Today I had the pleasure to attend Book Expo America (BEA), the largest book conference in America. Geared toward publishing professionals, booksellers and educators, BEA is probably the only opportunity you’ll have to see the number of men come anywhere close to the number of women in publishing. (Seriously. There were men there. And they like BOOKS.)

Though this wasn’t my first time around the BEA dance floor, I am reminded about a few things every year. Here are the highlights (and lessons relearned) today!

1.) Pounding the Javits Center hurts. A lot. Today’s heels means tomorrow will be spent in flip flops. As in other years though, I am sure that by the time Thursday comes around, everybody will be in sneakers and jeans, and they will be much more selective about the amount of swag they want to carry.

2.) About swag. It’s heavy. Free ARCs (advanced reader copies) freaking rock! At the next pub party, you get to talk about all the books you’ve read that the general public won’t even get to touch, let alone finish reading, for another two to six months. But they are still made of paper (at this point), and so by the third day, you become a little more picky about what swag you want to carry out with you. Book with a three page sex scene between woman and monkey, yes. (It’s literary fiction, it actually looks quite good!) Book that’s being handed out at self-publishing booth, perhaps not. (Lesson here — less free books handed out on Tuesday, so if you are a self-published author at BEA, go then. Less competition for bag space, and generally more excitement for the free.)

3.) Industry panels. Today’s panels were all about social media. Authors, aspiring authors, publishers — it comes down to Nike’s infamous slogan — just do it. (It was perhaps said more eloquently than that. But another thing I’ve learned about panels is that brevity is key. Especially when chances are, your topic is going to overlap with another panel your audience sat through just an hour or two before.)

4.) It’s still kind of odd to approach your favorite authors for signings. At BEA, authors are like celebrities, but more accessible and with a slightly more awkward following. In fact, last year, my colleague and I said to Jonathan Lethem as he signed our books, “we are extremely awkward.” That, of course, made things even more awkward.

5.) It’s becoming increasingly difficult to remember who you’ve met in real life, and who you recognize from their Twitter handle. Is that an editor I’ve met before at a lunch? Or someone who happens to tweet very frequently in my feed? Oh wait, I must know them from Twitter because I’ve seen pictures of their cats! And speaking of Twitter, now as the speaker you can see in real time if your audience thinks your panel sucks. Talk about pressure!

6.) Book parties. Book nerds know how to party. We really do. Last year, I managed to rip a hole in my shirt at a tweet-up. A tweet-up! So far, my shirts remain intact. But BEA is young. There are still two more days of swag collecting, Twitter stalking and pub partying.

I’m exhausted! But it’s true guys — BEA is like Christmas in May. (If you habitually go to happy hours during Christmas.)

I do think the Espresso book machine, the end of the return system, and embracing e-books and interactive derivatives could solve a lot of the bottom-line issues in publishing. I personally can’t think of a single other industry that knowingly pulps nearly half of their product!

But Moriah Jovan’s post on the perfect bookstore makes it sound as if all of publishing’s problems are instantly solved with print-on-demand. There is a lot to consider though in the adoption of POD technology.

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The ghost of Vladimir Nabokov: "I told you to burn that damn book!"

I was troubled when I first read in the New York Times that Vladimir Nabokov’s final, unfinished novel (The Original of Laura (Dying is Fun)) was published against his explicit instructions. At the end of his life, Nabokov told his wife, Vera, to destroy Laura if he had not finished it before he died.  Because she failed to carry out this task, Laura fell into the hands of Nabokov’s son, Dmitri. Dmitri, now in his mid-70s, decided to hand over the notes containing his father’s final creative efforts to a publisher (Knopf) because he felt his father would not “have opposed the release of Laura once Laura had survived the hum of time this long.” Representing what Dmitri claims is “the most concentrated distillation” of his father’s creativity, Laura consists of a series of index cards and notes packaged in a fancy, expensive book. It’s not really a novel but more of a peek into a writer’s creative process.

But should it have been published?

At first I thought “oh hell no” and was very angered by what I interpreted as Dmitri’s callous disregard for his father’s final wishes. But then I read Nathaniel Rich’s article on The Daily Beast. Rich, who has actually read the book (unlike me), says that “to describe The Original of Laura as a novel would be like mistaking a construction site for a cathedral” and calls the three year public debate over its publication “silly, meretricious” and “waged on false grounds.”

Here’s what I think: Read more »

A professor for one of my graduate writing classes is an acquisitions editor at a major publishing house.  He’s worked with some pretty big-name authors.  Last week we took the entire class time for a Q&A session about the publishing industry.  We’re all in this great program, focusing on our writing and how to make it better, but no one is really talking about how to market our ideas, what to do once we’ve got something good.

Many interesting questions came up during the two-hour session (Should one use a pen name if they want to write something commercial before writing something literary? Can a successful author switch genres mid-career? How do you find an agent who really gets you?) until someone finally broke the ice:  ”What kind of advances do authors get paid these days?”

A weight was lifted off everyone’s shoulders. After frankly stating that very very few authors will get the big advances of the last ten years, our professor told us a story about Junot Diaz, author of Drown and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Apparently two publishers had a bidding war over Diaz’s first book, until finally, Riverhead Books (a division of Penguin), offered Diaz a $150,000 advance for two books, guaranteeing themselves first rights to whatever he ended up writing next.  The other publisher gave up at that point, not being able to outbid such a high figure.  Well, they probably regret their decision now given how wildly successful Diaz’s two books have been.

Most of us aren’t going to have such a high-stakes bidding war for our first book, let alone any bidding war at all.  Diaz is a pretty lucky (and talented) guy.  Given all this, it was refreshing to find his recent admission that even he — a Pulitzer Prize-winning author — has had problems churning out good work.  So even if he’s successful on the whole making-money-off-your-writing thing, he still struggles with the whole actually-doing-the-writing part: Read more »

Oi vey, getting published.  That’s the elephant in the room here in my graduate writing program.  We’re all working on becoming better writers, critiquing one another, reading a ton — it’s incredibly valuable time spent on self-improvement.  But let’s be honest, to what end?  Why are we all doing this?  Because we want to be published.  We want the validation that our work is worth something.  We want to be able to add some italicized names of magazines to our biographies.  We want to write…drum roll please…a book.

Whether or not connections are actually necessary to get published is a separate question.  But if you want to do something other than self-publish, you might have a tough time if you assume that the all-knowing, all-powerful internet can help you find a publisher. Read more »

If you have never heard of it, then you live under a rock. If you have never read it, then there is a big hole in your life where this book should be. Holden Caulfield’s search to find his place in the world has long been hailed as the quintessential tale of teen angst. But for me, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye far surpasses such a general assessment. The entire story hovers above a violent undercurrent of energy, and it feels like Holden is going to explode if just one more person disappoints him or one more thing goes wrong. Holden’s voice puts me in a trance…I get pulled into his world of “phonies” and “slobs” and I absorb his loneliness and let it mingle with my own. It’s the story of not being able to find a single place where you feel you belong. Rye was one of the most censored and controversial books of the 20th Century, and as a result it possesses an almost mythical level of mystique. People are still fascinated with Holden, the ultimate modern antihero. And Salinger has only enhanced the book’s mystique by proving himself to be one of the most reclusive writers of the last century. He has hidden from the world for decades…refusing to grant interviews, not publishing any new work, and suing those who try to do anything with his existing work. It seems as if, like Holden Caulfield, Salinger thinks we’re all a bunch of phonies and he just wants us to leave him alone so that he can die. Well, some dude in Sweden had other plans.

Read more »

Check out IsReads, a biannual outdoor poetry journal that enlists volunteers to publish each “issue” by plastering the poems, printed on sturdy white paper, all over Baltimore, Maryland. IsReads favors experimental, playful prose–which probably reads either like it was written by an insane person to the people who don’t get poetry, or a tasty little morsel to the people who do. Anyone can submit poems via e-mail for consideration, and anyone can help publish the journal. Just contact the editors, and they’ll send back instructions and a PDF of the journal’s contents.

The journal’s emphasis on making poetry more accessible to the public has been hailed as something of a revolutionizing force for the languishing industry, but founder Adam Robinson has remained fairly modest. He says: “I don’t expect that by doing this I’m going to change anybody’s life. But for the ten seconds people stand in front of it, I hope they just kind of wonder about poetry again.”

Photos and poems after the jump.  Read more »

Imagine if Florentino Ariza from Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera had professed his love for Fermina Daza through e-mails instead of letters. Or if Homer’s Odysseus had a Twitter account (Oh, wait…). Or if Romeo and Juliet could text message each other:

Juliet: Fakn death. C U Latr.

Romeo: gud plan.

It’s reasonable to assume that if Romeo and Juliet really did have cell phones, they could have just texted their way through all their star-crossed struggles and misunderstandings. And ergo, no story. Matt Richtel of the New York Times points out that while technology may be doing wonders for the fiction and publishing industries, the fiction itself is having a hard time adjusting. Read more »

I’m just going to say it: as much as I love technology, I feel uneasy about the Kindle.

Yes, I realize there are some good things about it: compared to printed books, digital books are better for the environment; you can virtually carry around an entire library in your pocket (no pun intended, heh); and you can even read blogs on the device. For example, you might want to use the Kindle to read a certain blog you are viewing now…? Read more »