If you’re doubting the way consumers are pushing the publishing industry, witness the numbers released by Apple. In just a few days since the release of the iPad, the facts are:
That’s a weekend and perhaps a couple of days. The dollars are speaking. The trees are rejoicing.
A FoE just pointed me in the direction of this brief article by James Gavin for the not immediately identifiable site The Morning Call. Despite the brevity of the story and the site, which badly needs a redesign (call me, editors. My team awaits.), it got me thinking about something I literally think of every couple of days. Letter writing.
I miss letter writing. Badly. I had twenty years of intense letter writing with friends and other writers. Sometimes it was one-sided. I’d need therapy and would fire Howitzers of written rants about my life. Other times, I’d be on the receiving end, and take great pleasure in reading long letters about what they were doing far away. Now they’re either deceased or passed on to something worse: married lives where they’ve stopped being who they once were because of time constraints caused by financial pressures, television, home repair, and on and on and on.
My last great letter-writing friend was the poet Tom Trzaskos. I miss Tom rather badly. We were only in each others’ presence a few times during my long run working at the Sarah Lawrence Summer Writers’ Conference. His saint of a mother, Theresa, would drive him all the way down from central Connecticut for just a few hours, where he was able to glow in new surroundings and many other poets. He made no secret he loved me. As an only child, I imagine he loved me the way close brothers love one another.
Tom spent all the years I knew him in a wheelchair. He suffered from a progressive genetic disease not unlike amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or multiple sclerosis. He wrote me about it but I never asked him what the official diagnosis was. It didn’t matter. We lived far enough away that we rarely saw each other. Ours was a friendship of letters, and in that, there was something much richer than friends who see each other every week.
He had nothing but time, and I’d send him a letter, only to be replied to a few days later by an eight or ten page monologue about poetry, women, politics, or all that and more. The following day, I’d get another, then another. There was no way I could keep up, but I tried to write at least once a week. As my own life included other duties, my replies wouldn’t be as frequent, which was always a source of guilt.
Tom loved science fiction and spent endless hours making VHS tapes of space scenes from films and editing them together as he saw fit. He dreamed of spaceflight for himself, and the parallels between him and Stephen Hawking, whom he didn’t care much for, were unavoidable. With his own body failing him, but his mind brilliant, Tom would occasionally write me about the possibility of downloading his consciousness into some data format to be recompiled at a later time, i.e., eternal life.
The biggest thing in my life during those years was writing and women, two things you can never truly believe you’re doing your best at. There’s always room to improve in some way, it seems. I’ve written essays unread by others on parallels between these two issues. Maybe now with the Egatz Epitaph is back in action, I’ll post them some day.
That’s mostly what I wrote Tom about, I’m sure: writing and women. He always replied with encouragement to send more. He liked reading my crazy dating tales, my miserable struggles to attain the mate perfect for me, my stupid decisions, my tragic leavings. He wrote me in vivid detail of his own limited dating experience before becoming wheelchair-bound. His descriptions of a girl he took to one dinner were so heartbreaking I’ve often thought of looking her up to let her know.
One thing which made me crazy was reading about Tom falling in love with his caregivers. He was forced to live with his mother, and she worked a day job. Eventually, he needed full-time care, and I would see him go through emotional train derailments, pouring every waking second into his feelings for women who were just doing their jobs. He gave one of them a considerable amount of cash, while all she did was talk about a guy she was in a relationship with. It was tragic, but his letters were so rich and moving I couldn’t help but read them carefully, savoring the richness. It was difficult to not want to scream advice, but Tom had few options for emotional connections with the outside world.
His letters were filled with other pieces of heartbreak. The father who left long ago, and the soulless teenagers who once pulled him out of his wheelchair to leave him lying on a sidewalk were among two of the standouts I think of ten years after receiving my last letter from him.
We disagreed wildly over what we thought was good poetry. I did my thing fairly consistently, but Tom was all over the place. He suffered from the incomprehensibility of some kind of postmodern-tainted, broken narrative. His poems were often about the caregivers he had fallen in love with, and hence, they were, to use one of his favorite words, tragic. As equally important as sharing our poems, we turned each other on to different writers. I know Georg Trakl and Tomas Tranströmer thanks to Tom, for instance. I turned him on to Frank Stanford, whom Tom thought I looked like. He became absolutely obsessed with Stanford. He wrote letters to everyone he could find who knew the late poet. Later, he became pen pals with Ginny Stanford, Frank’s widow.
Tom couldn’t be bothered with submitting his poems to magazines and journals. He had been through that route before I met him, and as I later would, he gave up. Unlike myself, he self-published two large format books, which look like Kinko’s jobs: spiral bound, poorly designed, but full of hope, vision, and heart. Both were published in 1994. One is entitled A Gardening of Moonlight Beings, the other, Anglaise. They are varied, and, at times, seem as if they were written by different writers. I keep them on my bookshelves with all the other volumes published by firms with names you’d recognize.
I was dating a yoga instructor when Tom died. I hadn’t heard from him in a month or two, and that was very uncharacteristic. I wrote him a long letter about my new relationship, and how I thought it would be the last one I would ever have, which is how many people, including romantic poets, think each good one will be. Of course, it wasn’t. Tom’s mother wrote me back to explain he had passed away in a hospital after he was unable to battle off a germ which resulted in pneumonia. She had too many things going on to deal with a nutcase who wrote letters to her son, so I was unaware of his funeral. It felt like I lost him twice. Selfish, yes, but that is what letter writing is about: detailing what’s happening to us and waiting for commentary, giving advice when it’s rarely asked for.
My yoga instructor girlfriend cried when she read the obituary and newspaper article Tom’s mother cut out and sent to me. She said, “How could someone do that? How could someone pull a person out of a wheelchair and leave them on the ground?” Well, they’re human, and humans are capable of terrible things when their minds are closed. But what struck me as more profound than understanding cruelty of humans was that Tom’s accounts of the incident were infinitely deeper and vivid than what some newspaper hack had written. Tom was not only a poet, but a letter writer. He mined what he was and made literature out of it; a kind of literature rapidly disappearing from the world. We are all complicitous in this with each phone call made and each email sent—as complicitious as someone who watches the disabled pulled from wheelchairs and do nothing to intercede.
Of course, I miss Tom, and still love him like a lost brother I’m awaiting return from some difficult campaign. Of course, I know the reality, but I still find myself walking to the mailbox and looking for his crazy scrawl on an envelope. I can walk to the mailbox, unlike my old friend. Sometimes I find myself getting up on a ladder or crawling under my car or grabbing the woman I love and thinking how Tom couldn’t do these things for much of his life. In that, I feel selfish and guilty and mournful. As with so much of what writers do, I not only miss reading him, but I miss the opportunity to write him back. I have much to share with him; much more than an email or a phone call could ever convey.
Thanks to Oddity411.
Marc Aronson recently published interesting thoughts on the cost of copyright reprints, e-books and micropayments. With permission costs spiraling out of control, many publishers have encouraged authors to not include excerpts of poems, song lyrics, or photos in their work. Authors can’t afford these costs when self-publishing, of course. Publishers themselves are throwing darts blindfolded when trying to estimate how many copies of each book will be sold. It’s impossible for them to foresee the future to establish how many books will sell, how many copies are needed, and hence, how much a bad, unpunctuated line from Frank O’Hara is worth when reprinted in the next big thing.
The answer is go digital. To fix the permissions cost guessing game, do it sooner, rather than later. Things will get easier when there’s an exact accounting of how many copies of any e-book sold. This is happening whether we like it or not. While a sick bibliophile like myself will always love to turn a page of dead tree pulp, eventually, I and others like me will be dead. If we don’t blow ourselves up any time soon, future generations will save forests by reading electronic media.
If you’re a writer who has created something someone else wants to reprint, here’s something to consider. Would you rather get a small renumeration for each copy sold, or would you rather let a few guys in an office decide what they were going to pay you as a flat rate? I need not remind you of how creative accountants can get. Ask anyone who owned Enron stock.
This is worth thinking about. If publishers of the future and authors who create what they publish are not worried about repressive payments for permissions, more material will be quoted. Characters in novels will be able to sing entire verses and songwriters will get paid. Movies and television shows can be quoted in short fiction. Paintings can be used in biographies. The list is endless.
As a poet, I’d be most happy if I was getting my lines quoted in other books. Some readers who had never heard of me might get their interest piqued, attracting more readers to the source material. Me. That could also mean more sales of my books.
As a publisher of other peoples’ writing, I’d be more than happy to have a fair way to divide the proceeds of a sale. All it will take is some new blood on the Quicken team, and the publishing and writing industries can be changed forever.
As technology has made the electoral college obsolete, so stands poised the roulette wheel of permissions payment estimates. Now, if we can just get corporations to give up without the lengthy, ugly death throes we can expect whenever anyone is asked to give up power they’ve abused for far too long.
A new FoE who had read the Poems Out Loud interview sent me this link. He knew I’d have no interest in the article other than the fact the author of the article, “MrDisgusting,” has felt the need to insert the most unnecessarily used word in English into a perfectly fine quote.
“Dan Aykroyd called ‘ol pal and Ghostbusters co-star Bill Murry [SIC] and snarled ‘stop acting like a jerk’, ” Walker reported. “Murray, despite agreeing to doing the film, has suddenly turned so cranky and mean [that] he refuses to answer phone calls.”
One could argue it might be Mike Walker who inserted the offending word. Who knows? Who cares? Someone should’ve caught it, and someone else should’ve educated the offender many years ago. One day there will be a reckoning concerning that.
Thanks to MikeL.
Chad Harbach has sold a novel about Wisconsin baseball for approximately $650,000. Much is being made in the media about his being essentially an unemployed Harvard grad. He edits a literary journal, probably the most thankless job after editing an independent literary press. Good for you, Mr. Harbach. Although I’d rather watch my garbage cans until they’re picked up rather than suffer through watching another major league baseball game, reading about baseball when it’s well written is a different story. Often art definitely is better than life. If you disagree, think about Hollywood for the past hundred years.
More interesting than that, of course, is the deal allegedly struck. This may be the last big advance for an “unknown” fiction writer we’ll be seeing for quite some time; possibly ever. Good for you, Mr. Harbach. Now, the pressure to make back that advance for The Man.
Weighing in at 18.1 megabytes, Apple’s iBooks application is now available for download to use on the iPad. It’s users’ gateway to the iBookstore, where readers can purchase books and periodicals.
Aside from most Americans essentially being unable to read anything longer than what can fit on a milk carton, can anyone explain why iBooks is an app which must be downloaded, as opposed to shipping with the hardware? Can anyone accurately explain why the use of iPad as a Kindle-killing e-book reader was barely a mentioned in the official rollout and subsequent PR?
Steve, Steve, Steve. You are as vexing as you are brilliant.
Despite all the iPad hype, very quietly, Jobs has done it again. When it comes to writers, we have much to be thankful for regarding Apple CEO Steven P. Jobs. Famously, his vision and ability to identify quality enabled him to observe computer interface developments created at Xerox PARC. He built his own, superior version of it called the Lisa. Most of us came to know the technology behind the Lisa as the Macintosh, 1984’s miracle of computing interface. The 128k original Mac allowed writers, among countless others, to move words around effortlessly, and without penalty. Compared to MS-DOS—or anything else out there, for that matter—point and click with a mouse, the magic trio of copy, cut and paste and proportionally-spaced typefaces were lightyears beyond what computer engineers were dreaming of for endusers.
By recognizing the value of Adobe’s PostScript technology, writers were blessed once again when Apple introduced the LaserWriter. By building the LaserWriter to provide professional-looking output, Jobs gave countless writers (and designers) more work. This was text without jagged edges. Throw in a copy of Aldus PageMaker and for about ten thousand dollars, you could own a turnkey system which replaced typesetting systems costing deep into the six-figures. Suddenly, businesses everywhere created in-house newsletters. Someone had to generate the stories which filled those pages. Authors could produce better-looking hardcopy than they previously could on their ImageWriter printers, and often, better than newspapers.
There’s countless other things writers should thank the Great Jobs for. They include, but are not limited to, painless and reliable built-in networking, painless and reliable plug-in peripherals, true multitasking operating systems with protected memory, an all-around spiffy user interface, object oriented programming, the first stock email application, the death of the diskette, and more.
©2010 Apple Inc.
Since this is about writers, I’ll try to stick to just an additional few which are apropos. The iTunes Music Store is typically associated with consumers cherry picking songs they want, when they were previously shackled to buying entire albums, and often bad albums, at that. What you don’t hear much is how the iTunes Music Store helped align the audio book industry with consumer expectation. Most individuals I know who didn’t want to read found it absurd to have to buy an eight or ten audio CD set of a novel and pay $40 or more dollars for it. Who wants to fumble through eight CDs while you’re trying to avoid tractor trailers and road hazards on our decaying interstate highway system? Thanks to the Great and Powerful Jobs, not only did the price become more reasonable (and, yes, I state this as a consumer, an author, and a publisher), but by doing away with CDs, we’re saving space, slowing our inevitable destruction of the natural world just a tad, and preventing some accidents on the highway.
We’ve rarely seen the amount of speculation, hype, and insanity surrounding a consumer electronics product as we’ve seen around the iPad. With most pundits having never held one in their hands, there’s endless prognostications about how many Apple will sell or fail to sell, and what it will do. Most technology companies fantasize about consumer expectation the iPad generated before the public even knew what it would look like. Now that we have a reasonable understanding of the device before it ships, Apple has quietly announced something that will shake the publishing industry to its progressively multinational conglomerate core. If you live and/or work in Manhattan, be wary of using sidewalks for fear of senior editors and upper-level managerial types flinging themselves from windows.
The Great Jobs has done it again. He’s changed the world once more through an ingenious, yet obvious way which should’ve been normal, business-as-usual consumer patterns since the dawn of the Internet era. With the advent of the Gutenberg press, publishers of all kinds have had two things which kept authors relatively powerless and in a hostage-like position: physical media and its distribution.
Apple is about to change all that. As reported by AppleInsider, self-publishing authors can now get their creations into the hands of millions, thanks to Jobs, the iPad, and Apple’s iBookstore. The owners of LuLu and other print on demand solutions are drinking heavily, writing final notes, and loading handguns as I write this. If trees knew what was going on, they’d be sucking in carbon dioxide with great relief.
Allegedly, part of Apple’s stipulation on self-published offerings at the iBookstore is they must carry ISBN numbers. Our old friends at R.R. Bowker, the ISBN Agency in the United States responsible for assigning ISBNs, are rubbing their hands together and breaking out champagne. Way to go, Bowker! Ivy League tuition reimbursement for all employees’ offspring!
Amazon and Barnes and Noble have tried this. How many self-published breakout authors utilizing either one of these solutions can we name? How many writers do you know crowing about how many Kindle sales they’ve made with their self-published novels? When you type “self-publish” into the search field at B&N.com, you get sales choices, not information on how to self-publish with them. Len Riggio and his Walmart-like henchmen have famously long-struggled with Internet strategies, and, after arriving late to the party, have continually failed to make up for lost time.
Apple stands poised to show them how to do this right. The core strength of Apple has always been brilliant software with slick and intrinsic user interfaces. There’s no reason to believe self-publishing on the iBookstore will be any different.
As with previous revolutions kicked off by Jobs, the intelligent among us already know what will happen. When Apple democratizes previously financially unreachable technologies for the masses, the barbarians storm the castle, along with a lot of respectable content makers. Eventually, all things rise or fall to their level of incompetence. Dreck will pass largely ignored, except in rare cases of a self-published ebook going viral because of scandal, timely ridiculousness, or insanity.
On the other hand, quality will rise to the top. Well-written, professionally edited fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and other generes will gain precious exposure, organic public relations buzz, and ultimately, sales. This will happen in ways and via venues we can’t yet imagine. If anyone told AOL members in 1991 that an idea to sell used Pez dispensers online would create many millionaires, they’d have laughed and gone back to being hypnotized by the tones coming from their dial-up modems.
What’s more, careers will be created, and they won’t be created by multinational publishing concerns. Individuals and small startups will create jobs in the new publishing landscape where the heathen have entered the cathedrals swinging their badly-written and non-edited electronic manuscripts. Every spring our nation is awash in a fresh crop of MFA, MA, and, yes, Ph.D. graduates. Largely, these indebted youth wind up working unhappily in fields they were not trained in. Some of them will see this new opportunity to wind up making their own hours, sitting at home naked and writing reviews of a fortunate small percentage of titles riding in on the never-ending tsunami of self-published e-books.
There will always be a need for publishing companies. Customers know a decent publisher will provide quality products showcasing good editing, error-free copy, and a well-conceived cover and backcover, with blurbs by trusted, established authors and critics. If you doubt that, look at quality online publications like Slate, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, among others. Great reporting, carefully edited and fact-checked, will draw more readers than a poorly written screed blasted out by some yahoo who doesn’t know the difference between “your” and “you’re.”
Large publishing concerns are threatened, and they should be. They’ve had it too easy by controlling the physical media and its distribution. They will not be able to act like North Korea and assume or hope isolation will carry them through. Newspapers have already learned this lesson in spades. Unlike the days of analog information, data propagates, and does so at very little cost, especially via social media.
Apple, the iPad, and the Great and Powerful Jobs are going to change publishing. If you think Amazon, publishing on demand, Kindle, and used books available over the Internet gave readers more choices, that was just a drop in the ocean. Every bad idea for a novel by writers who haven’t read much will now have no excuse to not spend their evenings cranking out their unreadable tomes. The unending fantasy they will be able to quit their day jobs, write for a living, and be anointed by Oprah is now closer than ever.
Just some of the voting my dollars have done.
Publishing companies are not doomed if they stay nimble and progressive. That means the old ways of doing business will not apply as they once did. New publishers will arise from the inevitable gold rush and currently unrealized opportunities. I have many of thoughts on this, including notes from consulting gigs I’ve already undertaken for traditional publishers. Some have found their way into essays I may or may not post on The Egatz Epitaph, depending on feedback. I’m a writer and publisher, but I’m also a reader and consumer. I will vote with my dollars, as I’ve done buying dead tree books my whole life. Quality discoveries will still be waiting for editors in the slush pile. Good writing will out. Thanks, Steve. To borrow your phrase, the world is a better place.
William S. Burroughs once pointed out, “Man is a tool-using animal.” He was quick to add that without tools, humans don’t last long. I like tools, especially old tools. I have, for instance, a pair of one-hundred year old wirecutters. They belonged to my grandfather, and I mostly use them when changing guitar strings, and that’s a lot of use. I’ve got some other awesome analog tools I wouldn’t trade for anything, but regarding the digital tools I use, not too much is sacred.
If you’re a writer, using new tools can help jar you into new writing habits. If you’re open and receptive to a new workflow, it can result in helping you create a different kind of writing, almost the same way trying a sestina will push your writing in new directions. You might not finish your first sestina, but you can always mine it for good lines and images you can incorporate in other poems.
No matter your trade, sometimes you just need to shake things up. Changing your old gear can be a simple move, but superstitions are hard to break. It’s a pretty easy thing to do if you’re in the right frame of mind. Seemingly mundane things like replacing a favorite pen, a new size Moleskine or a new keyboard can do wonders.
Another approach for writers is a new word processing application. I’ve never been a fan of the kludgy interface that has long been the bane of Microsoft Word. In fact, I avoid Microsoft software as a general rule. If a client or publisher needs a document of mine in Word, I export it from Pages. They’re satisfied and I don’t have to give Microsoft any dollars. Double victory.
I love to set type. I’d done most of my word processing in QuarkXPress up until Adobe slaughtered it with InDesign 1.0 in 1999. Dave Eggers is the only other writer I’ve spoken to who agreed with me about how great it was to write in QuarkXPress. I felt that way until I found a better tool. I wonder if Dave has moved on to InDesign. It’s liberating, Dave. Try it.
InDesign is awesome in how beautiful you can make a page look, even if it’s just a short story manuscript. There’s something incredibly satisfying to me as a writer to create a manuscript page in InDesign with OpenType fonts like Minion Pro, of which I’ve been a huge fan since it was created by Robert Slimbach for Adobe in 1990. If you’ve got Minion installed on your computer, that’s what you’re seeing this blog typeset in.
If beautiful type isn’t what you’re looking for, there’s an answer. All the beauty of an InDesign document comes with a price. InDesign isn’t cheap. If you can afford to buy the application, the document sizes are fairly large in terms of space they take up on your hard drive. For those writers seeking a small footprint and corresponding price, there’s always alternatives.
If you want to pretend you’re living in 1982 and want the retro look of green type on a black background, you can now suffer the way your father suffered for The Man. Enter WriteRoom. Jesse Grosjean in Bangor, Maine runs Hog Bay Software. He specializes in software that doesn’t get in the way of your work. Stripped down and functional is essentially Jesse’s ethos. He runs a blog, and is interested in other things besides software development.
I’m a registered user of WriteRoom. When I need to move my head in a different direction, it’s there for me. It’s default font is Monaco, which helps bring back some of that dreaded DOS-era craziness. It hides everything else on your Mac by default with a black background. It appropriately violates Apple’s user interface guidelines by hiding the menu bar. The cursor is a blinking green block. Put on some Rick Springfield via iTunes and you’re in business.
WriteRoom doesn’t end there. You can use different fonts and type sizes, unlike how your father suffered with monospaced typeface the wizards of Redmond built into MS-DOS. You can open and save to rich text format with no problem. Even changing the scale of the document is possible: as a whole, the document can be made larger or smaller. This last feature alone would’ve been enough to prevent people from going postal thirty years ago.
Check out WriteRoom if you need to do what writers are made to do. There are few better solutions to block out the distractions and get the words down. Remember, man is a tool-using animal. Sometimes it’s good to get your hands on new tools.
Writing is a thing usually done in solitude, and, being an only child, that’s always been of interest to me. There’s no one else to hose you, no one else to blame. Well, no one to hose you or blame until the agents and attorneys get involved after you’ve finished creating. Writers are responsible for what they do or don’t do. That suits me.
I’m working on a project with my best friend, and it feels nice. I can’t mention anything about it now, but it involves a lot of writing and a lot of research. It’s deep and scary, but when you’ve got a co-creator, you tend to keep each other in line when distractions enter the picture.
Another project I have been formulating for the past two years now might really be getting some traction. A family member is interested in helping sell and executive produce a project. The ball is back in my court to put together a presentation.
It’s a strange world for me to think about working closely with others after doing what I’ve done for so many years. Part of it is learning to trust. Part of it is worrying about where I’ll find the time. Part of it is thinking about going on the road and reading my lungs out to promote the new book. The good thing about it is the universe is offering opportunities; things you shouldn’t refuse.
An aggregate site pointed me to a dilemma faced by Nadya Denise Doud-Suleman Gutierrez, known in the media as “Octomom.” She owes $450,000 on her home and is facing eviction. Vivid Entertainment has offered to pay off her debt if she has sex with strangers under some unforgiving camera lights. I don’t typically pay attention to non-news stories like this, but the deeper I probe, if you’ll pardon the expression, the more I feel my I.Q. leaking out of my ears.
Most porn flicks are shot in a day. That’s a pretty serious payday, especially when the bank is about to foreclose. I used to work as a production assistant on television commercials and corporate films, earning almost nothing for 20 hour overnight shoots.
On the other hand, you are what you do, and if you prostitute yourself for an afternoon to save the family homestead, your eight or fourteen children and their children will always be able to get their hands on Mom’s Big Adventure. This is not a small consideration.
Faustian bargain or no, one finds it impossible to realize hindsight is not necessary at this point in the narrative. It’s fairly obvious if you crank out fourteen children, life will not be easy by any stretch of the imagination.
I hope you have wise legal counsel and a superior therapist, Nadya. I have a tough time picking what shoes I’m going to wear each morning, or what poems I’m going to read as I approach the podium. You are more famous than most poets dream of becoming, although those fifteen minutes are a year behind you. A book of good poems lasts a little longer. My best thoughts to you on your difficult choice.