• Publishers put a lot of thought into designing the covers of books sold at airports
  More on the great cover discussion of May 2008.
• One man’s plan to rescue book reviewing
  Involves reviewing books, just in case you’re wondering.
• How do you get a debut novel published? It helps if your surname is Depp
  Henceforth, we will be known as Booksquare Depp.
• HarperCollins? social networking site Authonomy in beta for aspiring authors
  And we await the results of this project.

As English increasingly becomes the language of business, native speakers feel, quite understandably, that they are at an advantage. But discussion often goes more smoothly when the native speakers leave the room – proceedings are not muddied by idioms and intuitive, unthinking use of slang. Conversation among non-native speakers may be more direct and pragmatic – correct, probably, yet stripped down and functional. The people who see themselves as facilitators are, in reality, obstacles.

• One language fits all - Henry Hitchings

Ugly book covers are suffered by many male authors as well.

What I have hated most about reading romance, and I’m including the entire cowboys, babies, virgins, and daddies obsession, is reading a book in public that had one of those covers. Breasts falling out of dangerously low-cut gowns, well-muscled long-haired men in overly aggressive poses, cutesy, cuddly babies on gender-coded blankets. Romance novel covers, especially in days gone by, sent the wrong message about the quality and content of the novels.

Legend has it that the “bodice ripper” style of cover was geared toward the men who were buyers for bookstores, not the ultimate consumer. After all, women who read heterosexual-based romance aren’t generally choosing their books based on the cup size of the cover model. In fact, a lot of non-scientific studies have shown that more than a lot of women are uncomfortable reading romance novels in public…because of the covers.

With the advent of chick-lit and women’s fiction as a burgeoning business, book covers for fiction geared toward women suffered from similar, if less cringe-inducing, problems. Recall, for a moment, the overabundance of shoes on candy-colored backgrounds, the pastoral settings with weather-beaten houses, misty water colored memories of small town front porches. Just as there is a sameness in a new season’s television shows and designer clothing and wall paint, there is a sameness in book covers geared toward a particular genre.

This bothers ”’Philadelphia Inquirer”’ columnist Karen Heller, who finds this year’s trend toward “dismemberment” distasteful. She feels the books deserve better, though she doesn’t really offer suggestions about what sort of cover images might better represent the books and their content. She notes, incorrectly,

And it’s not fair to gifted designers who must groan when told to do the femmy-lit thing yet again. The beautiful book is an increasingly rare thing. Most times you see one, the author is male. What does this say? All women writers deserve generic treatment while all men are special in their own way?

If it will help Heller, I can point to a whole bunch o’ ugly covers for novels written by men and an equal number of beautiful covers for novels written by women.

Heller believes that covers with floaty dresses and curvy backs halve a book’s audience. Study after study shows that more women read fiction than men. I don’t think it’s the cover images holding men at bay. And the apparently more tasteful covers given to novels written by men aren’t doing much to increase male readership, are they?

People judge books by their covers. This, I know, offends a certain level of literary snob, but is clearly understood by publishers and readers. Book covers, necessarily, must send messages to potential readers. I know that a book with a smiling, probably gassy baby on the cover isn’t for me. Likewise a pregnant woman. But there are a lot of readers out there who see those images and believe the story inside will appeal to them far more than a cover with a handgun or Soviet-era image.

Cover images very often provide the first level of culling when it comes to find new books to read. When you walk into a bookstore, the sheer volume of product is overwhelming, even if you’re able to isolate your wanderings to just a single section. Browsers, as opposed to readers who are looking for very specific items, pull books off shelves because they look interesting. An image, a clever title, an author’s name, a blurb, intriguing cover copy. All of these elements serve one purpose: hooking the reader to buy and read a book.

I agree that gender bias is alive and thriving in the publishing industry. Just look at the silly criteria used to develop the main ”’New York Times”’ bestseller list. Only in the publishing industry would such paltry figures — relative to sales of non-bestsellers — constitute a “bestseller”. In any given month, an author of a romance published by Harlequin outsells the leader of the so-called bestseller list, but you don’t see that being acknowledged by the ”’NYT”’.

Book reviews continue to be male-dominated as well. I’ve seen a definite trend toward including more books and reviews written by women, but it’s still a Y-chromosome oriented business. Personally, I think this has been a key factor in the decline of newspaper book review sections — there’s a time and place for exclusivity, but not in a newspaper that purports to serve an entire community.

“Male” fiction is taken more seriously on many levels, and, yes, the stupid covers play a negative role in this. Women’s fiction suffers from the belief that domestic issues — home and family — are smaller and less important than big issues. This is a perception that predates the Victorian notions of “spheres”, with the feminine domestic sphere treated as less important the manly public sphere.

I have bypassed many novels because they have lousy covers (and held my snobbery at bay to read some because trusted friends have made it clear that the book inside is worth the time), but I cannot advocate making book covers more appealing to men in order to draw in a larger audience. It seems to me that the male authors need female readers and those covers should speak to the women who are buying the majority of books. Why should women have to make their books more “manly” to achieve male readers? Aren’t we talking about grown-ups here?

Book covers communicate to readers, and publishers are fully aware of the messages they’re sending. While Heller thinks publishers believe women are stupid (”The thinking, or so I imagine, is that readers will look at these women’s body parts or backs and identify. “Why that’s me!” or “That looks just like my old friend Susie!”"), I think publishers know the importance of using imagery to reach the right audience for a book.

Because if you think today’s women are going to plunk down hard-earned dollars for a book because a cover model’s back looks like her old friend Susie, then you seriously underestimate female intelligence and savvy.

From three-page short story to 550-page novel

My new novel, Salvation, began as a three-page short story, “Cannibals,” published in a literary quarterly a few years back. My agent and I were putting together a collection of stories, and this one didn’t fit. But she was smitten with the voice of this story and wondered if it could be longer. I had no idea if it could or couldn’t. I gave it a shot. And a three-page-long episode became a five-hundred-and-fifty-page life story.

My Agent

My agent, Denise Shannon, has her own agency, representing a variety of fine authors including Francine Prose, Gary Shteyngart, Karen Russell, Aryn Kyle, Samuel H. Huntingon, Ehud Havazelet, Kevin Canty, Mark Slouka, and many others. She has a lot of experience and a great sense of the marketplace. Her hunches regarding my work in the past have been proven 100 percent correct. And she loved this book.

What is Salvation about?

Salvation is set in rural Iowa in the 1950s. In a nutshell, the story is a funny/sad survival fable in the Ugly Duckling mode. The book traces the journey of Crane Cavanaugh, beginning with disfiguration in the womb as the result of an attempted abortion and ending with celebration in the world as an award-winning science genius.

Crane and her two half-siblings grow up illiterate, ignored, and unfed by the three adults of the household, all depraved, former gospel circuit practitioners who are now squatters living under the civic radar in a dilapidated shack.

When Crane’s prostitute-mother runs away from home to join the Iowa Sate Fair as a stripper, the authorities intervene. The cabin is condemned and the kids are sent to separate institutions to live. Crane is assigned to convent life. Here, her long-sought education begins, but it goes too fast and well—she’s too smart. Science is taught from the book of Genesis in the Bible. Crane rebels. The nuns give up and put her up for adoption.

Crane is reborn as Princess Hopkins by an adoring middle-class adoptive mother who takes Crane home to live in a ranch house a stone’s throw from the condemned shack where she was born. Loved to pieces at home, mentored happily at school, yet haunted daily by her grim past, Princess/Crane inhabits parallel worlds. She learns to use her scientific precocity and formidable intellect to make her mark—and if more than the usual number of social blunders and sexual humiliations follow in her wake, she somehow retains an inner continuity that keeps her unfazed, cheerful, and forgiving.

Note to Self: Never Use the Omniscient First Person in a Long Work

The point of view of the story was what I’ll call omniscient first person: a candid, sincere, trustworthy narrator describes the world around her—and her precarious place in it—in a way that includes details she couldn’t possibly observe firsthand. Never do that in a novel. It is too hard to consistently maintain the same, precise cognitive scope of omniscience over hundreds of pages and scores of episodes with dozens of sub-characters floating in and out.

Why I Didn’t Change the Voice

The voice was what made Salvation different. Salvation possessed a coming-of-age plot. The Midwestern setting was sturdy and unexotic. There were many original details in this character’s journey—such as an intuitive precocity in tracking the feeding and mating habits of competing ant clans—but the overall theme of a character surviving a deprived childhood and finding her rightful place in the world—that was anything but new. It was the voice that made the whole book feel fresh. The candid, forgiving, cheerful way this character tells you the particulars of her story are what make her memorable.

The Submission Process

My agent was determined to find an editor who would fall in love with the book as she had. There were several rounds of submissions as she tweaked her list of candidates at publishing houses of all sizes, looking for someone with the means and the interest to take a risk on Crane Cavanaugh. It was from the great, young editors at the small literary presses that we got the response we were looking for. We went with Tin House Books. Editorial Director Lee Montgomery bought the manuscript—with the proviso that it would need substantial revision.

Small Presses: People Not Just Policies

Tin House is based in Portland, Oregon, in—yes—a tin house. They have enjoyed an outstanding reputation as a literary quarterly since their first issue came out in 1999. A few years back, they expanded into publishing books. Lee Montgomery is a wonderful writer, whose memoir, The Things Between Us, was published by Free Press and won the Oregon Book Award in Creative Nonfiction. Lee’s short fiction collection, Whose World Is this? won the John Simmons Iowa Short Fiction Award and was published by the University of Iowa Press. To work with me on the revision, Lee assigned Senior Editor Michelle Wildgen, herself an extraordinary fiction writer who won Prairie Schooner’s Virginia Faulkner Award with a story that became her novel, You’re Not You, published by St. Martin’s.

More Focus on Fewer Titles

At every stage of the publishing process, my agent and I were dealing with people, not just policies. My agent has this to say about the advantages of publishing with a small press: “Small presses provide more focus on fewer titles… and everyone throughout the process really knows (and has read!) your book.” We were asked for input on the cover and our input was taken seriously. We were asked for input on the publicity and our suggestions were incorporated. But before the publicity or the cover, there was that little matter of the revision.

Really Revising

My editor had made extensive notes on the novel. My agent had her own list of questions. And I had some thoughts of my own as to what wasn’t working for me. The more soberly I addressed all of the feedback, the more certain I became that the omniscient first person was an unsuitable point of view through which to tell the account of an entire life. (Anyone who knows of a successful example out there, please tell me!)

As hard as we had all worked on every page of the manuscript, I put three hundred and fifty pages of my character’s life story in the wastebasket. I ended the book with the character on the verge of the first major success that will propel her (with plenty of ups and downs) through the decades to come. During this process, my editor combed through the book six or seven times. She was available via e-mail days, nights, and weekends.

Flexibility in Scheduling Publication

When we all agreed that Salvation was the book it wanted to be, Tin House was able to schedule publication within a matter of months. Cover designers, type designers, copy editors, proofreaders, and publicists all worked on compressed turnaround schedules to meet the deadline.

My Editor’s Experience

My editor has this to say about her experience: “I felt a writer as talented and lauded as Lucia could only help us grow the reputation of the book press, and that while we did a lot of work on Salvation, just looking at the original draft, it was clear to me she was certainly skilled enough and serious enough about her writing to find the right path. You could just see the intelligence and the care in the book, and this amazing prose throughout, that told you it was worth pursuing.”

The Ugly Duckling

When I think back to that three-page sketch, I am in awe of both the inner processes and the professional collaboration that helped bring Salvation into being, then coached it assertively into finding its rightful place in the world. Kinda like my character. Talk about the Ugly Duckling!

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You can buy Salvation right here and learn more about the book here.

When threatened with obscurity versus piracy, it helps to understand terms.

Yes, you’ve been warned. Random, disconnected thoughts to follow.

The entertainment companies — music, motion picture, and publishing — tend to equate piracy with lost sales. The thinking, when putting industry spin on the problem, is that each pirated copy of a product represents a lost sale. That only holds true if the person who enjoys a free download or physical bootleg would have purchased the product anyway. Or if that pirated version doesn’t represent a digital version of something the consumer also legally purchased in a physical format. It also only holds true if the pirated material represents the only available option for that consumer in that media at that time (see: the entire Harry Potter catalog, digital version).

Piracy does not always mean lost sales, but, absolutely, authors suffer some loss of compensation when their work is pirated. There is no way to absolutely quantify this loss, but it’s worth considering that authors have, in the past, encouraged, heck, championed, losses that are analogous to what we’re now calling piracy. Consider these examples, old and new, of “lost sales”:

• Libraries: Authors don’t make any more money if a book is borrowed once or a thousand times from a library (though wear and tear on a thousand check-outs might mean more copies sold). Yet authors and publishers are huge supporters of libraries (me too!). The thinking is that the volume of sales (lots of libraries) and exposure to new readers is worth the lack of ongoing compensation. Libraries bring readers and books together.

  And libraries aren’t really free to consumers: we support them via taxes. The free culture really doesn’t get free, but that’s another problem for another day. While authors and publishers and readers love libraries, these institutions are losing when it comes to funding. This “free” source of books needs to be nurtured if you’re serious about reading. Off soapbox now, except to say that you get what you pay for and if you’re not thinking about your tax dollars and libraries, you don’t love libraries.

• Used Bookstores: Unlike libraries, where there isn’t a commerce component (unless you count book sales), used bookstores make money by selling books without paying the author or publisher anything. A book can be bought and resold many times, but the author only sees benefit of that first sale. Again, authors and publishers often see this as a positive thing. I remain skeptical. Bottom line is that books are distributed and monetized by third parties. It’s the doctrine of first sale in the physical world; there is not equivalent in the digital world.
• Free Downloads: Though there is evidence that offering a free download increases sales of physical/legal digital product, the truth of the matter is that not every person who downloads will make a purchase. There will be a percentage of people who might have paid for the product but figure free is a better price. Still, those authors who give their work away seem to believe it was the right choice, with benefits outweighing drawbacks.

  Free downloads increase visibility for the author and the book, but they can also create negative impressions about the value of a book. So what — valuable promotional tool or gateway drug?

• Book Swaps: People have been sharing books with friends and family since the printing press was invented. Nothing feels more fantastic that pressing a great read on a good friend and saying, “You have got to cancel all your plans this weekend. Read this.” But for well over a decade now, book swapping hasn’t been a benign, limited range activity.

  Basic human activity has been made into viable business in this Internet age. Once, this was a pretty limited activity — now, it’s a highly specialized practice. Services like BookMooch are building frameworks that bypass, all together now, the author and publisher.

  It is often argued that these service represent a “Netflix for books”. They do not. Netflix pays the motion picture distributors ongoing royalties for their service. These amounts are then reported for residual and participation payments. The book business has not been aggressive in this regard. However configured, these services allow their clients to bypass book purchases.

  Good or bad? I’m not seeing many authors talking about this. I think my position is pretty obvious.

Piracy — the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials — is something that must be fought. Sort of. Maybe it’s me, but finding pirated books is a lot harder than finding legal downloads (thanks Jill for being my test bunny; I learned that a lot of people are talking about your mullet). After I worked through a few Google pages of results in my quest for illegal books, I found some fringe stuff. I have no idea, on first glance if these sites are legal or not. Without doing extensive research — and the average consumer won’t — I don’t know if these are legal sellers or not. But they weren’t top ten results (and we know that few people go beyond the top ten)

I found an interesting site where the download service was run like a library (with X-number of lending days and available digital copies). Found a few services that charged for ebooks, but didn’t seem to be illegal (if so, man, these are so obvious, why haven’t they been shut down?). I found a site that, after forcing me through a really horrific interface, funneled me to a site that wanted me to buy books. How is the consumer to differentiate between legal and not?

It’s a question worth exploring. We live in a world where the world’s largest online retailer sells new books and used books in the same breath. If piracy represents the loss of sales, then surely ready access to used books are the epitome of piracy. But used book sales are good and piracy is bad and lost sales are, what, only lost sales when they’re piracy but not when they’re used book sales?

What is piracy? Historically, there was an inherent profit motive (and given the fact that pirates still roam the high seas…), but we’re living in an era where the “pirates” aren’t necessarily making money off their activities, and it’s unclear to what degree sales are being lost. File sharing, unfortunate and pervasive, has much in common with the activities I’ve outlined above. As I look over that list, I’ll note that I’m on record as advocating smarter, better ways to create fair, ongoing compensation for artists, but I don’t think this nation is up to the task of changing.

People who are actively seeking free, illegal downloads are going to put themselves through the extreme effort necessary to find these books because paying for a book or video or song is not an option (I never did find free, though I admit I wasn’t a motivated pirate). Keep fighting those sites and make it !@#$ hard to download a pirated copy of your books. Terrify the kiddies with stories about evil viruses and spyware. Make piracy the least attractive option for your customers.

When threatened with obscurity versus piracy, it helps to understand terms. 400,000 books is a lot. Way too many, if you ask me. Others disagree, and I think they’re looking at the micro rather than the macro. Thinking, reading, and talking about books is changing, and there’s a necessary weighing of audience-increasing sharing of books (in the physical and digital worlds) against the specter of lost sales.

Your challenge is to figure out where you stand on this issue. I can only help by offering up a whole bunch of great thoughts on this topic (some even more coherent than what I’m offering up here):

• Scourge of the corporate pirates
• You’re an Author? Me Too!
• Free your mind
• Free BookMooch service puts novel spin on books
• Digital Public Libraries for Free?

Reading too much, my brother explained in his English-teacherly way, is a disaster for a writer. To immerse yourself in literature - particularly those of your contemporaries - makes your work derivative at worst, and unoriginal at best. To keep your voice pure, he suggested, you must retreat, Kasper Hauser-like, only to emerge later with a voice as clear as God intended. It was an argument that almost culminated in our first exchange of blows since 1994.

• Should writers be readers

Many years ago, in a graduate writing workshop, the professor—who has authored a long list of novels I admire—surprised us by beginning class with a warning. He instructed us to spend as little energy as possible on the classes that we taught. He told us to keep time with our students to an absolute minimum.

“Teaching, critiquing, working with them. It’ll suck out your writing soul,” he said.

The class got quiet. We were sorry. We’d clearly extracted a good chunk of his.

Was he right? It can certainly be hard work—reading student writing, answering questions, giving advice. Sure, it can be draining. But it’s both my hope and suspicion that mentoring, when done willingly and wholeheartedly, can have the opposite effect. It feeds the literary soul.

And, it might just be integral to the future of literature.

Now, I know I’m not making any sort of revolutionary statement by pointing out that people don’t read much anymore. I was lucky. My hippie parents didn’t allow me to watch television. It didn’t feel so lucky at the time, but, because of it, I read. My mother always had a book in her hand. We played word games in the car and on napkins at Perkins before our pancakes came, and she paid me ten cents a line to memorize poetry (I think I still remember ninety cents of Blake’s “Tyger, Tyger”). My father read poetry to me aloud. Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson. We had shelves and shelves of books—to which I had full access, and I read everything I could get my hands on. I remember reading novels and thinking how amazing it would be to actually write one of those things.

You don’t need hippies for parents to read, but these days, I think, young writers, more than ever, require guidance and inspiration. It’s no longer a given that students—even writing students—love books. I’ve had some tell me proudly, in fact, that they never read.

I was initially skeptical of writing programs. I thought that young writers should go out and see and do things. Study ancient African history. Figure out how to build a proper compost. Figure out how to build a proper house. Live. Read. Write. If you want to write, you will. You won’t be able not to.

And there’s some logic in that.

But it’s important to remember that we no longer live in a world where writers are automatically fed and primed by what they have around them. Instead, there is wonderful, delicious, big-screen TV, prechewed entertainment, video games. Kids don’t have as much free time—there are activities and sports and more activities and carpools.

Out there—it’s no longer a book world.

So we create one. I still advise students to double major if they choose to major in creative writing as an undergraduate, but writing classes do provide an environment where we can bring reading and writing to the forefront. Teachers can inspire—and be inspired. In the best of worlds, it becomes a symbiotic relationship.

My mentoring has helped me enormously. It helps in the immediate sense that I’m reminding myself of good exercises, different things to try–but also in that it puts me outside myself, it give me another lens on the world. In addition to teaching, some years back, I helped run a mentoring program for middle school girls, and I was astounded by the difference just a few hours with a kid can make—for everyone involved. I have hippie parents, so I can say it: there’s some sort of energy transference between mentor and mentee. And, in that, something happens.

And I don’t think it’s a soul being sucked.

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Check out After Hours at the Almost Home here. Read an excerpt, play on the Unbridled Books site here.

And, as a fan, I’m particularly bothered by this case because, well, there has to be a better way to deal with your readers than suing them. Especially after you’ve blessed the website and admittedly used it as a resource. It’s really absurd to belittle the efforts of said fan while tacitly admitting that you — the author — don’t have the same level of information readily available.

At the heart of the suit are issues related to fair use, derivative works, and copyright infringement. Rowling, over the course of eight books, created a complex world filled with new concepts, new language, detailed history, and a host of characters. A website, reportedly endorsed by Rowling, created a sort of lexicon of the Potter world. The creators of the lexicon then decided to release the work in print format.

Rowling wasn’t at all happy.

Rowling is famously protective of her copyright, to the point that her zealousness has backfired. As Kirk Biglione noted in his “Tools of Change” presentation (download PDF), Rowling’s refusal to release an ebook version of the “Harry Potter” series due to fear of piracy (among other reasons) lead to, you guessed it!, increased piracy without a single legal alternative for consumers. Demand existed for the ebook — small demand, sure, but demand — yet only the pirates met it.

Rowling says this suit isn’t about money, but it is. I do not believe it stems from greed on her part, but the heart and soul is about who profits from the Potter world (and it’s clear that the parties with the most financial interest are the author and Warner Brothers — not, you’ll note, either Bloomsbury or Scholastic). Once it was perceived that there might be money made of this derivative work, then the worries began.

JK Rowling, for all her innovative thinking, has an issue with the Internet, that much is clear. She might use it, but she doesn’t get it. eBooks are one issue, but it’s clear to me that she considered the lexicon created by Steven Vander Ark to be just fine as long as it remained online. Once he ported it to (printed) book format, things got sticky. Was it the idea that books are sold in stores and make money? Would she have been as litigious if he’d made a bundle via Google AdSense on his website (did he sell ads, one too lazy to check wonders).

So it’s okay for Rowling to benefit from the obsessive of a fan, but not okay for the fan to benefit as well? It’s a bit selfish, isn’t it, to support the efforts of your fans while they funnel money to you but to disregard their time and energy when it seems they might earn a little back? Over and over and over again, I see the publishing industry asking readers to give without, well, giving back in return.

I digress.

Rowling has stated that, at some point in time, she plans to write her own encyclopedia/lexicon. You know, a little something to tie the whole thing together. The when and if of this project are unscheduled, but you can bet your sweet bippie that Rowling’s book will skyrocket up the charts. Not only will she be able to bring intimate depth to the entire Potter oeuvre, but she’ll also present the material in her own voice.

There is no way that the RDR Books lexicon will cannibalize Rowling’s sales (if there are indeed any sales by Rowling as those sales are dependent on the creation of a book that is still in the “thinking about” phase). To suggest this might be the case is no less than a classic red herring. Readers are hungry for more Harry Potter from J.K. Rowling. The brilliant Jeff Gomez draws a similar conclusion:

True, it’s a different story when someone is using your exact words, repackaging them for their own profit. But if what’s being written about is instead your world, then that’s not only fair game (and fair use), but it’s good thing and not a bad thing. In Rowling’s case, her books are going to sell no matter what. But if she’s allowed to succeed in stopping RDR, think about all of the books about books (not to mention books about movies and plays and music) that won’t get written as a result. Bands could protest books being written about their songs, and directors could claim infringement when books about their movies appear. Part of the pleasure, and indeed the understanding, of art comes from putting it into context and perspective — not to mention just plain celebrating it — but if Rowling has her way nothing would exist but the works themselves.

Gomez hits the point square on: if derivative works are subject to approval of copyright owners, that leads to a chilling effect on criticism. The RDR lexicon provides a perspective on Rowling’s books that, while she might disagree, reflects particular reading and understanding of the text. And, I believe, given the cultural impact of this series, it’s not unreasonable to anticipate other analysis, cataloguing, discussion — that’s what great books do. They inspire readers to build upon and explore the literary landscape.

Rowling should be flattered and honored that her work created the kind of passion that went into this project. If this were truly about copyright infringement, I’d feel sympathetic to Rowling’s cause (the weird thing being that so little of the coverage indicates the level of actual copyright theft happening here). But she’s made it clear that this isn’t just about copyright — it’s about control. Rowling wants to control the conversation about her work. She lost that right a long time ago.

There’s a point where she has to come to terms with the fact that it’s time to let go. Jeff Gomez compares this to sending your children out into the grown-up world. You hope they fare well, hope you did a good job, wonder about who they will influence. Rowling can continue to offer her wisdom and insight.

Do I think this could have been handled better? Absolutely. Suing your fans is rarely a good public relations move.

There are many exciting things happening within publishing and I draw parallels with what happened to the music industry in the 1970’s when a small but significant core of people grew tired of the same old record being sung by supergroups, such as the Eagles or Queen. From the streets came what at the time many thought was a revolution called punk rock. History though shows us that there are few, if any, real revolutions in art or entertainments just evolutions. Sometimes the leap is a little large, maybe it misses out a generation and that is what can be frightening to the establishment. Are we in the midst of a revolution…no, but the industry is evolving and the leap ahead of it looks big.

• The London Book Fair 2008…Talkin’ Bout An Evolution

Nearly a decade ago, when I haltingly embarked on the project that would become The Painter from Shanghai, I was nothing if not flattered when people in my writing workshop immediately began comparing my novel to Memoirs of a Geisha. Well, actually, I was something else—mainly, surprised. Like most of the apparent universe, I’d devoured Arthur Golden’s runaway bestseller (my husband still refers to that weekend as “the time Jenn left me for the geisha”). But Painter struck me as a completely different endeavor. For one thing, it was set in China, a country I’d spent well over two years living and traveling in, and one I found radically different from Japan (where I’d lived for five). In fact, my first reaction upon detraining at Guangzhou Station in 1986 was a stunned astonishment: apart from Chinese characters (appropriated by Japan from China thousands of years ago, and somewhat awkwardly adapted to its own, radically different language), the Middle Kingdom seemed to share almost nothing with it’s smaller, more homogeneous neighbor. It was loud, rude, exuberant; cluttered, colorful, vividly alive. Watching Chinese citizens barrel across streets against the light, laugh and curse musically on the street and jostle good-naturedly in a ticket line, I—who had just spent a quiet year with a family in Kyoto–felt like a schoolchild let out to recess.

Of course, the fact stands that my novel–like Arthur Golden’s–begins in a brothel. Unlike Memoirs, though, it isn’t centered there. At heart, The Painter from Shanghai is less about prostitution than cultural mergings and clashings, and art, and a painter’s pain-filled but ultimately triumphant quest for self-realization. As I imagined her, Pan Yuliang—the real-life figure at its center–was a woman who battled fiercely against preset gender roles and aesthetic norms, during a uniquely tumultuous moment in Chinese history. So while I—like Golden–tried to take an unflinching look at the daily degradations and misogyny inherent in a life of prostitution (and it should be noted somewhere that a geisha is far more than a prostitute—as anyone who has read Memoirs should know) I was far less interested in the brothel itself than the fierce individualism and artistic sensibilities that (I imagined) separated Yuliang from her coworkers there—the same qualities that would eventually drive her transformation into one of China’s most controversial and daring modern artists. And then, there was the writing. As I’ve said, I thoroughly enjoyed Memoirs, and certainly admired Golden’s clear, elegant writing style. For my own part, though, I was trying for something very different; something more experimental; something that played with words and rhythm and image in a way that (hopefully) evoked–if not Joyce or Woolf–then at least the impressionistic daring of Pan Yuliang’s own paintbrush.

For all my efforts, though, my book continued to be compared with Memoirs. People to whom I described the project congratulated me beamingly, as though I’d taken on the Geisha sequel. Writing instructors glowingly referenced it in recommendations they wrote for me. Well-meaning friends pointed out where Memoirs had failed them, as though to caution me of the same pitfalls. Rather than fight the trend, I ultimately opted to embrace it, mentioning the comparison preemptively in agent queries. The responses I got went in two directions: at least one agent (I’m fairly sure) didn’t even read the manuscript before offering me her unqualified and enthusiastic services. Several others declined with polite (if unwritten) yawns, implying one Asian prostitute was quite enough.

The shadow of Memoirs reached, in fact, well beyond the point that a fabulous agent (who did read the book) took me on and promptly sold it to eleven publishers, both here and abroad. I have no way of knowing how many of these sales were on the strength of the kiss of Geisha’s kiss. I do know, however, that my two English-language publishers both agreed that marketing it after Memoirs made sense. Norton’s catalogue introduces Painter matter-of-factly as “evocative of Memoirs of a Geisha,” a description that is now writ, in bold, on the book’s Amazon page. Penguin went a step further, putting a round, red sticker on their (quite lovely) trade paperback’s cover that cheerily notes: “If you liked Memoirs of a Geisha, you’ll love this!”

“Don’t we want the book to be seen—well, on its own terms?” I asked my agent, hesitantly. But it was hard to argue with the common logic: Memoirs was a book people knew, loved and identified with. Referring to it offered an immediate hook to readers. Hooked readers, as everyone knows, leads to bagged revenue. And after seven years without an income, two college tuitions to save for and two years at a pricey writing program to pay off, income was something I couldn’t afford to eschew.

All this, by the way, is a quandary faced by other books as well; my friend Charlie Leerhson’s terrific new biography, for example. Crazy Good—based on the astonishing true story of Dan Patch, a former grocery-cart horse who “was the most significant pop-culture figure in the first half of the 20th century”– labored under the inevitable comparisons to Seabiscuit before finally getting picked up by Simon and Schuster. Charlie acknowledges that such automatic comparisons “give reviewers something to wrap their minds around, and thus can get you noticed and remembered.” But on the whole, he says, he considers it disadvantageous.

As far as the Memoirs hook goes, my own views are still unformed. Certainly, the comparison was picked up by reviewers—to mixed effect: Library Journal signed off its very nice, starred review by noting that “fans of Arthur Golden’s Memoirs…will enjoy this engrossing story of a woman forced to choose between following her heart and pursuing her art.” Entertainment Weekly, on the other hand, began its rather sniffy short take like this: “More than a decade after Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden’s best-seller still inspires imitators like The Painter From Shanghai….”

Happily for me, though, the New York Times not only loved the book, calling it “luminous”, “vivid,” “an irresistible story” but also refrained form making any literary references at all. Even more gratifyingly in some ways was the South China Morning Post, which compared my book to a “cross between Zhang Yimou’s movies and Chen Yifei’s oil paintings.” Granted, this may not hook American readers, most of whom probably couldn’t pronounce Zhang and Cheng’s names, much less get the reference. But for me, it’s worth at least a few sales.

In the end, while it’s been interesting to have traveled this far with a geisha, I do hope we’ll part ways at some point—even though (I’ll admit it) I plan to set my next novel in Tokyo. During World War. I do, however, plan to avoid the brothels. And if the book is pegged to anything this time around, I hope it’s War and Peace.

You can find Jennifer Epstein’s website here. And buy her book (c’mon you know you want to!) here.