Michael, is there reason to be optimistic about the publishing industry’s prospects over the next few generations?

You know, Susan Peterson Kennedy once gave a speech that framed this pretty well. There’s this tendency that people in the industry have to go on and on about the Internet and the literary apocalypse. Well, Susan quoted an article. The writer went on and on about a lower readership, less talent, higher production costs, and rapidly changing technologies. Things did not look good. They were terrible, in fact. This was Red Alert. Abandon ship! The sky is falling! He said the industry would be dead in less than a generation.

The clincher?

The article was published over a century ago. There’s more than reason for optimism; this is the nature of the beast. People have been saying that the publishing industry is about to die for roughly as long as there has been a publishing industry. It’s not dying.

But it’s certainly changing. It will change tomorrow, in fact. It changes every day. Our success in this business correlates exactly with our adaptability. Are you scared of eBooks, the iPad, that crazy computer paper that stretches, or does all of this excite you? Does the competition that the slew of small presses and self-publishers are about to come charging through the marketplace with intimidate you, or are you looking forward to welcoming what is undoubtedly going to be a broader, more interesting environment for literature? The only people who have anything to worry about are the people who romanticize our grandfathers’ industry. That’s long gone, it’s never coming back, and quite frankly I’m glad. We’re living in the future now, and it’s really, really cool.

How would you respond to people who argue that, while eBooks may expand the market in terms of sales volume, the amount of royalties that authors receive is shrinking along with advances? How can authors remain optimistic when facing this reality?

I would simply say that they’re wrong. Standard royalty rates are the same, and advances are adjusting across the industry to reflect the current publishing reality.

Don’t mistake the tenor of my last answer; there is a very tough road ahead of us. I’m positive because I believe in the people at the helm of the ship, but if we’re not smart, and if we’re not willing to dig hard and reach for the new ideas, then the reality your authors are upset in the face of is going to get a lot worse.

You’ve used Twitter for a while now. How do you think authors can best utilize it?

The thing about Twitter is, it’s a great marketing tool if you aren’t using it as a marketing tool. I love Twitter. I think it’s probably the most interesting thing that’s appeared online in the past six or seven years, but it’s a conversation. It’s a bunch of people sharing and debating news, posting random thoughts, insights, ideas, and linking to videos of cats with myotonia congenita or whatever other crazy thing. But they’re building legitimate friendships grounded in common interest. If you approach Twitter with one goal in mind – to sell books – you’re going to look like that guy who sells glow sticks and lighters in crowded bars along 14th street at two in the morning; nobody’s going to trust you, and nobody’s going to follow you. You’ll fail.

The best thing an author can do is approach Twitter earnestly, craft a voice that’s relevant to his or her genre or field, and blog about the things that they find interesting, because that’s the only way to build a real audience. Twitter needs to be an end, not a means. Once you have that – followers who you interact with, and who look to you specifically for your opinion – a book or event plug every now and then will actually be welcomed. Hell, it might even be retweeted.

Psst. P.S. Follow me @micsolana!

You’re a writer yourself, in your spare time, and you’ve had some experience with the process of searching for an agent. From the perspective of someone who has been on both sides (an editor at a publishing house and a writer seeking publication), can you offer any advice to writers out there who are as yet unpublished or unrepresented?

Yes, actually, I can. Your query letter is important. I mean, it’s really important. Actually, consider how important you believe it is — seriously, right now, take a second and think about it. Now multiply that by like a factor of ten. If I’ve learned anything while working in this industry, and pitching this industry, it’s this: there’s a lot of noise out there and not a lot of signal. Editors and agents have been conditioned, simply for experience, to expect a majority of work in their inboxes that ranges from terrible to legitimately insane. You may think that means you have an edge. You’re probably thinking, as I once did, well, score! I’m not a crazy person! My stuff’s at least good. It will stand out, right?

Wrong.

Unfortunately, what actually tends to happen is your work, regardless of quality, is assumed guilty of bad, simply for being in the slush pile, before the first word of your query is read. So you need to make that first word shine. You need to write the best paragraph of your entire life and show it to me and make me think my God, if I don’t read this right now someone else will and it will be amazing and I will lose this project and I can’t do that because HOLY CRAP! LOOK AT THIS! You need to write as if your life depended on it because trust me, the deck is stacked against you and this is not your first impression. This is your only impression. No one’s reading through your first twenty or thirty pages to see if things get better. If you work isn’t immediately, self-evidently great it’s assumed that it will never be. That’s an almost impossible judgment to recover from.

Also, I mean, you just have to write, right? Writers should just write. And read! Read all the time. Read everything. But that can’t be my advice because, well, duh.

So query letters! Yes! Make them glow!

So, now that you’ve crushed the spirits of every aspiring writer reading this, I should tell you something about myself as an agent. I ask writers to send me the first 25 pages or so of their manuscript along with their query, and when I’m going through my inbox I generally skip past the query letter and look at the writing sample first. What do you think about that?

Ha! Different strokes for different folks? But I do think you’re an outlier.

Let’s talk a little more about dual roles. As an agent, I have to both receive and dole out plenty of rejections, and it’s predictably not a fun thing in either role. You have experience in both roles as well, as an editor and a writer. This is essentially a three-part question. What can you tell writers about the role of the rejector? What about that of the rejected? Finally, do you know any tricks for coping and moving past rejections?

This is a great question.

My God, have I been rejected. About five years back I took to covering my wall in letters from houses and journals. A lot of writers do this, and for a while I thought it was clever. It made me feel like I was chipping away at this seemingly insurmountable obstacle – publication – one “no thanks” at a time, as if it were a necessary right of passage; a lot of people say that it is. But, at the risk of going all The Secret on your readers, what it actually did was lend my rejectors a higher position of importance in my life than they deserved, and it filled my life with, well, rejection. How could it not? Every day I woke up and looked right at it.

This is wildly insane. In the first place, most rejection letters are form. Do you know where a form rejection letter belongs? In the trash can. Do yourself a tremendous favor and throw it the hell away. Get it out of your life. I can guarantee you that it didn’t come from a negative place. Some editorial assistant or agent was really just trying for a polite “no.” But I’ve spent many hours of my life that I will never get back wondering what “it didn’t immediately grab us” meant. Should I change my opening? I can make it exciting, I’d think; should there be a fight? A talking cat with an important message? An explosion?! Well, maybe. Probably all of those things, actually. Who doesn’t love a good explosion in a tortured literary masterpiece? It was Tolstoy, after all, who said that nothing good would ever come of omitting giant alien robots from the first page of a novel (I’m paraphrasing). But maybe not. Maybe your opening is fine. Because do you know what that form rejection letter really means? What Peter Rich-White-Guy-Sounding-Last-Name over at Knopf is really saying to you? It’s this: I don’t like it.

So screw him.

Screw you, Peter!

Look to the few really thoughtful letters you receive. There are going to be agents and editors who liked your characters, or your story, or maybe just the quality of your writing, and these are the people whose advice you should take to heart. Force your friends and coworkers to read your stuff. Join a writing group. Let the real-life-actual people you’re surrounded by tell you what worked and what didn’t work for them because they’re your audience, and their opinion is just as important as mine. It’s more important, actually.

But what is the role of rejection in an author’s life? This is pretty subjective, I guess. For me, rejection used to matter a lot. The letters said something about me. They were my only real ties to the publishing world and so I cared about them a great deal. But lately I couldn’t care less, and my life is better because of it. The letters are white noise. I hardly even read them anymore. I just kind of skim to get the gist, and I move on, because every moment you spend worrying about not being published is a moment you’ve just stolen from your writing, and from immediately sending your work back out to be rejected, rejected, re – hey! Success!

In the seminal words of 3LW, “haters gonna hate.”

Ignore them.

Keep writing.

Be sure to check out The Internet is a Playground: Irreverent Correspondences of an Evil Online Genius by David Thorne, a New York Times bestseller that’s available now.

“There is usually a fine line between genius and insanity, but in this case it has become very blurred. Some of the funniest and most clever writing I have read in years.” (Terrance Fielding, WIRED magazine)

“I laughed so hard and uncontrollably I could hardly breathe. Reading this on public transport is not a good idea.” (Penthouse magazine)

“Brilliantly funny.” (Jezebel.com)

From the notorious Internet troublemaker who brought the world the explosively popular “Next Time I’ll Spend the Money on Drugs Instead”, in which he attempted to pay his chiropractor with a picture he drew of a spider; “Please Design a Logo for Me. With Pie Charts. For Free,” which has been described as one of the most passed-on viral e-mails of all time; and, most recently, the staggeringly popular “Missing Missy”, which has appeared everywhere from The Guardian to Jezebel to Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish, comes this profoundly funny collection of irreverent Internet mischief and comedy.

Featuring all of Thorne’s viral success, including “Missing Missy”, The Internet Is a Playground culls together every article and e- mail from Thorne’s wildly popular website 27bslash6.com, as well as enough new material, available only in these pages, to keep you laughing-and, indeed, crying-until Thorne’s next stroke-of-genius prank. Or hilarious hoax. Or well-publicized almost-stint in jail (really).

David Thorne is a humorist, satirist, Internet personality and author. His website, 27bslash6.com, typically receives several thousand hits a day, he has more than 60,000 followers on Twitter and Facebook, and his work has been featured on the BBC, The Late Show with David Letterman, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and Late Night with Conan O’Brien. He now lives in the United States.

My friend Chris Kepner asked me to write a guest post on this blog. He said this blog is read by a lot of writers looking for representation, so something about my experience with publishing would be apropos.

So I figure I’ll just share my personal story with publishing. First of all, my novel, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, comes out from Twelve today, and before reading another sentence of this you should probably go pre-order a copy of the book, plus five or six back-up copies in case you lose it. That said, here’s my story.

When I was in my first couple years of college I decided I wanted to write fiction. I took some writing workshops, but I realized that nothing will improve one’s writing more than obsessive, single-minded, devotional practice. Ninety-nine percent of learning to write comes from writing and reading. (And reading in a certain way, too… To read as a writer, in one sense you always have to be on the lookout for things to steal. If you like what you’re reading, a part of you ought to be thinking as you read, “How is this working? What is going on with the handling of time, pacing, point of view, scene, narrative, etc.” If you don’t like what you’re reading, that can be useful, too—if you’re thinking, “What exactly is it about this crap that I hate so much, and how can I avoid doing this myself?”) So, to the great distress of my parents and against the good advice of pretty much everyone I knew, I took a leave of absence from school. When a college sophomore takes a “leave of absence” it usually means he’s dropping out. I worked for a summer editing technical documents at an aerospace company, a decent but mind-numbingly boring job that I quit in order to move into a gross little apartment with a great friend of mine, an alcoholic poet who was working at a pool cleaning company. (This friend died a few years ago, and I dedicated my book to him.) So, I said to myself, you left school to write fiction. So let’s do it. Here we go. Write.

First I wrote a novella about a theater director who visits a passion play in rural Mexico. When I was done with that, I’d run out of the money I’d saved from the aerospace job, and out of dire financial desperation got another job baking bagels in the middle of the night. I would wake up at two in the morning and get to work at three, bake bagels until ten o’clock, then go home, set up shop with notebook and pen at the card table in our disgusting apartment and write until exhaustion came over me like a dark mist. (I’ve always written my first drafts old-school, with a pen and paper, and I strongly recommend it. It may just be superstition, but I think I write better when I write longhand. The icy, anxious flicker of a computer screen has a way of stanching the creative juices, but real ink on real paper just flows and flows…) That year I finished the novella, and another novel—a big one that weighed in at around 500 pages. Set in the early 60s, it was about an imagined friendship between characters based on Sun Ra and a young Alan Greenspan. That year I was dead-broke all the time, and at the end of it I was ill and noticeably skinnier. Also, I had grown long hair and a giant, bushy beard, an effect that in concert with my scrawniness made me look like I should have been standing barefoot on a milk crate at a busy intersection warning people of the apocalypse. But my writing had vastly improved. I fought with the Balrog that year, and when I returned from the edges of the earth, I was newly dressed in gleaming white robes, and more powerful than ever. Nothing I’ve ever done has helped my writing as much as that year.

To my parents’ pleasant surprise, I went back to school, where I funneled the lion’s share of my energy into writing fiction. I shelved the novels I’d written and started another, finished it and threw it away. That one was probably my next-best one. It was about a militant feminist anthropologist, a 400-year old man and a swingers’ resort on a fictional Caribbean island. I was also working on stories. My writing got better with every sentence I wrote. I applied to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, got in, and spent the next three years in Iowa City. I worked on stories off and on, but I mostly worked on my fourth novel, which eventually became by “first” novel. After the two-year MFA I got a godsend of a fellowship, which allowed me to live a third year in Iowa City, rent-free with a stipend and minimal teaching duties. I knew I was going to be broke when I finished the year-long fellowship, which meant that I would have to get a job, which would mean that after that year I would have far less time to write; therefore, I had to try like hell to finish the novel that year. By this point my novel had become an addiction, an obsession, something that was never absent from my waking consciousness and often invaded my dreams. So from August to August of 2008-9, I lived with two other writers in a nearly empty, drafty, bat-infested Tudor Colonial in Iowa City, locked in my office in the attic like a Victorian hysteria case, feverishly working on a 600-page novel about a talking chimp, distantly aware that in the world outside the global economy was collapsing or something.

And it worked. I finished it.

I had been in contact with a few agents who had visited Iowa over the course of the last few years, and I sent my novel to them first. The first few rejections trickled in, and I expanded my search. I was only sending my book to agents I’d met or had heard of, or who represented writers I knew. I didn’t keep count, but I’d say I was rejected by about twenty agents. There was one agent in particular that I was really hoping for. This guy is a dream agent, with an all-star client list and a golden reputation. I thought I had an in with him, because we had a friend in common, who passed my manuscript along to him with a good word. In his rejection email, he told me that my book is “hard to categorize, and as you know, publishers like categories.” When this “I’m sorry but I have to pass on this” email popped up in my inbox, I got frustrated, threw up my arms in despair and went back to what we at Iowa called the Big Blue Book of False Hopes—The Writers’ Market—and put out the dragnet for literary agents. I picked out about fifty agents and fired off a blitzkrieg of email queries. My query was only a few sentences long. It went like this:

Dear [name of agent],

I graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop a year ago and received a post-grad writing fellowship at the University of Iowa, which has given me the time I needed to finish a novel. The novel, titled “Bruno Littlemore,” recently received a Michener-Copernicus Society of America Award.
It is a comic novel narrated by a chimpanzee. Please let me know if you would like to take a look at it.

Thank you,
Benjamin Hale

That was all. I’d say over half of them wrote me back and asked to read it. Within about three weeks I had several offers.

Since then I’ve been a bewildered tourist cautiously exploring the confusing foreign country of my life, pointing at random items on menus and repeating the three or four words of the language I know.

I thought very carefully and considered the offers from some really fantastic agents, and chose one. I worked with my agent, Brian DeFiore, on polishing up another draft of the book, and in October of 2009 he sent it off to publishers. At the time I had just moved to New York from a lack of any other ideas (where else does a writer go?). I was subletting an apartment in Brooklyn from a friend of mine who was away on business for a few months, and working at a wine store in Astoria. Now, everything about the whole process of writing books, in what was then my experience, I knew to take a long fucking time. It took me about six years of writing novels and trashing them before I was good enough to write a novel that didn’t need to be trashed, three very concentrated years to write that novel, months and months to find an agent, another couple of months to work through edits with that agent. So I didn’t expect the publishing industry to have the swiftest of feet. I figured the process of selling the book would take months as well. There I was wrong. My agent sent the book to publishers on a Tuesday, and the first editor to make an offer—Cary Goldstein at Twelve—spent Tuesday night and all of Wednesday reading it and made an offer on Thursday morning. I was shocked. (This illustrates how unexpected this was to me: the previous day I had absentmindedly left my phone sitting on the counter of the wine store. I’d realized this when I got home, and thought, “Eh, whatever, I’ll get it tomorrow.” I opened the store at noon. So my phone spent that morning uselessly ringing in a locked wine shop in Astoria as my agent was frantically trying to call me to tell me we had an offer.) Twelve’s offer opened the gates, and over the course of the next week or two four more publishers threw their hats in the ring: Random House, Grove, Algonquin, and Free Press (an imprint of Simon and Schuster). I also met with people at Harper Collins, but they didn’t bid on it for some reason. There was an auction for the book, with the last men standing being Grove, Random House and Twelve. It wasn’t an easy decision. In the end I went with Twelve, who had been the first to bid, and they’ve done a fantastic job with my book. I’ve spent the last year waiting, mostly, and writing another book. The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore was released today. And that is the story of my experience with publishing, so far.

Sometimes I think that a good metaphor for success at writing would be to imagine a measuring cup that has to be filled up to a certain line, labeled “success.” To fill this cup up to the line, you have three ingredients: talent, hard work and luck. You can mix these things in any combination, but it has to fill the glass up to the line. I know plenty of incredibly talented writers who work really hard but seem to be stuck with the shittiest luck. And I know other writers who aren’t that talented and don’t work that hard but have had incredible luck. But really, the only one of these ingredients that you can control is hard work. Hard work will eventually, usually, create talent. There may be some people who simply hit the floor already loaded with talent, but I’ve honestly never met one. There is no shortcut—the only way to do it is to slowly, doggedly flog yourself forward like an abused horse in a nineteenth century Russian novel.

Usually, speaking in the office of wise-guru-on-the-mountain (right), the “Published Writer” (a mantle I am not yet accustomed to wearing) will tell the “Aspiring (i.e., Unpublished) Writer” that the best thing to do is to write every day. That’s probably good advice, I think, and more or less in line with what I said above. But on the other hand, I once heard Richard Price say something really interesting in an interview, the effect of which was, don’t bother writing every day. What’s more important is finding the story that you want to tell. The story that only you can tell. And when you find that story, you’ll be amazed at how much better your writing is. I found that comforting, in a way. So, I don’t know how much of my “success” was built on top of a mountainous body of practice work—those three other novels I’d written, not to mention the many stories and other, unfinished work—or just that I happened to find the story that I really wanted to tell after all that. What’s probably true, though, is that adage, attributed to some writer whose name I can’t remember, that goes, “Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.”

(I just Googled that quote—turns out it was Pablo Picasso who said it. Okay, so it was a painter, not a writer, but whatever, same thing applies to writing.)

The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore
by Benjamin Hale

A stunning debut novel, told from the point of view of Bruno Littlemore, the world’s first chimpanzee to develop the power of speech, chronicling the extraordinary events that lead to his imprisonment for murdering a man.

Bruno Littlemore is quite unlike any chimpanzee in the world. Precocious, self-conscious and preternaturally gifted, young Bruno, born and raised in a habitat at the local zoo, falls under the care of a university primatologist named Lydia Littlemore. Learning of Bruno’s developing ability to speak, Lydia removes him from the laboratory into her home to oversee his education and nurture his passion for painting. But for all of his gifts, the chimpanzee has a rough time caging his more primal urges. Bruno’s untimely outbursts ultimately cost Lydia her job, and send the unlikely pair on the road in what proves to be one of the most unforgettable journeys — and most affecting love stories — in recent literature.

With THE EVOLUTION OF BRUNO LITTLEMORE, Benjamin Hale has written a relentlessly inventive coming of age story that is by turns comic, violent, heartbreaking, and perverse. Talking animals are as old as storytelling, but Bruno’s fictional memoir stands apart for its brilliant and affecting expression of what it feels like to be human. It is, in the end, a novel about finding one’s own voice, and insisting on it.

“Benjamin Hale is the most talented and intriguing young writer I’ve met in years. I love his prose, his dialogue, and his balls. Not his actual balls, of course, but the balls to write so ecstatically and with such mad conviction. When I first read the wonderfully comedic The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, I was so pleased to have come across a Writer. A writer with a capital W. Someone who clearly loves books and the power of the written word. It was like, “Ok, here’s a guy who’s going to be producing novels for years. This is the real deal.” It was like being a baseball scout in Oklahoma in the late 1940’s and seeing this young kid running around center-field, and you ask the guy next to you, “Who’s that?” And the guy says, “I don’t know, some kid named Mickey Mantle.” Well, that’s how I felt, in a literary way, when I read Benjamin Hale for the first time.”—Jonathan Ames, author of Wake Up, Sir! and The Extra Man

“The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore is an enormous, glorious rattlebag of a book. Benjamin Campbell Hale’s extremely loud debut has echoes of the acerbic musings of Humbert Humbert and the high-pitched shrieking of Oskar Matzerath. Hale’s narrator, Bruno Littlemore, is a loony, yelping, bouncing, pleading, longing, lost, loony, bleeding, pleading, laughing, beseeching wonder. The book is of such enormous originality and vitality; it is the book I feel I have been searching years for but have never yet found, until now.”—Edward Carey, author of Observatory Mansions and Alva & Irva

“Benjamin Hale is a writer of rare and exciting talent. We’ll be reading his books for years. Dive in.”—Anthony Swofford, author of Jarhead

For more information about Benjamin Hale and The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, visit Benjamin-Hale.com.

Thank you very much for giving this interview. How did you get into publishing?

I’m from Huntington Woods, MI, a small city outside of Detroit, and went to college at Syracuse University, where I studied musical theater. I always loved the creative process but by the end of college I knew I wasn’t cut out to make it as an actor. Two of my other passions have always been reading and writing so after I graduated I interned at an alternative newsweekly in Detroit, then got an internship at Marie Claire in New York. I was looking for a job in magazine publishing for months afterwards, which, like book publishing, is notoriously hard to break into. Nothing panned out. My cousin’s fiancee finally suggested book publishing. He knew someone who knew someone who was looking for an assistant, and I ended up interviewing with Nan Talese at Doubleday. Incidentally, I had just finished reading Nicole Krauss’ Man Walks Into a Room but I had read the Anchor paperback edition and didn’t realize Nan had published the hardcover. I talked about the book during my interview and it may have helped. I certainly didn’t have many other credentials! I started working for Nan the next week, and I’ve been with her imprint for five years.

What is your job like?

Starting off as an editorial assistant, it was pretty administrative: typing correspondence, tracking payment requests, putting in requests for contracts. And then also reading submissions and evaluating them for Nan. I’m an associate editor now, so my responsibilities have changed. I’m looking to acquire my own authors, and I’m editing manuscripts that Nan or previous editors have acquired. I’m also writing jacket copy, acting as a liaison with marketing and publicity, working one-on-one with authors. And I create and design our foreign rights guide and manage our online presence.

One of the first books I edited on my own came out in October 2009, Master of Shadows by Mark Lamster. It’s a biography of the painter Peter Paul Rubens that focused on his little-known career as a secret agent for Spain during the Eighty Years’ War. I worked with the author on a couple drafts, trying to make the material more accessible to readers who wouldn’t be familiar with 17th century politics (like me!). Then I shepherded the manuscript and page proofs through production, worked on the photo insert, the jacket copy, and solicited blurbs from authors. Our other departments (production, publicity, art, etc.) are instrumental in producing the book, but it’s the editor’s job to be the spokesperson for the author, to refine and convey his vision to the rest of the team.

So the author has a say in the details of production?

The author doesn’t have final approval on everything, but we try to keep them apprised and involved. Obviously some choices, like trim size, aren’t presented to them, but other things like layout and typeface are. We do go back to the drawing board if an author isn’t pleased.

The Nan A. Talese imprint emphasizes production values, so you’ll notice that our paper is a little heavier and our books have a rough front (sometimes called a deckle edge). I can’t speak for other publishers—I don’t know if their authors are as involved in the design choices, but it’s a priority for us.

Could you describe the process of helping an author shape their manuscript?

The first time I read through a manuscript I’m digesting it as a reader, though I may take a few notes. The second time I’m thinking as an editor, underlining issues I think should be addressed, doing line edits. Then I write up an editorial memo that addresses the work as a whole, including any structural issues. It’s important to put editorial comments in writing because it gives an author a reference point when they go back and revise. I think it’s easier to forget a comment that’s conveyed verbally. The questions and suggestions I come up with arise pretty naturally. Is there a strong enough transition between point A and point B? Is there tension, and how could the author create more? Are there digressions? Inconsistencies? I think as an editor you don’t always need to come up with the solution, but it is your job to point out the problem. Sometimes the solution isn’t on the page yet, and you just need to ask the right questions.

How involved does the editor/publisher get in the development of a second book if it’s already under contract but hasn’t been written yet?

Usually an author knows what they want to write about next, but an editor can help refine their idea. Sometimes an author just delves into the next project (of course, you have a general idea of what they’re writing about) and you won’t see anything until they send the full manuscript. Other authors have a more piecemeal approach. They’ll show you an outline first, or tell you about their research, or send portions as they work. We had an author recently who asked for comments on the first half of his manuscript before he started writing part two, which I think was useful. That’s only typical for nonfiction. Novelists work more independently.

How is the author involved in terms of marketing and publicity?

We try to work with authors closely throughout the whole process. We get their input on which niche periodicals might cover the book, whether they have any contacts in the author community who we can approach for blurbs. It’s the editor’s job to write the beseeching blurb letters asking for endorsements, but we also rely on the author’s connections. Right now I’m editing a comic debut memoir by Avi Steinberg called Running the Books, which is about the two years he worked as a prison librarian after graduating from Harvard. When Lindsay Lohan was sent to jail, he thought it would be fun to write a prison reading list for her time behind bars and suggested we pitch it to The Daily Beast. The byline links to his book on Amazon. That was very proactive. Another author, Jessica Kerwin Jenkins, has a book out in November called Encyclopedia of the Exquisite. She writes about fashion for Vogue and she’s been very successful in getting her media contacts interested in the book.

Is the author’s online presence something that would be important to have in place before their book is sold to the publisher?

I don’t think so. It’s more important in the months leading up to the on-sale date. Unless the book is very commercial—prescriptive nonfiction, say—and you’re selling it based on a platform that’s already established. Or if it’s based on a blog. Stuff White People Like, for example, probably wouldn’t be a book if it wasn’t already a successful blog.

How do you feel about agents being involved in the promotion of a book?

It’s great when they have ideas, and not so great when they just want to hear about the fruits of your labor. Sometimes we don’t have the budget to produce something like a book trailer. If an agent wants to spearhead that, great. Or if they want to help their author set up a Facebook page, great. With Facebook, an author is spreading information to a network of people that isn’t thinking to check Doubleday’s website every day. It’s an effective way to self-promote.

Will the wrong title ever sink a novel?

Many, many novels don’t succeed sales-wise and it’s probably impossible to point to just one culprit (though we sometimes try!). Aside from great writing, you need a great title, an eye-catching cover, ample media coverage, an author who self-promotes, and so on. These things are all dependent on one another so it can be difficult to pinpoint the rotten egg. But an aspiring author should be more concerned with the manuscript than with its title. Editors will often revise a title, anyway, since we’re more in tune with the market.

What do you look for in fiction?

Well, both as a reader and as an editor I like literary fiction, as opposed to genre. Then the first thing I look for is a strong voice. Is this an original voice? Is it passionate? Does it grab me? I really love voice-driven fiction, first-person narrative. Lolita and Confederacy of Dunces are very different books, but they’re good examples of this. I also like humor—that element really speaks to me. I also look for a kind of searchingness, where the author isn’t writing something that feels premeditated, but is examining something via the work. I read Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese this year, which I loved—it’s sumptuous and the characters are very dynamic. And A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, which is about impermanence and the passage of time and rock and roll. But fiction is subjective and people’s tastes vary. I think the general aim in fiction writing should be to make it believable and to make it interesting. I learned that in acting school. It sounds simple, but it’s not that easy.

Has your theater background been an asset for you as an editor?

Yes, definitely. Having a feel for dramatic structure is useful in editing fiction and nonfiction. And it’s helpful in understanding character. An actor and an editor need to ask the same questions: What is the character’s intention? What tactics is she using? What’s at stake? What happened to the character the moment before this scene began?

What characteristics should authors look for in an agent?

Someone who’s reputable, someone who has placed books with major publishers or who is working with someone who has. If it’s a young agent who doesn’t have a long list of clients, ambition and industry knowledge are important. If you have agents fighting over you—I don’t know how often that happens—but gut feeling is probably important.

Do you have any advice for writers of literary fiction about writing a hook for their novel? Are there services that do this?

It’s true that it’s very difficult to boil down a literary novel to just a few sentences and, as I said, the plot is less interesting to me than the voice. It’s difficult to convey in a pitch. I’ve never heard of any services that help you write a hook, but I think an author should have an awareness of what their work is about. Simple is better than showy. And naming comp titles is useful—books that appeal to your intended audience.

What else can authors do to make themselves more publishable?

For literary fiction, accolades help. Awards or published short stories. It shows a certain dedication to the craft—that this isn’t the first and only thing the author will ever write. Because hopefully, as an editor, you’ll continue to grow this author.

So it’s less about the size of the audience that the writer has reached through the various journals in which he or she has been published?

Yes. It’s less about “Zoetrope has a circulation of X” than that they endorsed the work. That makes me curious. There are lots of great journals, not just The New Yorker, that have high standards for fiction.

Do you think, with the corporatization of publishing houses, that books are trending to the formulaic?

It’s true that we’ve been forced into publishing conglomerates, but it’s still people who are working for the companies, and people have personal tastes. And the various imprints within the conglomerates have different tastes. There’s not a uniform aesthetic formula that every publisher is adhering to. That’s not to say that the public doesn’t shape the market at all. As an editor you are looking for things that you think will sell, but that doesn’t mean, especially as a literary publisher, that you have to reject something new or different. Some books become breakout successes because the author is doing something original. As a writer, I don’t think you can be too concerned with the market. It will only limit your creativity.

Do you think people are reading less literary fiction these days?

Probably. I’ve only worked in the industry for five years, but that’s the news. Sales are down. It’s hard to draw attention to literary fiction when a novel doesn’t have a “newsy” element. Review space has shrunk. There are a lot of books clamoring to be heard. And with less bookstores comes less browsing. Someone recently complained to me that there just aren’t any good, contemporary novels being written these days. That’s entirely untrue! There are lots of wonderful books being published, there just aren’t that many avenues for them to get attention.

I don’t read much commercial fiction—maybe not any!—so I’m not sure what draws so many readers to it. I think people like to be gratified quickly, and commercial fiction does that. The story is about an external journey and there’s a central question that needs to be answered in a satisfying way. That doesn’t always happen in literary fiction, which asks broader philosophical questions. Things aren’t as neat and tidy. When you want to unwind, do you pop in Requiem for a Dream? Or do you watch Dating in the Dark? If you’re looking for a diversion, then commercial fiction is going to fulfill that need. But literary fiction will always be around, just like serious cinema will be. Provided that people are literate.

Do you have any advice for writers who have the talent, but for whatever reason haven’t had success in securing representation or getting published?

Keep writing. I heard someone say that you should put your first novel in a drawer and try to sell the second one. I’m not sure that’s necessary, but if you’re devoted to the craft of writing and it brings you joy, continue doing it. If your goal is to be published, write until someone wants to publish you. It’s a very subjective field and there’s a lot of turnover, so the editor who may have loved your book yesterday might not be here tomorrow. But if you’re truly devoted to writing, don’t get discouraged. And that doesn’t mean that writing should be your only job. A few years ago we published a wonderful novel, The Stolen Child. The author worked for a federal agency when he wrote it and now he’s published a second novel, and I think he still works there. Writing doesn’t have to be the be-all end-all of your life. After all, you need something to write about.

Sometimes blogging is about I-told-you-so moments, and this is one of those for me. With the announcement on her show today that Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom is the new book club pick, “Oprah also denied what she called ‘rumors that this will be my last book club pick.’ She said: ‘I’ll continue to pick books all season long, and the book club will go with me to the Oprah Network.’” (Source: Publishers Weekly)

Moral of the story: don’t say the sky is falling every time you feel a drop of rain. (Or an acorn…)

To what end we apply the Internet medium is now Shirky’s main preoccupation—as it is for publishing—especially now that our leisure time is, as Shirky puts it, a “global resource.” With just 1% of the hours we spend watching TV, he notes, people created Wikipedia, a bank of collective and constantly updated and corrected knowledge.

While the entire interview is worth a look, this was my favorite observation from Mr. Shirky:

CS:The greatest thing going for the publishing industry is that they’ve seen what has happened to the music industry; they’ve seen it happen to the magazine people. They’re watching it happen to the movie people right now; they’ve seen it happen to the software people. They’ve seen Blockbusters close, they’ve seen Virgin Records close. They’ve seen GameStops close. And they’re saying—not us, because we have these [taps book].

CS: Some of it is anxiety. Some of it’s the brilliant Upton Sinclair observation: “It’s hard to make a man understand something if his livelihood depends on him not understanding it.” From the laying on of hands of [Italian printer] Aldus Manutius on down, publishing has always been this way. This is a medium where a change to glue-based paperback binding constituted a revolution. But the interesting clash for me isn’t between Apple, Amazon, and Macmillan. The interesting clash to me is between you and say, Sonny Mehta. I can only name two publishers—Sonny Mehta and my own. You’re both in the same industry, but from his point of view if he can just hold it together 10 more years, he’s fine. He can retire. But you know that if you stay in the book industry 30 more years, there’s no way that things will be anything like today. Sonny Mehta’s incentive is to postpone—even if it makes things worse—the moment of shock to right after he retires. But you don’t have that option. I’m interested in young writers and editors entering a system that is plainly structured around the vestiges of a world fast draining away.

You can read the full interview here.

Clay Shirky is the author of several books. I plan to start with the two most recent, published by The Penguin Press, one of the best around:

I’m going to check them out, and perhaps you’ll find them worthwhile as well. And now to the discussion. As always, I’m very interested in hearing what you think.

Jofie Ferrari-Adler, an editor at Grove/Atlantic and the man who brought readers the illuminating Agents & Editors series, contributed a fascinating new piece to the July/August 2010 issue of Poets & Writers. It focuses on the different ways an agent can advocate for a book in that crucial period between the contract signing and first publication, and it presents valuable perspective from a variety of sources on both sides of the book deal. Here is an excerpt:

This is where a good literary agent comes in. An agent who understands that at a time when there is an industry-wide blockbuster mentality that makes it harder than it’s ever been for editors to find the institutional support it takes to publish serious work well, it is more important than ever for agents to be fearless, savvy, and relentless advocates for their clients after their books are under contract. An agent who understands that the long and winding road to publication is fraught with trouble, and that her role has evolved into a symbiotic partnership with your editor. An agent who understands that in today’s publishing industry, your editor needs her constant presence and support—needling, brainstorming, cajoling, and sometimes even harassing. An agent who understands, in short, that your editor needs her help.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Jason Allen Ashlock, Founder of Movable Type Literary Group, approaches the same topic from an agent’s perspective, and makes an incredibly compelling argument in his piece for Digital Book World. Here is an excerpt:

…the [publishing] industry is badly in need of what an agent—freed from the previous paradigm’s constraints—can offer.

To make my point, I’ll risk overstatement: the agent—more than the publisher, even more than the author—is best suited to stand alongside the work through a variety of categories along the value chain, to ensure the work’s proper development and shape, and to shepherd its arrival into the communities ready to appreciate its virtues.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE

Let’s start the discussion by honing in on a key facet of the publishing process that has traditionally fallen in the publisher’s domain: marketing. Do you think it’s reasonable today for the agent to work in concert with the publisher to develop the marketing plan for a book?