Hello World,
This posting is a heartfelt thank you (Mahalo!) to the readers who have so generously purchased my latest ebook, CANNIBAL NIGHTS, Pacific Stories Volume II, a sequel to my first collection, HOUSE OF SKIN PRIZE-WINNING STORIES. Since so many of you are curious about the genesis of these stories, I hope to give you a little insight into how I researched and wrote them.
CANNIBAL NIGHTS is a darker collection than HOUSE OF SKIN. The stories range from Navy SEALS (and the women who love them) and Al Qaeda terrorists, to a father's adultery, to slave-ships roaming the Pacific in the 18th and 19th centuries, kidnapping and enslaving hundreds of thousands of natives. A story set in the Marquesas Islands deals with Paul Gauguin in his last days, riddled with syphilis and morphine addiction. In other stories, a modern-day Tahitian girl searches for her biological father, a French Foreign Legionnaire. An Australian Aborigine exacts payback from white men who gang-raped her. And a brother and sister struggle to find normalcy and even happiness, while burdened with life-long affects of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.
Do I create these tales from scratch? No. But I build, I construct one story out of maybe three or five that I have heard, or personally experienced. My cousins in Honolulu know several retired Navy SEALS. Sometimes we sit and listen, stunned, to the stories they tell of their combat experiences. I knew the parents of several college students killed in the Al Qaeda nightclub bombings in Bali in 2003. I tried to merge all these stories until 'ASSASSIN ORDERS PEKING DUCK' evolved, a tale that is tragic but somehow ends hopefully. The narrator is a young woman forever searching for her father who abandoned her. Readers have pointed out to me that this is a theme that runs through earlier stories. Even my novels. I was not aware of it during the writing. But in fact, I never knew my father well. After my Hawaiian mother died at a young age, my father left our islands. Growing up, I saw him only intermittently. Perhaps it is what we most long for that circumscribes our lives, and ultimately becomes the running subtext of our work.
For three months I lived in Tonga, setting of 'GEORGE BUSH AND PAPA AT THE PARADISE.' During that time one of the maids at the Paradise hotel discovered her father was having an affair with a tourist. It broke her heart and she spent months thinking of how she could make her father pay. (There really was a life-size portrait of George Bush in the lobby!) I left Tonga before the story resolved itself, so I orchestrated an ending. Tongans are such a warm and beautiful people, so deeply dedicated to their children, that I wanted to ennoble both the wife, and husband. I wanted them to have a happy ending. And I wanted the young girl to mature and learn to forgive, and come to understand the imperishability of love. That it can be tested and survive.
'MYSTERIES OF RAPA NUI' is based on the tragic history of Easter Island. The ecological devastation and the unspeakable tragedy of how their male population was nearly wiped out by slave-ships roaming the Pacific. I have visited Easter Island and heard stories of huge sacrifices the women made, attempting to hide their men from the notorious Blackbirder slave ships. This 18th and 19th century practise of kidnapping and slave-trading was rampant in the Pacific, coinciding with the slave-trade flourishing in the Atlantic, yet so little has been written about it.
'CANNIBAL NIGHTS, COLONIAL AFTERNOONS' is based on the last year of Gauguin's life in the Marquesas Islands after he had been deported out of Tahiti, a French colony, as a drug-addled rake and libertine. In that period he was in a morphine-induced stupor, yet he managed to paint some of the most magnificent portraits of his life. There has always been the question of who helped him complete the last canvases as he began to fail and death approached. I took 'authorial license' in portraying these last days and who might have helped him and even, in some instances, repainted his portraits completely. More importantly, I wanted to portray how in the colonialist period of that time - when the Church over-ran the islands and taxed the natives to near-starvation - a young clergyman befriends Gauguin, sees through his eyes the bigotry of the Church, and learns how Art, true Art, goes deeper than religion.
We come to 'THE FRENCH FOREIGN LEGIONNAIRE'S BATARD,' and again, it is a story comprised of several stories. During my many trips to Tahiti (culturally, they are very close cousins to Hawaiians) I met several 'fatherless' women born to mothers who had had affairs with French Foreign Legionnaire's during their military duty in Tahiti. Several women had actually lived in France and spent years trying to locate their Legionnaire fathers. I began to wonder what would happen if one of them found her father. How the drama would unfold. My biggest challenge was the ending of the story. I struggled to make the characters sympathetic, but was the ending plausible? Only, you, the reader can tell me. I am anxious to know from your responses if this story works. I hope so! For, during the writing, I fell in love with both characters. They are each damaged, and lonely, and searching.
' FLASHNESS,' set in Australia, is based on a story I heard while traveling there a few years back. It happened after the Columbine High School tragedy in the U.S. I knew the background of how Aborigines were massacred when England deposited boatloads of its convicts on their shores, and so the story automatically fell into place in my mind. It is a dark, harsh tale of payback, but I hope readers will also remember the suffering and wholesale slaughter of Australia's Aborigines by white convict-settlers, that continued for two hundred years
The last story, 'CELL FATIGUE, ' was very difficult to write. Like Native Americans, and many other under-represented minorities, Native Hawaiians have an extremely high percentage of alcoholism, and thus, their children suffer from Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. I have seen people struggling all their lives with this condition. The story was initially so dark and potentially hopeless, I revised it least 20-30 times. It began to depress and defeat me, and I put it aside for weeks. Then one day, epiphany! I began to see it as a love story between a brother and sister trying to save each other's life. Then it became instantly deeper, more meaningful to me. The characters slowly transcending from victims to survivors. I now saw them as heroes, and when I finally wrote the last page, I was overtaken with emotion. (Only when I completed this story did I realize it was also a kind of memorial to my dear brother, Braxton Rowan, a soldier and hero, who died too young. )
Looking over the entire body of CANNIBAL NIGHTS, I see that what I have written is a collection of love stories. Though dark, and often violent, they are tales of people searching for the love of a father, or brother, or the love of women sacrificing their lives for their husbands. There is the love of a clergyman for an artist, and the love of that artist for his Art. The love of an Aborigine for her tribe, and for her ancestor, cold-bloodedly murdered. Finally, the deep love of a brother and sister, trying to survive.
I hope these stories will speak to anyone who has suffered the confusion of being a mixed-blood, or to anyone, male or female, who has served in the military and suffered Post-Traumatic Stress. I hope they will speak to anyone who has ever lost a child, or betrayed or abandoned a child, or, conversely, anyone who has ever searched for a parent who abandoned them. Lastly, I hope they will remind you that our fate is not determined, that we each have choices. And that, after all, especially in these cataclysmic times, love is still the basic need that drives us, that renders us still-noble, still-supremely human.
Again, thank you, mahalo, for your support. I sincerely hope you enjoyed CANNIBAL NIGHTS, and I look forward to your questions and comments.
With aloha, Kiana
Monday, July 25, 2011
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BIRTH CONTROL. HELLO INFERTILITY.
Hello, World.
Remember that ad for Ultra-Slim cigarettes, targetted at women? "YOU'VE COME A LONG WAY, BABE!" Even then the tobacco industry knew cigarettes were killing us. But, hey. It was a multi, multi-billion $dollar business. And it was run by men. (Of course, cigarettes were killing men, too.)
Well, recently I came across a similar ad in an old Glamour magazine from the 1980s. Half of the photo showed a turn-of-century chrone with six kids hanging on her apron. The other half showed a girl driving a Porsche convertible, hair flying in the wind. Caption? "CELEBRATE YOUR FREEDOM!" It was an ad for Birth Control pills. Those little miracles that wiped out centuries of female oppression, allowed women sexual freedom, and a way to finally chart their own reproductive kismet. The Pill, which celebrated its 50th birthday in October, created the most radical change in human history. It was of course manufactured by colossal, multi-billion $dollar drug companies, an industry run by men.
Enter a new era, "The Age of Infertility." An age of bestselling books entitled EVERYTHING CONCEIVABLE. TAKING CHARGE OF YOUR FERTILITY. A world of Fertility Centers, ovulation kits, infertility shots, and bioethecists telling women they should have planned ahead. A new kind of medical and bureaucratic Hell of doctor's waiting rooms and insurance companies that are lasar leaps away from the Liberation we thought we had achieve with the Pill.
Hello? Did I miss a segue? Yes, I'm afraid millions of women did. Now younger women in their 30s who've been on the Pill for 10 or 15 years, refer to the pills as 'Death Pods.' Because those 10 or 15 years were their prime child-bearing years. Now that they want to have children their bodies are in REPRODUCTIVE BACKLASH. Inadvertently, infertility has become the Pill's primary side effect.
Why does this suprise us? Because in our eagerness to be stand-alone human beings, empowered with our reproductive rights, women forgot basic biology: fertility is an offering of Youth. The body we woke up with after 10 or 20 years on the Pill is, putting it mildly, not the one we started out with. Body rhythms change, so do organs, and cells. Our stockpile of eggs becomes depleted, what's left is not exactly prime quality.
(Let me say that I was one of the lucky ones. The Catholic Church forbade the Pill, so I got pregnant instead. Only after my child was born, and I rebelled and left the Church, did I go on the Pill. So in some wacky, Byzantine way, the Church may have saved me from being childless.)
Now, granted, the Pill did not directly create the field of infertility medicine, but it has turned it into a gigantic multi multi-billion $dollar industry. Run by men. (Sound familiar?) Childless couples and single women are now depleting their savings accounts investing in in-vitro fertilization, or test-tube babies, which has been the last word in infertility treatment since the late 70s. But only now has the attempt at IVF become almost epidemic, a last ditch-try at biological parenthood. Success rates are dismally low if you're over forty. Mid-forties only a 12% success rate. Over forty-five the odds, less than 2%.
And with IVF we have the risk of birth defects especially with women over forty. Worse, insurance companies will not cover costs, which range from $12,000-15,000 per cycle. When IVF fails, there is grief and mourning, and women berating themselves for their lack of foresight. And only now, after the fact, are doctors telling women, "Oh! You should have frozen your eggs in your twenties." In fact, young women in their teens and twenties ARE now freezing their eggs for future fertilization. But for the infertile over-30s and 40s and evern 50s that information comes too late.
(Yes, there is always adoption, which I wholeheartedly endorse. But we are talking about the Pill and infertility here.) What I want is someone to tell me that the geniuses behind the research and develop-ment and marketing of the Pill, DID NOT KNOW, or anticipate, a future of infertile women. I want someone to tell me that women were not used as guinea pigs. And that even now, they are once again being used as guinea pigs in this latest tango with infertility shots, and infertility pills, and the whole new cornucopia of medicalized technology promising to produce viable fetuses, but not guaranteeing children born without defects.
I want someone to tell me, fifty years after the advent of the Pill, why even Margaret Sanger's grandson publicly demands to know "WHERE IS THE BIRTH CONTROL PILL FOR MEN?" It would be so easy. But, again, the drug companies, those Goliaths profitting so magnficiently from women, ARE RUN BY MEN. When confronted by legions of women demanding the Male Pill, drug company spokesmen turn coquettish and shy. The cost of clinical trials ' would be astoundingly high.' 'The impact of upending cultural norms would be global, and would reverberate for generations.' They have not yet found a male pill with 'zero side effects.' After fifty years? Oh, ladies, lets face it. The real rock-bottom truth is the same as it was in the Bible. Men don't want their reproductive organs fooled around with.
Yes, the Pill saved our lives. I embraced it. I embrace it now. Yes, it brought women's rights out of the Dark Ages. The right to serial sex partners, equal pay, the right to run for President of the United States. But, look. Our bodies are still under the control of the Goliaths - the drug companies. Who, by the way, long ago perfected the Male Birth Control Pill. They just won't release it. Think of the billions and billions of $dollars LOST if, finally, the Goliaths allow women to have drug-free bodies. If, finally, they give us back the right to our reproductive selves. The Pill took a certain biological control away from us, and that control was Empowerment.
Release the Pill for men. Freeze their young, unadulterated sperm, and then let them deal with potential sterility for a few decades. IT'S THEIR TURN.
Last month we watched a movie about a Pill-taking career-wife who has been rendered infertile. Her husband divorces her for a younger woman who can give him children. She drives herself off a cliff. A few nights ago we watched an old Turner Classic from the 50s, THE BEST OF EVERYTHING. An unmarried woman becomes pregnant and, out of shame, suicides with sleeping pills. Oddly, the theme song of both movies was something sentimental called, "Its a Woman's World..."
Oh, really?
Remember that ad for Ultra-Slim cigarettes, targetted at women? "YOU'VE COME A LONG WAY, BABE!" Even then the tobacco industry knew cigarettes were killing us. But, hey. It was a multi, multi-billion $dollar business. And it was run by men. (Of course, cigarettes were killing men, too.)
Well, recently I came across a similar ad in an old Glamour magazine from the 1980s. Half of the photo showed a turn-of-century chrone with six kids hanging on her apron. The other half showed a girl driving a Porsche convertible, hair flying in the wind. Caption? "CELEBRATE YOUR FREEDOM!" It was an ad for Birth Control pills. Those little miracles that wiped out centuries of female oppression, allowed women sexual freedom, and a way to finally chart their own reproductive kismet. The Pill, which celebrated its 50th birthday in October, created the most radical change in human history. It was of course manufactured by colossal, multi-billion $dollar drug companies, an industry run by men.
Enter a new era, "The Age of Infertility." An age of bestselling books entitled EVERYTHING CONCEIVABLE. TAKING CHARGE OF YOUR FERTILITY. A world of Fertility Centers, ovulation kits, infertility shots, and bioethecists telling women they should have planned ahead. A new kind of medical and bureaucratic Hell of doctor's waiting rooms and insurance companies that are lasar leaps away from the Liberation we thought we had achieve with the Pill.
Hello? Did I miss a segue? Yes, I'm afraid millions of women did. Now younger women in their 30s who've been on the Pill for 10 or 15 years, refer to the pills as 'Death Pods.' Because those 10 or 15 years were their prime child-bearing years. Now that they want to have children their bodies are in REPRODUCTIVE BACKLASH. Inadvertently, infertility has become the Pill's primary side effect.
Why does this suprise us? Because in our eagerness to be stand-alone human beings, empowered with our reproductive rights, women forgot basic biology: fertility is an offering of Youth. The body we woke up with after 10 or 20 years on the Pill is, putting it mildly, not the one we started out with. Body rhythms change, so do organs, and cells. Our stockpile of eggs becomes depleted, what's left is not exactly prime quality.
(Let me say that I was one of the lucky ones. The Catholic Church forbade the Pill, so I got pregnant instead. Only after my child was born, and I rebelled and left the Church, did I go on the Pill. So in some wacky, Byzantine way, the Church may have saved me from being childless.)
Now, granted, the Pill did not directly create the field of infertility medicine, but it has turned it into a gigantic multi multi-billion $dollar industry. Run by men. (Sound familiar?) Childless couples and single women are now depleting their savings accounts investing in in-vitro fertilization, or test-tube babies, which has been the last word in infertility treatment since the late 70s. But only now has the attempt at IVF become almost epidemic, a last ditch-try at biological parenthood. Success rates are dismally low if you're over forty. Mid-forties only a 12% success rate. Over forty-five the odds, less than 2%.
And with IVF we have the risk of birth defects especially with women over forty. Worse, insurance companies will not cover costs, which range from $12,000-15,000 per cycle. When IVF fails, there is grief and mourning, and women berating themselves for their lack of foresight. And only now, after the fact, are doctors telling women, "Oh! You should have frozen your eggs in your twenties." In fact, young women in their teens and twenties ARE now freezing their eggs for future fertilization. But for the infertile over-30s and 40s and evern 50s that information comes too late.
(Yes, there is always adoption, which I wholeheartedly endorse. But we are talking about the Pill and infertility here.) What I want is someone to tell me that the geniuses behind the research and develop-ment and marketing of the Pill, DID NOT KNOW, or anticipate, a future of infertile women. I want someone to tell me that women were not used as guinea pigs. And that even now, they are once again being used as guinea pigs in this latest tango with infertility shots, and infertility pills, and the whole new cornucopia of medicalized technology promising to produce viable fetuses, but not guaranteeing children born without defects.
I want someone to tell me, fifty years after the advent of the Pill, why even Margaret Sanger's grandson publicly demands to know "WHERE IS THE BIRTH CONTROL PILL FOR MEN?" It would be so easy. But, again, the drug companies, those Goliaths profitting so magnficiently from women, ARE RUN BY MEN. When confronted by legions of women demanding the Male Pill, drug company spokesmen turn coquettish and shy. The cost of clinical trials ' would be astoundingly high.' 'The impact of upending cultural norms would be global, and would reverberate for generations.' They have not yet found a male pill with 'zero side effects.' After fifty years? Oh, ladies, lets face it. The real rock-bottom truth is the same as it was in the Bible. Men don't want their reproductive organs fooled around with.
Yes, the Pill saved our lives. I embraced it. I embrace it now. Yes, it brought women's rights out of the Dark Ages. The right to serial sex partners, equal pay, the right to run for President of the United States. But, look. Our bodies are still under the control of the Goliaths - the drug companies. Who, by the way, long ago perfected the Male Birth Control Pill. They just won't release it. Think of the billions and billions of $dollars LOST if, finally, the Goliaths allow women to have drug-free bodies. If, finally, they give us back the right to our reproductive selves. The Pill took a certain biological control away from us, and that control was Empowerment.
Release the Pill for men. Freeze their young, unadulterated sperm, and then let them deal with potential sterility for a few decades. IT'S THEIR TURN.
Last month we watched a movie about a Pill-taking career-wife who has been rendered infertile. Her husband divorces her for a younger woman who can give him children. She drives herself off a cliff. A few nights ago we watched an old Turner Classic from the 50s, THE BEST OF EVERYTHING. An unmarried woman becomes pregnant and, out of shame, suicides with sleeping pills. Oddly, the theme song of both movies was something sentimental called, "Its a Woman's World..."
Oh, really?
Saturday, July 2, 2011
PRINT-OR-EBOOK: WORKING BOTH SIDES OF THE STREET
Hello World.
Today I need to address an important question that writing-students keep asking me. They have completed their manuscripts after dozens of revisions and my modest input. But now they are reluctant to approach agents, hesitant to move forward and submit their books to print publishers. Why? Because the world of print-publishing is foundering. many publishing houses have folded. Bookstores are closing left and right. Why should writers bother with submissions?
Now world-class writers like J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter) are going independent, self-publishing their books electronically. Rowling recently made global headlines with this news. She will not have to share royalties with a publisher on her ebooks. She is her own corporation now. She might be a billionaire, if not she's close. But her basic motivation in launching into ebooks is not necessarily MORE ACQUIRED WEALTH. "I want to reach young readers who have never read a book in print, who were born in the digital age. All they know are ereaders, so that is how my Harry Potter books will reach them." Simple, logical. She's planning ahead for the looming generation.
Then there are brilliant, literary writers like John Edgar Wideman whose books I love, his novels are set primarily in Philadelphia and deal with the tragedies, high drama, sacrifice and stateliness of working-class African-American families. Wideman recently became a 'cross-over' author, still writing his brilliant novels for print publishers, but also uploading his first collection of short stories as an independent ebook. He will undoubtedly produce more ebooks.
In an interview with Publishers Weekly, Wideman talked about the frustration of waiting a year, even two years, for his books to be published by established print publishers. He talked about the sense of empowerment of choosing one's own cover, one's own font, of the thrill of having one's work published and offered to reader's within a month of completing the work. I, too, am now a cross-over author, or as some of my colleagues say, 'a defector.' With three novels print-published, I am now also an indie ebook author of a short-story collection (HOUSE OF SKIN, PRIZEWINNING STORIES) and another on the way.
I do have another print novel coming out next year, THE CHINESE SOLDIER'S DAUGHTER, but after that, who knows? I may be dropped by the publisher as a 'defecting author,' another 'rat deserting the ship.' Unlike Rowling and Wideman, my motivation to turn to indie ebooks was pure economics. I am trying to save my own life. Books are my only source of income, prices of my novels are set too high by the publishers. With the recession, sales of those books have dropped considerably. My ebook is currently outselling all of them.
But when writing-students ask if they should cut to the chase, forego the rounds of expected rejections in the print world, and go straight to the independent-ebook route...MY ANSWER IS NO. Writers like Wideman and, to a more modest degree, myself, already have a reader-following from our print novels. In other words, a 'fan base.' Its a snap of the fingers to upload your book onto Kindle, Nook, and other ebook platforms. But it is a tedious, energy-sapping, confidence-draining task to go online for hours everyday to promote your ebooks, to attract readers, to beg them to buy copies.
Not all ebook writers are successful, some sales are dismally low. These authors have not edited sufficiently, their writing is sophomoric at best. Many of their facts and locations are wrong, lack of research, their book-covers are amateur and dismal. Or, more often, they simply don't yet have a reader-following. This is where established print publishers have the advantage. In the best of all worlds, they buy your book, they edit the manuscript professionally, they check your facts, and discuss cover-concepts with art departments. They decide how to market you. They make you an author, a bona fide pro!
BUT...Here is the downside: They take a huge percentage of the profits from your book sales. For every $15 trade paperback sold, the author earns only 8 or 10 percent. On your ebooks, print publishers will try to take more than 75% of each book. Think of that. Plus, fewer and fewer books are being bought by print-publishers. They want big names, guaranteed bestsellers. They don't have time to take risks on first-time authors because the print-world ...again...is foundering, figures from FORTUNE AND FORBES suggest it is dying. We are definitely in an evolution, and ultimately the digital world will prevail. Ebooks are already far outselling printed books. The world of books will never die. Intelli-gent humans must always and forever feed our imaginations! But the book-world as we knew it 10 even 5 years ago is evolving into something new. We have yet to know what that 'new' will ultimately be.
Back to my writing-students. Should they (And maybe you, a first-time author?) forego the usual print-route, and proceed directly to electronically publishing your book yourself? Again I SAY NO... that is...NOT YET. It has always been my belief that in this brief flicker of time we are each allotted...we should dare everything. At least once. If you jump into self-publishing your books, you will never know the thrill of submitting your work to print publishers. Of maybe having conversations with editors, of hearing suggestions from them. Of knowing that euphoric sense of feeling drunk with Hope. Nor will you experience the massive deflation of a rejection letter, and the grief and despondency of a 12th and 20th rejection letter. Or the final heart-stabbing realization that no one wants to publish your book.
Conversely, if you go directly to self-publishing you will never know if your book MIGHT HAVE BEEN BOUGHT and published. Might have gotten good reviews. Might have sold a decent amount and even earned you a second book-contract! You will simply never know. In advising you this way, I'm going diametrically against the sage advice of the Grand Guru of bloggers, Joe Konrath, whose blogsite THE NEWBIES GUIDE TO PUBLISHING, was voted one of the best 100 blogsites in the country by NEWSWEEK. (I urge you all to read all of his blogsite from beginning to end...it took me several days to complete it. I don't agree with all of his theories, but the man's instructions on self-publishing saved my life.)
Now, Konrath believes print publishing is in a MAJOR DEATH SPIRAL, that no sane writer should think of approaching print publishers today, that we all should be self-publishing and uploading our books for ereaders and keeping, not sharing, our profits from book sales. He's 95% right. But I keep thinking of my writing-students, the hope and joy and probable grief that they will miss out on by not giving print publishing a try. We're writers, we've should experience all emotions, hope, fear, dejection, rejection, all-out grief. We should take chances. If you choose to go directly to self-publishing you may always wonder "should I have tried the other first...?" "What if...what if...?' You will have deprived yourself of the gift of that experience.
So again here is my recommendation to my writing-students and any first-time authors. If you're undecided, and still leaning toward print-publishing, give yourself the opportunity to submit your work to print publishers. But also...GIVE YOURSELF A TIME-LIMIT!! Give it six months, a year. If you have not sold your book by then, I would definitely switch tracks and go to indie ebook publishing. Digital is the new norm. And the competition is growing. Hundreds of thousands of out-of- print books are now being revitalized through ebook publishing. Estate/trust heirs of famous dead authors will soon be rich.
Okay. So, you don't have a reader-following yet. Well, neither did John Locke. No one had ever heard of him. He's a mystery writer who cleverly prices each of his dozens of ebooks at .99. Locke has just become the first indie author to sell ONE MILLION books as ebooks. He has been at it less than a year. Joe Konrath, the myster/thriller writer will sell about 500,000 ebooks this year. These are the uber-sellers. Yes, they're the exception. But there are dozens of first-and second-time ebook authors, many women, who are writing genre books, sci-fi, vampire, thrillers, romance, who are selling several thousand copies of their books each month. Each book ads to their fan-base.
And don't forget Amanda Hocking, a twenty-something author who just reversed gears. After self-publishing for several years (MY BLOOD APPROVES) and gathering a huge following of readers, she recently sold her next couple of books to St. Martins Press for several million dollars. You see where this cross-over thing is going. Authors who couldn't originally get print-published, self-published their ebooks, and when those books become bestsellers, the print-publishers come courting! Its not an ethical pickle, its that right now there are no hard and fast rules. There is only which decision you make.
The important thing is to...GET STARTED NOW. Set up your time-limit if your going the print-route.
One year of your life won't kill you. While your sending out queries to agents and/or publishers and waiting, waiting, waiting, you will NOT be wasting time. You will be working on your next novel. Or, you will be learning all about self-publishing ebooks, knowing if you go that route, whatever profits you earn will be yours. All yours!
Thanks. Anyone with suggestions or opinions on this subject, please chime in!
*****
Another thing I want to touch on here is: AUTHOR BABBLE. Too many beginning writers and established writers and in-betweens forget that once we begin writing for an audience, which is what we all aspire to...we become public figures. Whether you're a bestseller, or your audience so far only extends to your immediate family, you are inviting public scrutiny.
A twenty-five old in unitards and combat boots, raking in major bucks from her bestselling Zombie series, a suburban mom who pens bodice-rippers, or a Nobel Laureate all have this in common: they are being scrutinized. And in this age of instant media-access, our voiced opinions and behavior seriously affect how readers read us. Or, if they will read us at all.
One night in a dreamy, highbrow mood, I misperceived the exclusivity of a limited audience on a late-night talk show. The host and I were relaxed, wandering from the 'meaning of literature' to silly, existential things - like how can authors make a living without turning commercial and selling out their souls? Somehow we drifted into loneliness, and how dogs make the best companions for writers. A man was in the news that day for having beaten his dog, then set it on fire. I, a dog-lover, said the man should be taken out and shot in the head. I volunteered to do it. Shoot him in the head. That late-night interview went viral. Months later at a book festival, a woman walked up to me and said, "Oh, you're the writer who wanted to shoot someone in the head. Joking or not, I found that offensive." She did not buy a copy of my book.
The scrutiny grows exponentially with every book your write. Every appearance you make. A close friend Anna, appears at dozens of booksignings every year, and dozens of writer's conferences. She's obsessively driven to promote her books and refers to herself as a 'book-whore' even in interviews. Anna has published five novels, one a bestseller. In a review of that bestselling novel, the reviewer (of a major suburban newspaper ) referred to her as a self-described 'book-whore. ' That word still follows her across the Web.
Writing is solitary, sometimes excruciatingly boring. At times we yearn to be cutting-edge comics, or political hipsters, or big-mouth do-gooders, and we forget. We forget the perils of verbal dilettantism, or verbal abuse, or publicly outting our biases and hatreds. And it comes back to haunt us. Readers are loyal, or frivolous, but they will always react. What I'm suggesting is, however little, or however much, you think of yourself as an author, there is now a part of you that should live up to those readers' expectations.
Writing is a lofty endeavor, even if its about inter-galactic infanticidal maniacs. People assume, like idiot savants, we're touched by the hand of god. So. Divorce your spouse, elect to have trans-gender surgery, become a born-again Mormon polygamist - whatever your particular quirk or deviation, try to articulate/execute it with a touch of class, that is, with restraint, and preferably in private. No matter how successful a writer becomes, we are not exempt from the higher civilities of accepted human behavior.
I know what you're thinking. Writers are supposed to be renegades, anarchists, blowing up the barriers of societal norms. Telling the high-priests to f-ck off. How to be that and still be palatable, and inoffensive? How to link our tiny selves to our giant narratives, so that our private grievances and struggles seem universal? Its difficult, we're complex. Complexity seems to be the ultimate ingredient in art. Complexity and ambiguity, what Keats - that poet of cognitive dissonance - called 'negative capability.'
Here is a prime example of what I'm trying to say: Patricia Highsmith, that elusive mystery writer of the 1950s was almost forgotten for several decades. But with the endorsement of Graham Greene and other such luminaries, her novels were resurrected, so there has been a frenzy of posthumous adulation since the late l980s. Even movies have been remade of her novels, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, more recently in the 1990s THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY (Jude Law, Matt Damon). Her literary forte was how she wrote about cold-blooded humans, stylish murderers who got away with it.
I have found her writing rather bloodless, nevertheless fascinating. Not a writer you could love, but one you might respect. But recently as I was finishing THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY, I discovered that in later life, Highsmith repeatedly and publicly proclaimed herself rabidly anti-black, anti-semitic, an outspoken hater of gays. (This from a woman who came out as a lesbian in the 'silent 50s.') Such blatant racist hatred does not pop out of one's forehead overnight. It had been seeding all those years of her writing. After I read that profile on her, and similar others, I flipped back through STRANGERS ON A TRAIN and THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY. I reread sentences and dialogue, and saw more clearly the repugnance of the subtext. The reverberating lack of humanity in her characters. The lack of regret or grief, or heart.
Now I understand that Patricia Highsmith will not endure as other than a dated, genre writer. She does not address or explore the depths of our human emotions. She did not feel them. As an author, and a human being she is/was predictably repulsive. She wrote about nineteen novels after the two above. Two is enough. She has lost me as a reader. I think of Highsmith now with great distaste. A mediocre writer who went in and out of vogue, and ultimately should have kept her mouth shut.
Thanks. Comments? Chime in.
Today I need to address an important question that writing-students keep asking me. They have completed their manuscripts after dozens of revisions and my modest input. But now they are reluctant to approach agents, hesitant to move forward and submit their books to print publishers. Why? Because the world of print-publishing is foundering. many publishing houses have folded. Bookstores are closing left and right. Why should writers bother with submissions?
Now world-class writers like J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter) are going independent, self-publishing their books electronically. Rowling recently made global headlines with this news. She will not have to share royalties with a publisher on her ebooks. She is her own corporation now. She might be a billionaire, if not she's close. But her basic motivation in launching into ebooks is not necessarily MORE ACQUIRED WEALTH. "I want to reach young readers who have never read a book in print, who were born in the digital age. All they know are ereaders, so that is how my Harry Potter books will reach them." Simple, logical. She's planning ahead for the looming generation.
Then there are brilliant, literary writers like John Edgar Wideman whose books I love, his novels are set primarily in Philadelphia and deal with the tragedies, high drama, sacrifice and stateliness of working-class African-American families. Wideman recently became a 'cross-over' author, still writing his brilliant novels for print publishers, but also uploading his first collection of short stories as an independent ebook. He will undoubtedly produce more ebooks.
In an interview with Publishers Weekly, Wideman talked about the frustration of waiting a year, even two years, for his books to be published by established print publishers. He talked about the sense of empowerment of choosing one's own cover, one's own font, of the thrill of having one's work published and offered to reader's within a month of completing the work. I, too, am now a cross-over author, or as some of my colleagues say, 'a defector.' With three novels print-published, I am now also an indie ebook author of a short-story collection (HOUSE OF SKIN, PRIZEWINNING STORIES) and another on the way.
I do have another print novel coming out next year, THE CHINESE SOLDIER'S DAUGHTER, but after that, who knows? I may be dropped by the publisher as a 'defecting author,' another 'rat deserting the ship.' Unlike Rowling and Wideman, my motivation to turn to indie ebooks was pure economics. I am trying to save my own life. Books are my only source of income, prices of my novels are set too high by the publishers. With the recession, sales of those books have dropped considerably. My ebook is currently outselling all of them.
But when writing-students ask if they should cut to the chase, forego the rounds of expected rejections in the print world, and go straight to the independent-ebook route...MY ANSWER IS NO. Writers like Wideman and, to a more modest degree, myself, already have a reader-following from our print novels. In other words, a 'fan base.' Its a snap of the fingers to upload your book onto Kindle, Nook, and other ebook platforms. But it is a tedious, energy-sapping, confidence-draining task to go online for hours everyday to promote your ebooks, to attract readers, to beg them to buy copies.
Not all ebook writers are successful, some sales are dismally low. These authors have not edited sufficiently, their writing is sophomoric at best. Many of their facts and locations are wrong, lack of research, their book-covers are amateur and dismal. Or, more often, they simply don't yet have a reader-following. This is where established print publishers have the advantage. In the best of all worlds, they buy your book, they edit the manuscript professionally, they check your facts, and discuss cover-concepts with art departments. They decide how to market you. They make you an author, a bona fide pro!
BUT...Here is the downside: They take a huge percentage of the profits from your book sales. For every $15 trade paperback sold, the author earns only 8 or 10 percent. On your ebooks, print publishers will try to take more than 75% of each book. Think of that. Plus, fewer and fewer books are being bought by print-publishers. They want big names, guaranteed bestsellers. They don't have time to take risks on first-time authors because the print-world ...again...is foundering, figures from FORTUNE AND FORBES suggest it is dying. We are definitely in an evolution, and ultimately the digital world will prevail. Ebooks are already far outselling printed books. The world of books will never die. Intelli-gent humans must always and forever feed our imaginations! But the book-world as we knew it 10 even 5 years ago is evolving into something new. We have yet to know what that 'new' will ultimately be.
Back to my writing-students. Should they (And maybe you, a first-time author?) forego the usual print-route, and proceed directly to electronically publishing your book yourself? Again I SAY NO... that is...NOT YET. It has always been my belief that in this brief flicker of time we are each allotted...we should dare everything. At least once. If you jump into self-publishing your books, you will never know the thrill of submitting your work to print publishers. Of maybe having conversations with editors, of hearing suggestions from them. Of knowing that euphoric sense of feeling drunk with Hope. Nor will you experience the massive deflation of a rejection letter, and the grief and despondency of a 12th and 20th rejection letter. Or the final heart-stabbing realization that no one wants to publish your book.
Conversely, if you go directly to self-publishing you will never know if your book MIGHT HAVE BEEN BOUGHT and published. Might have gotten good reviews. Might have sold a decent amount and even earned you a second book-contract! You will simply never know. In advising you this way, I'm going diametrically against the sage advice of the Grand Guru of bloggers, Joe Konrath, whose blogsite THE NEWBIES GUIDE TO PUBLISHING, was voted one of the best 100 blogsites in the country by NEWSWEEK. (I urge you all to read all of his blogsite from beginning to end...it took me several days to complete it. I don't agree with all of his theories, but the man's instructions on self-publishing saved my life.)
Now, Konrath believes print publishing is in a MAJOR DEATH SPIRAL, that no sane writer should think of approaching print publishers today, that we all should be self-publishing and uploading our books for ereaders and keeping, not sharing, our profits from book sales. He's 95% right. But I keep thinking of my writing-students, the hope and joy and probable grief that they will miss out on by not giving print publishing a try. We're writers, we've should experience all emotions, hope, fear, dejection, rejection, all-out grief. We should take chances. If you choose to go directly to self-publishing you may always wonder "should I have tried the other first...?" "What if...what if...?' You will have deprived yourself of the gift of that experience.
So again here is my recommendation to my writing-students and any first-time authors. If you're undecided, and still leaning toward print-publishing, give yourself the opportunity to submit your work to print publishers. But also...GIVE YOURSELF A TIME-LIMIT!! Give it six months, a year. If you have not sold your book by then, I would definitely switch tracks and go to indie ebook publishing. Digital is the new norm. And the competition is growing. Hundreds of thousands of out-of- print books are now being revitalized through ebook publishing. Estate/trust heirs of famous dead authors will soon be rich.
Okay. So, you don't have a reader-following yet. Well, neither did John Locke. No one had ever heard of him. He's a mystery writer who cleverly prices each of his dozens of ebooks at .99. Locke has just become the first indie author to sell ONE MILLION books as ebooks. He has been at it less than a year. Joe Konrath, the myster/thriller writer will sell about 500,000 ebooks this year. These are the uber-sellers. Yes, they're the exception. But there are dozens of first-and second-time ebook authors, many women, who are writing genre books, sci-fi, vampire, thrillers, romance, who are selling several thousand copies of their books each month. Each book ads to their fan-base.
And don't forget Amanda Hocking, a twenty-something author who just reversed gears. After self-publishing for several years (MY BLOOD APPROVES) and gathering a huge following of readers, she recently sold her next couple of books to St. Martins Press for several million dollars. You see where this cross-over thing is going. Authors who couldn't originally get print-published, self-published their ebooks, and when those books become bestsellers, the print-publishers come courting! Its not an ethical pickle, its that right now there are no hard and fast rules. There is only which decision you make.
The important thing is to...GET STARTED NOW. Set up your time-limit if your going the print-route.
One year of your life won't kill you. While your sending out queries to agents and/or publishers and waiting, waiting, waiting, you will NOT be wasting time. You will be working on your next novel. Or, you will be learning all about self-publishing ebooks, knowing if you go that route, whatever profits you earn will be yours. All yours!
Thanks. Anyone with suggestions or opinions on this subject, please chime in!
*****
Another thing I want to touch on here is: AUTHOR BABBLE. Too many beginning writers and established writers and in-betweens forget that once we begin writing for an audience, which is what we all aspire to...we become public figures. Whether you're a bestseller, or your audience so far only extends to your immediate family, you are inviting public scrutiny.
A twenty-five old in unitards and combat boots, raking in major bucks from her bestselling Zombie series, a suburban mom who pens bodice-rippers, or a Nobel Laureate all have this in common: they are being scrutinized. And in this age of instant media-access, our voiced opinions and behavior seriously affect how readers read us. Or, if they will read us at all.
One night in a dreamy, highbrow mood, I misperceived the exclusivity of a limited audience on a late-night talk show. The host and I were relaxed, wandering from the 'meaning of literature' to silly, existential things - like how can authors make a living without turning commercial and selling out their souls? Somehow we drifted into loneliness, and how dogs make the best companions for writers. A man was in the news that day for having beaten his dog, then set it on fire. I, a dog-lover, said the man should be taken out and shot in the head. I volunteered to do it. Shoot him in the head. That late-night interview went viral. Months later at a book festival, a woman walked up to me and said, "Oh, you're the writer who wanted to shoot someone in the head. Joking or not, I found that offensive." She did not buy a copy of my book.
The scrutiny grows exponentially with every book your write. Every appearance you make. A close friend Anna, appears at dozens of booksignings every year, and dozens of writer's conferences. She's obsessively driven to promote her books and refers to herself as a 'book-whore' even in interviews. Anna has published five novels, one a bestseller. In a review of that bestselling novel, the reviewer (of a major suburban newspaper ) referred to her as a self-described 'book-whore. ' That word still follows her across the Web.
Writing is solitary, sometimes excruciatingly boring. At times we yearn to be cutting-edge comics, or political hipsters, or big-mouth do-gooders, and we forget. We forget the perils of verbal dilettantism, or verbal abuse, or publicly outting our biases and hatreds. And it comes back to haunt us. Readers are loyal, or frivolous, but they will always react. What I'm suggesting is, however little, or however much, you think of yourself as an author, there is now a part of you that should live up to those readers' expectations.
Writing is a lofty endeavor, even if its about inter-galactic infanticidal maniacs. People assume, like idiot savants, we're touched by the hand of god. So. Divorce your spouse, elect to have trans-gender surgery, become a born-again Mormon polygamist - whatever your particular quirk or deviation, try to articulate/execute it with a touch of class, that is, with restraint, and preferably in private. No matter how successful a writer becomes, we are not exempt from the higher civilities of accepted human behavior.
I know what you're thinking. Writers are supposed to be renegades, anarchists, blowing up the barriers of societal norms. Telling the high-priests to f-ck off. How to be that and still be palatable, and inoffensive? How to link our tiny selves to our giant narratives, so that our private grievances and struggles seem universal? Its difficult, we're complex. Complexity seems to be the ultimate ingredient in art. Complexity and ambiguity, what Keats - that poet of cognitive dissonance - called 'negative capability.'
Here is a prime example of what I'm trying to say: Patricia Highsmith, that elusive mystery writer of the 1950s was almost forgotten for several decades. But with the endorsement of Graham Greene and other such luminaries, her novels were resurrected, so there has been a frenzy of posthumous adulation since the late l980s. Even movies have been remade of her novels, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, more recently in the 1990s THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY (Jude Law, Matt Damon). Her literary forte was how she wrote about cold-blooded humans, stylish murderers who got away with it.
I have found her writing rather bloodless, nevertheless fascinating. Not a writer you could love, but one you might respect. But recently as I was finishing THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY, I discovered that in later life, Highsmith repeatedly and publicly proclaimed herself rabidly anti-black, anti-semitic, an outspoken hater of gays. (This from a woman who came out as a lesbian in the 'silent 50s.') Such blatant racist hatred does not pop out of one's forehead overnight. It had been seeding all those years of her writing. After I read that profile on her, and similar others, I flipped back through STRANGERS ON A TRAIN and THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY. I reread sentences and dialogue, and saw more clearly the repugnance of the subtext. The reverberating lack of humanity in her characters. The lack of regret or grief, or heart.
Now I understand that Patricia Highsmith will not endure as other than a dated, genre writer. She does not address or explore the depths of our human emotions. She did not feel them. As an author, and a human being she is/was predictably repulsive. She wrote about nineteen novels after the two above. Two is enough. She has lost me as a reader. I think of Highsmith now with great distaste. A mediocre writer who went in and out of vogue, and ultimately should have kept her mouth shut.
Thanks. Comments? Chime in.
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