[Note:  Lots of news today…and comments on that news…for both readers and writers.  Enjoy!]

#216:  Books as Christmas gifts.  I’m not adverse to using the word Christmas and gifts in the same sentence.  Sure, Black Friday and Cyber Monday show that the holidays are becoming more commercial.  What isn’t?  For me, there’s little difference between tee shirts with the faces of Santa Claus, Christ, the Buddha, or Che Guevara—as Yoda would say, “Still commercial they are.”

However, reading is an educational, mind-bending, and exhilarating experience anytime.  Because people love to read, gift the readers among your family and friends—and yourself—some books.  With eBooks, I’m talking about just a download (counts for online sales?); for trade paperbacks and hard-bounds, FedEx, UPS, and the U.S. Postal Service come into play, but you do end up with something to wrap.

Are you looking for bargains?  My suggestion is to boycott the Big Five’s high prices, even for eBooks, and support indie authors.  You’ll get more bang for your buck.  Compare Lee Child’s eBook version of A Wanted Man at $13.99 to my Angels Need Not Apply at $4.99.  I’m not pretending to be Lee, but you just know Random House has inflated that eBook price to make more money for them, not for Lee (and maybe to drive readers to the other formats).  Lee’s a good guy, makes money off the volume of sales, and deserves all the success he’s had with Jack Reacher (see below), but I won’t spend more than $10 on any eBook—not even his.  You shouldn’t either.

#217:  Online buying versus brick-and-mortar.  I’m talking books here, not that sweater for nephew Joey that he’ll never wear.  Traditional bookstores will become extinct as the asteroid that is digital publishing hits all aspects of legacy publishing.  Borders is dead.  B&N is struggling.  It’s only a matter of time.

I’ll not shed a tear for the B&N barns.  (I was only once in an Apple Store too, and hated it.)  Talk about crass commercialism.  However, I do have some sympathy for the mom-and-pop bookstores.  While my experience with these has been limited to snooty receptions for indie authors, their nooks and crannies provide an experience akin to that described in Zafón’s La Sombra del Viento (I guess Shadow of the Wind would be the English translation of the title).  Also, those little shops with first and second editions and those with musty old books no longer in print are special to me.

So, go online.  Kindle people, go to Amazon; Nook people to B&N online; and so forth.  If you’re adverse to those online giants, there are places to buy eBooks that specialize in low-priced offerings, many of them free.  Google “cheap eBooks.”  You’ll be surprised.  (The Author Marketing Club publishes a list of free eBooks every few days, for example.)  Most of the online places in fact allow you to put their books in the order of price.  Also, don’t forget Smashwords for your fix on indie authors.  They distribute to everyone except Amazon, so Sony reader and Kobo reader devotees can find a home there.

#218:  Lee Child interview.  That venerable and over-priced ($25 for 10 issues as a special deal for a first-time subsription) publication Writer’s Digest features an interview with Lee Child in the January 2013 issue.  Occasionally, they have articles that catch my eye.  While most of their writing advice can be found online where you can’t beat that free price, Lee’s interview has several interesting points.  At the risk of quoting him out-of-context, I’ll list a few.

First, are pseudonyms important?  Who knows?  I often wish that I’d chosen one.  Steve Moore is a common name.  Maybe if I’d chosen Tiberius Prendergast, my website would have more traffic and I’d have more readers?  Lee Child is a pseudonym for Jim Grant.  I’m not sure I see the advantage there.  Both of the first and last names are one-syllable and common.  I’m sure many just know Lee as “that author of the Jack Reacher series.”

Lee was laid off from England’s Granada Television at 39.  (Their loss, our gain, I say.)  That probably biases the following quote:  “I honestly believe that writing is possibly the only thing that not only can you, but you should do later.  I think writing fiction especially is something that is unnatural when you’re young, because you haven’t absorbed enough, you haven’t seen enough, you haven’t developed your own mental space or your thoughts and all that kind of thing.”

I concur, as readers of this blog probably already know.  I’m particularly not a fan of delusional twenty-somethings getting an MFA for all the mistaken reasons Lee discusses (the delusion is in thinking they’ll be the next Lee Child).  (The agenting ranks are full of these people.  They’re OK kids, I suppose, but having them decide the value of your book is like getting marital advice from a priest.)

The WD interviewer gave a nice twist on a common question.  “We talk a lot about good writing advice.  What’s the worst writing advice you commonly hear?”  Lee’s answer: “The worst is probably Write what you know.”  Yea!  This is one item in my post “The Eightfold Way” on eight things that a novel writer should NOT do.  Lee and I are uncannily on the same wavelength—well, except for movie stars (see below).

Finally, how does Lee feel about self-pubbing?  “Writing is in such a state of flux at the moment, with all this conversation going on about digital versus physical, legacy [publishing] versus self-[publishing] and all that kind of stuff, but ultimately those are such trivial details.  All that matters is coming up with a great original story.  And yeah, then you do have a sort of procedural problem with how to publicize it….  A publisher is basically a publicizer [Brit sic?].”  Of course, Lee is so internationally famous that his publisher licks his shoes spotless and does all his marketing and PR.  We peons have to do our own, even if we have a publisher and aren’t self-pubbing.  But I would like to emphasize that phrase “coming up with a great original story.” That’s what it’s all about—entertaining our readers.

#219:  Sims strikes again!  Another article that caught my eye in the January issue of WD is Elizabeth Sims article “Master Description through Sensory Detail.”  She consistently offers good advice to writers.  This article is no exception.  She considers sight, touch, smell, and taste.  Highly recommended for all writers and readers interested in the writing business.  To some authors, all this comes naturally.  I, for one, have to be continuously on my guard about assuming my mind’s eye view of a situation is adequately translated into words.  Maybe when eBooks contain both sounds and odors, this will be easier!

#220:  Is Simon and Shuster next?  The merger (or takeover?) of Penguin by Random House takes the Big Six down to five. Talks are going on about a merger between Harper Collins and Simon & Shuster.  Will that reduce the Big Five to the Big Four?  In related news, S & S wants to gobble up self-pubbing shop Author House.  Life after the Apple-publishers lawsuit is still being redefined, it seems.  I think the Big X are running scared.  They should be.  Indie publishing will change the book publishing business like indie music changed music publishing.  It already has, in fact.

#221:  Books to movies.  Lee Child’s Jack Reacher book One Shot will become the movie Jack Reacher.  I learned long ago to leave my expectations and memories of a good (or bad) read at home when Hollywood transforms a book to the silver screen.  You have to forget about the book and accept the movie for what it is.  Only in that way could I enjoy movies like I, Robot and the Jason Bourne movies, for example.

There are exceptions.  Tinker, Tailor… was a good rendering, if memory serves.  (Sometimes the time between movie and book is very long.)  Hollywood followed the story line of The Lord of the Rings well, for example, but why did they make The Hobbit into three movies?  And why don’t the promos I’ve seen for Jack Reacher look anything like the book One Shot?

I have a great admiration for screenwriters.  They work in a high pressure environment surrounded by inflated egos who think they’re God’s gift to humanity.  I can’t imagine a worse way to make a living.  I suppose, like Lee Child (see the WD article mentioned above), I might get a kick out of seeing one of my books becoming a movie.  But I certainly would not participate in writing the script.  Hollywood is a dog-eat-dog world that I intend to steer clear of.  The closest I’ve ever been to it is Knott’s Berry Farm, Farmers’ Market, and my Aunt Betty’s apartment (she made some awesome meatballs, bless her soul).

#222:  Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher.  Speaking of my hang-ups with the soon-to-be released movie, Hollywood’s casting of diminuitive Tom Cruise as 6’5” Jack Reacher is absurd.  More than absurd…baffling.  Tom should have the starring role in The Hobbit.  This choice for Jack Reacher is worse than Denzel Washington playing Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme.  I’m calling for a boycott of the movie Jack Reacher.  Sorry, Lee.

Another problem I have with the choice of Tom is that he’s on my list of truly bad actors—not quite as bad as Sylvestor Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Marisa Tomei, or Sally Fields, but right up there on the list.  Many Hollywood actors, in fact, can’t act worth beans, though many think they can.  Those named and others just don’t measure up to the likes of Morgan Freeman, Anthony Hopkins, and Judi Dench, for example.  Maybe it’s stage training like on Broadway or just natural ability, but for me it’s too easy to pick out the bad ones.

#223:  Who is the real Thomas Jefferson?  Henry Wiencek’s new book Master of the Mountain is another author’s take on the life of this complex man.  Non-specialists (i.e. not true historians) are giving the book some glowing reviews—the academics not so much.  Wiencek’s main theme is not new—Jefferson owned slaves and participated in that loathsome business.  His perspective seems like a revisionist view of what has already been done—some reviewers have complained that there is nothing new here, only repackaging.

Fortunately, the expertise developed in my previous life as a scientist (and Jefferson was an amateur scientist) lies elsewhere.  I can’t comment on the veracity of Wiencek or his critics.  I will say that the founding fathers had opinions on slavery that most of us today would find deplorable.  We have just come through an election where, thank goodness, unlike 2000, the Electoral College results and the popular vote agreed.  The Electoral College and the aristocratic-like Senate are two manifestations of the founding fathers’ mistrust “of the rabble,” a sentiment not foreign to today’s GOP.

Maybe we should just recognize Thomas Jefferson as a complex man, as full of the contradictions characterizing his time as the other landed colonial gentry were, some of whom went beyond their milieu to create the six-sigma statistical event called the American Revolution and our Constitution with its Bill of Rights.  His complexity is perhaps no different from politicians today, who are often full of internal contradictions and hypocrisies—to put it nicely.  Would that they get beyond these and rise to greatness like Jefferson.

In libris libertas…

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 30th, 2012 at 4:00 am and is filed under News and Notices from the Writing Trenches, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.