The Pros and Cons of the Publishing Industry

Over at the Independent Publishing Magazine, guest blogger Andrew Deen outlines the pros and cons of traditional and self-publishing. Thorough yet succinct, it's a must read for every writer about to embark on the road to publishing their work.

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DED

Stigma Erased

It is done.

The stigma of self-publishing has been slowly subsiding for the last couple of years, but this year its demise has accelerated. And today I can say with certainty that it doesn't mean a damn thing anymore.

Amanda Hocking, Jeremy Robinson and Zoe Winters are just a few authors that have had tremendous success with indie sales. A couple of months ago, Ms. Hocking used her indie success to land a deal with a big publisher. Apparently, they didn't mind how she sold her books. Joe Konrath, a successful traditionally published author, went indie and has had tremendous success. Barry Eisler, another best-selling traditionally published author, spurned a deal from St. Martin's Press to go indie.

And the names keep coming.

Earlier this week, Amazon announced that indie author John Locke sold 1 million ebooks on the Kindle in 2011. Take a few seconds to absorb that one. 1 million. That's hundreds of thousands of people who didn't care one iota that this guy published his books on his own without an agent or a big publishing house to back him.

Wired UK reported today that J.K. Rowling is going to self-publish the Harry Potter series. In essence, indie publishing has been blessed as acceptable by one of the most successful authors of all time.

Traditional publishing purists may continue to sneer with contempt at indie authors, but they can pretty much go stuff themselves because no one cares anymore. Readers don't care how books come to market so long as they're entertained. They don't need any self-appointed "gatekeepers" (nannies of literature, if you will) to tell them what's OK to read because the Readers can figure it out on their own. Or they'll ask their friends. Or they'll read reviews on blogs or booksellers' sites. Readers want to read what they want to read! And that's all that matters.

The Book Thief

The Book Thief
Markus Zusak
584 pages
Picador (2005)

"Five hundred souls. I carried them in my fingers, like suitcases. Or I'd throw them over my shoulder. It was only the children I carried in my arms."

This is a novel narrated by Death. It’s January 1939, and nine year-old Liesel Meminger and her young brother, Werner, are being taken by their mother to live with a foster family in Molching, a small town outside Munich. Liesel’s father was arrested as a Kommunist, and Liesel’s mother fears a similar fate. During the train journey, Death takes six year-old Werner, but not without noticing Liesel, too. It will be the first of many such encounters. By her brother’s graveside, Liesel’s life is changed when she finds a mysterious object, partially hidden in the snow: it’s a book, The Gravedigger’s Handbook, left there by accident. It’s the first of many she will steal.

So begins a fascination with books and words as Liesel, with the help of her foster father, learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi pyres. With the help of her new friend Rudy Steiner, she liberates several from the personal library of the mayor’s wife. As years pass, Death watches. Life with the Hubermann’s on Himmel Street is punctuated by the terror of the Allied bombings, but is otherwise as tolerable as a wartime childhood can be. Then her foster father repays an old debt by allowing a Jewish fist-fighter to hide out in their cellar, and Liesel’s life is changed in more ways than she could’ve imagined.

Does the world really need another Holocaust novel? Yes, if it's as good as this one. No, it’s not some German inversion of The Diary of a Young Girl despite what the synopsis might suggest. Nor is it Harry Potter and The Holocaust as more than one critic has quipped. Young Australian writer Markus Zusak is a prize-winning writer of children’s fiction, but The Book Thief is his daring adult debut.

And what a debut it is. The Book Thief is one of those extremely rare novels: an absolute page-turner as well as a serious work of art. It’s unsettling, provocative, triumphant and tragic, at times fanciful and at others relentlessly grim. It’s beautiful and harrowing in almost equal measure. More than anything, it’s emotionally gripping in a way that few novels are. I stayed up one night, determined to finish it, and brushed away tears for the last fifty pages.

Zusak says he was inspired by two real-life events related to him by his German parents: the bombing of Munich, and a teenage boy offering bread to an emaciated Jew being marched through the streets, ending with both boy and Jewish prisoner being whipped by a soldier. As Philip Ardagh in The Guardian noted, it’s the way in which Zusak combines such terrible events with such believable characters and the minutiae of everyday life in Nazi Germany that makes this book so special.

The genius, too, is in the voice. Death is arch, wry, and given to bad jokes about his profession, but he’s also moved by the plight of humans and amused by our attitudes to him. "By the way – I like this human idea of the grim reaper. I like the scythe. It amuses me." Death is closely involved with what’s happening in wartime Europe – and obviously very busy – but he’s also, for the most part, emotionally detached from it. This allows him to comment on man’s inhumanity to man without ever being ponderous or moralistic, and without taking sides. This is important. The novel could be painfully sappy or irritatingly didactic without such a detached perspective driving it.

Zusak uses a plain style, punctuated only occasionally by vivid images. The moments of joy and violence, when they come, are all the more striking for the economy with which they’re depicted. It’s an object lesson to writers who want to deal with complex moral issues or powerful themes. And the lesson is this: just get the hell out of the way. Your language doesn’t need to be dazzling and ornate; your plotting doesn’t need to trick and surprise; you don't need to lecture or berate. Carefully choose your narrative point of view. Then put the right characters in the right situation and describe what happens as clearly as you can. The rest will take care of itself.

This is an important indirect lesson in a book that takes as its subtext the power of reading and writing. As Janet Maslin in The New York Times commented: "It will be widely read and admired because it tells a story in which books become treasures. And because there's no arguing with a sentiment like that."

Briefing for a Descent into Hell

Briefing for a Descent into Hell
Doris Lessing
228 pages
Vintage (1981)
First published, 1971

"Sometimes when you read a book or story, the words are dead, you struggle to end it or put it down, your attention is distracted. Another time, with exactly the same book or story, it is full of meaning, every sentence or phrase or even word seems to vibrate with messages and ideas, reading is like being pumped full of adrenalin." (p.155)

You don't say, Doris. The title alone should be enough to tell you that Nobel-winner Lessing's 1971 novel isn't going to be an easy read, and the first 100 pages are a very hard slog indeed. This is one of the few books I have almost turned away from in frustration (I normally finish everything I start). But it's worth the effort.

This self-declared "inner-space fiction" narrates the gradual "recovery" of amnesiac Charles Watkins, a Cambridge Classics Professor who is hospitalized after being found wandering along the London Embankment. The narrative alternates between Watkins' inner world and the efforts of his doctors and friends to revive him.

Lessing has been accused of trivializing mental illness here, but the charge carries no weight. She isn't attempting to articulate the experience of amnesia, nor of delusional psychosis. Her aim is philosophical. The further we go into the novel, the more we come to realize that Watkins may not, in fact, be ill at all - rather, the human condition may be his "illness" and his breakdown is actually a kind of waking up. What emerges is a view of the world in which identity is conditional, all matter is a unified system, and "time is the whole point". The "Hell" of the title may not be mental illness - it may be life as it is lived in the supposedly real world.

Of course, Lessing can give no definitive answer to such philosophical questions, but her exploration is powerful and increasingly sharp. Once we leave Watkins' inner world and he is asked to write about his experiences, Lessing's narrative elevates to a level of startling lucidity. The stories Watkins writes about his apparent wartime experience in Yugoslavia, and what he can see from the window of his Cambridge study, are both beautiful and profound. They make the philosophical point far better than any academic essay ever could.

And what is the point? It's a particular understanding of reality. As Lessing's epigraphs - one from a fourteenth-century Sufi mystic, the other from a twentieth-century marine biologist - neatly show, we tend to think of spirituality and science as heading in opposite directions, but they may in fact be inching ever closer together. No, the conclusion is not that God actually exists as some old man sitting up there in heaven, but rather that the ancients' intuitive understanding of the nature of reality, and their poetic expression of such, is startlingly similar to a lot of what quantum physics is telling us about space-time today. Much of human suffering may stem from an inability to see our world and ourselves in the right way. Readers engaged by this kind of thinking might also enjoy "Valis" by Philip K. Dick.

The Faber Book of Utopias

The Faber Book of Utopias
Edited by John Carey
528 pages
Faber and Faber (1999)

Anthologies are a wonderful way of exploring a genre or theme; not as a substitute for wide reading but as pointers to make your reading more rewarding. I’ve discovered some of my favourite books and authors through anthologies such as The Art of the Story edited by Daniel Halpern, and Alberto Manguel's Black Water: The Book of Fantastic Literature, which is a wonderful collection of fantastic/speculative tales.

Given a fair number of this site's readers declare an interest in post-apocalypse and alternate history titles, I suspect they might also be interested in an anthology such as this. The Faber Book of Utopias edited by John Carey is a fascinating survey of writing dealing with one of the most recurrent concerns in speculative literature and philosophy.

As Carey explains in his introduction, utopia actually means nowhere or no-place. It has often been taken to mean good place, through confusion of its first syllable with the Greek eu as in euphemism or eulogy. As a result of this mix-up, another word dystopia has been invented, to mean bad place. But, strictly speaking, imaginary good places and imaginary bad places are all utopias, or nowheres. Both are represented in this book and Carey uses the word dystopia for the bad places simply because it now has currency.

Not every imaginary nowhere counts as a utopia, however. To qualify as a utopia, an imaginary place must be an expression of desire. To count as a dystopia, it must be an expression of fear. This book, then, is a collection of humanity’s desires and fears over several millennia. The instant we recognise that everything inside our heads, and much outside, consists of human constructs that can be changed, we want to change them. This belief in the perfectibility of human life and society encourages many noble and selfless schemes but it's also inspired a trail of folly, tyranny and attempts at social control. They tend to centre around genetic engineering, education, crime and punishment, the prevention of ageing and the avoidance of death (or painless ways of inducing it).

Carey’s scope is vast, in terms of both period and genre. The first extract, “Holy Snakes”, comes from an Egyptian manuscript written 2000 years before the birth of Christ. The last comes from Lee M. Silver’s 1998 book Remaking Eden and concerns the fate of humankind in a post-cloning America of the year 2350. In between there are fiction and non-fiction selections from Plato, Tacitus, Francis Bacon, Jonathan Swift, Milton, Hobbes, Voltaire, Samuel Johnson, the Marquis de Sade, Robert Owen, Karl Marx, Oscar Wilde, William Morris, H. G. Wells, W. B. Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Italo Calvino, Julian Barnes and many more. As other reviewers have noted, while many of the selections are predictable, some are surprising: Carey has defined utopian writing widely enough to include an extract from Hitler's Mein Kampf and Abraham Lincoln's “Gettysburg Address” as examples. (Sidenote: Did you know there is actually a photograph of Lincoln delivering that speech?)

Each has a brief introduction which provides enough context for you to appreciate an unfamiliar piece without ruining it for you (a lesson the editors of many anthologies should learn, including the aforementioned Manguel). Carey’s impressions are sometimes radical: on Plato’s Republic he argues that, however benevolent its goals, the imagined world is maintained by a mixture of force and lies and depends on squashing the aspirations of ordinary people. This points to a theme that emerges consistently here. Utopias obviously offer warnings, promises and social critiques by encouraging us to compare imagined realms with our own. But the meaning we make of the comparison will differ depending on the nature of where, and when, we live. In the mid-twentieth century, Karl Popper criticized Plato’s Republic because he saw in such a seemingly benign utopian model the beginning of, and justification for, totalitarian states. The force of a utopia seems to rely on how readily it thrusts us into a re-evaluation of our own world and its current trends. This can change over time.

Overall this is a vast and rewarding work that should appeal to anyone interested in the idea of utopia/dystopia. Ultimately, utopias seem to be attempts to address the insoluble problems of human life, but utopians tend to falsify these problems by regarding them as simple. They build their utopias on universal human longings. But what they build usually carries within it its own potential for crushing or limiting human life. As this anthology shows, how that particular contradiction plays out can be endlessly fascinating.

Real People

Real People
Alison Lurie
146 pages
Random House (1969)

I’m a big fan of the ‘diary novel’ as a genre – i.e. those novels which purport to be the actual journals of fictional characters. I enjoy the unreliability of the narrator, the blend of interiority and external action, and the freedom it gives the narrative to slip into analysis, reflection and anecdote.

Some of the most engaging and enjoyable books I’ve ever read fall into this genre: Saul Bellow’s early novel Dangling Man, Ruth Prawer Jhabwala’s 1975 Booker-winning Heat and Dust, Evan S. Connell’s Diary of a Rapist (don’t let the title deter you, it’s actually an insider’s vision of the classic disintegration of a schizoid personality) and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea which is part-parody of the form and one of the best novels of the twentieth century.

In Diary Fiction: Writing as Action (1984), H. Porter Abbott gives an amusing outline of the genre’s key elements. Though remarkably consistent across the genre, within these apparent "rules" there can be almost infinite variety of stories. In the male version, the diarist is intelligent, sensitive, introverted and self-conscious. He is reasonably alienated with no gift for social life. He is young, in his twenties or early thirties. He is poor and powerless. He is alone. He lives in a room that contains at least two things: a window with a view and a mirror. It is a shabby room in a shabby house. The house is in a city. He walks the city streets. He writes. He paces the room. He gazes out of the window and meditates upon those passing below. At least once in the course of his entries, he looks in the mirror and describes what he sees there. He is either in love or obsessed with that fact that he is not. He is prone to melodrama. He is doomed. There is a good chance he will die. If he dies, there is a good chance he will die by his own hand.

In the female version, the major differences are that the writer is usually married; she is oppressed by the indifference, the insensitivity, or the love of her husband (or lover); she is a victim of the stereotyping imposed on her by virtue of her gender; her powerlessness is a function of her social condition as a woman; her sense of identity is more tenuous; she is less melodramatic.

That all sounds pretty grim, but the diary novel can also be the occasion for great hilarity, as demonstrated by John Updike's A Month of Sundays, Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones novels and Sue Townsend's classic series on the adolescent and adult adventures of Adrian Mole.

One of the most enjoyable examples of the "female version" is Pulitzer-winner Alison Lurie’s 1969 novel, Real People. It was reprinted several times right through to the 1990s, so most good second-hand bookstores will have it – which is precisely where I stumbled across it.

When writers write about writing, the results are usually very interesting. Think of Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler, A. S. Byatt’s Possession, Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, and J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. To my mind, Real People is right up there with them. It’s only 146 pages long, but what it lacks in length it more than makes up for in elegance and sophistication.

Janet ‘Belle’ Smith - married, early forties, and the author of a well-received collection of short stories - is taking her annual sojourn at Illyria, a New England mansion which has been converted into an invitation-only retreat for artists of all kinds. Craving escape from a deadening home life, Janet is delighted to find her friend Kenneth is on the guest list, but the appearance of the witless waif Anna May and the husky sculptor Nick Donato threaten to disrupt everything. As Janet struggles to construct new stories she is forced to confront some uncomfortable truths about herself, her companions, and the potential fraudulence of her art.

Lurie chooses Janet’s diary as the narrative device, and it’s an excellent choice for the kind of novel this is: one which deals with the difference between appearance and reality, between social roles and one’s own sense of identity, and in which the protagonist’s reflection on these differences is vital. Apart from constructing a neat snapshot of American art in the 1960s, Lurie deftly explores the familiar crisis of female artistry: the competing claims of being a wife/mother and having a creative career which family members more or less refuse to take seriously.

But this isn’t just about women. It’s about the relationship between art and reality. What starts out as a comedy of manners escalates in profundity until it becomes, in the final pages, a concise manifesto on the nature and purpose of art – which turns out to be truth: “If nothing survives of life besides what artists report of it, we have no right to report what we know to be lies.”

The Reader

The Reader
Bernhard Schlink
224 pages
Vintage (1999)

Michael Berg, 15, is on his way home from school in post-World War II Germany when he falls ill and is befriended by the 36-year-old Hanna who takes him home. When he recovers many weeks later, he dutifully brings her flowers in appreciation, and the two become lovers. The relationship, at first purely physical, deepens when Hanna takes an interest in Michael’s education, insisting that he study hard and attend classes. Soon, their meetings take on a more meaningful routine in which after lovemaking Michael reads aloud from the classics. There are hints of Hanna's darker side: one inexplicable moment of violence over a minor misunderstanding, and the fact that Michael knows nothing of her life other than that she collects tickets on the streetcar. Hanna leaves the city abruptly and mysteriously, and Michael does not see her again until years later, as a law student, he sits in on her case when she is being tried as a Nazi criminal.

The Reader explores Germany's guilt-ridden relationship with its own past by objectifying it in the sexual and emotional coupling of a 15-year-old boy and a 36-year-old woman. On the face of it, that doesn't sound like the premise for one of the most engaging pieces of Holocaust fiction available, but it is. Far from eroticizing Nazism or trivializing the Holocaust, using the metaphor of a human relationship makes them both more accessible. Schlink provides a way into the unique postwar experience of the German people by relating it to things we have all experienced: guilt and romantic love. Issues and events which usually repel or dismay us with their enormity are taken out of the zones of History and Philosophy and reconfigured on a human, interpersonal scale - the scale on which they actually happened, and on which they must be confronted if we are ever to understand them fully.

I was surprised and moved to find a novel that treats the Holocaust in this way; a novel that risks being misunderstood in order to foster understanding. The erotic aspect of the novel is, in the end, a minor one and hardly the point: it's about so much more than that. Through careful characterization and plot development, Schlink manages not only to make plain the ease with which German civilians were drawn into unspeakable roles, but also to explore the difference between a legal conviction and real justice, between retribution and recompense, and, most importantly, the almost insoluble situation in which Germans born postwar find themselves - laden with guilt for things they did not do and for which they cannot possibly atone.

Interestingly, Schlink's book also becomes a sustained yet subtle commentary on the function of literature and literacy as ways of recording and recovering the past. Those interested in this subtext might like to read next W. G. Sebald's On The Natural History of Destruction which explores the historical unwillingness, and therefore the contemporary inability, of German literature to deal with the terrorist victimization of German civilians at the hands of the Allies, e.g. the bombing of Dresden. Anyone unfamiliar with W. G. Sebald’s work should read all of it. Immediately.

For all its high intent, and equally high achievement, The Reader is almost an easy read. Schlink's language (or Carol Brown Janeway's translation, at least) is smooth, spare and precise. Schlink's subject is dignified by such straightforwardness.

The Killer Inside Me

The Killer Inside Me
Jim Thompson
256 pages
Vintage (1991)
First published, 1952

Lou Ford, 29, is the Deputy Sheriff of Central City, Texas. He's a local boy, son of the town doctor, and a sure thing to marry the girl next door. He's also a secret sufferer of what he terms "the sickness": textbook sociopathy, most likely, the dramatic upshot of which is a penchant for committing nasty murders, preferably of women. It first emerged in adolescence and resurfaces when Lou is drawn into a plot to silence a prostitute with the potential to embarrass the town's first family. Things rapidly escalate when suspicion falls on Lou and he needs to eliminate an ever-growing number of human loose ends, including several people he claims to love.

The genius of Thompson's dark classic is that he manages to horrify us with Lou’s truly vicious murders and all the calm premeditation that goes into them – every monstrous step narrated in Lou's wonderfully deadpan voice – and yet still have us feeling for him. Lou’s flat, affectless delivery is anything but unaffecting. He’s intelligent, cynical, self-aware and chillingly rational in his irrationality until he detours into obvious delusion towards the end. But by that point you understand him. You can't forgive him, but by witnessing his villainy from the inside you might just be able to accept that, for Lou, things couldn't have been any other way.

Technically, there's a lot to like here, and potentially a lot to learn for those interested in writing their own thrillers: an engaging voice, beautiful plotting, some agonizingly suspenseful scenes (Lou’s visit to Johnnie Papas in the lockup, in particular), masterful use of laconic speech rhythms and Texan dialect, and a whole raft of wonderfully realized minor characters who, while still identifiably small-town types, are never caricatures. But the construction of Lou Ford is Thompson’s real achievement. Numerous scholarly articles available online explore Lou’s “sickness” and find consistency with clinical diagnoses – some of which post-date the novel’s publication, suggesting Thompson had remarkable native insight into this kind of character (including their tendency to misdiagnose themselves). While I don’t think we should psychoanalyze characters as if they were real people, authors constructing fictional killers can obviously benefit from a good working knowledge of the symptoms, behaviours, inner life and childhood origins of the pathologies they want their villains to express. Thompson’s novel demonstrates how engaging and enduring such veracity can be.

It’s endured, too, because this novel is actually about something, and not just mental illness: there are several passages in which Thompson touches on the tenuousness of civilized morality; on the phoniness of social interaction and the grim reality it masks. The recognition of this commonplace inversion of values – the difference between the way the world actually is, and the way we say it is or think it should be – is a staple of the noir genre, of course. But Thompson gives it a highly effective workout here, making this a superior novel. Running chills up and down your spine is one thing. Making you think is something else.

Sidenote: Those who enjoyed Casey Affleck’s performance as Patrick Kenzie in big brother Ben’s 2007 adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s Gone Baby Gone might be interested to know he’s playing Lou Ford in a new adaptation of The Killer Inside Me directed by Michael Winterbottom. Currently filming, it’s slated for release in 2010. Stacey Keach played Ford to good effect in the otherwise undistinguished 1976 version, but the unassuming young Affleck should bring some rather chilling, baby-faced menace to the role.

Come Closer

Come Closer
Sara Gran
168 pages
Soho Press (2003)

This clever little “horror story” can be read in one sitting, but don't let that suggest it isn't significant. It has the intensity of a parable, and that's probably the best way to describe it, given the subtext.

Amanda, a young married architect, suspects she is losing her mind. Odd things keep happening to her: a strange tapping sound that only seems to occur in her presence, bizarre dreams, frightening blackouts, and out-of-character behaviour: like finding herself in bars seducing strange men. She mistakenly receives a book in the mail—Demon Possession Past and Present—which includes a quiz on how to tell if you're possessed. Obsessively returning to it, Amanda finds she is able to answer “yes” to more and more of its questions.

The demon apparently possessing her is Naamah—Adam's second wife, in Jewish folklore, and the woman he rejected because he saw her being created by God, i.e. he saw the human “blood and guts” beneath the feminine beauty. Forced to confront a real human being rather than a submissive sexual object, Adam refused her and she fled to the Red Sea. (This is a story hidden in documents only accessible to older Jewish men, of course!) Naamah wheedles her way into Amanda's consciousness through blood-soaked dreams and nagging voices, gradually taking control of her life, with shocking consequences.

Ostensibly this is a story about a case of demonic possession, but Sara Gran uses that as an analogy for the psychological crisis of Amanda who turns out to be an intelligent, thirty-something woman trapped in a too-safe relationship that has drained her life of meaning. It's an exploration of the fear felt by both women and men about female power and the surprising incapacity of modern life to allow women appropriate avenues for its expression, especially as they grow older. It also confirms the way religious/mythical stories grow out of the real and predictable crises of adult life (you can read Naamah as Amanda’s frustrated id). But don't worry; the novel doesn't read like some kind of feminist psycho-babble, even if this review might to some readers. The subtext isn't worn on the sleeve. Gran focuses on the visceral as she carefully unwinds her tale with all the skill of an accomplished horror writer, but with quite a bit more economy and flair. It's a testament to her narrative power that using the questionnaire entitled "Are YOU Possessed by a Demon?" she can foreshadow, several times, the chilling logic of escalating violence by which the story will proceed, without ever actually undermining the horror of those events when they inevitably come to pass. The key is the bluntness of the narrative voice. Every step is executed with a dispassionate distance that makes it more chilling, more credible, more real.

Not everyone agrees. Some enthusiasts of horror fiction have found Come Closer trifling or slight, but these reviewers seem to have missed the point. If your taste in horror or thrillers runs more to the literary, this is one you'll enjoy.