Risky Business

If I weren't careful I could spend all day just surfing blogs about writing and publishing (and sometimes I have)--there's an astonishing amount of commentary out there, much of it worth reading, and more than I can keep up with. I just recently discovered the blog of literary agent Nathan Bransford, who offers frequent and savvy posts about the book business and very good advice for writers.

In a recent report on a tour of New York publishing houses, Bransford talks about the buzz phrase of the moment, "moving the needle," which is tossed around by editors looking for blockbuster books. Only the phrase is new--commercial houses have been obsessed with big books for some time.

And in the comment thread he nicely phrases the paradoxical situation of much commercial publishing now:

I think the weak link right now is that publishers are increasingly taking huge risk and shying away from small risks.

Publishing is always going to be a risky business. Publishers should take risks. I'd even say that by and large, the best publishers are the ones who take the most risks (successful risks, that is; the ex-publishers are the ones who take the wrong risks....) But the perceived need for blockbuster books, for some companies, pushes them to chase books that seem to be potential blockbusters, even if that means overpaying for them one after another--and overpaying for those titles means overpaying by hundreds of thousands, or millions, of dollars. 


The industry, and readers, might be better served by more houses taking a greater number of modest risks--on new authors, titles with niche or regional markets,  word-of-mouth, hand-sell kinds of books.  There are serious challenges in the "small ball" business model, too, which I'll talk about in an upcoming post.  But it's a workable one.  

Keys to Good Writing--48 of Them

So Cormac McCarthy is selling his typewriter. Traditionalists need not fear: he's replacing it with another one. The retired machine, bought circa 1963, has just got a bit worn down after almost half a century of clacking away, churning out a dozen novels and a sheaf of other works.

Today the Guardian's Books Blog lists a few other old-school authors who still love their old-fashioned typewriters. Don DeLillo says "I need the sound of the keys...The hammers striking the page. I like to see the words, the sentences, as they take shape." Will Self says that with a typewriter, "You don't revise as much, you just think more, because you know you're going to have to retype the entire fucking thing." (I, and several of my fellow editors, believe that since the word processor came into widespread use, the tendency of manuscripts to balloon to excessive lengths has become more pronounced.)

I know exactly what DeLillo means about the sound of the keys. The photo of McCarthy's trusty Olivetti reminded me of my mother's Hermes Rocket, another slim but sturdy portable whose keyboard I gleefully bashed away at long before I knew how to actually read or write. I remember exactly how satisfying it felt to hear the clickety-clack and see the letters marching across the page. Who cared if they made words?

But when I learned how to make words of my own, using the typewriter got to be even more fun.  I even, at age 5 or so, wrote a very, very short novel titled "Sandy the Sandpail." I honestly don't remember the plot of S. the S., but I do remember chapter 6, because other members of my family have enjoyed, for decades, quoting it at me in its entirety:
"Sandy the Sandpail had a friend called Goldie. Nothing happened to Goldie."

Obviously, the use of the typewriter has influenced the elliptical style that Cormac McCarthy and I share.

A Grave in Provence

A few years ago, on a holiday in Provence, I dragged my family to the village of Lourmarin to visit the grave of Albert Camus. Lourmarin is a pretty, well-preserved medieval town, but the nondescript cemetery outside its walls must be its least alluring feature. The graveyard was hot, dusty, and indifferently tended. My wife recalls the place as "depressing." But for me it was, in Michelin-guide terms, worth the journey to pay my respects to Camus. 

There are not many authors I would classify as my heroes, but Camus is one of them. He was not just a superb writer, but a courageous man. Camus edited a Resistance newspaper during the occupation of France, and throughout his life consistently stood up for individual choice and dignity in the face of all forms of oppression and conformity--whether Stalinism, Naziism, or religious orthodoxy. 

Camus' gravestone is simple and unadorned: just his name and dates. It took some time to find, because it was not specially marked.  I stood by the slab for a few minutes. In the hot August afternoon, the Provençal sun pressing down on my head, I thought of the shimmering heat of the beach in Algiers, indelibly rendered in The Stranger. The humility of this resting-place touched me; it seemed perfectly suited to the man who lay there.

Now France's president, Nicolas Sarkozy, is lobbying to move Camus' remains to the Panthéon, the imposing (some would say bombastic) tomb that holds other great men and women of France--Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Marie Curie. His plan has stirred a heated controversy. It seems like the rankest ploy of an unpopular politician hoping to appropriate the aura of a figure revered in France. But even if Sarkozy is acting from the best of intentions, to move Camus from his provincial grave to the Panthéon is a stunningly wrongheaded idea. While Camus' daughter has apparently assented to the scheme, his son Jean is sticking up for the Lourmarin cemetery. The move, he says "would be contrary to his father’s wishes and [he] does not want to have his legacy put to work in the service of the state." 

Jean is right. Camus should be allowed to remain in his quiet, sun-baked plot in the south of France--closer to his native Algeria and far from the machinations of the Elysée Palace. The Pantheon speaks of the greatness of France, but not the humanity of Camus. 

Thanksgiving

I'll probably post briefly and irregularly over this holiday, as I'll be on the road visiting friends and loved ones. It occurs to me that as a publisher, I have many things to be thankful for (not least, at the moment, the fact that my company is healthy and I have a job). The thing I am most thankful for in my working life is that it has brought me into contact with so many smart, funny, interesting, and congenial people--colleagues, authors, booksellers, and readers. For all the transformations publishing is going through, I don't think that aspect of the business will ever change.