Category Archives: writing/blogging/publishing related

writing, blogging, publishing

More Fun and Games at the Kindle Store: Indie vs Self-Published – What’s in a name?

December 12, 2011writing/blogging/publishing relatedindependent-publishing, Indie author, Kindle, self-publishingMarion

Somewhere in cyberspace, Perplexed Reader writes:

“A question on terminology: Is an “Indie” author a self-published author, or an author published through an indie (that is, non-legacy/”Big Six”) publisher?”

Answer: Some people resent the idea that self-published writers have taken the term “indie” which until recently was understood to designate authors published by “independent” (of the Big Six) publishing houses — an historically very well-known (though sometimes notorious) group of folks that included literary lions like DH Lawrence, William Burroughs and the Marquis de Sade.

As the publishing industry became more corporatized and controlled by fewer and fewer people, some independent smaller publishers like Farrar, Strauss and Giroux were sold to bigger publishers, but never completely lost their independent identity. Yet, authors publishing through them, however innovative, would not be considered “independents.”

The term “legacy publisher” used in Perplexed Reader’s query, is a poorly understood neo-logism which according to “indie” author Joe Konrath (whose name must be mentioned by law in any blog related to indies) was coined by author Barry Eisler. It means any publisher which uses “outdated” methods and technologies. We should probably take this term out of the equation altogether because its meaning highly debatable, and many established small presses would reject it as being offensive.

I challenge anyone to find the exact origin of using “indie” to describe individuals who publish themselves independently of any publisher. (And I don’t mean “challenge’ in a bad way. I’d genuinely like to know.)

But it is used, and it’s accepted throughout the digiverse at least, to mean self-published. More importantly, it’s accepted by Amazon. (See Amazon’s Indie Bookstore, etc.). One could argue that Amazon’s use of the term is pandering to the multitudes who publish on its Kindle Digital Platform and through its print-on-demand company, Create Space. In any case, “the facts on the ground” for better or worse have been established.

I’m not sure where this leaves people who’ve been published by established small press houses. Today, in addition to big and small publishers being lumped together as “traditional publishing,” the waters are muddied even more by micro-presses set up to publish a very limited number of authors (beginning with the number one), e-book publishers who may use POD for print (and bear few of the risks or expenses of traditional small publishers), and other start up concerns that aren’t traditional “vanity” houses, in that they don’t ask for money up front from authors, but offer neither the services of traditional publishing or the respectability that comes with it. So there’s also the question of who is a publisher? Does it have to do with the size of the list? The services offered? Whether or not there are full time editors? Whether or not they can actually do print runs and/or get copies of books onto store shelves?

Often the only thing these tiny newcomers and retooled vanities offer writers is a chance to say “I’ve been published,” even though they might have done better self-publishing, and are unlikely to impress anyone, especially literary agents.

Vantage Publishers, probably the most infamous old-time vanity house, known for their tombstone newspaper ads offering titles ripe for parody, has more recently retooled itself as a “self-publishing” concern, although it still charges tons for its publishing packages. Historically, the vanities never called themselves vanities, at least not in public. They used the euphemism “subsidy.”

Meantime, because of the taint of self-publishing, firms like PublishAmerica have been able to con the vulnerable and desperate by insisting that they are a “traditional publisher” because they don’t charge writers upfront fees, and allegedly don’t charge to publish. They accept anything, don’t edit or proofread (unless you pay them), do incompetent formatting (and then charge for corrections), and they don’t actually get their books into stores or reviewed. They do print books and publish e-books for which they charge higher than standard prices. They get writers to contract to buy their overpriced books at a “discount”prior to print runs with the understanding that the writers will act as their own marketers and sell them to stores. Of course stores don’t overpriced, badly formatted, unedited books written by unknowns. PublishAmerica also holds on to the book rights, so authors are stuck even after they realize they’ve been conned.

Nowadays, most of the respectable and established independent publishers are swamped by manuscripts, and extremely unlikely to look at unsolicited work. If I was an author who through hard work and development of craft had had work accepted by one of those august houses, I’d probably be outraged that the good name of “indie” has been taken by anyone who can load a “book” onto the KDP. On the other hand, some of these houses have become risk-averse in these tough and uncertain times and are both dropping their mid-listers and rarely taking on newcomers, making self-publishing an attractive option for many.

On the Kindle forums, the folks who are most vehemently against what they term “vanity-writers,” “self-uploaders” or “scribblers” lump everyone in one boat. Those discerning readers aren’t buying into the “indie” designation even if Amazon and a zillion blogs are. They don’t really believe that anyone is self-publishing by choice, or that anything good can come from allowing anyone to publish. “Indie” is certainly a much nicer term than “driveler.”

Meantime, the writers themselves are often the first to shout, “I’m different! It’s a reprint of a previously published work!” or “I was this close to getting a deal.” or “Look at my sales numbers.” or they just babble something about Amanda Hocking. But whether you are an octogenarian self-publishing your memoirs of WWII, or a romance fan loading up years of secret attempts onto the Kindle Digital Platform, or a previously published legit author, or anything in-between, calling yourself an “indie” beats the alternatives.

So, my dear Perplexed Reader, the short answer to your question would be, independent authors published by established small presses may need to clarify their status. to the understandably perplexed, but they are still independent. However, the term “indie author” will be understood by many to be a synonym of “self-published.”

Fake!

December 1, 2011book reviews, New York Stories, Politics and Culture, Things that Piss Me off from The NY Times, writing/blogging/publishing relatedfakes, literary frauds, plagierism, Quenton Rowan, Spoonbill and Sugartown, WilliamsburgMarion

“I object, your honor! This trial is a travesty. It’s a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham.”

— Fielding Melish, Bananas

In an age when the “self” may have infinite online iterations and an “award winning” 16-year old novelist can unapologetically admit to “mixing and matching” by mostly taking the words of a less well-known writer, and still get nominated for a prestigious literary prize, how do we even begin to define “fake”?

Millions of viewers tune in for the wedding a woman famous for nothing. The marriage is over in 72 days, and it’s possible the bridegroom wasn’t in on the joke, yet the celebutante’s ratings and brand do not appear to have suffered.

Still, some fakes are roundly condemned. In 2006, Kaavya Viswanathan wrote How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. Viswananthan got a major book deal while a sophomore at Harvard. The novel came out, and so did the accusations that she had stolen chunks from another author’s series. Viswanthan claimed it was unintentional. When the extent of her cribbing made her excuses unlikely, she blamed her photographic memory, saying she must have “internalized” the other texts. Her publisher didn’t see it that way and canceled her contract.

Fitzgerald aside, second acts exist in America., Kaavya went on to Georgetown Law School just like former “journalist” Steven Glass who had been famously fired from The New Republic for passing off fiction as journalism.

There are many infamous cases of straight out plagiarism and other literary fakery over the last ten years — “fake” memoirs like A Million Little Pieces by James Frey. Frey is best known for an oft parodied episode of getting reamed out by an enraged Oprah. There’s Margaret B. Jones, who published a memoir of gang life in South-Central, in which she claimed to have been a part-Native American foster child in South Central. She turned out to be a white surbanite with the last name of Seltzer, who briefly went to a public high school.

Perhaps the condemnation of Frey, Viswanathan, and Jones/Seltzer has to do with their “success” at fooling the self-important. You don’t mess around with Oprah, The New York Times, and big publishers.

I’ll admit to having sympathy for Laura Albert who wrote novels under the name JT LeRoy and even had a relative make public appearances as this persona. She was convicted of fraud for signing legal papers using her pseudonym. While she never claimed that her books were non-fiction, she gave her alter ego a backstory suspiciously similar to that of her characters — a childhood of abuse and neglect, sexual identity issues, prostitution, etc. As Birdie Coonan in All About Eve might have said “What a story. Everything but the blood hounds snapping at her rear end.”

Readers who “believed” in JT LeRoy were very upset to find out that the “author” didn’t exist. Yet, how does that change their relationship to “his” fiction? In an interview with The Paris Review, Albert explained the origin of the JT LeRoy persona. In her version, LeRoy was not invented to fool readers or sell books, but to protect the psyche of a writer who was filtering some difficult material, which in fact came from her own past.

Do we forgive Albert because the writing stands on its own and the motives, at least in the beginning, did not appear to be monetary ones? Or do we condemn her because readers grew emotionally invested in an “author” who was in fact a creation?

Sometimes it’s difficult to spot a motive for fraud. Over the past couple of weeks, The Hacker Hunter has become the talk of the town on Kindle related blogs. This is a techno-thriller/spy novel, self-published in October that amassed 350 favorable reviews. The problem was that none of them were real. The “tells” for fake were abundant, and the numbers impossible. Even Amanda Hocking, the Queen of Kindle doesn’t have anywhere near that many reviews on a single book. Readers complained and almost all the reviews on Amazon US were pulled. As of this writing, they are still up in the UK. The book itself wasn’t just “bad” in a Jacqueline Susann kind-of-way, it was the Springtime for Hitler of books.

Fake reviewers are reportedly paid $10 a pop and the review mills may be paid twice that for setting them up more. That means the author of Hacker could have spent $7k on the fakes. Did he really think this would lead to big sales? A movie deal? Why not just hire a ghostwriter? Or at least a proofreader? Why risk one’s own reputation and maybe even one’s business?

Pondering motives brings me to the curious case of QR Markham, aka Quentin Rowan, whose thriller Assassin of Secrets was published in November by Little Brown (the people who brought you Kaavya Viswanathan). Secrets was getting rave reviews and all kinds of buzz. Within two weeks of publication, readers had noticed the plagiarized passages from a number of other books, and Rowan’s entire oeuvre turned out to have involved a lot of heavy, unattributed borrowing. When caught, Rowan admitted the fraud, even though some bloggers offered a way out, imagining it could have been a brilliant postmodern hoax.

Rowan sat down for a virtual (honest) conversation with a blogger about his “career”. He suggested that it was having a poem anthologized in Best American Poetry when he was nineteen years old that set him on his wayward path. He thought he was “destined” to be a great writer, and when he started writing prose, he just found other people’s words more “clever” than his own and started to “swipe” them. He compares this to other addictive or obsessive behavior that is not rational. There’s something awfully self-pitying about those remarks. “Poor me, if only I hadn’t been ruined by early success and had applied myself to my craft. I could have been somebody. I could have been a contender.” Or as Jane Austen’s Lady Catherine put it, regarding music, “If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient.”

Nietzsche said, “The thought of suicide is a powerful solace: by means of it one gets through many a bad night.” Another cure for insomnia is schadenfreude. Rowan is an investor in a bookstore, Spoonbill and Sugartown in Williamsburg. I blame Williamsburg itself for sealing his destiny. I used to live there once before it became a playground for trustifarians and the tragically hip.

This is a neighborhood about which a young musician recently told me, “It’s not enough to be an artist or a musician, you have to be the right kind.”

Back in the 80’s, when my friends in the East Village referred to Williamsburg as a suburb, when taxi drivers wouldn’t take me there, when it was still a real place, there were writers and artists even then, but they weren’t there because it was a “scene.” They were there because it was affordable. Nowadays, I feel too old, too ugly and too poor to even get off the train at Bedford Avenue, much less set foot in its most chichi of bookstores.

Rowan wasn’t actually trying to be a writer. He was trying to be “the right kind“, the “kind” who gets published in the right places, and owns the coolest shop on the coolest block, in the coolest neighborhood, of the greatest great city in the world — even though it’s a world of appearances that are no more real than shadows cast on the wall of a cave.

My Most Popular Post

November 3, 2011book reviews, Politics and Culture, writing/blogging/publishing relatedchildhood home, I Used to Live Here Once, Jean Rhys, saudadeMarion

I sometimes copy my posts to Open Salon. I’ve made “Editors’ Pick” there a few times. Editors’ Pick puts posts in the center column, where anyone dropping by the site is likely to see them. The editors tend to pick posts with universal appeal or dealing with current events. My posts in the center column include ones on cyber-bullying, on politics — or more accurately, political personalities, and one or two on life events. They are likely to be viewed by several thousand people over the day or two they hold the center.

On this, my rather eclectic, “personal” blog, I don’t get nearly as many hits. Still, a post I published almost two years ago continues to attract readers almost every day. Not large numbers, but usually several a week, whether I’ve published any new posts or not.

Is this one of the Sarah Palin-bashing bits of snark? Is it a serious solution to big social issue? No. It’s something I wrote about my childhood home in Sunnyside, Queens.

I have no illusions about the reason for its popularity. People around the world are not checking it out because of an interest in the early years of the author of Loisaida — A New York Story.

They are checking out the post because I stole the title. You can’t copyright titles, and I didn’t do it to purposely mislead people on the Internet. I named the post, I Used to Live Here Once. I knew where it came from, a classic very short story by Jean Rhys. Rhys’ story is often anthologized. I’ve taught it in both community college and high school classes. It’s just about perfect. Lazy students afraid to think for themselves are plugging the title into search engines, looking for somebody else’s interpretation, and that’s the reason for the “hits.” So if you’ve come here for an easy answer, you can read my “hidden” synopsis, followed by a brief interpretation, but if you haven’t read the story itself, you really need to first. You can do so here. I’ll wait.

A young woman watches children playing outside of her house. They don’t notice her, even when she calls out to them, shouting, “I used to live here once.” She remembers bits from her life. She finally remembers slipping on some stones in the river. The boy and girl who don’t hear her, suddenly get tired of their play, feeling a strange chill and they decide to go in the house. The last line of the story is: “That was the first time she knew.” The interpretation which even not so great readers get, having seen The Sixth Sense, and similar movies like it, is that she is a ghost.

Beyond the obvious, the story is haunting for other reasons. Rhys was a life-long outsider. A “white” Creole woman from Dominica, she lived and wrote most of her life outside of it. Her personal life was chaotic, married three times, once to a spy, once to a jailbird. At times, she depended on the kindness of male patrons and admirers, including at one point, Ford Maddox Ford. The story is sometimes seen as a metaphor for her own displacement.

So when I wrote a post about my sense of saudade when thinking of home, I thought of Rhys’ story.

We never lose our childhood. The memories are centered in places that mean something, that haunt us. And I believe we haunt them as well. Certainly, in the months following my father’s death, I felt his presence in the house, looking over my shoulder as I packed the boxes, whispering in my ear as I spoke to potential buyers. He was in every corner, often checking in with me regarding my mother. Where was she? Was she safe? I had to reassure him often.

But it’s not just the dead that haunt. The living do as well. I’ve moved a lot, and sometimes I’ve passed up apartments that didn’t feel right, where the melancholy hung like curtains, even if the space was spacious and sunny.

And these days, going on six years since the house was sold, I still haunt the block on occasion. Walking past the gate, and thinking, “I used to live here once.”

Sequel and Sensibility

October 18, 2011book reviews, Politics and Culture, writing/blogging/publishing relatedfanfiction, Gone With the Wind, Jane Eyre sequel, literary sequels, PD James sequel, Pride and Prejudice, Rhett Butler's People, sequels, The Wind Done Gone, Wide Sargasso SeaMarion

PD James at 91 is about to publish her novel, Death Comes to Pemberly, a mystery-murder sequel to Pride and Prejudice. No need to worry — Wickham, seducer of teenagers and the rake you love to hate, is the one who gets it.

James has stated she always wanted to do this. Godspeed. Short of murder, ninety-one year olds should be able to do whatever they’d like.

But how do we (myself and anyone who cares to comment) feel about this? Is this, as Martha Stewart would say, “a good thing”?

In principle I’m not against sequels, prequels, and reboots written by authors who didn’t write the original, but I have my own rules for which ones interest me.

There are sequels that happen because readers can’t let a character go. This seems most prevalent in detective fiction, with authors continuing to write books featuring Sherlock Holmes, or in the case of Perchance to Dream, Philip Marlowe. Have any of these ever surpassed the original or even come close?

Perchance to Dream by Robert S. Parker was officially sanctioned by Chandler’s heirs after Parker had completed Poodle Springs, Chandler’s unfinished last novel. Authorized sequels may work for hardcore fans but they box writers in. Parker said he wouldn’t do another because he “didn’t want to spend [his] life writing some other guy’s books”

There is also, of course fanfiction which doesn’t enter into the “official” canon, and is often written by amateurs. This is more prevalent when the originals were television series or even comics as opposed to novels, and almost always when they are of a particular genre, especially science fiction and fantasy.

Another example of the authorized sequel is Rhett Butler’s People by Donald McCraig. Authorized stories bring with them restrictions. McCraig had to maneuver around the overt racism and defense of chattel slavery embedded within the point of view of the original, which would not sit well with modern readers, while at the same time not wavering too much from its conception of its characters. He chose to ignore the storyline imagined in the previous continuation, Scarlett by Alexandra Ripley, a bodice ripper, set after the original, in which Scarlett goes to Ireland, where race is not an issue. McCraig downplayed the love story, and focused instead on deepening our understanding of the protagonist. The book received a decent critical reception,, but didn’t do well with hardcore fans. While Ripley’s sequel was panned, it was a commercial success, giving readers what they wanted, more than eight hundred pages of Scarlett.

Sequels authorized or not, that stay close to the intent and perspective of the original, are primarily written to please fans and sell books. They don’t bring anything new, except possibly an ending in cases where the writer didn’t finish the story, or a resolution to a part of the story the creator left hanging. By their nature, they do better if they are offering more of the same.

Recently, there’s been an invasion, of horror-parodies, pioneered by Quirk Books. These include Pride and Prejudice with Zombies, Sense and Sensibility with Sea Monsters and The Meowmorphosis, in which Gregor Samsa awakes one morning to find he has been transformed into a giant adorable kitten. I will confess to never having read any of them and having no interest in doing so. A five-minute sketch or YouTube video I could see, but they are stunts, not novels.

Another kind of continuation, taking place in what Lost fans might call the “sideways-verse” is a bit more interesting. These books deconstruct the original, recounting the story in a way the original writer never could have imagined. A great example is Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, which brings us Jane Eyre as seen through the eyes of the madwoman in the attic herself and her keeper. A fully realized tale of Rochester’s first wife, Wide Sargasso Sea is set partly in the West Indies and deals with racism, colonialism, and the powerlessness of women to control their own destiny.

There is also a very unauthorized take on Gone with the Wind. The Wind Done Gone, by Alice Randall, tells the story from the perspective of a completely “new” character, Scarlett’s slave half-sister — the child of Mammy and Scarlett’s father. Randall’s story gives us a different take not only on the characters we know from the original, but on the ones we barely see — the house slaves who have their own agendas. The problem with Randall’s book when compared to Rhys’ is that Rhys parodied a true classic still taken seriously, while Randall looked at a story so dated by its racism and nostalgia for the “old south” that one wonders if a parody was even needed. In terms of readership, Rhys was offering something new, a way to examine issues around feminism, race, class, and colonialism by hearing from characters who didn’t normally get their own books — Creole women, British servants. By the time Randall’s book came along, we already had original stories about the ante-bellum South told from the point of view of slaves. Who was her readership? Fans and apologists for GWTW wouldn’t be interested, and she’s not telling people who dislike the original anything they don’t already know. To pull off the deconstruction model, you have to be deconstructing something that serious people still take seriously.

And so back to James. Will Death Comes to Pemberly be a success? Commercially, I predict it will be a smashing one. I’ll buy a copy. James is not Austen, but she’s no slouch as a stylist. She knows how to tell a story, especially a mystery. She has a huge audience even without the Austenites, and the Austenites won’t be able to resist. She admits to having had a lifelong passion for Austen’s work. She’s writing, in a sense, professionalized fanfic — not authorized, not the same genre, but told with love and respect for the source. Most likely, she’ll present the characters as we know them. Darcy will not have turned into a wife-beating philanderer. Elizabeth will still be Elizabeth. And if Mr. Collins is a less than passionate husband, or Mary has never married, but has chosen to set up housekeeping with a female friend, we won’t delve too deeply. Will it have the reverence of an authorized version? I suspect it will, to the extent that it will strive for historical accuracy and won’t veer far from our expectations of how characterize will behave.

Will it tell us anything about Austen’s world that Austen herself was unable to perceive? Doubtfully. If Darcy’s money comes from plantations in the West Indies, we won’t learn about the conditions of the workers.. The servants at Pemberly will continue to be mostly invisible. The resolution of the mystery will not reveal a larger rot at the core of society.

Yet, by bringing in murder most foul, won’t something change? This is to be a mystery, not a love story or one that ends, like most of Austen, in a marriage. Then again, perhaps an announcement of Kitty’s engagement will come in the final chapter, assuming of course she isn’t exposed as a murderer and hanged for killing her brother-in-law.