Conversations with her fake boyfriend

In addition to being the author of Sex & Violence, Carrie Mesrobian maintains a very funny Tumblr I’m not supposed to read:

But I do read it. I like the formula:

1. Find a picture of an attractive man. (The Internet haz these.)

2. Add a caption where he says something implausibly sensitive, solicitous, and/or witty about something you’ve done or that’s a source of consternation or whatever.

Even I can do it:

“Really. He made you watch that ugly old movie about freaks in nutcups beating up old men? Again? Forget about him. Tell me about those cowboy boots and Kenny Chesney’s mastery of the pentameter one more time?”

Except, apparently I failed on step one, because when I showed this to Carrie, she wrote, “Is that Kenneth Brannagh? Jesus.” (Maybe Dot Hutchison would have been more sympathetic.)

But maybe you can do better, and to incentivize you, I have five signed copies of Sex & Violence  to give away to Carrie’s favorite entries. I’ll also give you a theme to focus your efforts:

Conversations with My Fake Boyfriend About
My Real (or Fake) Editor

My example above would work as an entry for Carrie if she acknowledged Mr. Brannagh as fake boyfriend material (which she apparently does not). Submit your entry here. Carrie will pick winners on June 1.

“How’s the Book Doing?”

The always provocative Cory Doctorow has a piece on book marketing that’s been making the rounds.
Much of it is smart. I have a few trivial quibbles that aren’t worth detailing. I’m sure he’s right about many of the things he has direct experience with (blurb-request spam), but I think he’s occasionally on thin ice in generalizing about things he doesn’t have direct experience of (inner workings of multiple publishing houses and how sales data gets reported).

There is one paragraph that I think deserves a close look. At least, it made me think hard (for which I thank him):

[A] few lucky times, I was able to score a few free minutes for a meal or a conversation with friends, and the number-one-champion frequently-asked-question they asked me was, ‘‘How is the book doing?’’
The honest answer to this is, ‘‘We’ll know in two to six months.’’ I mean, yes, Homeland was on the NYT bestseller list for four weeks, on the Indiebound bestseller list for three, and still carries a satisfyingly high Amazon sales rank, but none of this tells you anything particularly useful. Indiebound and BookSense tell publishers a bit about where books are selling, but compared to Internet businesses, publishers are almost entirely in the dark about their books. Even e-book reporting is frustratingly opaque: e-book retailers know which sites refer customers to their purchase pages, know those readers’ demographics and other purchases, understand which search terms direct the most traffic, and which subset of those terms generates the most sales. Publishers get little to none of this data. If I was negotiating with Amazon, Apple, Google, and Kobo, my top request would be realtime access to anonymized aggregate data from these services.

First, let us be thankful that publishers have bungled their negotiations with Amazon, otherwise Cory’s dinner guests would have their small-talk questions met with a stream of “anonymized aggregate data.”

More seriously, though: I don’t begrudge him the right to be frustrated about the relative opacity of sales reporting to authors (he’s wrong about publishers being in the dark—Bookscan?--but I’ll allow that even if he saw what we do know, he might still want more). But let’s consider a world of “realtime access to anonymized aggregate data from these services” for a moment. What would an author do with that data that’s better than what he’s doing now? What should I, a publisher, do with that data that’s better than what I’m doing now?

Can we entertain for a moment the possibility that a world where the best things an author can do after she’s finished a book are

a) go be an interesting, engaging person (note I didn’t write “salesperson”) in real and virtual communities of book lovers and
b) write another damn novel

is actually not a half bad world?

And similarly, let’s consider that a world where the best things an editor can do after he’s published a book are

a) go be an interesting, engaging person (note I didn’t write “salesperson”) in real and virtual communities of book lovers and
b) edit another damn novel

is also a pretty fine place to live.

I think Cory Doctorow is smart person who’s worth listening to on these subjects. (I think he does a pretty good job of succeeding in the world I mentioned above too.)  And I also think data is good. I wouldn’t want to do my job without our many sales reporting tools (even the ones Doctorow seems to think I don’t have).  I’m not naïve about where my paycheck comes from.

But I’m also not inclined to dismiss the elements of mystery and imprecision in measuring “how the book’s doing” at a given moment as bugs to be purged from the system with a fire hose blast of data. I have a sneaking suspicion the bug, as they say, might actually be a feature.

The winding road

One of the first questions I inevitably ask when I’m auditioning to be an author’s editor (what, you think you’re the only one who’s nervous in those initial conversations?) is “where did this manuscript come from?”

I love hearing about inspiration, about the unlikely kernels from which books grow. Sarah Aronson’s Believe has such a story, a Sarah tells it well.

Janine Collins, the protagonist of Believe, first took root in my mind thanks to a pile of tabloids. They were mostly People, and I was reading them in of all places, the hair salon. 

It was May 2006. I was in a particularly open mood for inspiration. My creative thesis for VCFA had just been approved. I had one more packet before graduation. My advisor, Tim Wynne-Jones had encouraged me to have some fun—do something different—go out with a bang.

I opened the magazine. The first thing I saw was a retrospective of Jessica McClure. Almost twenty years earlier, on October 14, 1987, she became famous after falling into a well.

I remembered that story as well as the media circus that followed her. Back then, this kind of attention was unique. CNN was a fledgling network. The 24 hours news cycle that we all take for granted now had yet to mature. That day, as I read the newest update, I couldn’t help but judge what she had done with her life—how she had used this “gift” of fame. When I got home, I looked for more stories about her. To my dismay, I found out that one of the EMT’s who had saved her had killed himself—he became depressed when his fifteen minutes of fame ended.

Fame is a theme that has always interested me, particularly this modern kind of fame. I was also very interested in exploring faith. I asked myself: what if Janine was the sole survivor of a suicide bombing? How would faith communities respond to her? What if the bombing had crushed her own beliefs?

It took me many tries and many drafts to figure out how best to tell this story. I probably drove my friends crazy. At one point, in complete confusion, I deleted everything but the prologue. A few times, I wrote sections in third person. In general, I like to re-imagine my stories, but at times, this story shook my confidence. The first turning point came after Norma Fox Mazer read a chunk of the book. She sent me some ideas, but unfortunately, we never got to talk about the book as we had planned. After her death, I kept looking at her advice. It almost felt like I was decoding a secret message. I was determined not to waste her wisdom. At that point, there was no way I could forget about this novel.

In the end, I focused back on character. And motivation. And theme. I embraced the idea of a girl with a public story that had dominated and, perhaps, ruined her life. I immersed myself (without judgment) into our world of social media, reality TV, 24 hours news and religion. The story became clear.

I knew the book was ready to be submitted when People published another update about Jessica. This time, for Janine, I didn’t read it. I didn’t need to.

Needless to say, this is a story that captivated me. Not only was Sarah’s Janine caught in the maelstrom of our peculiar culture of celebrity, I thought Sarah captured beautifully the ways in which that maelstrom magnified an essential—maybe the essential—teenage question, which is, of course, “What’s it going to be then, eh?” What am I going to do with my life is a question every teenager faces in our culture. In Janine’s case, the answer is also the subject of great national fascination.

I’m thrilled with how Sarah’s “something different” came out, and I’m not alone in this regard:

“I was fascinated by this thoughtful, twisty, and convincing story about faith in the media age. Halfway through, I felt so deeply for Janine that I found myself looking at my own hands and wondering what I'd do if I were her.” -Nancy Werlin, New York Times bestselling author of Impossible and The Rules of Survival

If you’d like an early look too, name the source of my essential teenage question in the comments. First three get an ARC.

The Underdog

Vaunda Micheaux Nelson’s novel No Crystal Stair  is the last book standing in SLJ’s annual Battle of the Books. I could not be prouder—especially given the stunning quality of the finalists* and indeed of the whole bracket.

NCS (because it was an all-acronym finals this year) seems to have been something of a surprise winner, if the comments are to be believed, and I think there’s a certain poetry to that fact. After all, Lewis Michaux was a man who, when applying for a loan to open a bookstore in Harlem, was told to sell fried chicken instead. “Negroes don’t read,” the banker said. No one would bet on Lewis.

A couple decades later, after selling precisely zero fried chickens and an untold number of books** to countless Negroes, things had changed for Lewis. I thought of this passage when I read Frank Cottrell Boyce’s Big Kahuna post on Monday morning:

 

Yes indeed, some respect for The House of Common Sense and Proper Propaganda. And we’re all very grateful for it.

 

* You know who’s classy as hell? Elizabeth Wein. Anyone who heard her Boston Globe Horn Book honor speech can attest to that. And now anyone who reads the comments on the Big Kahuna post will too:

 

 

** Literally untold, as in he wouldn’t tell anyone:

Lewis starts at around 1:00.

Free but not cheap (or trustworthy)

My days as a heavy reader of RSS-supplied blogs are mostly in the past. Twitter has long since supplanted a carefully tuned “pub blogs” folder in my Google Reader, and I haven’t actually used the Reader interface to read blogs for a couple years (Feed Demon, Feedler, Reeder, NetNewsWire, and others have been my front ends of choice). However, like many others if Twitter and Facebook yesterday evening are to be believed, I use  Reader every day—even if only as the backend, syncing and managing the various RSS feeds.

I’ll need to find another solution by July 1, because Google is shuttering Reader—a service that clearly has millions of regular nonpaying users. It strikes me that the lesson here is that this is the moment Reader ceases to be cheap, even though I remain a nonpaying user. True, I’m going to end my 8 year ride on Reader without giving Google a dime directly, but now I have to spend time finding a replacement—time I didn’t plan on spending.

What will I look for in a new feed syncing/RSS reading service? A fee. If Google couldn’t monetize this service by selling the users (because to Google, the users are the product to be sold, not the software) no one can. So I’m going to find a service on a different model, one where I am the customer, not the product.

It sounds weird, but I want to have fewer free things in my life. It’s cheaper that way.

Manuscript formatting and prep screencasts

I don’t know if this is by popular demand or if many will find this useful, but here are two screencasts of what I do to clean up and format manuscripts of almost all types (pictures books are the only exception).

Click “Watch on YouTube” for best scaling options. (I suggest 720p).

Basic invisible-character elimination.

For the bold-ish and the quasi-brave.

I think everyone should do the first video. The second is as needed and as you find it useful. Questions in the comments or on Twitter @andrewkarre.

It hardly gets any better

It hardly gets any better than publishing debut novels. If I may be utterly self-indulgent for a bit, there is a pleasure special to editors in looking back at an author’s first book in light of all their subsequent work. And I've been very blessed in this regard over the past seven years or so. And it’s frankly heartwarming to witness the support established authors give to newcomers here in the kidlitosphere. The generosity never ceases to amaze me.

So allow me to introduce the two debutante Lab Rats for fall 2013, including their jackets and some advance accolades from fellow authors. Click the caption below the jacket to see everything.

A Wounded Name by Dot Hutchison

Sex & Violence by Carrie Mesrobian

So many people help get a debut book to an audience, but Tess Gratton, Victoria Schwab, Andrew Smith, Geoff Herbach, Patrick Jones, and Trish Doller all deserve special thanks for helping launch Carrie and Dot. My eternal gratitude to you all.

But wait, there's more!

Would you like to win an ARC of these two debuts? Would you like to win an ARC packed in a box with a copy of every debut novel Lab has ever published? There are two ways to accomplish this:

1. Send me a video of you reciting a few lines from Hamlet. No costumes or staging necessary. No, I'm not kidding.

Here's mine:

And here's how a pro does it:

2. Send me a video of you reciting the Official Carolrhoda Lab poem, which is equally applicable to either of these novels.

Stick a link in the comments or email carolrhodasubmissions@lernerbooks.com.

On March 1, I'll pick three winners.