Authors, agents, and editors talk honestly about money

George Orwell, always prescient, once wrote, “If booksellers wanted to be millionaires, they’d be in another line of business.”

Few writers count on becoming millionaires, and just the promise of a book advance is enough to keep many motivated.  But in this time of transition, when publishers struggle with uncertain book sales and march towards new digital models, advances have waned.  The bulwark against day jobs and exigent debt, the champion of getting the writing done, the book advance is in retreat.

That is what writer and editor Meghan Ward discovered after she surveyed 105 authors in November 2011. Ward had heard rumors from colleagues and agents about the precipitous fall of advances, and because she is shopping a memoir of her modeling career (titled Paris On Less Than $10,000 Dollars a Day), she wanted to put the rumors to test.

“We hear that advances have plummeted in the last few years,” she said.  “One agent told me that advances are a quarter of what they were a few years ago.  Though I did not do a direct comparison, my survey clearly shows that advances were quite high in 2008 and have steadily declined since then.”

The authors Ward surveyed reported an average advance of $124,000 in 2008, and that number decreased to less than $60,000 in 2011, though the survey was taken shortly before the year ended.

Because of its small sample size, Ward’s survey is not comprehensive, but it does represent a range of authors—an illustrative cut of the market at large.  Authors with and without agents participated.  A third of the authors sold non-fiction books; the rest sold young adult titles, novels, memoirs, short story collections, and other books.  Most advances were given by “big six” publishing firms – that collection of industry captains including Random House, Harper Collins, and Penguin – but independent and medium-sized publishers were also in play.

Except for memoirs and young-adult titles, which garnered average advances that held steady above $100,000, book advances trended downward across all genres, for all authors.

“It’s really, really hard to sell books,” said literary agent Andy Ross. “Publishers are not being irrational. Large multi-media corporations have bought many of them, and they have much higher expectations for the return on their investment. They don’t take many risks. I talked to Random House, and they said if they don’t think they can sell 20,000 copies of a book, they will not buy it.  The bar is very high, and the big publishers are under a huge amount of pressure.”

Daniela Rapp, an acquisitions editor with New York publisher St. Martin’s Press, said that in the current business climate her company has also become risk-averse.

“We are generally even more conservative in evaluating sales potential than we used to be—e-books are eating into our print laydowns,” she said. “That there are fewer opportunities for media exposure in both print and other outlets makes acquisitions of certain projects more difficult.”

What about writers themselves?  Freelance Journalist Steve Kemper, whose book Labyrinth of Kingdoms, about a prominent and forgotten explorer of Africa, will be on bookshelves in June 2012, received a $250,000 advance in 2001 for his first book, Code Name Ginger.

That advance, he said, ”was extraordinary then and would be more so now.” He added that the advance for A Labyrinth of Kingdoms was nowhere near that amount.  “I don’t think it’s anybody’s business what I got,” he said in answer to a point-blank inquiry, “but I got enough to make me feel comfortable to write the book.”

Kemper mentioned that during the writing of Labyrinths he was forced to spend more time then he would have liked on magazine work to make ends meet.  As a result, he needed two months longer than anticipated to finish the book.

Like Kemper, most authors were reluctant to share specific dollar amounts of advances. Some echoed Orwell’s reminder that writing is rarely a lucrative business–tightfisted market or no. And some have clearly made their peace with that reality.

“Even in these difficult times I look to writing itself as a great privilege. I’ve been lucky to make a living doing what I love, and many people—writers, non-writers, furniture salesmen, nurses—aren’t so fortunate,” wrote Peter Orner in an email. His novel Love and Shame and Love was released last year, and he just signed a three-book deal with Little, Brown. “I would write even if I wasn’t able to make a living at it. That’s the nature of this. Anybody who doesn’t write because they know they won’t get rich is a) smart and b) probably not a writer.”

Orner’s recent success suggests that book publishers are hardly calling it quits. But they are in the midst of a harrowing transition, especially in the form of the book itself. According to The Association of American Publishers, between January 2010 and January 2011, e-book net sales leapt 115.8 percent. (See this update on e-books.) But e-book sales still comprise a small percentage of net book sales, and are not necessarily driving book advances.

It’s also a period of transition for book contracts, as publishers have begun to toy with different models. (Read this primer on bucks and book publishing.) Traditionally, authors received half an advance up front, and half upon acceptance. Today, advances are given in ever-growing numbers of installments, and some publishers, like the San Francisco-based McSweeney’s, have offered writers smaller advances in exchange for lucrative profit sharing terms.

But new terms don’t always favor the writer.

“There is an experiment with giving advances in chunks—a third, fourth or even fifth at a time, where the final payment would be after publication,” said Ross, who once owned the defunct Cody’s Books in Berkeley.

“The purpose of an advance is to get writer to sign on and to give them enough money to write the book. Now, essentially you’re getting an advance after the book is written,” Ross continued. “That’s not even an advance, that’s a behind.”

{Gianmaria Franchini writes fiction and non-fiction, and will settle for a five-figure advance.}

Is self-publishing really the way to go?

With a sidebar on what you need to know to do it yourself.

By Sarah Baker

Go to any panel on book publishing these days, and you’ll hear the hoopla over self-publishing. Easy to do! More control! A bigger cut of the profits! At a time when advances aren’t exactly advancing, editors are often too over-worked, and publicists are spending the house’s dimes on blockbusters, self-publishing sure sounds tempting. Add to this the allure of royalty rates of 70 percent or higher instead of the 15 percent (at most) from traditional publishers, and it’s no wonder all writers aren’t going indie.

But, wait. Self-publishing might be the word on everyone’s lips, but is it right for you?

“You have to decide what your goals are,” said thriller-writer and self-publishing guru Barry Eisler at a lecture in November 2011 at the Park Plaza hotel in Boston. For him, it seemed like a no-brainer. He had already published three books with a traditional, or what he calls “legacy,” publisher. He has a following, developed when he pounded the pavement one summer, visited 500 bookstores, and called on 1,200 bookstores in 40 states. Other things in his favor: His wife is a literary agent, so he has access to publishing professionals.

As if his platform weren’t enough already, the press from his decision to turn down $500,000 from St. Martin’s and go indie practically made him a household name. The mighty-marketing-machine Amazon is his publisher. He likes control. He likes business. He’s clearly very good at it.

But not everyone has built what Eisler has. For first-time authors, like Boston Globe reporter Billy Baker, who is armed with a literary agent and a nonfiction book idea, an advance from a traditional publisher is necessary for him to take time off from work to report and write. “I don’t have 50 grand in the bank,” he said.

Other authors make the point that they want the strong winds of a trusted publisher in their authorial sails. Pagan Kennedy, author of ten books including Spinsters and Black Livingstone, doubts she would ever go indie. “If you can live with 1,000 readers and not making any money, then fine. But, if you want an audience of 20,000 for your book—how do you get that?” she said.

So what should a writer weigh when considering self-publishing?

“Self-publishing had a stigma,” said Eve Bridburg, literary agent and founder of Grub Street, Inc., an independent literary-arts center in Boston.  But she points out some critical new factors: increasingly sophisticated self-publishing tools are available; you can distribute via the Internet (and not just via the back of a station wagon); Twitter and Facebook can help to spread the word. Then there is the payoff: higher royalty rates. So many more serious writers are self-publishing, she added, that Grub is now offering workshops not only in the craft of writing but in marketing and publishing, as well.

Many people are taking the plunge. An article by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg in the Wall Street Journal cites an estimate by R. R. Bowker, which tracks the publishing business: the number of self-published titles exploded 160 percent from 2006 to 2010 (that is, from 51,237 to 133,036.)

Some recent success stories—Amanda Hocking and John Locke, in addition to Barry Eisler—have helped fuel the movement. And let’s not forget that some historic bestsellers (What Color is Your Parachute and The Elements of Style, for example) started out as do-it-yourselfers (DIY), the old-school name for the self-published. They were acquired by traditional houses after they were already successful.

Sales figures for self-published books are difficult to track, and hard to interpret, since people choose this route for all sorts of reasons. Many are printing 10 copies of a memoir for the family or 100 for the business. Amazon.com doesn’t share overall sales figures of books, according to Brittany Turner of their public relations department. But, in an email she was willing to say that “John Locke and Amanda Hocking have both sold more than 1 million books using Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), 12 KDP authors have sold more than 200,000 books and 30 KDP authors have sold more than 100,000.” Over at Amazon’s self-publishing service site, CreateSpace, she added, former New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin self-published his memoir Katrina’s Secrets, which hit the Top 100 Best Sellers in Books on Amazon the week of its release.

(If you’ve seen anyone report on the other end of the spectrum—that is, the number of self-published authors who never surpass their break-even point—please post links in the comments section! The more solid information we all have, the better.)

Even traditional publishers are capitalizing on the popularity. Book Country is Penguin Books new foray into the do-it-yourself world. It’s a place for genre fiction writers to circulate their work, get feedback, and buy self-publishing services. “Self-publishing is a trend that isn’t going away,” said Book Country president Molly Barton to Calvin Reid of Publishers Weekly.

But all of this takes time and ingenuity. Martha McPhee, author of Dear Money and three other novels, said self-publishing would be like pushing a boulder up a mountain, and she wouldn’t know where to begin. Claire Messud, New York Times-bestselling author of The Emperor’s Children, equates self-publishing with home schooling.

Would you consider home schooling?

SIDEBAR: Should you self-publish?

If you want a professional-looking book with a chance of success you’ll need four things: Time, Money, Connections, and Gumption. Traditional publishers have been in the business for a long time and a book contract, despite that many authors accuse them of everything from neglect to abandonment, guarantees a professional process. You’ll have a well-oiled machine behind you so that you can focus on writing and promotion. If you want to replace them you’ll need to:

1. Hire a load of people if you aren’t a jack-of-all-trades: Editor, copyeditor, jacket designer, interior designer, publicist, marketer, rights salesperson (for foreign and first serial), Web site designer, printer, and distributor (for print books). If you’re publishing nonfiction you might need a lawyer to check for libel and an indexer to create an index. But buyer beware—these people work for you, so make sure they tell you what you need to hear and not what you want to hear.
2. Verify your account balance and uncap your pen—you’ll be writing a lot of checks.
3. Buy a Starbucks Card or a Nespresso machine. With the amount of work this will involve, you’ll need your caffeine. Self-publishing is akin to starting your own business.
4. Do the hustle. Work your friends on Facebook, your followers on Twitter, your old colleagues in the media, your local librarian, and your buddies in the bookstores to spread the word and buy the book.

Good luck.

{Formerly a book editor at Viking/Penguin and Simon & Schuster in New York City, Sarah Baker is now a freelance writer and an independent radio producer. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.}

The iPad may sometimes seem like a boondoggle for authors (Yet another must-have device? Now I need an app for my memoir?), but it has been a bona-fide boon for e-book vendors. Caught in the middle are agents and traditional publishers, trying to carve out new territory for themselves and their clients. In April 2010, Sarah Baker explained the finer points of the chaotic electronic book market, informing authors of the state of e-rights, royalties, piracy, and pricing in this competitive (and lucrative) landscape. Let’s trace the zigs and zags of the e-book industry in the year since.

How large is the e-book market?

According to a press release from the Association of American Publishers, e-book net sales leapt 115.8 percent between January 2010 and January 2011, comprising approximately 9 percent of the consumer book market. American readers spent $263 million on e-books in the first eight months of 2010 alone, and in October 2010, Amazon released a statement boasting that during the previous three months, it had sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover ones.

Who buys e-books?

In January 2011, Digital Book World—a forum for the digital publishing industry—posted a slideshow detailing the results of a customer survey on e-reading. Results indicated that typical e-book consumers are employed 30- to 44-year-olds in cities and suburbs, followed by 45- to 54-year-olds and then 18- to 29-year-olds. The survey also revealed that sharing the literary love is good marketing strategy: nearly 40 percent of respondents reported purchasing an e-book after receiving a free sample chapter, and almost 30 percent reported buying an e-book after receiving a free one from the same author.

What should I be aware of in my contract?

According to an article by the Author’s Guild, publishers typically request broad grants of electronic rights in their contracts. However, because digital copies of a book can easily be sold long after physical printing has ended, the time limit on e-rights retention by publishers may remain open-ended. “Typically, rights revert to the author when [a book] goes out of print, but everything changed with print-on-demand and e-books,” said Paul Aiken, executive director of the Author’s Guild. Aiken advises authors to modify the out-of-print reversion of rights clauses in their contracts to stipulate that if digital book sales don’t hit a certain number in a 12-month period, e-rights revert to the author.

Literary agent Ted Weinstein says that contract modifications like these are the goal of many literary agents fighting to establish new industry standards. But Weinstein cautions authors to let experienced agents take the lead in contract negotiations. “Authors can work themselves into a neurotic frenzy, but I say worry only about the stuff that is in your realm,” Weinstein said. And, he adds, get a good agent. (Start with the Association of Author’s Representatives.)

What royalties should I expect?

E-book royalties for authors have coalesced at 25 percent of the publisher’s receipts. This a higher royalty than is standard for hardcovers (12 to 15 percent) or paperbacks (7.5 percent); however, the sale price of e-books tends to be much lower than that of bound books, so in absolute terms an author is likely to earn less in royalties on e-books—unless the digital format allows for the sale of many more volumes.

In an online article, the Author’s Guild argues that publishers will reap far greater profits on e-books, and that this could distort publishers’ incentives and ultimately hurt authors. The Guild did the math on authors’ royalties and publishers’ gross profits for several popular hardcover titles using industry-standard contract terms (15 percent royalty for hardcover sales and 25 percent for e-book sales). For example, Kathryn Stockett, author of The Help, earns $3.75 in hardcover royalties, while her publisher earns $4.75 in profit. However, Stockett earns $2.28 in e-book royalties, while her publisher nets $6.32—a 39 percent loss per book for the author and a 33 percent e-gain for the house.

Some writers, including Terrill Lee Lankford, author of Blonde Lightning, have balked at the 75/25 royalty split. Lankford, in a blog for Publisher’s Weekly, aired his decision to walk away from a publishing contract altogether in protest. Yet, Lankford and the Guild are hopeful that as authors demand better rates, and digital sales begin to overtake print sales, the playing field will level. The current royalty rate “runs against a long-standing tradition of essentially splitting net proceeds from book sales,” Aiken said. When big-name authors—and even authors who are not at the top of the food chain—say, “‘my market is now 50 percent digital and I’m not going to be a junior partner,’” publishers will take notice. Once one publisher begins to sign known authors at a higher rate, Aiken added, other publishers will have to follow suit or risk losing business.

How are e-books priced?

On March 1, the New York Times reported that Random House became the last of the six largest U.S. publishers to switch to the “agency model” for the pricing of e-books, in order to sell its 17,000 e-titles through Apple’s iBookstore. Under this model, publishers set the list price for their e-books and online booksellers return 70 percent of this amount to the publishers for each sale, taking a 30 percent commission per book. Under the “wholesale model,” preferred by Amazon, publishers sell e-books to Amazon at about half the list price and Amazon sets the Kindle price.

The move from “wholesale” to “agency” pricing has finally broken the mega-retailer’s hold on the largest share of the e-book market: Amazon can no longer artificially lower the price of e-books in order to attract more online business. “You need competition not just among authors and publishers, but also on the distribution end,” Aiken said. “Without the agency model you’re in a winner-take-all situation, and the winner is Amazon.”

Predictably, the “agency model” has led to an overall increase in e-book prices from the “standard” 2009 Amazon listing of $9.99, spurring some e-reader owners to leave hostile comments and one-star ratings on vendors’ websites. According to a New York Times article, under new publisher agreements with Apple and Amazon, the prices for newly released e-books will rise to between $12.99 and $14.99 in the coming months. Aiken says that we are likely to see additional price fluctuation because publishers must now measure how incremental increases or decreases in price affect their volume of digital sales.

Do books ever go straight to e-book?

Some trade publishers have been experimenting with releasing titles straight to e-book—typically timely digital releases followed shortly by print editions. But in a tight publishing market, the Author’s Guild reports that midlist and maverick authors are being wooed by the prospect of self-publishing. Agent Weinstein asks: What are publishers really doing for authors when anyone can publish an e-book through Amazon in minutes and receive 70 percent of the proceeds?

The answer, of course, is that publishing houses offer advances, edit manuscripts, and market the finished product. Yet niche outlets, including Self-Publishing Boot Camp, provide opportunities for those capable of aggressive self-promotion. The rag-to-riches story of young-adult fantasy author Amanda Hocking, who sold more than 400,000 e-books in January 2011, is a testament to the power of social networking and the equalizing potential of the digital-book format.

What is the state of e-book piracy?

E-book piracy has been slow to take hold, but a study by Attributor—an online content-monitoring firm—indicates that authors and publishers may yet face the challenges recording artists and record labels did with the introduction of the iPod. “All the same mechanisms that have made music and movies stealable online are there for e-books now,” Aiken said. “It can hit overnight and decimate an industry.” In January 2010, the Attributor blog claimed that e-book piracy costs the publishing industry nearly $3 billion annually, or roughly 10 percent of U.S. book sales.

E-book files are small, and several thousand titles can be easily packaged into a single torrent requiring less than 4GB of memory. Author and C-Net blogger David Carnoy realized in February 2011 that the digital version of his novel Knife Music was being pirated in just such a package. Carnoy believes that a rise in the popularity of the Kindle e-reader and the spectacular success of the iPad have “supercharged” e-book piracy. Still, the variety of e-book file formats and the relative novelty of the technology mean that piracy has not yet had the same devastating effect on the publishing industry as it has on other sectors.

Check back with us next year for a report on the swordfights over that subject.

A San Francisco literary agent on the digitization of books

In 2002, Google initiated a secret project with a noble goal: to make the knowledge in the world’s 130 million books available to anyone connected to the Web. Thanks to the exploding smartphone market, by the end of the decade, this will include most of the people on the planet. But some feel that the project, now public and known as Google Book Search, has flown in the face of Google’s noble motto: “Don’t be evil.”

Indeed, the very idea of digitizing books in copyright without permission was viewed as pernicious by the writing and publishing community, which created a firestorm of protest and took various tacks to block Google’s attempt to commandeer our literary heritage.

Remember: Power corrupts. Far too much power these days rests in the hands of fewer and fewer people—or fewer corporations. After all, corporations like Google, Amazon, or the not as menacing Barnes & Noble, exist for one purpose and one purpose only, as noted by Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich in a recent San Francisco Chronicle column:  “to make as much money as possible.”

Unless stopped, technology companies like Google and Amazon, the leading online bookseller, will control the culture for which they are now the gatekeepers. Access to books is far more important than quarterly dividends. Allowing books to become victims of the corporate imperative will lead to evil being done to readers, writers, students, libraries, and publishers.

Consider this three-part solution:

1. Google should seize the opportunity created when U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin ruled against its plan, citing concerns about copyright, privacy, and monopoly. Google should turn to the publishing community to make decisions about how the corporation provides access to books. Google might finance a nonprofit governing board, which would decide how best to balance access and profit in the public interest. The board would include a representative from Google, the Association of American Publishers, the American Booksellers Association, the American Library Association, the Library of Congress, the Author’s Guild, the Association of Authors’ Representatives, the American Board of Higher Education, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the World Intellectual Property Organization, and perhaps other organizations.
2. These organizations can elect a member to serve a single two-year term for the part-time position in return for the income the member presently earns plus expenses. The ideal candidates will have integrity, creativity, and a passionate dedication to the public’s right to access books.
3. The board’s monthly meetings should be made transparent: Televise them, show who votes for what, and post the text of its meetings on the Web.

After two setbacks, let us hope that Google will see the wisdom in surrendering control to assure profits. If it does, the courts and the international book community will look more kindly on its efforts.

History has proven Napoleon right: “Humanity is only limited by its imagination.” All that separates conception and achievement are time and resources.  Creativity and collaboration across media, disciplines, and borders will continue to unleash a growing torrent of wonders.

{Michael Larsen is a partner in Larsen-Pomada Literary Agents, author or coauthor of eleven books, including How to Write a Book Proposal, and co-director of the San Francisco Writers Conference.}

E-books arrived at America’s bookstores on December 6, 2010, with the announcement that Google eBooks would be sold through independent bookstores, including my own, Book Passage in Northern California. Bibliophiles like me greeted the news with a mixture of excitement and trepidation.

Google eBooks are stored “in the cloud,” so you can read them on your computer, iPhone, iPad, and other devices. We liked this flexibility, as well as Google’s willingness to support bookstores like ours, and you can now buy e-books from our Web site. (There is a full FAQ at the Book Passage Web site to acquaint you with Google eBooks.)

Many breathless digerati have been heralding the arrival of e-books as a sign that the reign of the printed word is over. Soon, they claim, everyone will be reading digital type on backlit screens. Not so fast, booksellers say. We are generally happy to have an array of electronic books to offer to our customers, but few of us are tearing down our bookshelves.

Hardware-store owners may rave over a favorite screwdriver, and kitchen-store owners may fall in love with a set of pottery, but there’s nothing to match the bookseller’s love for a well-crafted book. Go to any meeting of independent booksellers, and you’ll find them swarming over authors, ogling brilliant cover designs, and passionately debating this passage or that. Booksellers consider themselves the inheritors of a 600-year-old tradition. We will do almost anything to maintain the quality of the books we offer our customers, and we bristle at the thought of anything that might undermine us.

The Luster of Books

Part of that “quality of books” is the printed page itself. The sheer physicality of books is part of their strength. I’m not just talking here about luscious paper, tasteful font, or smart design. Books on a library shelf or bookstore table support each other in a myriad of ways, one leading to another. Pick any book off the shelf, and your attention may be drawn to the ones next to it. “Touch me,” they seem to say. “I have something you want to know.” When you pass shelves of books—some of them familiar, others new and intriguing—their presence can reset your mind and give you purpose. By the time you reach the book you want, your mood may have changed from when you entered the door. You’re ready to read, and the book is ready to do its work.

For my wife, Elaine, and I, books “do their work” in a number of ways. Among our houseful of books is a large collection about food. These books are truly visceral in their impact. Sure, the recipes might be found on the Epicureus app, and some photos have probably wandered into the bowels of Flickr. But, for us, it is these books that inspire the inner chef.

The same is true of the children’s books that are scattered around our house. I can still see the pictures of the first book I had as a child—and feel the weight of it on my lap. (Can I remember the first Web page I ever saw? Hardly.) And the warmth that comes in curling up on the couch and reading with one of my grandchildren will never be replaced by leaning over a screen.

The Lust for an E-Book

As a kid I was known to carry a book with me everywhere. Decades later, being caught somewhere without a book to read is one of my worst nightmares. That’s why a recent experience with Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 was so maddening. I was about 50 pages into this riveting work when I lost it in the Heathrow Airport lounge—at the start to a three-week vacation. Damn! I groused about it for days, knowing that I’d have a hard time finding another copy in a small town in Italy. I can see why travelers might want to have e-books on hand to get around the restrictions on airplane luggage. And if my vision were impaired, I would welcome the opportunity for an e-book with adjustable print-size.

Yes, electronic books have their place. As it has become clear that electronic books are part of the literary landscape, it has also become clear that independent bookstores are an ideal place to buy them. Why? Because independent bookstores reflect the sensibility of the booksellers who work there.

No two stores are alike. But once you are in such a store, book selection becomes a two-way street: You are no longer just heading towards a book, because the books are seeking you out. Bookstores do this in many different ways. Some emphasize their careful selection of books, the manner in which they are displayed, and the shelf-talkers with staff recommendations. Others cultivate the person-to-person relationships, with booksellers making recommendations, hosting book clubs, encouraging customers to arguing in the aisles over the merits of a book. Many of us also invite authors to read from their work and take questions from our most avid customers. Some of this is serendipity, but it arises from a setting in which books and book lovers find themselves at home.

Giving Google a home

Book Passage will now bring this same sensibility to Google eBooks, which means that we will feature the best selection of electronic books in the market. It’s a pleasure to be working with a company of Google’s size, expertise, and reputation. This assures us that we can offer the finest electronic books and keep pace with new developments in the e-books field. And we believe that Google sees our role as helping it to reach the most dedicated and sophisticated readers in America.

Books have outlived some of new technologies and learned to live with others. There’s every reason to believe that books and e-books will learn to accommodate each other and find their proper place in any reader’s collection. And as lovers of printed books we welcome our new electronic cousins into the household. We’ll learn to love and respect each other —just as long as they don’t barge into the kitchen and start trying to run things.

{Bill Petrocelli is an author, a bookseller, and a former attorney. For the past three decades he has been the co-owner with his wife Elaine of Book Passage, a retail bookstore in San Francisco and Corte Madera.}

Exploring the split personality of a literary term

Style may not seem like such a sticky word, but ask writers and editors to define it, and you’ll find yourself in the mire. Some will tell you that style dictates whether you should use O.K. or okay, D.J. or deejay, an apostrophe before or after the s. Others will insist that style refers to sentences that swing, or paragraphs that unfurl with panache.

Look up style in a dictionary, and you may actually find the word panache—as well as synonyms like fashionable elegance, grace, and ease of manner. But the dictionary echoes the paradox mentioned above, too: among the definitions of style are “a distinctive manner of expression” and “conventions, used in writing or printing, that dictate spelling, punctuation, capitalization, and typographic arrangement and display.”

That second definition is owned by denizens of the Associated Press, the University of Chicago, and the Modern Language Association, who have laid down conventions in, respectively, the AP Style Guide, the Chicago Manual of Style, and the MLA Handbook. This reference-book troika has shored up copy editors for generations. Then there are the Young Turks, with the impertinence to publish their own style guides, whether the editors of Wired in the 1990s (of whom I was one) or the staff at Yahoo!, who just published The Yahoo! Style Guide: Writing, Editing and Creating Content for the Digital World. Many of these style guides pretend to be about panache when they are really more about prissy rules. They trade on the split personality of the word style.

I blame Strunk and White for the confusion. Their ever-popular Elements of Style smashes the two unlike ideas together. To E. B. White and his co-author William Strunk, style referred to “cleanliness, accuracy, and brevity in the use of English.” Their slim book, first published in 1957 and revised since, offers eleven “elementary rules of usage,” as well as lists of expressions “commonly misused” and words “often misspelled.”

Usage, though, is different from style; it refers to the way words and phrases are actually used in a community sharing a common language. (For example, those in the know don’t confuse irritate and aggravate; they use the former for something that vexes, annoys, or inflames and the latter for something that makes matters worse. For more on the difference between style and usage, see my list of style guides and usage manuals.)

To their lists of spelling and usage bugaboos, Strunk and White added “a few matters of form,” eleven “elementary principles of composition,” and a twenty-one-item “approach to style.” And there’s the rub—ideas about writing style (“write in a way that comes naturally”) are spliced in with ideas about spelling and usage (“use orthodox spelling”). The priss and the panache, mashed together.

~

Let’s disentangle these disparate ideas, since most of us who are writers care more about “distinctive manner of expression” than we do about conventions of spelling and usage. We are curious about—and may even want to emulate—the literary style exemplified by such masters as Ernest Hemingway and James Salter, Joan Didion and Junot Diaz, George Orwell and Susan Orlean. So what are the elements of literary style?

Language. First come the surprising, precise, evocative words a writer chooses. Look how Hemingway described the Gulf Stream, in Green Hills of Africa: “a flotsam of palm fronds, corks, bottles, and used electric light globes, seasoned with an occasional condom or a deep floating corset.” Now check out Orlean on orchids: “There are species that look like butterflies, bats, ladies’ handbags, swarms of bees, clamshells, camels’ hooves, squirrels, nuns wearing wimples, and drunken old men.”

Literary devices. Next, there is the use of literary devices—imagery, metaphor, allusion, alliteration, onomatopoeia. James Salter used “the silence of a folded flag” to describe the quiet of an afternoon in provincial France. Martin Luther King, Jr., imagined his children being judged “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Barak Obama alluded to the struggles of farmworkers in pledging “Yes, we can.”

Musical sentences. Next comes the exquisite control of sentences, using clean syntax (all the parts in the right places) and rhythm (musical beats, incantation) to evoke a feeling for the subject at hand. Abraham Lincoln’s “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” is an example of musical syntax. Sojourner Truth’s “and ain’t I a woman?” punctuates her speech at the 1851 Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio; repetition can be quite musical.

Tone. Control over tone, the writer’s mood or attitude toward the subject is another element. Tone might be ornate or plain, high-brow or breezy, lofty or punchy, scientific or comic, lyric or ironic. Tone might be the essence of a humorous piece (take a look at “Buzzed”) or of a deeply serious essay (see the opening section of Joan Didion’s essay “The White Album”).

Voice. Voice is to writing what timbre is to speaking: it is what clues us in to the identity of the writer, even if we don’t have a byline telling us whose words we’re reading. Voice is close to style—it, too, reflects a combination of diction, sentence patterns, and tone. Voice is the particular way novelist Junot Diaz combines Dominican slang and the vocabulary of postmodernism. Voice is that quality that makes you suspect a New York Times story is written by Marc Leibovich even when you missed the byline. (One of my favorite Leibovich articles described President George Bush the morning after the 2006 primary: “He looked worn at his must-see midday news conference, in need of a haircut, good-night’s sleep, better makeup job, hug, vacation in Crawford or some combination thereof. The grooves across his forehead were dark and articulated, his voice slightly hoarse. He wore a maroon tie, the color of blood.”)

~

In my mind, a stylish writer has a command of language, literary devices, supple sentences, and tone—as well as a distinctive voice. But literary style is more than the sum of these parts: it is writing in which the sentences in some way echo or underscore or complement the subject at hand.

A great example of literary style would be the following passage in All the Pretty Horses, when Cormac McCarthy describes his characters leaving the ranch in Texas and setting off on an adventure to Mexico:

They rode out along the fence line and across the open pastureland. The leather creaked in the morning cold. They pushed the horses into a lope. The lights fell away behind them. They rode out on the high prairie where they slowed the horses to a walk and the stars swarmed around them out of the blackness. They heard somewhere in that tenantless night a bell that tolled and ceased where no bell was and they rode out on the round dais of the earth which alone was dark and no light to it and which carried their figures and bore them up into the swarming stars so that they rode not under but among them and they rode at once jaunty and circumspect, like thieves newly loosed in that dark electric, like young thieves in a glowing orchard, loosely jacketed against the cold and ten thousand worlds for the choosing.

An editor could flag several things style manuals would frown upon here, but in doing so might miss exactly what gives the passage its power. Notice how the rhythm of the sentences echoes the gait of the horses—starting out short and staccato as the horses pick their way through corrals, gathering steam as they canter across a pasture, and then taking off into an out-of-control gallop as they head out under the night sky.

Journalist Po Bronson took poetic license in a Wired profile of conservative intellectual and techno-utopian George Gilder. Bronson used style to humorous effect, conveying the essence of Gilder’s technophilia through this mock dialogue:

Every time Gilder meets an engineer, they go through this sort of cascade of language syntax, negotiating like two modems, trying to find the most efficient level of conversation they can hold. It ends up sounding like the dueling banjo scene from Deliverance:

George: “Hi, nice to meet you. Hey, that’s a sweet access router over there. Wow, both Ethernet and asynchronous ports?”

Steve: “Yeah, check this baby out – the Ethernet port has AUI, BNC, and RJ-45 connectors.”

George: “So for packet filtering you went with TCP, UDP, and ICMP.”

Steve: “Of course. To support dial-up SLIP and PPP.”

George: “Set user User_Name ifilter Filter _Name.”

Steve: “Set filter s1.out 8 permit 192.9.200.2/32 0.0.0.0/0 tcp src eq 20.”

George: “00101101100010111001001 110110000101010100011111001.”

Steve: “. .. . .. . .. … … . ….. .. .. …. .. .. . .. . .. … … . ….. ..”

George: “Really? Wait, you lost me there.”

Bronson combines word choice (those tech terms), sentence rhythm (if you call those sentences) and tone (not exactly serious), and all his choices combine to say something about Gilder and his world.

Literary style can tickle the funny bone, but it can also raise goosebumps. It was style that made Winston Churchill’s speech to the House of Commons (after the defeat at Dunkirk in 1940) so stirring:

Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

The British prime minister combined strong words, straight syntax, and strong rhythms to buck up his country and tap into national strength.

Style can also be deceptively simple. Think of the stories that lulled us to sleep as children: they combined all the elements above and gave us enough calm to close our eyes and drift off to sleep. Margaret Wise Brown uses simple words, repetition, rhyme, and rhythm in her classic bedtime book, Goodnight Moon:

Goodnight moon. Good night cow jumping over the moon. Goodnight light. And the red balloon…. Goodnight comb. And goodnight brush. Goodnight nobody. Goodnight mush…. Goodnight stars. Goodnight air. Goodnight noises everywhere.

Style in itself is not the end—meaning is, whether it’s a call to courage or a an evocation of the peace that ends each day.

Last fall, in a class on the postwar novel, Harvard professor James Wood commented on Cormac McCarthy’s use of parataxis in The Road. Para-what? I wondered. I’m a bona fide English major, but I’d never heard of parataxis. I understood from the lecture that parataxis had something to do with biblical rhythms. Uh-oh. I’ve never read the Bible. Snippets maybe, but never enough to master it as a literary text.

More recently, I’ve been ruminating about rhythm. In my writing classes with journalists in Harvard’s Nieman and Loeb fellowship programs, I wanted to explore techniques leading to rhythmically masterful prose. It was time to find out more about parataxis.

So I started with my standard source for all words unknown to me, the American Heritage Dictionary, Fourth Edition. The big book defined parataxis as “the juxtaposition of clauses or phrases without the use of coordinating or subordinating conjunctions as It was cold; the snows came.” OK. I get that.

That definition was echoed by the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary: “the placing of clauses or phrases one after another without coordinating or subordinating connectives.” Helpfully, Merriam-Webster’s also told me that parataxis comes from New Latin and from Greek, for “the act of placing side by side.” It gave the date of coinage as circa 1842.

The lack of conjunctions thing was starting to seem like a key, but what was confusing was that the paragraph in which Wood noted parataxis was filled with the conjunction and:

Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond.

~~~

Now I was beyond curious. More like confused. As it turns out, Wikipedia spills a bit of ink on the subject, defining parataxis as a literary technique, in writing or speaking, that favors short, simple sentences, without the use of coordinating or subordinating conjunctions. It can be contrasted with hypotaxis.”

The plot thickens. Now I have to sort out not just parataxis, but hypotaxis.

Back to Merriam-Webster. “Syntactic subordination (as by a conjunction),” the dictionary says, letting me know that hypotaxis emerged as a term in 1883, long after parataxis, and that it, too, comes from New Latin and Greek.

Critic Stanley Fish says the Oxford English Dictionary defines parataxis as “the placing of propositions or clauses one after the other without indicating . . . the relation of co-ordination or subordination between them.” By contrast, hypotaxis refers to “the marking of relations between propositions and clause by connectives that point backward or forward.”

(Fish brought up these devices while commenting on President Barack Obama’s 2009 Inaugural Address.)

Fish offers this helpful analogy: “One kind of prose is additive—here’s this and now here’s that; the other asks the reader or hearer to hold in suspension the components of an argument that will not fully emerge until the final word. It is the difference between walking through a museum and stopping as long as you like at each picture, and being hurried along by a guide who wants you to see what you’re looking at as a stage in a developmental arc she is eager to trace for you.”

I like that explanation. But I have to admit that right now I’m looking for a developmental arc in a linguistic “museum” of my own making.

~~~

Back to Wikipedia. Parataxis, announces the encyclopedia-for-everyone, is also “a technique in poetry in which two images or fragments, usually starkly dissimilar images or fragments, are juxtaposed without a clear connection. Readers are then left to make their own connections implied by the paratactic syntax.”

(Think Ezra Pound, who borrowed from Chinese and Japanese poetry the stark juxtaposition of images. His “In a Station of the Metro” uses parataxis: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd:/Petals, on a wet, black bough.”)

Wikipedia notes that the concept has expanded since its original, and that a number of definitions have emerged, often conflicting.

No kidding.

Try these very conflicting examples of parataxis:

Julius Caesar:

“Veni, vidi, vici.” (“I came, I saw, I conquered.”) (cited by Wikipedia)

Joan Didion, in “Goodbye to All That,” from Slouching Towards Bethlehem:

I remember walking across 62nd Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later…. (cited by About.com)

Toni Morrison, in Sula:

Twenty-two years old, weak, hot, frightened, not daring to acknowledge the fact that he didn’t know who or what he was . . . with no past, no language, no tribe, no source, no address book, no comb, no pencil, no clock, no pocket handkerchief, no rug, no bed, no can opener, no faded postcard, no soap, no key, no tobacco pouch, no soiled underwear and nothing nothing nothing to do . . . he was sure of one thing only: the unchecked monstrosity of his hands. (Cited by About.com)

Ernest Hemingway in “Hills Like White Elephants”:

The woman brought two glasses of beer and two felt pads. She put the felt pads and the beer glass on the table and looked at the man and the girl. The girl was looking off at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry.

‘They look like white elephants,’ she said.

‘I’ve never seen one,’ the man drank his beer.

‘No, you wouldn’t have.’

‘I might have,’ the man said. ‘Just because you say I wouldn’t have doesn’t prove anything.’ (From a paper I wrote in college)

Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast:

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you saw and smelled nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l’Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cezanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. (From the blog of Amardeep Singh, a prof at Lehigh University)

I am now thoroughly confused. I kinda see the connection between Caesar and Morrison, but Caesar and Didion? Or for that matter, the Hemingway in “Hills like White Elephants” and the Hemingway in A Moveable Feast?

~~~

Maybe some examples of hypotaxis will unmuddy the waters. Here’s Oliver Wendell Holmes in “The Soldier’s Faith”:

If you have advanced in line and have seen ahead of you the spot you must pass where the rifle bullets are striking; if you have ridden at night at a walk toward the blue line of fire at the dead angle of Spottsylvania, where for twenty-four hours the soldiers were fighting on the two sides of an earthwork, and in the morning the dead and dying lay piled in a row six deep, and as you rode you heard the bullets splashing in the mud and earth about you; if you have been in the picket-line at night in a black and unknown wood, have heard the splat of the bullets upon the trees, and as you moved have felt your foot slip upon a dead man’s body; if you have had a blind fierce gallop against the enemy, with your blood up and a pace that left no time for fear—if, in short, as some, I hope many, who hear me, have known, you have known the vicissitudes of terror and triumph in war; you know that there is such a thing as the faith I spoke of.”

When you see sentences so full of ifs and wheres, you know you are encountering subordination. When you see subordination, you know you are encountering hypotaxis.

While Holmes using hypotaxis to build a complex chain of ideas that culminates in a final point, others use it in terser arguments. Although we think of E. B. White as a master of clear, simple sentences, really he is a master of hypotaxis, as in these sentences from “The Ring of Time”:

After the lions had returned to their cages, creeping angrily through the chutes, a little bunch of us drifted away and into an open doorway nearby, where we stood for a while in semi-darkness watching a big brown circus horse go harumphing around the practice ring.”

~~~

Are we closing in on the difference?

I didn’t think so. I came to this whole question when Professor Wood compared passages of The Road compared with the King James Bible. So perhaps a source on the Bible might help. On a Web site devoted to the study of the Old Testament, parataxis and hypotaxis are seen as two different ways to express relationships between successive ideas. (Parataxis, though, is more common.) “In parataxis, the main elements are placed in a sequence of simple phrases, linked together by the conjunction and (or variations such as but),” the site’s editors write. “In hypotaxis, relations are specified as subordinate clauses joined by temporal or relational links such as when, although, after, etc.” Many modern translations use hypotaxis, as it is seen by modern readers as providing “more interest and variety,” but that alters the narrative pace.

Just to show you how carried away I’m getting, I want to tell you that I found an essay written by Bob Perelman in 1993 called “Parataxis and Narrative: The New Sentence in Theory and Practice.” Perelman writes that parataxis “is the dominant mode of postindustrial experience.” We’ve all been experiencing parataxis our whole lives! “It is difficult to escape from atomized subject areas, projects and errands into longer, connected stretches of subjectively meaningful narrative—not to mention life,” he continues. And you thought it was ADHD!

As examples of “intense, continual bursts of narrative” Perelman cites that twenty seconds of heart-jerk in a life insurance ad, the blockbuster mini-series that continues for ten nights, and AT&T ads where “fast cuts from all ‘walks of life’ demonstrate the ubiquity and omniscience of AT&T.”  Oh, and if you want another confusing term for what you’re already experiencing, Perelman’s contemporary Ron Silliman (note the last name) calls it the “new sentence.” And you didn’t even know you were experiencing one ordinary sentences that “gains its effect by being placed next to another sentence to which it has tangential relevance”!

~~~

It’s time to end this essay. I’m going to have to take a stab at my own definition.

Here goes: Parataxis holds disparate ideas into a kind of equilibrium. Sometimes parataxis bluntly juxtaposes them. It might use punctuation—commas, semi-colons, full-stops—to force the juxtaposition. Sometimes parataxis elegantly runs one into another by using coordinate conjunctions. Parataxis might also use and and but and or to smoothen the jump from one idea to the next. Hypotaxis, on the other hand, puts disparate ideas into a kind of hierarchy, often using subordinate conjunctions to underscore this hierarchy. If parataxis links phrases or clauses with short pauses, creating a steady drum of ideas, and sometimes a seamless flow of one idea into the other, hypotaxis creates stronger pauses, letting subordinate conjunctions put twists and turns into a sentence, allowing not just juxtapostion but transition, from one group of ideas to another.

Did you notice what I just did?

But what does this tell us about rhythm, which is why I started this quest in the first place? Parataxis may yield a staccato rhythm (“Veni, vidi, vinci.”), or it may establish one that is sinuous and fluid (“I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume…”).

Some say that parataxis creates the immediacy of thought; putting ideas side by side without pauses or full-stops startles the reader. On her Web site, Writerly Life, Blair Hurley says that parataxis is flat and declarative, spare and uncompromised; in Hemingway, it is effective for showing shocking scenes of war and allowing us to distance ourselves.” Hmmm. But that’s only one side of Hemingway.

Others argue that hypotaxis ranks ideas, or builds observations from mere evidence to transformative conclusion. Phillip Lopate, in The Art of the Personal Essay, says that James Baldwin “perfected a unique style of maximum tension which yoked together two opposites, tenderness and ferocity.”

In the end, it doesn’t matter whether or not we can define parataxis, as long as we can craft prose full of tenderness and ferocity.

Electronic rights are the chaotic bazaar of book publishing. Here authors barter with agents, agents haggle with publishers, and publishers brawl with e-retailers. Everyone is vying for his or her claim on the best pomegranate.

This frenzy, and a barrage of media attention, has left most people involved feeling confused. Agent Laurie Liss, vice president of Sterling Lord Literistic, says, “I have never felt such a divide between publishers and agents as there is now about electronic rights.” And Mark Gompertz, executive vice president of digital publishing at Simon and Schuster, acknowledges an “anxiety on the publishing side, too. We’re on the threshold of something new.”

So what should a writer know in a labyrinth of twisting alleys and ad-hoc product stands? Here are some key terms and general guidelines to the unstable warren of the U.S. market.

E-book

According to PC Magazine Encyclopedia, an e-book is “the electronic counterpart of a printed book, which can be viewed on a desktop computer or a portable device such as a laptop, PDA or e-book reader.”

E-reader

The Free Dictionary states that an e-reader, or e-book reader, is “a small, portable device onto which the contents of a book in electronic format can be downloaded and read.” Although there are more then two-dozen different brands of e-reader available, the most popular are Amazon’s Kindle, Sony’s Reader, and Barnes and Noble’s Nook. Then there’s Apple’s iPad Tablet, which will be available April 3, 2010.

Enhanced e-books

These are e-books with bells and whistles. Think of a DVD—you get the movie plus the option to watch cuts or interviews with the director. An enhanced e-book could include audio, a video interview with the author, passages cut from the final text, slide-shows, or illustrations. You might even be able to click on a recipe, or a footnote, that takes you to a full citation. Enhanced e-books are interactive e-books.

How big is the e-book market?

Publisher’s Weekly recently reported that “e-book sales from the 13 publishers that report figures to the Association of American Publishers soared 176.6 percent in 2009, to $169.5 million.” The jump in sales increased the e-book’s share of trade sales from 1.2 percent in 2008 to 3.3 percent in 2009. And, five million e-readers sold worldwide in 2009 and an estimated twelve million will be sold in 2010, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Who is the market?

“Most e-book devices were bought by baby boomers (or older) and, mostly, women,” says Gompertz. At $259 a pop for a Kindle, or around $500 for the iPad, it’s understandable that they are selling to a more mature market. Peter Miller, director of publicity at Bloomsbury Books says that these readers are devouring “genre fiction.” In other words, the e-book market so far is most popular for “people who read for guilty pleasure.”

What should I be aware of in my contract?

Get an agent or have a publishing lawyer check over your contract. “You wouldn’t have your spouse pull your tooth for you,” says agent Wendy Strothman. That isn’t just a plug for her industry; contracts are confusing and if a professional looks at them, you’ll sleep better. Some things to look for in particular:

1. If you have been previously published, now is the time to check your contract to see if you control e-rights, says Liss. In other words, be on top of it.
2. For new contracts, “publishers will demand e-book rights. “No book publisher will allow e-book rights to be retained by the author,” adds Strothman.
3. Double-check the reversion of rights clause and insert a minimum number of annual sales for a work to be deemed “in print,” suggests The Author’s Guild.
4. Agents and publishers are in battle mode over enhanced e-books and there is no standard yet. A big question is whether they will be classified separately from regular e-books. Many publishers want these rights, but most agents are trying to retain them.
5. Read the fine print regarding the format of book. If the publisher is considering publishing straight to e-book, you want to be aware of that.

Don’t rush into anything. The e-book market is uncertain and changing.

What royalties should I expect?

Most publishers (“about 90 percent” according to Liss) are offering rates of 25 percent of net receipts for e-books. The Author’s Guild thinks these are low and suggests ways to protect you if industry standards change: First, because the market is changing so quickly, don’t lock yourself into a rate. Try to obtain the unconditional right to renegotiate after a period of, say, two years. Second, negotiate for a royalty floor. Insist that your royalty amount for e-books will never fall below the royalty amount for the hardcover edition of your work.

Do books ever go straight to e-book?

You can self-publish straight to an e-book. The advantages are obvious: no rejection letters from editors, no distribution costs, no royalties to an agent. Plus, you’ll get marketing for you or your business. The disadvantages are that—unless you are a jack-of-all-trades—you must now pay someone to copyedit, proofread, design your cover, market, advertise, and publicize. And you don’t have the advice and expertise of editors and designers. There are many sites on-line that offer self-publishing services including Amazon.com and Lulu.com. Or you can set up PayPal on your own Web site. Publishers have started publishing a few books straight to e-book. According to Gompertz, this is still experimental. Simon & Schuster published a book straight to e-book because it was topical, but then published it as a regular book.

Are there any pitfalls to e-books?

Piracy. It happens. If you are self-publishing and want to make sure that nobody steals your content, copyright every page or install PDF security features. If you are working with a publisher, check with them about protecting your content.

The other pitfall? Things can go wrong, Orwellian wrong, like in 2009 when Amazon removed 1984 from people’s Kindles.

What’s the lowdown on the pricing of e-books?

There’s been a lot of press about e-books, but a little history might help. It all started with Amazon and its Kindle and an e-book price of $9.99.  Amazon and the publishers used a wholesale model, whereby publishers would sell the books to Amazon at about half the list price and then Amazon would set the Kindle price. So, if a book was priced at $24.95, Amazon would pay the publisher $12.50. But since the online giant was charging $9.99, it was actually losing money ($2.50) on the e-book. It didn’t matter to Amazon because it was making up for it in Kindle sales. In the process, however, consumers got used to paying that lower price.

This price started a dispute between Amazon and publishers because, as Mark Gompertz points out, “publishers are against devaluing content.” Two years of disagreement led to Amazon temporarily removing the “buy” button from Macmillan books in January, although they were still offered on the site by third parties. Eventually a resolution was reached; soon an e-book on Amazon will be priced at $12.99 to $14.99.

Then publishers came to a pricing agreement with Apple, known as an agency model, for the downloading of e-books on the iPad.  Apple will give publishers 70 percent of the consumer price, which the publishers set. But Apple wants a guarantee from the publishers that no other retailer will sell e-books for less then their iBookstore price. Consequently publishers and Amazon are back at the negotiating table. Now, according to The New York Times, Amazon is insisting that publishers sign a three-year contract guaranteeing that no other competitor will get lower prices or better terms.  Mark Gompertz says, “We felt like we were losing ground, but now we have possibility because of competition.”

Next up, Google. Publishers are currently in discussion with the Internet giant over its plans to enter the e-book world. Because of the Amazon and Apple discussions, Google is now open to talking about an agency model and to paying publishers 70 percent of each sale, according to Mokoto Rich of The New York Times.

For the moment, publishers and e-retailers have devised a formula that works. But if e-book sales outpace hardcover sales—or if bookstores can’t compete—the equation might not work. This would mean that publishers aren’t making the money they need to acquire, edit, design, support, and promote books. And, as Jonathan Galassi wrote in The New York Times, “An e-book distributor is not a publisher, but rather a purveyor of work that has already been created.”

So, check regularly. The offerings at this bazaar change daily–new vendors, new products, new prices, and new customers. I’ll do without enhanced pomegranates, though. I like them just the way they are.

{Formerly a book editor at Viking/Penguin and Simon & Schuster in New York City, Sarah Baker is now a freelance writer and an independent producer for Word of Mouth on New Hampshire Public Radio. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.}

Sources:

Motoko Rich, The New York Times, “Amazon Threatens Publishers as Apple Looms”

Douglas MacMillan, Business Week, “E-Readers Everywhere: The Inevitable Shakeout”

Motoko Rich, The New York Times, “Math of Publishing Meets the E-Book”

Jim Milliot, Publisher’s Weekly E-Book Sales Jump 176 % in Flat Trade Year”

Louisa Ermelino, Publisher’s Weekly PW’s Panel on Going from Book to e-Book

Nicholson Baker, The New Yorker, “A New Page”

Jonathan Galassi, The New York Times, “There’s More to Publishing than Meets the Screen”

Geoffrey A. Fowler, The Wall Street Journal, “More Makers Jump into the E-Reader Market”

Ina Fried, CNET News, “Amazon recalls (and embodies) Orwell’s ’1984′“

Steven Pearlstein, The Washington Post, “The Amazon-Macmillan book saga heralds publishing’s progress”

Sarah Weinman, Daily Finance, “Enhanced e-books”

Kevin Kelly, The New York Times Magazine, “Scan This Book!“

A Boston literary doyenne dispenses advice

1. If you have more than one idea or book you are working on, pick ONE of them to lead off with, and don’t mention the others for a while. (The woods are full of amateurs who have drawers full of unpublished manuscripts.).

2. In a bookstore, browse through lots of other books in a similar category, books you admire and think are in the same style as yours.

3. Look in those books’ acknowledgments sections to see if the authors thank their agent; thereby you will accumulate a list of agents who handle this kind of material.

4. Research these agents online to get their addresses, names, and submission criteria. If a website is good, you can also get a feel more broadly for the kind of work the agency represents.

5. You can then send a highly professional, crisp query to any number of your selected agents at once. However, don’t make it look like a blanket submission. Tailor each query letter to the specific agent; mention if possible other work you admire that the agent represents. If you know one of the agent’s authors personally, get a personal reference. Be sure your query letter gives background on you personally and why you are a credible expert on the subject addressed. Publishers think of nothing but “platform” these days — authors who teach in the field at a reputable institution, who run workshops nationally on the subject, who have a popular blog on the subject, who have already published material on the subject in national media and thus have a pre-existing audience.

6. To bypass some extra steps, you can attach to your query an outline or short prospectus of your proposed work, together with a short sample of the actual prose. (A sample is important, since summaries often don’t make a work sound attractive.)

7. Keep in mind that an agent is running a business and looking for commercially promising projects. Agents will not be interested in helping you develop your ideas, or helping you select good ideas to develop, until you have already proved you can be a solid breadwinner for them. You’d do best to arrive with a very clear, professionally presented package. Good agents are overwhelmed with prospects (we get more than 30 submissions a day) and in many cases they don’t even have time to answer a query unless it is irresistible.

8. Remember, the gods favor the persistent.

—by Jill Kneerim

{Jill Kneerim is the co-founder of Kneerim & Williams, a literary agency in Boston, New York, and Washington, D.C. Since she is not actively looking for new clients, Kneerim put together this list to help prospective authors find agents who are.}

A writer/editor on the reality of royalties

If you’re thinking about writing books, it’s helpful to know some of the basics about how much money to expect, how advances work, and when—if ever—you’ll collect royalties. There’s much confusion out there, especially since all we generally read in the press is that Sarah Palin got $5 million for her book, Barack Obama $500,000 for his.

I did some quick research, added to it what I know from my own experiences both as an author and editor, and then ran this summary by a few agents and editors to make sure it’s sound.

For starters, forget that $5 million advance. Most first-time book authors are lucky to get $50,000. (And at a small house or academic press, $5,000.) Any advance that is six figures is considered strong. In these tentative times, you have to be a pretty big celebrity—or an author who’s already got a track record of producing bestsellers—to earn in the sevens.

What’s more, that advance doesn’t all come at the front-end, and it’s shared with an agent. Read on….

Advances

An advance is actually an “advance against royalties”: A publisher gives you money when you sign a contract to produce a book, but you have to earn that money back through book sales before you start earning additional money from royalties.

Suppose your book will be published in hardcover and will sell for $20. If your royalty is 10 percent you will get $2 per copy sold. If you get a $10,000 advance, you will need to sell 5,000 copies before the book “earns out” and you start to receive additional royalties.

The amount of the advance is based on how many books a publisher thinks it can sell. Classically, an advance reflected a book’s earning potential in the first year, less costs to the publisher (for designing the cover, paying for paper, printing, binding, shipping—not to mention marketing and publicity). This isn’t always true any more.

Advances are almost never paid out all at once. Traditionally, half of the agreed upon amount was paid on signing the contract, with the other half due once the revised manuscript was delivered and accepted by the editor. In recent years, publishers have often been dividing payments into thirds, payable one-third on signature of the contract, one-third on delivery and acceptance of the manuscript and one-third on publication. More and more payments are being divided into even smaller chunks, perhaps with a portion of the advance payable upon publication of the paperback edition (!), for instance.

Royalties

Authors agree to accept as payment for writing and delivering a book either a percentage (royalties) of the profits from the book’s eventual sales, or else a straight flat fee (work for hire).

Under a standard book publishing contract, authors earn a royalty on each book sold. Hardback royalties on the published price (list price) of trade books usually range from 10 to 15 percent. On trade paperbacks it is usually 7.5.

An “escalator” means that the royalty rate rises after an agreed sales threshold has been reached; for example, the royalty might be 10 percent for the first 5,000 copies, 12.5 percent up for the next 5,000 copies, and 15 percent thereafter. Royalties for special sales—books sold at special prices—may be lower, e-book royalties higher.

Some publishers may offer lower royalties by basing them on the “published price” rather than the “price received”—i.e., a percentage of the publisher’s receipts from booksellers, which is usually much lower.

Work for hire

In certain cases a publisher may approach you to write a particular book or part of a text on a payment-only basis or as a work for hire. In these cases you will not receive royalties and you may not even hold the copyright.

Different publishing houses, different books, different advances

Most of the books we see in bookstores and on bestseller lists come from what we call ‘trade’, or general, publishing. But there is also academic publishing, professional publishing, and educational publishing.

Manuscripts may be printed in hardcover, trade paper, or mass-market editions. And then there are e-books. Whether a book is published as one or the other is determined by other books on the market, review potential, the concept and intended audience, and the quality of the writing. Sometimes paperback rights are sold separately–even to another publisher.

In academic, educational, and professional publishing, advances are small to paltry, and royalty rates tend to be lower than those for general trade titles; the payoff may be in robust sales for a built-in audience. In trade publishing, advances to authors are standard, but not the huge advances that attract headlines, especially for first-time authors.

Titles with color illustrations integrated throughout may have lower royalties because of the higher production costs.

The fine print

Almost all traditional publishers issue royalty statements every six months. This means that almost all authors are paid only twice a year and then only if their advances have earned out and there are royalties owed to them. Further, even if their advances have earned out, authors still never know how much money, if any, they will receive during any given pay period. This is because, usually, until receipt of the royalty statements, they never know how many books they have actually sold, or what reserve against returns is being held by the publisher for that pay period.

Reserves against returns: Unlike most merchandise, creative works like books and CDs are sold on a returnable basis. That means that if a retail bookstore orders 100 copies of an author’s book and doesn’t sell any of them, then the bookstore can return all 100 copies to the publisher, for credit—which the publisher charges back against the author’s royalties, as well. (Mass-market paperback books have only their covers stripped and returned, while the books themselves are required to be destroyed. Sales of these stripped books are illegal.)

In order to avoid overpaying the author, the publisher will withhold a percentage of the author’s royalties against returns. These returns tend to be higher at the outset, as reserves usually taper off during a book’s life. If, for instance, unsold books are being returned to the publisher at a rate of 50 percent—meaning that out of 100,000 books shipped to retail bookstores and wholesalers (who also stock outlets such as supermarkets), 50,000 books have already been returned unsold—then the publisher may withhold 50 percent of the author’s royalties, as a reserve against returns. (The amount of the reserve is determined by the publisher.)

Subsidiary rights: The licensing a book for foreign markets, magazines, movies, etc.) will increase an author’s income for it. However, there is no guarantee that a book will ever produce any sub-rights income.

Royalties are paid only on the sales of new books. Under current copyright law, authors earn no royalties whatsoever from the sales of used books, no matter how many times the used books are resold.

Sources:

Interviews with various editors and agents

http://www.publishing-services.co.uk/faqs_royal.php

http://www.writersservices.com/res/ri_adv_royalties.htm

http://www.brandewyne.com/writingtips/authorspaid.html

http://ezinearticles.com/?Book-Advances,-Royalty-Checks,-And-Making-A-Living-As-A-Writer&id=812872

A writer reflects on unleashing the unconscious

Nearly every writing book on my shelf suggests the same somewhat mysterious daily practice. It has many names: “morning pages” in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way; “first thoughts” in Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones; and “early morning writing” in Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande. Peter Elbow, author of Writing Without Teachers, prefers the somewhat ungainly but increasingly popular “freewriting.”

According to these gurus, beginning writers as well as seasoned ones freewrite for many reasons. Sometimes, as Cameron writes, it empties your mind of the garbage that would needle at you anyway. I find it a useful channel for my ever-churning, over-active brain. It’s efficient therapy—cheap and fast.

Of course, as Peter Elbow reminds me in Writing Without Teachers, “Freewriting isn’t just therapeutic garbage. It’s also a way to produce bits of writing that are genuinely better than usual: less random.” It might not happen always, or even frequently, but better bits will happen eventually. I sift through a lot of garbage and sometimes get lucky and discover a buried gem or two. Often it is in a digression or an unlikely place. It could be a new way to think about something—an opening, a shining light.

Often writers freewrite to get their creative juices flowing. “It is the bottom line, the most primitive, essential beginning of writing,” suggests Goldberg. And, it can eliminate the need to toss those first few paragraphs, and a bit of the ego, when you finally do sit down at the computer.

If you’re aching from transitionitis or seized up with writer’s block, a freewrite, like a deep-tissue massage, might limber you up.  Brande recommends, “…whenever you are in danger of the spiritual drought that comes to the most facile writer from time to time, put the pencil and paper back on your bedside table, and wake to write in the morning.” In freewriting, thoughts often get worked out, unleashed. And, more often than not, the muse will appear. In my freewriting, I sometimes find that a choice, uncensored bit of honesty percolates up. It’s a time for my inner editor, that ever-present critic—who can be found staring over my shoulder whispering, “boring” or “Come on Sarah, can’t you find a better verb?”—to go on sabbatical.

Freewriting admits no judgment, no criticism, only freedom. Cameron says these lines “are not meant to be art, or even writing. Nothing is too petty, too silly, too stupid, or too weird, to write down.” No one will see this. And if they do, the writing will probably be illegible. Mine looks like my doctor’s signature on a prescription. I can barely decipher the words when I reread them. If you tend to write your deepest, darkest secrets when you freewrite, and write legibly, and are prone to leaving things around, then do yourself a favor. Lock the freewriting up. Or, shred it. Unless, secretly you want it to be discovered.

The writer Martha McPhee is a friend, and she once recommended when I was searching for a subject, “Write what’s raw.” There’s no better place for rawness then a freewrite. Find the words that hold the most power and write about them. You might just stumble onto your next topic.

Many writers recommend freewriting first thing—pre-caffeine, pre-good breath, pre-newspaper, pre-chats with humans.  Brande suggests writing when you are in this dream-like state. I often leave my notebook, pen, and timer next to my bed for just such mornings, but my 7-year-old seems to set his internal clock just ahead of mine, arriving bedside moments before my alarm beeps. Until he becomes a teenager and sleeps till noon, my early morning freewrite is fantasy. Until then, I write freely when I can.

And so should you. It works.

—Sarah Baker

◊

So How Do You Do It?

Freewriting is a powerful technique for both beginning and seasoned writers. It can help quiet your mind, warm you up, let loose uncensored thoughts, and even banish writer’s block. Every writer discovers what works best for his or her needs, but here are some general guidelines:

1. Write longhand with a pen or pencil in a notebook. No typing.
2. Write for 10 minutes (initially.) Set a timer. Some people like to write first thing, when they are still in a dreamlike state, to capture unconscious thoughts.
3. Keep your hand moving the whole time, and I mean writing, not scratching your nose.
4. Don’t edit or cross out. Don’t worry about punctuation, spelling, grammar, or handwriting. Don’t ever look back and never judge.
5. If you get stuck write, “I’m stuck.” Or, in my case, “My lower back aches,” or “My shoulders hurt.” Sometimes I just write, “dumb, dumb, dumb” because that’s the way I’m feeling. Once, “platitudes, platitudes, platitudes” emerged when I sensed I was holding back from the truth.
6. Don’t think. Don’t get rational. Go for the raw.
7. Do it every day even if your dog needs walking, a letter needs mailing, or you have an unexpected urge to cook chili.
8. Take risks. Go deep. Be free. This is for your eyes only.

Enjoy.

—Sarah Baker

{Formerly a book editor at Viking/Penguin and Simon & Schuster in New York City, Sarah Baker is now a freelance writer and an independent producer for Word of Mouth on New Hampshire Public Radio. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband and two children.}

A writer/psychotherapist offers his insight on creativity

An old deodorant commercial once proclaimed, ‘If you’re not a little nervous, you’re really not alive.’

Pretty sage advice, even though the only thing at stake was staying dry and odor-free. But there is something to be said for accepting—and learning to navigate—the minor turbulences of life. I’m talking here about common, everyday anxiety. The jitters. Butterflies.

This is particularly true for writers, whose very feelings are the raw materials of their craft. No matter how mundane, the small anxieties can swarm like bees, making work difficult; distractions, like an impending visit from the in-laws, money worries, or that funny noise the Honda’s been making.

Then there are the more virulent writer’s anxieties, shared by few in other lines of work: Your agent hasn’t returned your phone calls. You are three weeks past deadline. You have Act Two problems.

In other words, you’re becoming a clone of the Charlie Kaufman character in Adaptation—bleary-eyed, unshaven, sleep-deprived, staring pathetically at the empty computer screen, hoping for inspiration and yearning for another cup of coffee, and maybe a nice banana-nut muffin. A dozen nagging, self-mocking thoughts echo in your head: You’re untalented, a fraud. You’re getting old and fat. No woman (or man) will ever want to sleep with you again. Your life is over.

These kinds of feelings require work, to be sure, if only to be validated (and then gently challenged) by a supportive therapist, mate, good friend, or fellow writer. These deeply embedded, childhood-derived, seemingly inescapable Dark-Night-of-the-Soul feelings can, in fact, be crippling, regardless of your level of craft or years of experience. When it comes to these writer demons, none of us escapes.

And, as I’ve said countless times to the writer clients in my practice, struggling with these doubts and fears doesn’t say anything about you as a writer. Other than that you are a writer.

Frankly, this difficult emotional terrain is where a writer lives much of the time—in a matrix of triumphs and defeats, optimism and despair, impassioned beliefs and crushing deflations.

And, believe me, this is equally true for both beginning writers and accomplished, battle-hardened veterans.

But there’s another kind of anxiety that emerges occasionally in a writer’s life: the kind of gut-wrenching, dizzying upheaval from within that throws everything you think you know into doubt and that scares you to the very core. A shattering divorce. The death of a family member. A spate of sudden, inexplicable panic attacks. Terrorism. War.

Then, what balm is there to offer—or to receive—that doesn’t seem trivial or woefully inadequate? Catharsis and validation, the foundation of most psychotherapeutic work, feel like mere word games. Medication, while often clinically appropriate, seems at best an armoring against something primal that’s working within you.

What is a writer to do with that level of anxiety?

Use it.

Because when all that’s left is writing, writing’s all that’s left.

What kind of writing? It may be numbed-out and shapeless at first; chaotic and unsatisfying. It may be dark and ugly, or self-pitying and shameless. It may be a blind, angry clawing at the air with words and images.

The important thing to acknowledge, to accept and to make use of is the fact of the anxiety—its weight, its size, and its implacability at this time in your life. It’s there, as immoveable as a brick wall; as deep and fathomless as a sea.

So you must ask yourself this question: Is there a character in the story I’m working on who feels such anxiety; who feels as overwhelmed, as out of control, as terrified as I? 
Is there a way I can funnel my passion into the story I’m writing, searching for the words and rhythms that will give my article new power?

If so, plunge headlong into writing the hell out of whatever you are working on: give that fictional character your voice, your fears, your dreads. Use these anxieties to create dramatic scenes, to animate your language. Use your power of empathy to bring voice to the voiceless.

Play with rants, vitriol, strong words to turn your passions into words on the page. Write furiously. If you are writing fiction, imagine fiery exchanges between characters, letting passions and behaviors emerge that may astound or alarm you; that stretch or distort or even demolish the narrative you’ve been working with. If you are writing nonfiction, put the passion on the page. These explosive sentences can all be edited later—softened, deleted, made more nuanced, or woven artfully into the story tomorrow, or the next day, when you have some kind of perspective.

To be truly in the eye of the emotional storm, to create from a state of anxiety, is to surrender any fantasy of perspective. In fact, in the purest sense, it’s the ultimate act of creative surrender from which, out of the crucible of your deepest pain, you might discover a joyful, wonderful surprise.

If, however, you feel so impotent in the face of your anxiety that you can’t even imagine utilizing it in this way, then write about that feeling, create metaphors, find analogies. Even if you have no characters whose voices you can appropriate, even if you are writing nonfiction, even if your fingers tremble at the thought of making narrative sense out of the inchoate feelings inside you.

Do this: put those trembling fingers on a keyboard, and start stringing words together that reflect how you feel … without context, or narrative, or character. Just raw feeling, in as many vivid, living words as you can call forth.

Then look at what you’ve written. Feel whatever it is you’re feeling. And write some more. Soon, I believe, you’ll have a sense of the logjam cracking. You’ll feel the urgency of creative expression, the palpable release of banked anxiety. Without judging what comes, without needing it to be anything, I think you’ll find yourself writing, even if that’s just defined, for the moment, as putting words down on a page.

Does the idea of this exercise itself make you anxious? Doesn’t surprise me. We’re all pretty scared of writing out of the very emotional space we’d most like to avoid or deny. It’s human nature.

But for those artists who have the courage to embrace their own fears, to stay emotionally connected in what seems like an ever more dangerous world, to co-exist with potentially crippling anxiety and write anyway, the rewards can be significant.

Moreover, when all that’s left is writing… 
Writing’s all that’s left. 
So trust it. Trust yourself.

And write.

—Dennis Palumbo

{Formerly a Hollywood screenwriter (My Favorite Year; Welcome Back, Kotter), Dennis Palumbo is now a psychotherapist, specializing in creative issues. He’s the author of Writing From the Inside Out (John Wiley), as well as a collection of mystery short stories, From Crime to Crime (Tallfellow Press). His first crime novel, Mirror Image, is due out in August 2010 from Poisoned Pen Press.}

A laid-off writer/editor contemplates the challenges of a freelance career

The day I walked out of the newsroom—July 29, 2008—I felt like the happiest unemployed man in America. For nineteen years, I had put out the Sunday Travel section at the Sun-Sentinal in Fort Lauderdale, filling it with stories from journeys around the world (mine and freelancers’), and columns reflecting on—and often poking fun at—the changing state of that world. It was, as I wrote in the book that collected some of those pieces, “a charmed, unheralded life.”

The charm came to an end in 2007, when my newspaper began taking seriously its motto of “local and useful.” While not particularly exciting for the rest of the paper—our erstwhile foreign correspondent wrote one story, titled “Cold War,” about the excessive air-conditioning of offices and malls in South Florida—it was disastrous for the Travel section. My budgets were cut to the bone, and I was, for the first time really, given directives on how to run the section, with more “weekend getaway” articles a wire column on theme parks. Travel, the one part of the paper that always offered a release from the familiar, an openness to the world, was turned into a provincial bore.

So when the first layoffs in the history of the paper took place, I was delighted to be one of the casualties. I was also insulted, experiencing for perhaps the first time in my life a feeling of joyous indignation (which the Germans probably have a word for).

I knew that the great advantage of being a writer—as opposed to, say, being a banker—is that you can always do what you do at home. A real job is immaterial to your professional advancement; in fact, in writing it can be a detriment. Writers are about the only people who can lose a job and gain respect.

Countering the dignity of unemployment is the fact that writing is one of the few trades in which the older you get, the harder the business of it becomes (especially in a culture that glorifies youth). For years, many of my contributors had been telling me about the dismal freelance market. One longtime freelancer in San Francisco wrote plaintive e-mails about having to pay the rent by selling his collection of MAD magazines, issue by prized issue. During his career he had written for Playboy and Harper’s, but had unwisely, if unintentionally, outlasted his editors. And, of course, there were now thousands of unemployed journalists sitting at home typing on computers.

But I was not deterred. I had never completely given up freelancing, and I was looking forward to sending out writing that didn’t have the label of “newspaper travel editor” attached. In my nearly two decades as such, I had published two books and had been included in a few anthologies, and I hoped that these accomplishments might stand out more clearly when disconnected from a branch of journalism somewhat lacking in respect.

Within a couple of months, much as I had done when I began in this business thirty years earlier, I had a list of pieces and the publications to which they had been shopped. I was still, for the moment at least, writing about what interested me and hoping that these pieces would interest someone else. This had earned me piles of rejections as a novice; I soon learned that not much has changed in the interim.

What is new is the technology, though a number of elite magazines still insist on submissions by post. But the immediacy of e-mail rarely translates into prompt replies. Actually, it often contributes to silence, as messages get pushed down out of sight—and, subsequently, mind—by the onslaught of new ones.

I’m being generous. I’d been warned of a new etiquette, or lack thereof, by which editors feel no obligation to respond to e-mails—presumably because they receive so many. The ease of communication has so crowded the field that it has ended communication.

This makes life difficult for any writer, but especially for one who was recently an editor. And even more so for one who was a writer/editor. For nearly two decades, I assigned myself stories, turned them in to my unwavering approval, and then got back to myself immediately regarding publication dates. Being your own man pales in comparison to being your own editor.

Occasional freelancing hadn’t prepare me for the daily uneventfulness, which belies—and is made all the more disconcerting by—the concept of instant connectedness. I used to send something out and then go about my life; now, this is my life. I work at home, without the diversions of traffic and colleagues, and sit for hours at the machine through which news of my success (or failure) will eventually come (or not). It is a maddening ur-connect, with no escape. While writing, I am forever conscious of the potential arrival of a verdict on my writing. No longer do you check the mail once a day; now you can check it once a paragraph. Waiting is now a twenty-four-hour ordeal.

You can log off e-mail, of course, but you can’t turn your mind off the idea of e-mail. Hugely successful writers complain that the demands of fame take them away from their work; today, all writers are distracted by the persistent fantasy of an incoming valentine.

Breaks are more important than ever, providing relief not just from the intense mental concentration of writing but also from the psychological toll of nonstop anticipation. The longer that you are away from your computer, the greater the chance (statistically, at least) of collecting messages on it. What those messages say is another matter.

Rejection is to writers what flies are to cows—a constant annoyance that we somehow attract but never get used to. Being common does not make it any more palatable, in part because it’s always a private, individual affair. Though not personal. Intellectually, all writers know this, and if they forget, the impersonal rejection letter dutifully reminds them. Those that arrive electronically tend not to be form rejections, as that would require too much typing. They are dashed-off one- or two-liners. When I was starting out, I collected my rejections; like war wounds, they seemed a kind of badge of honor. (Nothing says you’re a writer like your first New Yorker rejection.) Now I delete them.

Waiting and rejection are the being and nothingness of a writer’s life. The first begins with an element of hope, but as it drags on the feeling of optimism turns into one of abandonment. The silence, as you sit at your computer hour after hour, month after month, becomes unbearable. You can be convinced that your writing is brilliant, but not that it is being read.

Rejection, if it finally comes, does have the virtue of providing closure. Though even with the more bespoke e-jections, it is not always obvious that your submission received a careful perusal. The dismissal can be a little fuzzy. Nevertheless, it unequivocally kills any remaining hope. It is one of the rare situations in which vague writing has a potent effect.

The combination of waiting and rejection used to drive writers to drink; now it drives them to blog. The blogosphere is an editor-free zone, a lawless, all-embracing realm from which uncertainty, disappointment, and standards have been banished. Anything goes and everyone, it sometimes seems, is there, even the talented, which is proof of the painful universality of rejection. (We all need a place safe from putdowns.) The blogosphere is the hack’s idea of heaven.

Blogs unquestionably have their uses, but finding room for what John Cheever called “a page of good prose” isn’t one of them. Andrew Sullivan’s claims to the contrary, their rise would seem to put artful writing in jeopardy. For what use is nuance in the age of information? What hope has the poetic in a landscape of opinion? When so much is of the moment, is there still a place—and an audience—for the timeless? “I rewrite,” André Gide is popularly quoted as saying, “in order to be reread.” But who rereads on the Internet, that ever-changing screen?

The people who still care about the written word tend to become writers (MFA programs are thriving), which necessarily limits the number of disinterested readers. The practice of writing has always verged on folly, and in a world that craves images it has become more questionable and frustrating than ever.

I’d give it up tomorrow if I could shed my unfashionable belief in its importance.

—Thomas Swick

{Thomas Swick grew up in New Jersey and now lives in South Florida, where, for a cheap thrill, he goes to the Boardwalk in neighboring Hollywood—it’s the anti–Ocean Drive, with no models, no fashion, no pretense, no attitude. He is the author of two books: Unquiet Days and A Way to See the World. A version of this essay was originally published in 2009 in the Oxford American.}

My writing mantra

I don’t remember the year, or the name of the artist, or even whether the exhibit contained paintings or sculpture, but I’ll never forget the name of the show years ago at New York City’s Guggenheim Museum: “Total Risk, Freedom, Discipline.” I immediately copied down the words and later pasted them on my bulletin board. There they still live.

“Total risk, freedom, discipline” has become my mantra. Those four words say more about my daily life as a writer than the empty term “process” can begin to suggest.

The third word, discipline, actually is primary. Without discipline the other two qualities are moot. Discipline means showing up every day, early, and staying in my studio at least five hours. It means plugging away at writing every one of those hours, no matter how much I hate staring at the empty page, no matter how much anxiety I feel, no matter how discouraged I am by the latest rejection.

It also means focusing, intently: I often unplug the phone in the early hours; I manage e-mail very carefully, so as not to let it rule me; I discourage friends from calling me during my work hours; I never bring personal chores (doing bills, scheduling appointments, dealing with health insurance) into my writing space.

If I just show up and keep at the writing, things always start to click.

Sometimes it’s not until the last half hour of work, but then I know I have a place to start the next morning.

The freedom part has to do with giving myself free rein, even as I stick to my strict schedule. I often start the day by puttering—watering the garden, sweeping my studio floor, putting on some inspiring music. I try to listen to my thoughts, sensing where I am emotionally. The music helps here: If I’m writing a travel story about Hawaii, slack-key guitar helps me ride the currents of my imagination; other times it’s Mozart, Nina Simone or Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert that helps me tune in.

Unless I’m on deadline, I work on the project that seems most true to where my imagination—or my heart—is. Freedom means the ability to work on what most energizes me in the moment. (Then discipline allows me to see projects through to completion.) Freedom also means taking a break, going and sitting in the sun, walking to a favorite café for lunch, and letting my mind wander. It also means going to the gym every afternoon. I can’t tell you how many brainstorms I’ve had in lane three of the swimming pool, or working up a sweat on a bicycle—or even weeding. Each day, I try to give myself free moments, down time, when inspiration can drift in.

How do I build risk into my routine? Mostly by setting aside time to work on writing that pushes me in a new direction, or writing that is deeply personal. Taking risks can mean writing something that I know won’t sell, or—conversely—trying to make inroads at publications where I’ve not yet published. Sometimes, when I’ve finished one big project but have not yet started another, I take a few days for “risk writing.” Sometimes I write entire pieces on spec, because I want to push myself in a new direction whether or not I have an assignment.

Another thing I do to is to stop midproject and ask myself whether I’m taking the safe route in a piece of writing. Every now and then I try something really “out there”—maybe a daring lead, maybe a particularly musical phrase, maybe something so revealing it makes me slightly uncomfortable.

Once when I was writing a piece and trying to push beyond some of my “safe” habits, I smoked a joint and wrote all night long. (I’m no Faulkner: I always write in the morning, aided only by a little caffeine.) Some of what I wrote made it into the final piece. If an editor doesn’t respond to the risky writing, I can always rewrite.

Freedom and discipline are essential to my being able to be a professional writer. The freedom fuels me, keeps me creative; the discipline ensures that I get it done. But risk goes to the heart of why I write in the first place. It’s artistic, not professional: I want never to stop exploring, finding new vistas, and surprising myself.

—Constance Hale

{A version of this essay appeared in The Writer in January 2009}