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.}

Related posts:

1. Constance Hale on Bucks and Book Publishing
2. Sarah Baker on do-it-yourself books
3. Sarah Baker with an E to Z on e-books

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.}

Related posts:

1. Sarah Baker with an E to Z on e-books
2. Heather Ross with an e-books update
3. Sarah Baker on the Art of Writing Free

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.

Related posts:

1. Sarah Baker with an E to Z on e-books
2. Constance Hale on Bucks and Book Publishing
3. Sarah Baker on do-it-yourself books

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.}

No related posts.

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.}

Related posts:

1. Sarah Baker with an E to Z on e-books
2. Heather Ross with an e-books update
3. Sarah Baker on do-it-yourself books

Some of my favorite stylists share their thoughts

Ask any writer to define literary style, and you’ll find that the answer is as distinct as, well, that writer’s style. I noodled around on the Net and found that Gore Vidal defined style as “knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn.”

Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini, on the other hand, called it “craftsmanship”: “What’s really important for a creator isn’t what we vaguely define as inspiration or even what it is we want to say, recall, regret, or rebel against. No, what’s important is the way we say it. Art is all about craftsmanship. Others can interpret craftsmanship as style if they wish. Style is what unites memory or recollection, ideology, sentiment, nostalgia, presentiment, to the way we express all that. It’s not what we say but how we say it that matters.”

Poet Robert Frost remarked that “style is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.”

Are you dizzy yet?

I took a crack myself at defining style in an essay in the Sin and Syntax Salon: I suggest that literary stylists use wonderful words, smart syntax, literary devices, and maybe even structure to echo or underscore the idea of their story.

◊

But, mucking  around a bit more, I asked some of my favorite writers—including Po Bronson and Susan Orlean—how theydefine style, and whether they have favorite “stylists.” Here’s what they said:

Po Bronson:

I don’t have singular favorite stylists, I just keep a mental catalog of style tricks I’ve seen over the years, which are available to draw upon (if, theoretically, I could remember them at the right moment). But I do think about it. On my website I have this page where I have an example of a variety of fiction and nonfiction, implementing stronger styles of various sorts. One’s a story through FAQ style narrative. One’s nonfiction meant to read with the immersion of fiction. One’s about split alternative narrative futures. One’s an early short story in maximalist voice, my reaction to the popularity of minimalism in the early 90s.

Susan Orlean:

Style is so hard to describe… I guess I’d say it’s as ineffable and indescribable as someone’s personality, and in fact, I think a writer’s style is linked exactly to personality. It’s the voice of the storyteller, the distinct tone and tenor of how a writer “talks.” I think of it as a genuine and organic expression of the writer’s way of looking at the world.  My favorite stylist? Hmm. Non-fiction? Or fiction?

Tommy Tomlinson:

I usually think of style as something that strikes me AFTER I’ve read the story—if the story is really good, I’m a lot more concerned about what happens next than how the author is presenting it. When the style outshines the substance, I usually just put the book down. It’s a delicate trick, I think, to write in a style that sounds like a narrator (or a character) speaking, and not like the author speaking. I love a narrative voice that sounds more like somebody telling me a story than an author writing down words. When the style is right it’s intellectually absorbing AND emotionally rewarding.

Gary Smith of Sports Illustrated has a distinctive style—he talks directly to readers, guiding them through the story, peppering them with questions. Every time I read a new Gary piece, it’s a jolt to read that style, and I’m always thinking this is the time it won’t work. Then 100 words later I’ve forgotten all about it and I’m neck-deep in the story. This is one of my favorites. And here’s a story I did a few years ago as a Gary Smith homage.

Katy Butler:

The “literary style” I worship is compelling and transparent. If style is the window through which I see the story, I don’t want the window drawing attention to itself, covered with filigree or etching. I want to see the characters in the scene, and be absorbed in the writer’s thoughts. So I don’t like unnecessarily fancy words or over-clever thoughts. On the other hand, I work for hours on the opening of a piece to get it right. I don’t want any dirt or lumps on that window. I scan the sentences, as if they were poetry, because what trips the tongue will trip the eye, and beautiful rhythm will please and reassure the reader without her knowing it. You want the reader to know she’s in good hands. I omit unnecessary words and details. I trust my irrational mind or heart when it insists on including a detail whose significance I don’t understand.

In the opening of “My Father’s Broken Heart” [written for the New York Times Magazine], I HAD to include the mention of two cardinals in my mother’s birdbath, her Japanese iron teapot, the weak October sunlight in which we discuss turning off my aged father’s pacemaker.  I don’t want the reader to linger over those details, but I want them to subtly suggest the fidelity of a long marriage, my immigrant mother’s foreignness and interest in Zen, the weakening of the end of life.

So I like style that is pared-down, and yet beautiful. Metaphors and similes exist, but are sparely used. More is implied than stated. There’s rhythm, alliteration, choice of “kitchen table” Anglo-Saxon words rather than multisyllabic Latinate language.

On the other hand, I love Virginia Woolf, and her language is often complex. But the language never overwhelms the images. I am carried on a stream.

Primo Levi’s “Survival in Auschwitz” is another example of the style I like.

Good prose writers are secret poets. We use all of the craft skills of poetry: telling detail, synecdoche, repeating elements at the opening and the end, rhythm, scansion, etc. But we pretend we aren’t doing it.

◊

My colleague Audrey Dolar Tejada, a journalist and poet who experiments with nonlinear storytelling at www.strangetango.com, added these thoughts:

Literary style is ultimate self-expression and exploration. In an era in which books are largely marketed to leverage on multiple platforms, in digital forms, as movies and screenplays, and as brands, I eschew the temporal for the eternal. Stylists like Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges wrote novellas—a literary form now rarely published in which concept and form, not necessarily plot, are part of the intellectual and sensory enjoyment of literary works. Judged against today’s best sellers, Borges’ “The Library” and Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” are unmatched in their innovation, spare beauty, and ambition.

How do you define style? Add your comments, below. And if you’d like to play around a bit with style, there are some suggestions in Week Twelve section of Online Writing Classes.

Related posts:

1. Got style?
2. E-books, twit wit, and Susan Orlean

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.

Related posts:

1. Constance Hale on the search for rhythm
2. Constance Hale on Risk, Freedom, Discipline
3. Constance Hale on Bucks and Book Publishing

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.

Related posts:

1. Constance Hale on the meanings of style
2. Parataxis, paradoxis
3. Constance Hale on Risk, Freedom, Discipline

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!“

Related posts:

1. Sarah Baker on do-it-yourself books
2. Heather Ross with an e-books update
3. Constance Hale on Bucks and Book Publishing

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.}

Related posts:

1. Demystifying Books