Tag Archives: traditional publishing

Little Town, Big Exposure: A Visit to the 9th Annual Gaithersburg Book Festival

This column originally appeared in Late Last Night Books on May 20, 2018.

In the opening hours of the Ninth Annual Gaithersburg Book Festival, the skies were an ugly steel gray and the precipitation shifted across mist, sprinkle, drizzle, and steady rain — and still the book lovers came out in force. Sporting umbrellas and rain ponchos, they were ready to hear their favorite authors read from and discuss books at the different literary tents, browse the new and used bookstores and independent booksellers, get their books signed while chatting with those favorite authors, grab something tasty from the food vendors, and go back again for more.

Of the many book festivals that the Baltimore-Washington area now enjoys, Gaithersburg is my personal favorite. Though it often draws over twenty thousand attendees and attracts many nationally known authors, it still has a very intimate feeling. At Gaithersburg, it’s entirely possible for a book lover to chat with an author they’ve admired for years as they both stroll the grounds and take in all the activity.

Participating in the Festival

This year, I was at the festival for more than just simple enjoyment. I’m a board member of the non-profit Washington Independent Review of Books (WIRoB), which is a sponsor of the festival, so I helped to staff our booth to get the word out about our review site.

Even better, though, I had the pleasure of being on two panels. The first was with Elliot Ackerman, whose second book Dark at the Crossing was a 2017 finalist for the National Book Award, and which I had the pleasure of reviewing for WIRoB. Elliot is a journalist, a White House Fellow, and a Marine, having served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.

His first two novels take place in and around both of those wars, as well as in the conflict in Syria. His intimate and empathetic stories recognize the shared humanity of all concerned, including those that he once fought against. One point that Elliot made was that we are running out of Afghanis who remember life in peacetime, before the Russian invasion, so that we now have generations for whom war, rather than peace, is the natural state of being.

Shifting gears completely, I moderated a panel called “Drugs, Relationships, and Power,” with two wonderfully talented authors, Kelly J. Ford and Eryk Pruitt. Both of their novels share settings in the South, and both have had their work called “Southern Gothic”.

Kelly’s debut novel, Cottonmouths, centers on a young gay woman who has washed out of college and is forced to return to her parents and their small Arkansas town to pick up the pieces. But she is also drawn back into the orbit of her old unrequited love, Jody, who happens to be running a meth lab on her property.

For Eryk, What WE Reckon is his third novel, and involves the pitched power battle between two fully co-dependent forces, Jack and Summer. The two start out the story with different identities, which they shed like snakeskins, and a kilo of coke in a hollowed-out King James Bible. They are both losing a grip on reality at the same time that they are growing rather tired of each other.

The conversation ranged over issues of identity and the pressure to conform, the sense that even the most seemingly irredeemable characters have redeeming qualities, and the idea that the opioid scourge ravages rural areas in different ways than in urban environments.

Reconnecting with Old Friends, Making New Ones

One of the great pleasures of Gaithersburg for me is knowing that I’ll see a bunch of old and new book-loving friends. I remembered to bring my copy of Leslie Pietrzyk’s acclaimed new novel, Silver Girl, for her to sign for me while we chatted about the challenges of complex plot development. Melissa Scholes Young had already signed my copy of her much-discussed debut, Flood, but she and I were together in the Politics & Prose book tent. And it’s always a pleasure to have a chance to reconnect with Richard Peabody, who continues to be a driving force behind so much of DC’s writing culture.

I’m also a member of the Chesapeake Chapter of the Historical Novel Society, and, because so many of us were going to be there already, we decided to hold our bimonthly meeting right after members Stephanie Dray and Laura Kamoie finished a panel on their latest book, My Dear Hamilton: A Novel of Eliza Schuyler Hamilton. (And even after all that planning, I got pulled away and wasn’t able to catch up with the group!)

There were so many exceptional panels and speakers, and I know lots of folks like me were running back and forth between tents to try to catch as many as possible. Bethanne Patrick chatted with one of my all-time favorite authors, Alice McDermott, about her latest book, The Ninth Hour, which I also reviewed for WIRoB. In the Michener Pavilion, C-Span Book TV captured all the panels presented there, including Eugene Meyer (Five for Freedom) and Paula Whitacre (A Civil Life in Uncivil Times) discussing their historical renderings of forgotten figures of resistance with moderator Will Pittman.

I couldn’t drop in on Madeline Miller, since her end-of-day panel was the same time as mine. Author of the acclaimed Song of Achilles, Madeline’s latest novel, Circe, is winning rave reviews from all over, including Ellen Prentiss Campbell’s recent review in WIRoB. But I did get the opportunity to have her sign my copy of Circe and chat with her and Jud Ashman, the festival’s founder and now mayor of Gaithersburg, as the 2018 event wound down around us. (I also got to sign a copy of my novel while standing in Madeline’s line. Photographer Bruce Guthrie offered his back as a flat surface, while others snapped photos. I can’t wait to see those pictures!)

As an extra bonus, many of the huge staff of volunteers participated in an after-party at Greene Growlers, where author E.A. Aymar hosted an episode of “Noir at the Bar”, with a number of festival authors reading from their gritty works. Participants included Con Lehane (Murder in the Manuscript Room), Alma Katsu (The Hunger), Alan Orloff (contributor to The Night of the Flood), Shawn Reilly Simmons (Murder on the Rocks), Aymar (editor and contributor to The Night of the Flood), Owen Laukkanen (Gale Force) and my personal favorites and new-found, book-loving friends, Kelly Ford and Eryk Pruitt.

Save the date for the 10^th annual Gaithersburg Book Festival, May 18, 2019. I’ll see you there!

Another Busy Book Season

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Hope you’ll join me for one or all of these upcoming events:

MWA Howard County: “You Only Debut Once: What Every Author Needs to Know Ahead of Publication”, Thursday, March 15th, 7-9 p.m. at the Owen Brown Community Center, 6800 Cradle Rock Way, Columbia, MD 21045-4809. Join me at this free event as I share some of what I learned before and after the release of my novel in 2015. Learn how to make the most of the publication calendar, and be prepared to make the very most of your launch, because yu only get one chance to have a first release.

Maryland Writers’ Association 2018 Writers Conference, Friday and Saturday, March 23rd & 24th at the BWI Airport Marriott. I’ll be presenting a two-part talk called “Publishers, Publicists, and a Reading Public” just before and just after lunch. That second part better be pretty scintillating. I’ll be discussing the importance of knowing your publication goals, the pros and cons of small press publishing, and what to expect in working with a publicist.

2018 Washington Writers Conference, Friday and Saturday, May 4th & 5th at the College Park Marriott Conference Center (Friday from 6-8:30 pm and Saturday 8-5). I’m chairing this conference, which is one reason I’d love to see everyone there, but I’m also moderating a panel on debut authors across genres–including biography, memoir/journalism, novel, and short stories–and publication paths.

Write Now: What Makes a Good Editor?

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In this space back in June, “Too Big to Edit?” pondered why books from seasoned authors often compare unfavorably to their newcomer counterparts. I argued that the heart of the difference is the investment in editing and, in that column, anticipated the release of What Editors Do as a helpful reminder to cost-cutting publishers that good editing makes good books.

Peter Ginna edited this compendium of discussions from editors representing every possible facet of books and the book-publishing process. If you’d like to know what his job entailed, you can find out in chapter 20, “Reliable Sources: Reference Editing and Publishing” by Anne Savarese.

There, you’ll learn that reference works typically start out as ideas that later get married to authors, and that’s just what happened with Editors. Ginna was recruited to spearhead this book by yet another editor, Mary Laur, and he notes, “We got almost dizzy contemplating the complexities of my editing editors writing about editing, and her editing my edits of the editors…”

The result is a revealing look behind the curtain not just into the myriad details of what it means to be an editor, but also into the publishing world as a whole.

As I look back through my highlighted and Post-It-noted copy, here are some of the primary takeaways I’m chewing on:

To the reader, great editing is visible only in its absence. This is the unfortunate paradox of editing: When it’s done well, the reader doesn’t notice it. We only know that the author gave us a great book. As contributor Matt Weiland says in “Marginalia: On Editing General Nonfiction,” “I aim to be useful to the author but invisible to the reader.”

It’s possibly only in comparison to other, less-polished books by the same author that we might come to understand why every author and every book needs solid editing.

To the author, great editing includes remembering who the author is. Last week, I went to hear Alice McDermott in conversation with longtime Washington Post columnist Bob Levey at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD. She shared an anecdote about her first agent suggesting an editor she thought would be good because “he doesn’t want to be a writer. He’ll let you be you.” As Alice explained, she had exactly 100 pages of a novel at that moment, “and if he’d told me to put a murder on page 101, I would have done it.”

Several contributors here make a similar point about being sure the editor is supporting the author in achieving the author’s best book, and not attempting to make it the book the editor thinks it ought to be. This is an especially delicate dance for a fledgling author: figuring out what’s worth protecting against a seasoned acquisitions editor who knows what sells. Which leads us to the next point.

“I love it. Now let’s change everything.” It’s fascinating to read the discussions of book acquisition that many of the contributors describe here, since acquisition is a black-hole mystery to would-be authors. A number of editors describe the beginning of book acquisition as “falling in love” with a manuscript, and then getting others on the editorial staff to fall in love, too. As Ginna says, “Unless you’re passionate about a book, publishing it is a mistake.”

The editors then go on to describe, post-acquisition, the process of developmental editing, which often entails stem-to-stern reworking of the manuscript. Plots that don’t hold together, characters that wander aimlessly, and dialogue that no human would ever utter all need fixing. With that kind of heavy-lifting needed to make a book workable, I could only wonder, “What exactly were you able to fall in love with in the first place?” I’m guessing that this is another difference between debut manuscripts and contract deliveries: few editors would invest that kind of effort in a debut.

Like effective journalism, effective editing requires a long apprenticeship. In “Widening the Gates: Why Publishing Needs Diversity,” contributor Chris Jackson says, “Publishing, it turns out, is a job you can learn while doing, if people are willing to help a little.” In fact, according to What Editors Do, it’s a job you can only learn while doing, because there’s nothing else out there that teaches it.

The defining characteristic of would-be editors is a love of books, but after that, it’s a learn-by-working-with-the-master sort of thing. Unfortunately, shifting economics and business models mean the opportunities for that kind of apprenticeship are shrinking. What does the future hold for readers if we end up with successive generations of amateur editors?

The dirty little secrets of publishing for the most part remain secret. Recently, I spoke to a young woman who had been summarily laid off by one of the Big Five publishers in a major cost-cutting move. Many of the people let go had worked at the company for their entire careers.

Like the tyranny of the editorial calendar, these are not the stories you will generally find in Editors. However, there are a few chapters that take on some of the uglier truths of publishing in general. Which leads to my next point.

Aspiring authors, read this book. Also, prepare to be depressed. Far more than a description of editing as a career, Editors is a window onto the business end of publishing. Business equals bottom line, profit-and-loss sheets, sales targets, and return on investment. I’m sorry, did you think we were talking about great literature?

Yes, actually, Jeff Shotts does think we’re talking about great literature. Shotts is the executive editor at Graywolf Press, one of the best-respected and most successful independent presses in operation. In his contribution, “The Half-Open Door: Independent Publishing and Community,” he comments on how the Big Five equate quantity with quality and have sacrificed literature for sales.

Within that reality, “It cannot be exaggerated how rare and how valuable it is for an editor to have the freedom to take on books based on their literary quality and their capability for social change.” But that is generally what indie presses do.

Life is still too short to read bad books. As Jane Friedman describes in “A New Age of Discovery: The Editor’s Role in a Changing Publishing Industry,” much of that role is to “filter and amplify.” That is, in the deepening slough of published material, editors need to help readers wade through the muck to discover what is truly worth their time.

Even if you’re neither an aspiring author nor editor — perhaps just a lover of books — it’s worth your time to read this one. It explains a lot.

This column originally appeared in the “Write Now” book blog in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 2 November 2017.

Write Now: Of Pitching and Publishing

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This column originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 11 May 2017.

Recently, I was listening to literary agent Malaga Baldi expound on the kind of books that pique her interest. What she described were not big-ticket thrillers, YA dystopian fantasies, or anything with “Girl” in the title.

She was talking about intimate, quirky books that had something unique to say in an appealing, engaging voice. As she spoke of what she finds exciting in the kinds of stories she represents, I thought, “Yes, exactly! I would want to read those books!”

Perhaps you were listening to Malaga, too, since she was speaking at the Friday night “How to Pitch an Agent” panel at the fifth-annual Books Alive! Washington Writers Conference, held at the College Park Marriott Hotel & Conference Center on April 28th-29th.

I had the pleasure (and — I won’t kid you — sleep-depriving terror) of being this year’s conference chair. I’ve been volunteering at the Independent since I signed up at the second conference in 2014 — first as an assignments editor, then as a reviewer, a conference committee member, the chair, and, starting today, as a monthly columnist. Taking advantage of that impeccable timing, I wanted to recap some of this year’s conference highlights.

As always, the big draw of the conference was a powerful combination of pitch opportunities and publishing luminaries. When every attendee has the chance to pitch a manuscript or book proposal to several agents selected from a roster of 20, the electricity around the pitch room is palpable. Independent president David O. Stewart likened the buzz to “being by a nuclear reactor, there is so much energy.”

This year, the lucky winner of our drawing for a free conference registration — whose enthusiasm was truly infectious — managed to schedule pitch sessions with seven agents over the course of the day, and all of them asked to see a few pages or his full manuscript.

We also understand that one of our agents offered an attendee representation on the spot. Success stories like this emerge from every conference, which is what keeps both our attendees and our agents returning year after year.

But as great as the pitch opportunities are, they’re only part of the story. With Judith Viorst as this year’s keynote speaker, and panelists who included Washington Post Book World editor Ron Charles, fellow longtime Washington Post book critic Michael Dirda, legendary children’s author Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, and 2017 PEN/Bingham prize winner Rion Amilcar Scott, attendees found themselves inspired, entertained, and motivated.

Panels this year included genre focus on ghostwriting, memoir, biography, children’s literature, and short stories, and on such topical issues as bridging racial and cultural divisions through literature, writing about war — with a focus on current ongoing conflicts — and on the use of illness or disability as a literary device.

In his discussion on “the State of Books” with author Susan Coll, Ron Charles remarked that simply keeping up with the onslaught of 150 books a day arriving at the Post is “like Lucy and Ethel in the chocolate factory,” and, at best, the Post is able to review 1,000 of the approximately 55,000 books it receives each year. His advice is to market to women in book clubs, because that’s where the high-volume sales are these days.

On the panel “Across the Cultural Divide,” classics professor and epic poetry lover Carolivia Herron shared that her children’s book Nappy Hair is still banned in New York City and Montgomery County, Maryland. On the same panel, Neely Tucker (a white man and Washington Post reporter) noted that many people mistake his byline as belonging to an African-American woman. “One reader wrote, ‘I can tell from your writing that you hate white men.’ I thought about it and wrote back, ‘You might be right. I can’t think of a single white man I’ve ever wanted to date.’”

Kelly Kennedy, author of They Fought for Each Other: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Hardest Hit Unit in Iraq, told powerful, wrenching stories from her time in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Jack Farrell, author of Richard Nixon: The Life, alluded to where he believes the disgraced president is spending eternity when he said, “I envision Dick Nixon looking up at us all…”

Finally, beyond both pitches and panels, one of the most valuable and enduring outcomes of the conference each year is the connections that attendees make. In 2016, for example, a writers’ group formed as a result of the conference and has been meeting all year; four of the six members were back again at this year’s conference.

Certainly, my own experience has been that the Independent encourages and nurtures a community of writers and readers from which we all benefit, and there’s a lovely symmetry to a book-review site holding a conference focused on helping authors find a path to publication.

Consider the Washington Writers Conference trifecta of an author pitching at the event, garnering a book deal, and having the resulting work reviewed in the Washington Independent Review of Books. That could be you. So between now and next year’s conference, all of us at the Independent wish you a productive year of writing!

Want to hear more about the 2017 Washington Writers Conference? Veteran journalist and conference stalwart Gene Meyer offers a great wrap-up on his website, and you can see photos on our Facebook page, where the video summary will soon be posted!

Book Review: The Book

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This review originally appeared in the Washington Independent Review of Books on 30 August 2016.

The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time, Keith Houston, W.W. Norton & Company, 448 pp.

The Book is meant to be read in physical, printed form, and it promises to be an object of beauty. The galley proofs indicate that the final product will not only contain detailed reproductions of illuminated manuscripts, it will also offer samples of both papyrus and parchment. Oh, snap, Kindle! Mic-drop on you, iPad/iPhone/Android!

It’s clear that the meteoric rise of e-readers drove this project forward, since The Book itself doesn’t provide new or revelatory information. It doesn’t need to, though; it just needs to collect readers who understand the sensual and emotional dimensions tied up in this oh-so-physical object.

As author Keith Houston says in his introduction, “Find the biggest, grandest hardback you can. Hold it in your hands. Open it and hear the rustle of paper and the crackle of glue. Smell it! Flip through the pages and feel the breeze on your face.”

As with other quaint analog objects whose technology-induced death has been declared prematurely, the printed book doesn’t appear to be going anywhere. That we’re not in imminent danger on that front, however, doesn’t detract from the enjoyment of what is both a scholarly and light-hearted review of everything you want to know on the origins of written language, the media upon which it is captured, and its methods of illustration, reproduction, and distribution.

The Book reminds us of what we may have forgotten, or what we’ve failed to consider. For instance: Early paper was made of linen pounded from worn-out undergarments. Hence, the bragging still associated with fine stationery of its rag content. And parchment is made of livestock skin, the bloody implications of which Houston drives home with force. (Hands-down best quote: “Books are rectangular because cows, sheep, and goats are rectangular too.”)

The origin of such terms as upper- and lower-case, italics, foolscap, ostracize, stereotype, museum, protocol, syllabus — perhaps we’ve heard it all before, but it’s fun to go through it again from the beginning, and the author is a charming tour guide.

We learn that the Frankfurt Book Fair was already up and running in 1454, when Gutenberg sent samples of his printing to display at the annual event; that Charlemagne was illiterate and apparently incapable of mastering how to write his own name; and that standard paper sizes were not finally set until 1995.

What Houston’s account drives home is how stunningly labor-intensive the early production of papyrus, parchment, paper, and all the other accoutrements of writing and printing truly was. His detailed accounts of these processes leave the reader feeling sympathetically exhausted and wondering how more than a handful of books was ever produced before the advent of digital typesetting.

It was these exhausting steps that drove each successive improvement in the paper-making/printing processes, and while it’s difficult to follow the descriptions of, say, how the original Fourdrinier machine operated to produce continuous rolls of paper, Houston’s stories of the people who imagined, designed, created, failed in, and perfected each of the evolutionary steps toward the modern book are fascinating.

Readers are introduced to Cai Lun, a eunuch in the imperial court of the Han dynasty, who is credited with the invention of “thin, feltlike sheets made from vegetable fibers that had been pounded, macerated, and sieved in a pool…then pressed and dried to a smooth finish” — the world’s first paper. Producing more than a few sheets took huge amounts of labor.

Houston also explains that “Gutenberg was not the father of printing so much as its midwife,” since he did not invent movable type but accomplished all the heavy lifting to make it a viable component of the printing process.

The removal of one bottleneck in the production process inevitably revealed the follow-on bottleneck, around which the next innovation would concentrate. Each innovation was aimed at streamlining paper-and-print production in order to scale it up, making it faster and more efficient.

One illustrative story recounts how John Walter, owner of the Times of London, conspired with inventor Friedrich Koenig to construct a mechanically driven press in order to secretly print the paper’s November 29, 1814 edition.

The secrecy was necessary to prevent sabotage by the paper’s pressmen, since the new press was able to produce 1,100 double-sided sheets per hour, compared to the normal output of 200 single-sided sheets on the existing Stanhope presses. Walter’s willingness to pay extraneous workers full wages until they found other employment removed some of the sting of instant obsolescence.

And here we are at the point where virtually all bottlenecks have been eliminated, including those introduced by publishers. With no physical media needed to produce a book, new ones are being pumped out at rates unimaginable only 10 years ago. There’s no arguing the wondrous convenience of e-books — anyone who has run out of reading material moments before boarding a trans-Pacific flight understands the lifesaving qualities of a Kindle — and if people buy and read more books because it’s so easy to do with an e-reader, I as an author am hardly going to find fault with that.

But Houston knows, as do those of us who keep indie bookstores thriving well beyond their predicted expiration date (1998’s “You’ve Got Mail,” anyone?), that a physical book is not a commodity but an experience, a full-on feast of the senses, a tactile joy. Try putting that in your iPad.

Direct Submissions: Traditional Publishing, No Agent Required

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This blog post also appeared on the Indie Book Week blog on 27 May.

It’s hard to overstate the changes to the publishing landscape over the last decade. The doors to the gates that regulated who got published have effectively been blown off their hinges, and authors are now awash in possible avenues to get their work out into world. For those trying to navigate their way through all the choices, the field seems to narrow to two primary options. On one end of the spectrum is self-publishing, where the author is in total control of the entire process, which can be both a joy and a nightmare. On the other end is the traditional two-step of finding an agent in order to find a publisher, in which even the first step can be a multi-year process. There is, however, a third, middle-ground, option, called direct submission.

In traditional publishing terms, direct submissions are often referred to as over the transom, when an author submits a manuscript directly to a publisher without an agent. These manuscripts end up on the publisher’s slush pile; if they are read at all, it is typically by the most junior staff with a few moments free. But there is a growing number of publishers—usually small publishers and university presses—that work primarily or even entirely through direct submissions. These presses expect to work with authors throughout the publishing process, and that close relationship is one of the best things about working with a small press that accepts direct submissions. Authors often have significant input into the design and layout of the cover and interior of their books, something that even big-name authors rarely get. Small presses are often willing to take chances on books that are outside of the mainstream. They aren’t expecting their books to be John Grisham or Stephen King blockbusters. It’s worth remembering, though, that Tom Clancy’s debut novel The Hunt for Red October was a direct submission to the Naval Institute Press, which had never even published a novel before, and which still accepts direct submissions from authors at any time. It’s more typical for small presses to have open reading periods at set times of the year, in which authors can submit manuscripts by a certain date. Others hold contests in which the winner is published. Some publishers charge a reading fee for direct submissions, but that fee should be nominal; you are not paying them to publish your book. Literary Marketplace offers a list of direct submission small presses free to their registered users.

The downside of working with a small press that takes direct submissions is generally a lack of resources. A small publisher might help to develop a marketing plan, but the author will primarily or even solely be responsible for execution. Authors may need to find and pay for their own editing. Even at the big houses, though, it’s the new normal for authors to do a significant amount of their own marketing. As for editing, an increasingly scarce commodity, it is often the agents who do the lion’s share.

As an author, you can certainly do everything a small press would do for you, from cover design to distribution, and you could do it on your own timetable, but for a novice there’s a steep learning curve with lots of potential landmines. For me, direct submission was the right choice: it allowed me a lot of creative control and a relatively short publication timeline, while also producing a product that gets “credit” for being traditionally published, and giving me the peace of mind of knowing that I wasn’t in it alone.