Rewriting publishing
New authors are increasingly using internet-based strategies to publish. The problem, if any, is one of quality. Sure, readers will filter good from bad, but all writers know that the average reader knows little of good writing.
Mark Twain’s words to live by.
Lit Drift discusses the angry writer. In the words of Mark Twain:
I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.
Back to writing…
It’s not that I don’t like to add new posts — I do — but unlike so many of my peers, I don’t think highly of blogging. It’s cheap writing. And it doesn’t matter if the writing is beautiful — the writing is cheap because there’s no paper involved. Your head doesn’t hurt from the thinking, the depression, the investment. There’s no paper with which to create the story. Instead, it’s the internet, where pseudo-stories — of Tiger and Paris and Britney — change with the weather. And that’s sad, because I’d love to say we once aspired to something more than celebrity gossip, but I don’t think we really ever did.
That said, I’m done with scanning and back to writing. And boy does my head hurt…
James Patterson: writer, adman, shark.
The NY Times Magazine published a wonderful, wonderful piece on James Patterson — a guy who apparently has no problem publishing nine hardbacks every year, at the least.
Surprising:
There are many different ways to catalog Patterson’s staggering success. Here are just a few: Since 2006, one out of every 17 novels bought in the United States was written by James Patterson. He is listed in the latest edition of “Guinness World Records,” published last fall, as the author with the most New York Times best sellers, 45, but that number is already out of date: he now has 51 — 35 of which went to No. 1.
And incisive:
Unsatisfied with publishing’s informal approach to marketing meetings, Patterson had expected corporate-style presentations, complete with comprehensive market-share data and sales trends. “A lot of authors are just grateful to be published,” Holly Parmelee, Patterson’s publicist from 1992 to 2002, told me several weeks earlier. “Not Jim. His attitude was that we were in business together, and he wanted us both to succeed, but it was not going to be fun and games.”
And revealing:
Patterson built his fan following methodically. Instead of simply going to the biggest book-buying markets, he focused his early tours and advertising efforts on cities where his books were selling best: like a politician aspiring to higher office, he was shoring up his base. From there, he began reaching out to a wider audience, often through unconventional means. When sales figures showed that he and John Grisham were running nearly neck and neck on the East Coast but that Grisham had a big lead out West, Patterson set his second thriller series, “The Women’s Murder Club,” about a group of women who solve murder mysteries, in San Francisco.
Seriously revealing:
To maintain his frenetic pace of production, Patterson now uses co-authors for nearly all of his books. He is part executive producer, part head writer, setting out the vision for each book or series and then ensuring that his writers stay the course. This kind of collaboration is second nature to Patterson from his advertising days, and it’s certainly common in other creative industries, including television. But writing a novel is not the same thing as coming up with jokes for David Letterman or plotting an episode of “24.” Books, at least in their traditional conception, are the product of one person’s imagination and sensibility, rendered in a singular, unreproducible style and voice. Some novelists have tried using co-authors, usually with limited success. Certainly none have taken collaboration to the level Patterson has, with his five regular co-authors, each one specializing in a different Patterson series or genre. “Duke Ellington said, ‘I need an orchestra, otherwise I wouldn’t know how my music sounds,’ ” Pietsch told me when I asked him about Patterson’s use of collaborators. “Jim created a process and a team that can help him hear how his music sounds.”
The way it usually works, Patterson will write a detailed outline — sometimes as long as 50 pages, triple-spaced — and one of his co-authors will draft the chapters for him to read, revise and, when necessary, rewrite. When he’s first starting to work with a new collaborator, a book will typically require numerous drafts. Over time, the process invariably becomes more efficient. Patterson pays his co-authors out of his own pocket. On the adult side, his collaborators work directly and exclusively with Patterson. On the Y.A. side, they sometimes work with Patterson’s young-adult editor, who decides when pages are ready to be passed along to Patterson.
And, at times, obvious:
Patterson’s chapters are very short, which creates a lot of half-blank pages; his books are, in a very literal sense, page-turners. He avoids description, back story and scene setting whenever possible, preferring to hurl readers into the action and establish his characters with a minimum of telegraphic details. The first chapter of “The Swimsuit,” a recent thriller with a villain who abducts women for pornographic snuff films, opens with the kidnapping of a supermodel on a beach in Hawaii:
“Kim McDaniels was barefooted and wearing a blue-and-white-striped Juicy Couture minidress when she was awoken by a thump against her hip, a bruising thump. She opened her eyes in the blackness, as questions broke the surface of her mind.
“Where was she? What the hell was going on?”
(Did you ever think someone would give up their business model so easily, so freely?)
Updike, edited
Ann Goldstein, a long-time editor for John Updike, revealed a bit about their exchanges during a NYPL tribute:
Knitting and purling at these reviews seems to be harder work for me than it used to be; we feel like field mice painstakingly weaving our little nests while the shadows of the hawks swirl all around us.