When we return, we will be refreshed, inspired, and just as incapable of keeping to a regular schedule as always. Happy Holidays from the both of us and, as always, we really appreciate your support.

Cheers!
Kelsey and Maggie

I have a bunch of half-finished posts I keep emailing myself to remind myself to work on them or saved to my desktop as BLOG POST TO FINISH!!! TONIGHT! THIS MEANS TUESDAY!

I have guests currently in town, guests arriving in town soon, and my book is due back to the library in two days. I’m reading The Miseducation of Cameron Post and I really want to finish it, but it’s hard to find the time to slow down and take time away from such tiresome chores as talking with close friends and family and getting excited about our upcoming plans.

Ugh.

I’m pretty sure this is one of those books I’ll (grudgingly) accept fines on in order to finish—and, yes, this eventually means a post about An Actual Book I Read Finally omg. Those were, after all, a thing we once wrote about  ; )—but I hope you’ll excuse me from a substantive post tonight. I would like to minimize the financial impact of my poor time management and maybe make it to the end of the chapter before next Monday.

…which is looking less and less likely as I inventory the cleanliness of my apartment.  But I’m sure my parents will understand.

They’re contractually obligated to love me, right?

…right?

Love,

I’ve been rather long-winded lately so, in honor of Banned Books week, I’m going to shush and let them speak for themselves.

Or, I suppose, let some miscellaneous internet art speak for them.

(Internet art is intended for informational purposes only. It is not, nor is it intended to be, a substitution for literary content.  Any resemblance to texts, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and not intended by the author. No books were harmed in the making of this post.)

Why was this classic novel banned? 

Not sure if it’s appropriate to wish you a “Happy Banned Books Week” but “Happy Reading,” regardless.

Love,

I’ve been a complete blog hermit this summer. Apologies for my absence! I am slooowly getting back into gear with this whole blogging venture.

Partially my absence was due to the fact I’ve been buried in books. That happens when you work at a small, independent bookstore. This summer my boss anointed me as the YA and sci-fi/fantasy buyer, which thrilled me to my toes (and I’ve already talked your ear off about). Goodness me, I have a much greater respect for book buyers now. Do you know how hard it is to choose which books to bring in, especially when you have tiny sections like I do? So hard. Much angst is involved.

Since working at Sunriver Books and Music is what took up most of my time this summer, I thought I would share some of my favorite bookstore moments, memories, and people with you:

I love book shipment days. For my boss, these days are extra stressful because she is the one who has to call New York about missing or damaged books. But for me, every week, twice a week, it felt like Christmas. Seventeen new boxes of books…for me? Why thank you!

*****

There was the day we received, I kid you not, a length of rope from Random House as a promotion for Fifty Shades of Grey. My coworker and I just collapsed in laughter. When I asked my boss what in the world we should do with it she said, “Well, just put in the closet. Rope is always useful.”

 *****

I get ridiculously excited when someone buys one of my favorite books, to the point I may have scared a few customers. I often forget my job is to sell books to, you know, bring in money. Most of the time I think my job title is “book evangelist.” My mission is to put as many of my favorite books into as many people’s hands as possible.

You can imagine my exuberant joy when a teen came up to the counter with The Book Thief and The Fault in Our Stars. The conversation went something like this:

Me: Two of my favorite books ever! Al;djal;sjkdflas;jf;lsjk!

Girl: Me too! I’ve actually already read them but I have to own my own copies.

Me: Have you read John Green’s other books as well?

Girl: Oh yeah! But The Fault in our Stars is my favorite.

Me: Me too!

Girl: Wait…are you a nerdfighter?

EEEeeee! I met a nerdfighter in real life! We were both a bit stunned and lost for words by the fact, to the point that I forgot to tell her “don’t forget to be awesome” when she left. But nevertheless, it made my day.

*****

In August I received, as the official fantasy buyer, a box of The Hobbit promotional materials, the jewel of which was a big glossy catalog full of all the various Tolkien editions. I just sat at the counter slowly flipping through the pages, squeaking to myself. Yes, I brought in new versions of all of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. So pretty.

*****

There was the day a little tot came up to me and asked, “Where are the tiny books?”

*****

A shy middle schooler came in asking for The Wizard Heir, which we were out of so I had to apologetically send him away. He came back on shipment day and bought it out of the box before we had a chance to put it on the shelf and then returned two days later for The Dragon Heir. Voracious Kid Readers: You Rock.

*****

Early in the summer, I decided to bring in Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer because the movie had just come out. My boss, a devout literary fiction reader, just couldn’t believe it. “What will the regulars think when they see I let that into the store?” All I said was, “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

*****

A mom came in and proceeded to gleefully embarrass her son, who was away at college. Apparently, he loves YA and his mom wanted us to send him a book care package but she didn’t know what he’d already read. She called him up and started the conversation with, “I’m standing in the bookstore right now and this cute girl is helping me pick out books for you…” and then put her hand over the phone and mock-whispered to me, “I’ve embarrassed him.” She later put me on the phone to get his dorm address. Those rascally moms.

*****

I was so lucky to get a new coworker this summer who happens to like all the same kinds of books as me. Now we have two people on staff that read YA and sci-fi/fantasy! She turned out to be an awesome handseller as well, so I’d bring in the books and she’d sell them. You know you’re a good handseller when you can convince customers to buy The Way of Kings. I think Brandon Sanderson is an awesome author, but give me a break! The Way of Kings has a cover that is so stereotypically EPIC FANTASY it can probably do magic itself. And it is 1,280 pages long. 1,280 pages!!  She sold it not once, but multiple times. My sections wouldn’t have been nearly as successful this summer without her help.

*****

Of course, like any job, it isn’t always butterflies and rainbows (I could tell you customer stories you wouldn’t believe). But it is lovely moments and people like these that keep us going.

I’d like to send out a big THANK YOU to all of you who buy books from real-life indie bookstores. We love you!

Love,

Kelsey

We did it.

We finally hired someone.

I think I speak of all of us at the office when I say “YAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYY!!!!!”  Yes, I’d venture a guess that even our Editorial department would sanction this many exclamation points. (It’s only a guess, mind you.)

Even though I’ve been working in publishing for OVER A YEAR now (as of…last Wednesday. Whatever. It still counts!), I still feel like I should have been on the other side of the interview desk through most of this process. So, naturally, I couldn’t really help myself from taking preemptive competition-scoping notes in case I’m ever shopping around for the entry-level position I just vacated. (I didn’t say it made sense. I just said I did it.) 

I threw together a quick list after our second round of interviews, and have been mentally (and occasionally physically) updating it as the process progressed. Now that we’ve finally (FINALLY, HALLELUJAH!) finalized the decision, I wanted to share the much-reduced-and-much-generalized version of it. Reduced because, at the time, I felt like budding publishing hopefuls desperately needed tips like “don’t be a moron” and “don’t make me miss my 20-minute interview day lunch break.” But now at last my faith in our candidates and new hires has been greatly restored : )

(…although, if you’re considering either option: Don’t.)

I’m also ever-so-slightly long-winded. I know. I know. Who would have guessed? But since nobody really wants 8 pages of my snarky interview notes, I’ve cut it down to 5 generally-good-to-know tips. It was a Herculean effort, no doubt, but I got there.

…Also maybe I’ll do a follow-up post sometime AND NOBODY CAN STOP ME.

1. Know what you want and why you want it. You should have a clear understanding of the field you’re applying to, even if you don’t have a lot of experience. We don’t expect you to walk in knowing everything (and we don’t really want someone who thinks they do), but we do expect you to know what you’re interested in.  “Editorial,” by far the most common answer I received, covers a lot of ground. Do you want to work on the micro level, checking grammar and running heads? Do you want to work on the manuscript as a whole, making sure everything that should be there actually is? Do you want to work in Marketing? Rights? Design? Each department has a different approach to “working with books,” and even if the job you’re applying for does not match your ideal exactly, you should be able to speak to what you want out of the position.
2. Know what will be expected of you (and what won’t). I had a candidate describe what he thought editors did as “sitting behind their desk all day reading books.” If that didn’t make you snort with disbelief, please please please do some more research. There are many many blogs about publishing. There are programs to help educate you. People are willing and eager to give informational interviews.*Read a book on the subject—hell, just read the goddamn job description.

   If you’re selling yourself for a position we don’t have, we will wish you the best of luck and hire somebody who fits what we’re looking for. If you’re applying for a job in production and all you’re asking about is foreign rights, we will wish you the best of luck and hire somebody who is interested in what we need them to do. It is OK to ask questions about other departments and about “interdepartmental congeniality” (yes, a direct quote), but make sure your interviewer knows that you know what you’re applying for.

3.  Be Excited and Responsive. Maybe this particular position isn’t your dream job or the area you absolutely want to end up, but I can guarantee that it is for many of the other candidates you’re up against. I don’t mean to suggest that you need to be bouncing-in-your-seat excited either—probably that would be creepy—but we definitely want to hire somebody that wants to work with us.Also, respond as soon as you can to emails or phone calls. Just do it. It’s completely likely that we were later than we said we would be in calling you back (I don’t think any of our hiring managers made every “we will contact you by…” deadline) but the more it’s dragged on, the more we want it settled. The longer you wait to reply, the longer we’re sitting at our desks worrying that you don’t really want the job, that you’re weighing the pros and cons and you will ultimately just suffer through your time here. And we definitely don’t want that.
4. At the same time, be Realistic. Starry-eyed idealism is not professional (though it is flattering). Publishing is work. There’s not a lot of money in this industry and everybody is doing, essentially, a job and a half. If you go on and on about the smell of the pages or the delicate symbiosis between author and editor, we’re probably going to move on. Not because we don’t feel the same, exactly—we all have our book-sniffing moments—but because working in publishing not a utopia and we don’t want to deal with your disillusionment. (Or, if we do, we at least want to know that you’ll keep doing your job at the same time. Not because we’re soulless, but because we’re busy). Authors can be amazing, but they can also be a royal pain in the arse. Knowing that the job isn’t going to be perfect but knowing why you still want it will absolutely make you stand out.
5. Ultimately, it’s not about your answers. It’s about you. I think this career advice is about as cliché as “don’t judge a book by its cover”—and as routinely ignored. But it’s true (and not in a lovey-dovey “be yourself” kind of way). Try to present yourself as somebody we could enjoy (or at least tolerate) working with. Of course you’ll be nervous, but we are, too. We’re deciding who we can depend on and work in close quarters with for indefinite and substantial amount of time. If you’re uncomfortable to be around, or misleading-to-dishonest with your information, if you trash your previous coworkers or flirt aggressively during an interview, we won’t want you around. Maybe we’d get to know you and find out it’s just nerves, or your quirky sense of humor which—for all we know—may grow on us. But we don’t really want to take that chance.
   A quick illustrative story: A handful of candidates applied for more than one of our open positions, and I always tried to ask them which one they were more interested in. Obviously the right answer was mine. Obviously.  But my favorite candidate told me point-blank that she would prefer the other position over the one I was interviewing for, and I still loved her. Because she was honest, and realistic, and friendly, and nice.

   And you know what? She got the job.

   (Did I mention the “YAAAAAYYYY!!!!”?)

BONUS “That’s right: I snuck in a 6th point because I can“ TIP Some answers are like a rite of passage. “I want to work in publishing because I like books,” for example, or “I want to work in ‘Editorial.'” I know these feel like the real answer, but it’s also completely uninformative to your interviewer. We know you like books because you’re applying for a job in publishing. And It’s not like saying “I like books” is going to hurt you in this industry, but it squanders an opportunity to stand out. Almost every single candidate said these in some variation or another and after a while (…like the second time I heard it) it was the interview-answer equivalent of radio static.

*And, if you’re suffering a lack of interviewees, my email address is over on the left

Love,

Ryan has this theory that lists of things are really only interesting to the list-maker. (He shared this theory when we were coming up with our Recommended Books, so you can imagine how well THAT went over.) Although I disagree on principal (and somewhat gleefully observe Ryan’s desperate search for a new book, taunting him with various Top 100 lists) I’m reluctantly starting to consider that he may have a point. Because the list of articles I want to share is nothing more than “A Few Things I Read on the Internet Recently that I Bothered to Write Down and were Related to this Blog.”

(I know. Can I write a catchy title or what?)

Here we go:

“How to Make a Book Disappear,” by Maria Konnikova for The Atlantic, takes a look at some of the pitfalls of digital book distribution and why and how a publisher can erase the digital record of a book. The comments section delves into further DRM issues before collapsing (perhaps inevitably) into the tired “Tree Books vs. Pixel Books” bickering.

In “Is This Book Bad or is it Just Me? The Anatomy of Book Reviews,” Darryl Campbell writes about what goes into a quality book review and the role such reviews play in our culture. Similarly, Laura Miller’s article “The Dreaded Amazon Breast Curve,” looks at the culture of online reviews—purchased, solicited, and volunteered—and one interesting theory to interpret the whole.

When we say a book is “too long” are we being lazy reviewers or is there something to it? Laura Miller’s “Are Longer Books More Important?” talks about the relationship between genre, tone, and length of a book, and how they determine what a reader can (or should!) sit through.

And, yes, Laura Miller again (what can I say? I have a crush): “Your Brain Loves Jane Austen,” a brief interview with one of the researchers from Stanford’s interdisciplinary study on brain activity when reading for pleasure and how it differs from analytic close reading. (Also, guess which under-appreciated Austen novel they made them read :D)

Anthony Lane’s article in The New Yorker, “Out of the Frame: A New Portrait of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady,” takes a close look at the newest biography of James (a biography on James through the lens of Portrait of a Lady!!) and a quick look at biography as a genre. Also, did I mention it’s a

Finally, on a more political bent, nervana1 looks at “The Tragedy of Alexandria’s Book Market” in an article about censorship in Egypt and the value of literacy as a political tool and as a livelihood.

…What do you think? Internet curation is an interesting business and, since I’ve been seeing a few seminars and panels about it lately, one of growing interest. Are lists or round ups or blogrolls a useful tool or blogger self-indulgence? Is it a way of sharing information or is it appropriating good content to mask your own lack of ideas?

…and can you tell this is one of those long-standing arguments I really want to win?

See you on Friday?

Love,

When I decided I wanted to work “in publishing,” I only ever considered working with fiction. I didn’t care what genre (as I said in all my grad school applications) so long as I worked with novels. Hilarious, right?

I think I still fall prey to the notion that academic publishing is like this overlooked stepchild to our glamorous fictional siblings. While I know this isn’t true systematically (in many of our interviews, candidates—unprompted—said they hardly read fiction, they love textbooks, they wouldn’t want to work in trade publishing for anything…??!), I felt it so strongly at one point that I’ve never been able to shake it.

After all, wouldn’t everyone rather hear about the latest NYT bestseller than the Revised and Updated Ninth Edition of Principals of Sociology: An Introduction?

BUT THEN! This morning, Brie sent me a link to a Reddit AMA request for “Someone who works in the textbook industry (publishing/management).” !!! People had actual questions and I could answer them! I know these things!

I had planned to post some surely-insightful-and-not-at-all-redundant thoughts about ebooks tonight (long story short: my e-reading device of choice died and I didn’t have anything to read on the bus home. Horrors. I’m sure you can imagine. It was a nightmare.) but instead, I spent several hours answering the Reddit questions. And then I figured: you know what. People do find this interesting. Some people, at least ; ) So, I am starting a Reddit AMA, going live tomorrow morning. Here are my first few answers. Feel free to read the ones you find interesting, ask more questions, or head over to Reddit to make me look popular ; )

How much does it actually cost to MAKE a textbook?

There are a lot of factors here—some high profile authors get advances, but even with standard books the costs vary based on the length of the book, the quality of the manuscript (whether there will be a lot of corrections/fact checking), and whether or not the book has an art program—and, if so, if it needs 4-color printing and high-gloss paper. The art, especially, makes a huge impact on the price.

For example: we print all of our textbooks in 1-2 colors (standard black ink is considered 1 color, while full color printing is 4), usually on fairly inexpensive paper. Our “average” budget for a standard-length book with no art (scare quotes because the average is wildly estimated) would be $4,500 to $6,000, where the costs for a book with a large art program would be $35,000 to over $40,000.

Then consider that most big text publishers always print in full color on the glossy paper with a lot of “free” ancillary materials (teacher’s manual, test banks…) that also need to be produced and printed and bound and…yikes.

How much does a bookstore profit from selling a textbook? Renting?

I can’t speak to textbook rentals, but publishers sell books to bookstores at a 20% to 50% discount, and we’re usually obligated to take returns on the product that doesn’t sell. The discount can vary, but a general rule for most publishers is 20% to university bookstores and 50% to trade stores like Barnes and Noble.* Bookstores set the price at their own stores, usually marking it up to full price, but occasionally selling at a small discount or—in cases where they don’t want to return the books, at a loss.

I only worked in a bookstore for a few months, but they have ridiculously small profit margins and make -very- little money. It’s an incredibly tough business.

*Not Barnes and Noble college stores, though

How much does the company take away from the sale of a textbook?

The bookselling business is pretty convoluted, so I can’t quite give a straight answer. The publisher pays all the upfront costs for the book: paper, printing, binding, as well as all the editing, typesetting, and production costs. We use a lot of freelancers, and pay them their hourly rate within 45 days of invoice. This is usually well before the book is an actual product. Once a book is printed, we fill bookstore orders, but don’t receive any money for the books until much later (to give the store time to actually sell copies), often 3-12 months. Once the store pays, the publisher gets all of it (at the set discount), but we still need to give some of the money to our distributor (our distribution invoices are $15,000 to $30,000 per month) and hold a % for author royalties. We also have to give credit to bookstores if they later send back any returns.

Many, many books are unprofitable, or barely cover their production costs.

How much would an author make from selling a book through your company?/How much does an author make on producing a textbook? All of my professors have written their own for class.

Our authors get between 8%-10% of each sale. Which is only 50%-80% of the retail price.

Textbook publishing is tricky, too, because many authors are asked to offset some of the publishing costs themselves—if they demand an expensive cover photo, for example, or we have to pay them an advance. We usually book these costs against their royalties rather than making them pay upfront. However, since most textbooks aren’t runaway bestsellers, many authors actually carry a negative balance. Of the authors that do earn money, our average royalty payments are probably between $150-$1,000 a year.

Admittedly, we are a very small company. An average print run for is probably 1000 copies and we all get pretty excited whenever we sell 50 copies to a course at once.

Regarding professors adopting their own books: some universities require that their professors not get any personal benefit from adopting a text. We have a few authors at such schools who do assign their own books, which means we have to subtract the amount earned from copies sold to their own students from their royalty payments (and while I support and admire the schools with these regulations…it’s an accounting nightmare). As to where their royalty money goes instead? A few of our authors have designated a preferred charity, but it depends more on the rules of their particular university how much control they have over it.

How long does it take to publish a textbook?

I’m going to answer this with probably far more detail than you intended. Brand new textbooks (all new nonfiction, usually) are contracted long before the book is written. Authors either write and submit a proposal or (more likely, with textbooks) publishers hound/beg well-known scholars to write a specific book. Either way, the book is contracted and the author(s) have between 6 months to 3 years to write it, depending on the material already available (we’ll often pick up textbooks from other publishers where the contract was cancelled after the book was written) and the availability of the author. Once a full manuscript is submitted, the editor will either go back and forth with the author for a few months trying to implement changes and revisions, send the book out for review, or, if it’s in good shape, send it off to production. In our company, it takes about 7 months to get from word files to a book. It goes through copyediting, proofreading/fact checking (this is how we caught a largely plagiarized book only a few weeks ago), typesetting, proofs, and printing. Several stages involve further approval from various author or editors. Most university presses also have a double-blind peer review process, which can add a lot of time on top of that.

New editions are supposed to be less involved, but in our company, that’s not quite how it works. We try to schedule new editions about 3 years apart from each other. This gives us time to sell the first edition, do some market research, surveys, &c with adopters to see whether a new edition would be valuable and what kinds of changes would be useful, and do some sales analysis and projection on our end. Then, with the authors, we come up with a proposal for changes to the book, bring on a coauthor if necessary, and sign a renewal contract. It doesn’t usually take more than a year to update the information, and then it’s another 7 month in production from that point.

Why do publishers come out with an unnecessary new edition every year?

A lot of this is market driven. The textbook market is incredibly competitive, and publishers produce a lot of free materials (test banks, instructor manuals, custom materials, power point slides, suggest readings…the list goes on and on) just to convince a professor to adopt their book. With such competition, most professors refuse to teach a book over 2 years old, even when the basic concepts are the same. And with the rising need to make the content trendier and more “relevant” to students, the fluff/flavor does date the books pretty quickly. Nobody is really going to want Lady Gaga on the cover of their textbooks in a few years.

Also, of course, the flood of used books on the market makes it impossible for the publisher to keep selling it. And since it usually takes two or more editions before a book finds a market…we have the constant, constant updating.

I was in college when I realized Powell’s was a Big Deal. I know, I know, it’s Powell’s. How could I fail to see that? But although Powell’s wasn’t our local bookstore when I first learned to read, it was just down the road by the time I acquired enough spending money to spend recklessly. My mom would drop me off and I would wander the impossibly tall stacks, treading a well-worn path to my favorite authors or genres so I wouldn’t get lost in Biographies or trapped in Current Events.

I grew up at Powell’s…sort of. I still can’t reach the top shelf, but I’ve gone boldly past Easy to Read through Series Fiction and Young Adult to Romance and Fantasy and on into Literature, Criticism, Pop Culture, Graphic Novels—even *gasp* Biographies and Current Events. My well-worn path now looks like a map of the entire store.

But even though I knew Powell’s was awesome, it wasn’t until I took Writing and Culture my sophomore year that I realized other people thought so, too. We had an assignment to visit three bookstores—at least one chain and one independent—and write a paper about our experiences. When we were discussing our essays in class, several people started talking about Powell’s. And it wasn’t any particular thing they said so much as it was that my classmates from Hawaii, Colorado, New York, and Florida were all saying Powell’s in these hushed, reverent tones as if my bookstore was some kind of Mecca.

What?!

To see something that had always felt so local and personal have such national prominence was…strange. I had my own seven stages of grief for the childhood vision of Powell’s—Horrified (“What!?”), Confused (“What??”), Possessive (“Mine!”), Outraged (“I beg your pardon”), Resigned (“Ugh.”), Grudgingly Impressed (“My Powell’s?”), and Delighted (“Mine!”).

Now that I’m away from my favorite bookstore, I take a peculiar pride in that traumatic day. Sure, it was a room full of massive book nerds in the Pacific Northwest—obviously Powell’s would come out with good reviews. But even as I fall in love with new stores such as the Tattered Cover, I still find myself thinking “Well, I’d never heard of it before today…” which simply renews my inevitable conclusion that Powell’s is the best.

…Nostalgia coupled with Trendiness is a hard combo to beat

Anyway, Powell’s is celebrating its 41^st anniversary this week and I thought I would join in remotely : ) Authors are writing sentimental blog posts, there’s a new twitter hashtag, and (I imagine) all of Portland is in raptures. If you’re in town, there’s a list of festivities here, and it sounds like they’ll be an absolute blast.

Buy a book for me, okay?

Love,

We’re still in the process of interviewing for my former position, and I think the endless question-and-answer has started to affect my brain. I’m thinking in interview answers and—and I don’t know if I can stop. For example, this was the actual beginning of my post before I got myself under control:

Over the past year in an office, I’ve gained a clear sense of my work style and habits. I’ve learned what organizational techniques work most effectively for me, and I’ve learned which ones fall apart under stress. And I’ve learned that when I’m stressed, I tend to drop everything that is not causing me stress in order to focus on and resolve the stressful aspect of my life as quickly as possible.

Really?!  

What I intended to say is that work is absolutely crazy. I’ve been going to academic conferences and author events every weekend, the interview process is exhausting on our end as well as theirs, we’re additionally understaffed from everyone taking their summer vacation time, and next weekend I’ll be going to New Orleans for another conference—which is (needless to say) tremendously exciting, but was also dropped on me very suddenly and requires a lot of advance preparation.

And, as I indicated in my false-start beginning, when I’m stressed I tend to let my hobbies and personal correspondence lapse…entirely. I got a few snarky texts last week about being AWOL even though I had time for my blog, so I thought I would fess up. I wanted to keep up with the blog if only to exert some control over and connection with my personal life while I’m so frazzled. 

…It’s definitely not because I’m starting to think that the consistency of my posting schedule clearly demonstrates a deadline-oriented perspective in my personal as well as professional life. I take my responsibilities seriously and, as you can see, work effectively when I am self-directed and self-motivated.

Thank you for taking the time to consider my blog post,

Although I may not have seemed appropriately impressed by your argument in our prior discussion on the narrative structure of video games, I definitely internalized your point. Of course predetermination is a huge factor in novels. Of course! The only control the reader exerts is whether or not to continue reading. While I am always attracted to the places where sharp delineations begin to blur (I’m looking at you, “enhanced” ebooks!), the engaged passivity of the reader seems to be a pretty essential piece in experiencing novels.

With that in mind, I want to add another example to our video game discussion. Dear Esther, an award-winning, experimental video game, feels (for lack of a better word) novelistic. There is no real game-play: you cannot interact with anything, speak, pick objects up, shoot, bash things, or even jump. You aren’t even able to kill yourself—the screen fades to black, whispers “come back…” and places you back on the path. All you do is wander slowly through a deserted island and experience bits of a story.

Nothing will jump out at you, try to scare you, or startle you, but even knowing this beforehand (because I refused to get near it until I was assured, repeatedly, that nothing would happen), I was unbelievably tense. Like a ghost story, it’s eerie and atmospheric, and I think a lot of my tension came from an awareness of cinematic conventions (something behind you, danger in the darkness…) juxtaposed with the relative safety of written narrative.

One of my favorite reviews described the gameplay thusly: “Dear Esther is, in a very real sense, boring. It is supposed to be. Lonely tedium, that slow, slow walk through a stark land, leads to subconscious introspection. Ever walked along an empty beach at night? Sat alone on a hillside on a cold winter morning? Where did your mind go? Wherever it was, that’s where Dear Esther can take it. If you let it” (Source). 

But before you begin to imagine it’s some creepy isolated horrorscape, let me show you something:

Dear Esther is beautiful. A Hebridean island off the coast of Scotland, it’s got rocky crags, shipwrecks, lighthouses, wildflowers, bioluminescent caves, underground waterfalls…every scene is breathtaking (or maybe I was just holding my breath).

The story, told through fragments of letters, is nonlinear and fractured. I know how much you love postmodern narratives, but the game’s focus on abstract language and interpretation is absolutely in this literary tradition. The “random” elements of the game—for some letters are variable and others are not—reflect the themes of a constructed personal reality (as opposed to a concrete or objective one) perhaps even better than a novel, which is necessarily the same words every time.

Let me take a moment to acknowledge how demoralizing it is to find myself so completely outclassed in literary analysis by a video game review blog before I pass over the reins again: “I found Dear Esther to be a broadly magnificent and genuinely moving experience, and that was almost entirely on a sensory level….I do not believe Dear Esther is the search for an answer, or even for a meaning. I believe it is an experiment with the senses and the emotions….It is a journey through morbidly beautiful emptiness, a maudlin cocktail of sight, sound, implication and metaphor designed to conjure up a feeling of purposeful despair” (Source).

Kelsey, I genuinely don’t know how to classify the experience of Dear Esther. Despite the graphics and soundtrack, this game felt more like experiencing a novel than any enhanced or experimental ebook I’ve come across. Despite the partially-randomized letters and open world exploration, I felt completely under the control of the author/development team. And despite the fact that it’s a video game, okay, not a novel!, I might need some help marking those delineations again…

Will you play it and help me decide?

Love,