Endless Knots

Justine Musk: "Technology changes idea of author-brand"

Justine Musk, met via Zoetrope, on how being an author has changed, bringing up agonies familiar: what your cover looks like (just watched a friend prevail with her ideas for a better one); where they shelve your book (this one, originally a struggle for us, may be again and which persists in digital world as the category they "shelve" you in); and how people come to know about your work (radically different when a mere mention can replicate in seconds across multiple networks, when you-as-author are writing constantly, not just in books--status, posts, comments, likes, tweets...). Great lines here, ital mine: 

An author-brand used to be a kind of object: an unchanging set of assumptions and expectations about the kind of book that the author produced, defined not just through the writing itself but the artful packaging of the books and where those books were placed in the bookstore (“fantasy” or “science-fiction” or “romance” or whatever).

What happens when we don’t buy books based on the covers anymore? When we don’t even go to the bookstores but buy them quite literally out of thin air?

As an author, you are defined through the ongoing experience that you provide for the reader. That is how you will catch new readers and maintain old ones. This experience has been severed from the physical forms of books and now exists as a kind of energy that moves between you and your readers via cyberspace, which will eventually become so integrated with daily life that it will no longer be referred to as ‘cyberspace’, or a separate kind of space at all. Your author-brand becomes a living thing that streams out to your readership who then reflects it back to you who then streams it back to them and so on and so forth.

What kind of experience will you provide for your readers?

How will they experience not just your novels, but you? How will they experience you in order to find your novels in the first place?

Thrill your bookclub: Import Roy Kesey from Lima

The world-famous (well, among us) Fiction Book Club conference called last night with Roy Kesey pummeling him with questions about his stunning novella, Nothing in the World. That the book won a literary award (Bullfight Little Book Prize) is little surprise when you read it; that it's short means you can prove me right in one long sitting.

Here's how we did it: First the book club members met to talk as we typically do, discussing what we liked, what we wondered about, and, but not in this case, what we didn't like. Our overall opinion of the book was unanimous: everyone loved it.

This story about the war that consumed most of the Balkans during the 1990s is hair-raising, horrific, mythic, and supremely well written. Gorgeous. Such exquisite language that one of our members read out a section that he called poetry.

About an hour later, Roy called us from Lima, Peru, where he and his family are living. (His wife, Lu, is a Peruvian diplomat.) Each person did a self-introduction while I snapped pictures and emailed them to Roy. Then we fired questions at him: Why did he write this book? How much time transpired from the beginning of the story to the end? How did he go about writing it? What was the meaning of a particular character? How did the book come to be published? What role did the vignettes play in the story? Why did he choose the title? And all kinds of other intrusive-none-of-our-business queries whose answers I'm not going to give away in hopes that you'll ask them yourselves.

Graciously, with humor and diffidence, Roy explained everything, including his telling us that in fact some of the prose began as poetry, that he had visited the area both before and during the war, that he knew some of the stories, variously, first, second, and third hand, and that it took much courage (he didn't use the word) to throw out some 40,000 words that were once in the draft.

It was a great evening and I recommend that you do the same with your book club. Read this book, invite Roy to attend by conference call, and you'll have an evening you never forget.

And, thanks, Roy. We'll be delighted to host you when you come to Boston on your next book tour.

Almost forgot! How do I know Roy? Zoetrope, of course. One aspect of being part of the Zoe writer community is critiquing the work of other writers. (In exchange for every five stories you critique, you can submit one of your own.) I was in the business of amassing critiques when Roy posted a story, which I loved--and wrote many notes back to him about, suggesting this that and the other thing. What I remember most was my feeling after reading it - that he must have written it, then fallen over in an exhausted heap. Such energy in his writing. And now having read more of his work, such range. We decided to read this book at the suggestion of our December '09 author-guest, Ron Currie Jr., who calls Roy "the best unknown writer in America." Not for long, both Ron and I wager.

He really matters

He's funny, his thinking original, his second book unlike anything you've ever read. "How old is this guy?" one friend asked when he finished reading the book. It's hard to believe that someone with such insight and such an unblinking eye toward human foibles is only 34.

 

Our Fiction Book Club spent last evening with Ron Currie Jr. to talk about his award winning second book,  Everything Matters! I've already raved about the book and written aplenty about my admiration for Ron's work. Just read it - and if you're lucky, he'll come to your book club too.

"Everything Matters!" - the world according to Ron Currie

It's almost publication day (officially June 25) for Ron Currie's new book and it's being eased into existence with a generous introduction from none other than The New York Times's superb reviewer, Janet Maslin--see yesterday's insightful study, "The Sky Is Falling Soon! (And Junior Is Agitated)."

Her praise is unqualified for Everything Matters! (a prophecy cum coming-of-age set in rural Maine) and the set-up for many similar reviews to follow, which is just what a supremely talented writer needs in an era where publishing on paper is in peril, where people are watching every penny, and I'm sure there are three more phrases I can think of where all the important words start with p.

And the review is very long, sports a great picture of Ron, and makes all of us who've been on his team since before any publisher even knew who he was very happy. I love this guy so much he's a category here (one of a very small number of writers dubbed "Endless Knots Writers), even gave the book party for his first book, God is Dead."

Here's a taste of what Maslin says:

What these opening passages also announce is that Mr. Currie is a startlingly talented writer whose book will pay no heed to ordinary narrative conventions. His thoughts on cosmic doom somehow take the form of a joyride. He survives the inevitable, apt comparisons to Kurt Vonnegut and writes in a tenderly mordant voice of his own. He seems equipped to succeed at almost anything...

PS: Just tried to look up his reading schedule for the book and found this picture on his site, which I apparently snapped, taken in our dining room. Something very recursive about all this. He'll be at Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Mass., on July 8 at 7 PM. Other places too and I'll post as soon as he sends me the schedule (come'on, Currie).