. For a while I had been doing a fair amount on Tumbler, but nothing there lately. It’s not that I don’t like it, it just comes down to the time spent and it adds up. Some other social media that I signed up for I really never did much with. There’s just so many to choose from. But you have to pick two or three, maybe a couple more. Because you just can’t focus on all these things. It’s too hard to follow people and too hard to keep up with your own accounts and you’ll never have time to write.

Have FB and Twitter made me a NY Times Bestseller? No. But they have definitely helped get me more readers and connect with people with similar interests, which is more than I could have done by going on a cross country booking signing tour …and it costs a lot less. And I figure now there’s not a state in the country that I couldn’t have lunch with someone if I happened to be passing through – and if I do I’ll be sure to post the photo of the meal. Hell, there’s several countries on different continents that I could have lunch with someone I know from social media.

So yes, in answer to the question today – yes yes yes. Social media is great. I’m a total convert. So, uh, here’s what I had for breakfast.

***

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