What’s an author to do? No sooner do you say, “here’s what just happened in book publishing” than the earth beneath us shifts again. In the latest temblor, the U.S. Department of Justice accused Apple and five major publishing houses of price-fixing e-books last month. Three parties settled, and two will duke it out with the DOJ. But who benefits from this contention: Consumers? Authors? Amazon? What is the overall narrative: Another painful loss for physical bookstores? A triumph of capitalism? A literary tragedy?

The suit, and the future of publishing, can only be understood by examining the e-book market, its dramatic growth, and the ways publishers have scrambled to adjust to it. So let’s start with a two-year recap of the rise of e-books before taking stock of the DOJ suit.

In April of 2010, we ran Sarah Baker’s post, “E-Z on e-books update.” It answers questions that look quaint today – “what is an e-book?” and “what is an e-reader?” – but her article is an excellent primer and, more importantly, reveals how rapidly the market is evolving.

In May 2011, Heather Ross posted an update meant for writers considering publishing their work digitally. Ross raises more daring questions  (“How are e-books priced?” and “What should I be aware of in my contract?”) and cites e-book net sales statistics (between January 2010 and January 2011, e-book net sales leapt 115.8 percent).

That trajectory of growth continues. Publishers Weekly reported a 176.6 percent growth in e-book sales in 2009, to $169.5 million. Another Publisher’s Weekly press release, from February 2012, reporting on 2011, says that “e-book sales rose 117% for the year, generating revenue of $969.9 million at the companies that report sales to the Association of American Publishers.”

Pricing models between publishers and retailers are at the center of the suit. The “agency” publishing model allowed publishers to set their own prices for e-books rather than selling them to retailers at wholesale prices. The Justice Department believes that such pricing, along with Apple’s insistence that no other retailer received terms better than its own, is collusive, illegal, and designed to shut Amazon out of part of the digital market.

On April 15, in The New York Times, David Carr wrote “Book Publishing’s Real Nemesis,” an overview of Amazon.com’s pricing tactics and models and their effect on consumers. He calls the Justice Department suit “the modern equivalent of taking on Standard Oil but breaking up Ed’s Gas ’N’ Groceries on Route 19 instead.” Authors Guild President Scott Turow penned (or keyboarded) a scathing take on the Justice Department’s proposed settlement and what it could mean for traditional bookstores, here.

Amazon is an absolute giant in the e-publishing market, both boon to consumers looking for low prices and bully to competition. The Seattle Times’ four-part series on Amazon, called “Behind the Amazon Smile,” delves into the company’s corporate practices and its relationship to publishers, authors, and its own employees. The second part of the series, “A Hammer on the Publishers” pays particular attention to Amazon’s relationship with the book industry.

Has Amazon itself acted unethically? Illegally? What about the Justice Department? Amazon’s mega-dominance makes is easy to hate, but in the Wall Street Journal Thomas Catan cogently argues that the department had no choice but to file an anti-trust suit. Amazon’s market-grabbing might be vicious, but it is probably not illegal.

{Gianmaria Franchini is a freelance writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He does not own any e-books, but might be interested in reading one.}

Related posts:

1. Gianmaria Franchini on sliding book advances
2. Piercing news on the book front
3. The David Black Agency on the DOJ suit

Commentators outside the book business often compare books to LPs and CDs in the music business. Since information in a book can be downloaded into an e-book in the same way that music can be loaded onto an iPod, they argue, books and records will share the same fate.

Although e-books are now probably no more than about 15 percent of all books published, these commentators would have you believe that the printed book is in dire straits. And some within the digerati have even written off the printed book entirely. John Biggs, who writes a blog called TechnoCrunch.com, is absolutely certain that by 2025 books will be “at best, an artifact and at worst a nuisance.” We need a generic name for people who espouse this viewpoint. I suggest “techno-twit.”

What if a book isn’t like a record?

Books printed on movable type have been around for 573 years, since Gutenberg printed his famous bible and upended history. Anyone who claims that the demise of records foreshadows the end of books needs to consider the many ways that books are integral to our culture. When technological newcomers—like vinyl records, tapes, and CDs—were forced to give way to succeeding technologies, it was usually because the new technology was able to recreate the exact same experience as the one it replaced (Of course, some, including my son, claim that they can hear the difference in vinyl records).

But not all new technologies moot their forbears. Radio’s death knell has been sounded many times, but radio fills a role that other technologies, like television, cannot. The book, too, will not be replaced.

What if a book is more like a movie?

The death of movies has been routinely predicted with the advent of television, VCRs, DVDs, and streaming video. But watching a film in a movie theater is physically different that watching it at home. The screen is larger, the sound more enveloping, and the experience more engaging. E-books and printed books may both deliver the same words, but beyond that the mediums diverge. This is most obvious in large art, travel, or photography books, where the visual aspect of the book predominates. It’s true also in children’s books, with their flip-up illustrations, over-thick pages, and enticing shapes and sizes. People often love a particular book for reasons that transcend the collection of words it might contain.

But books are like movies in another sense as well. “Going to the movies” allows you to immerse yourself in a shared cultural experience. Going to the bookstore—or a modern library—is a similar social tradition: staff members recommend books, customers compare notes, book clubs allow us to share the literary experience. What truly sets a printed book apart is a modern-day author event. Having sat through hundreds of them, I can attest that nothing compares with the moment when writers meet their fans for the first time. And what is the medium of exchange? A printed book—one that is lovingly handed over, inscribed, and then carefully handed back.

What if a book is more like a Rembrandt etching?

Rembrandt’s 1632 etching “The Raising of Lazarus” has a going price of about $60,000. So does a first edition of Charles Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” (or at least that’s what one sold for in London in 2009.) Other books sell for gallery-like prices, too. A signed first edition of John Grisham’s 1989 novel “A Time to Kill” was selling two years ago for $1,500. Can you imagine a similar price on the open market for a non-transferable, cloud-based e-book?

What if a book is more like a love letter?

The British writer Malcolm Bradbury, in a New York Times essay, called the giving and getting of books “The Courtship Dance.” “It was some time ago, when I was still a young student in college, that I learned that books make subtle and indeed erotic presents,” Bradbury writes. “Today I realize that I have to thank my female friend in college for a good deal more than a happy half-year and a fine copy of [D.H.] Lawrence.”

“The means of seduction is the book itself, that intricate object, with its great fan of pages far more complex in its messages than the most advanced word processor. Designers design it – the right cover, the right typeface, the right style. Then the booksellers take over. I am not sure what your bookstores in the States are like these days, but here in Europe they grow more exotic by the week. The lighting is low, coffee is served, evening readings and lunchtime signings tempt you to some literary assignation. You taste, you sniff, at last you buy.”

Love letters come in many forms. A book doesn’t need to have a flower pressed between its pages to be a billets doux. A note written by a grandmother and inscribed on the fly-leaf of a child’s book will unleash a life-time of memories when that same book is picked up and looked at years later.

What if a book is more like….

I could go on, but I’ll give the last word to San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr. He was commenting in the San Francisco Chronicle  about the upsurge in daylight robberies from people who sit on buses and benches, mindlessly reading their smart phones. The robber approaches, and within seconds the electronic device is gone.

“If you’re on the bus, read a book,” Suhr advised. “We do not have an upward trend of the theft of books.”

{Bill Petrocelli is an author, bookseller, and 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.}

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I invited readers to to try their hands at a little descriptive writing, and many readers posted their own skyscapes. I commented on some of the images I found especially striking in a follow-up post.

Some readers emailed me directly, sending their favorite passages from literature. I wanted to share some of them, as well as another I’ve kept in my back pocket ever since first reading it in a New Yorker short story in 2008.

Sara, from Scotland, writes:

The best-ever description of a sky?  It has to be the one from the opening paragraph to Justine (the first book in the Alexandria Quartet) by Lawrence Durrell: “The sea is high again today, with a thrilling flush of wind.  In the midst of winter you can feel the inventions of Spring.  A sky of hot nude pearl until midday, crickets in sheltered places, and now the wind unpacking the great planes, ransacking the great planes.…”

Melanie, from New Jersey adds:

“Dylan Thomas once wrote ‘starless and Bible-black,’ [which] has stuck in my memory for decades.”

James, from Massachusetts, sends this:

From Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill: “It was the kind of barbarously sticky American afternoon that made me yearn for the shadows case by scooting summer clouds in northern Europe, yearn even for those days when you play cricket wearing two sweaters under a cold sky patched here and there by a blue tatter—enough to make a sailor’s pants, as my mother used to say.”

And one of my favorites:

I have reread these lines from “Friendly Fire,” by Tessa Hadley, many times, always surprised by the images: “They sat there for a few minutes, too tired to move, giving the car time to recover, talking about their Christmas shopping, who they’d bought for, what they still had to get. More than half the short winter’s day had passed while they were in the warehouse. The sky was a blue so pale that it was almost no color; wooded bluffs loomed above them, beyond the industrial estate, marking the edge of the city. The sun had dropped behind the bluffs already, so that the tops of the bare trees showed up finely spiky, like hair or fur, against a yellow flow of light from somewhere out of sight. While they waited, their breath began to fog up the car windows.”

Please feel free to post your favorite images of the sky in the comments below.

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Not long ago a family friend asked me, “What is it that allows you to do what you do?” Without hesitating I told her that I felt teaching was my calling. This approach may not appeal to you, but shortly after I started working at the inner-city school where I have taught for the last ten years, I realized that my love of literature alone would not be enough to sustain me. My students struggle to maintain basic skills; sustained critical reading happens sporadically in my classroom. To prevent quitting altogether, I needed something else to keep me curious.

So I asked myself another question: “How can I help my students grow into their best selves?” I also began attending a very progressive church, which has social justice as one of its central pillars. In one sermon, the rector offered four precepts, borrowed from multiple wisdom traditions, for a path to joy. They have become my personal professional teaching standards.

I measure how successful I am against the precepts and not my students’ test scores, which remain in the regions of below basic and far below basic. I offer these ideas to you now because they allow cultivation of a very valuable tool that is at the core of good teaching. They are show up, pay attention, tell the truth, and, do not hold onto results.

Showing up means you are in your classroom, prepared and ready to go before that first bell rings.

The Buddhist nun Pema Chodron suggests that looking at the sky in moments of anxiety allows us to keep our focus away from ourselves and on the world around us. More than anything such as a packaged lesson plan, or video, or treat (a-k.a. bribe) you might buy for your students, you have to work from the part of you that is as vast and generous as the sky. This sense of openness and optimism has been essential to my survival as a teacher in an overcrowded urban school, where the average reading level of my students, even the upperclassmen, is the fourth grade.

Last fall, a student named Angel carved his name into six of my computers. To use the words of my students, I tripped. I called security and three deans and Angel’s mother. I repeated the story to anyone who would listen.  Inevitably, they confirmed how right I was to demand this child be fined and expelled and sent to jail. Over time, the story got faster and faster and I added more and more detail and before I knew it, I had a libretto of a three act opera on my hands, but no solution to help this boy, who in a moment of madness made a stupid and destructive decision. Meditating on the sky helped to access my inner expansiveness so I could welcome Angel back to the classroom, where he would have fewer opportunities for mischief.

Showing up means trusting that what you have to offer is enough. When I started teaching, I convinced myself that the marketplace, real and virtual, offered the bluebird-of-happiness lesson plan or the perfect book that would entertain my students and teach them at the same time. This is a fallacy. While it is true that some materials will be more accessible to students than others, there is no perfect book, film, or lesson plan. If you bring your whole generous self to your classroom, you will become a fine teacher, but it will not happen instantly. The best way to assure becoming the teacher you hope to be is to have a mentor in your classroom to help you do it. A mentor will prove invaluable as that person can catch your behaviors and show how they are running counter to what you are trying to achieve. Once I did this, I was forced to move my concentration away from myself to my students and the millions of ways in which they were avoiding the work I was giving.

The next precept is pay attention. To pay attention you have to get out of your seat and walk among your flock. Many inexperienced teachers think that students avoid doing their work because they are bored and their material is not challenging; however, I have not observed this. Students avoid their work because they lack basic skills. Check your students’ work! This means you have to pick up what you ask them to write, read it, and correct it. If you want them to discuss something, spy on their discussions, take notes, and share your observations. Give quizzes after a lesson. When you give instructions, ask one of your students to repeat your instructions to the rest of the class. Then ask another student to say the same thing in a different way. Repeat the process.

I am embarrassed to say how often I ignored obvious errors and glaring avoidances because I was concerned about violating students’ needs for expression. To prevent that, follow the third precept, which is to tell the truth. To illustrate the third precept, I would like to tell a story.

Once, a student came to me because he was dismayed that he had failed a progress report. “Mister,” he said plaintively, “I do my work.” I said to him, “Andrew, I can say this to you because you are not overweight, but for the moment, I would like to imagine that I am your doctor, and you are my patient. You have come to me because you are not feeling well, and yes, you weigh 350 pounds. What do you expect me to say?” Andrew thought for a moment and said, “You’d tell me to lose weight.” “Right,” I said, “and if I did not I would be remiss as your physician to have ignored this fact. Since I am your teacher, I have to be honest and say that while you are handing in your work, what you are handing in looks as though someone much younger than you wrote it.” Andrew giggled and shrugged, which were typical reactions for him. We finished our conversation by agreeing on what was necessary for him to improve, but he did not follow up on what we discussed and he failed at the end of the semester.

Three years later, he has returned to my class, a junior now, and his skills are better, but Andrew has still much maturing to do. However, his presence in my classroom is a gift because he has taught me much about the fourth precept, which is not to be attached to results. The best I can do is to be fully present for each of my students, and offer what I know in interesting way. The rest is up to my students. I have to accept the fact that they may not be ready to hear what I have to say, even if I think it is valuable.

Over the weekend I read a newspaper editorial that outlined, according to some think tank, what makes a great teacher. In short, the editorial claimed that the optimal candidate must have great intellectual prowess. The piece mentioned nothing, however, of what I have come to believe is equally important as a well-honed mind: a well-honed heart. The precepts I offer you here are leading me to that every day. The vulnerability of a well-honed heart has shown me in ways I never could have imagined the boundless capacity of others for decency and love and humor inside and outside of my classroom. I cannot think of a better way to spend a life than growing towards that sort of excellence.

I hope you have a great first year! Good luck and by all means, contact me if I can provide some assistance.

{Thomas Roddy, Jr. (tpr0741@lausd.net) teaches English and Journalism at Manual Arts High School in South Los Angeles.  He divides his time between the classroom, kitchen, and garden —when not working on perfecting his flip turns at the Rose Bowl.  This article first appeared in June 2010 in California English Volume 15, No. 5, pages 10-11. California English is a publication of the California Association of Teachers of English.}

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What I won’t mention at all in this series—but what some mentioned in the comments after my “Make-or-Break Verbs” post—is a very geeky way of subdividing dynamic verbs into two other categories: stative and nonstative. I go into detail on this in Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch: Let Verbs Power Your Writing, but if you don’t want to wait until October, when the book comes out, here’s the (brief) lowdown:

Surprise! Stative verbs—which are sometimes called “state verbs”—describe states: mental states, physical sensations, habits, eternal truths, or conditions. By contrast, nonstative verbs describe happenings or events with beginnings and ends.

Stative verbs have no foreseeable endpoint. Because we can only use verbs in the progressive tense if they describe events or actions, stative verbs cannot be used in these tenses, which describe an action while it’s happening. You can say, I was watering the Venus fly traps, but you cannot say I was knowing Darlene for the past ten years.

Get the difference?

Here’s a cheatsheet to help you identify stative verbs (not that I can think of why you would ever have to do that):

• For mental states: exist, want, feel, think, like, dislike, agree, believe, doubt, seem, know, imagine, remember, mind, prefer, need, understand, wish, depend, possess, have, own, promise, suppose, impress, matter, mean, surprise.
• For physical sensations: see, hear, smell, taste, sound, look, appear.
• For eternal truths or statements that are timeless: concern, consist, contain, fit, include, involve, measure, weigh, make (numbers), move (the earth), share (geographic borders).
• For habits, usually expressed in phrases: “I like reading westerns”; “I don’t eat meat or dairy.”

I told you it was geeky! Now you probably understand why I am avoiding this subject in the “Draft” series.

(And here’s a shout-out to poet Ava Sayaka Rosen, who researched stative verbs and helped me write this post.)

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The news is so fresh that I’ve hardly had time to absorb it: No sooner had authors and publishers started to accept, understand, and play with the role of e-books in publishing, than the Justice Department stepped in to block a proactive response by the book industry to changing technology and changing habits. With Nooks, iPads, and other e-readers competing with the Kindle, and with prices freed from the dictates of Amazon, books seemed to be springing back.

For a recap of life as we knew it up until April 11, 2012, see this post by Heather Ross in the Sin and Syntax Salon, as well as this earlier primer on e-books by Sarah Baker.

For a recap of the DOJ suit, see this New York Times article, as well as this statement by the David Black Literary Agency, which represents me and my books on language.

My own opinion will evolve, I’m sure, but I’ll confess that when I saw the headlines about the suit I felt stabbed in the chest. It’s harder and harder to earn a fair wage for all the hard work I put into writing well, so it was depressing to think that Amazon will now be free—again—to set prices and dictate terms for book sales. This is the company, remember, that considers books “loss leaders,” not gems in their own right. This is the company that exhibits the ruthless capitalism of 19th century robber barons when it comes to driving booksellers (who do value and promote quality books) out of business and competing head-to-head with established publishing houses, possibly intending to drive them out of business as well. This is the company that endlessly recycles used books for pennies, which means that authors are deprived of the royalties they might get from the sale of new books.

On the other hand, I’m trying to keep an open mind. Disruptions are, well, disrupting, and it behooves us to think creatively about how to work in new contexts, with new tools, and with new companies.

Please post comments of any and all articles you see that shed light on this topic. I am especially interested to hear cogent arguments about how the DOJ suit helps not just the consumers of creativity, but the creators themselves.

One last plea: Visit your favorite bookstore today. Talk to the booksellers, who have so much more to offer than Amazon’s algorithms. Ask for a recommendation. Buy a book. Enjoy.

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This week, the Department of Justice sued Apple and five major publishing houses claiming a conspiracy between the parties to collude on the price of electronic books. Three of the publishers – Simon & Schuster, Hachette (Grand Central Publishing, Little, Brown & Co), and HarperCollins – simultaneously settled with the Justice Department, while the other two – Penguin and Macmillan (Holt, FSG, St Martin’s Press) – have decided to face the civil charges in court. According to the details of the settlement that have been released, publishers must end their current agency plan agreements and retailers can now resume discounting e-books as they did before the introduction of the “agency model” in January 2010.

The agency model gave publishers the opportunity to set their own e-book prices as opposed to selling e-books to retailers at wholesale, after which the retailers set their own discounts.  The Justice Department is claiming that Apple and the five publishers devised the system in order to subvert the dominance of Amazon’s Kindle in the digital market.  Apple insisted on “most favored nations” clauses to make sure that no other retailer received better terms than they received from the publishers.

While our analysis of the DOJ’s action is not a legal one, we believe that the agency pricing model fostered a competitive market.  Since the agency model was instituted, Amazon’s near monopoly has dropped from a 90-percent share to about 60 percent.  Barnes & Noble’s Nook is now a viable competitor to the Kindle, with 25-30 percent of the market.  And while e-book prices did rise for consumers, they rose to a point where e-books were financially sustainable for publishers.  Ultimately, it is our contention that a publishing ecosystem with more players is better for readers, authors, and the books we publish.  As Scott Turow asserts: “The irony of this bites hard: our government may be on the verge of killing real competition in order to save the appearance of competition.”

Related posts:

1. Piercing news on the book front
2. Sarah Baker with an E to Z on e-books
3. Heather Ross with an e-books update

On March 19, my own series within the series débuted. Every other week, I’ll be going over some of the basics of writing great sentences. Each essay will contain some challenges for readers. In this first essay, I asked readers to send in their favorite sentences. So many readers responded in the comments section that I wrote a response to their comments that posted March 23.

Some readers sent their favorite sentences directly to me, rather than posting them in Opinionator. I wanted to share some of them, along with their words about those sentences:

“Secret to life, marry an Italian.”—Nora Ephron

(That sentence needs little explanation. Ephron is a comic writer of the first degree, and she wrote it as part of the Six-Word Memoir project of SmithMagazine.)

*

“No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place.”—Isaac Babel

(“Reading Babel is like being thrown blindfolded into a large body of cold water,” wrote the person who sent that in.)

 *

“My family is American, and has been for generations, in all its branches, direct and collateral.”—U.S. Grant

(The opening sentence of The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, wrote one reader, is “still the gold standard for its genre and, IMHO, a classic of 19th C. American literature.”)

*

“In the Spring of 63 B.C., there appeared on the roads of Palestine columns of Roman soldiers. Behind them stretched a string of squealing carts, followed by the rumbling of siege artillery; in clouds of dust the legionnaires” panoply glistened, and their military standards fluttered.”—Alexander Men

(“Because I can see and hear the soldiers now, I think it’s a marvelously effective piece of writing,” wrote the person who sent those sentences, which are from the Prologue to Son of Man.)

*

And she sat; she wrote; she longed for money for she had a lover; all she needed was money to live; love, money money money.”—Gertrude Stein

(That one arrived via Twitter, so there was no room for the sender to comment. Or to say where the quote comes from. I haven’t been able to verify it. Can you?)

*

“Sara stood on the fox until it died.”—Mitchell Smith

(“It is the first line of the novel Due North, wrote the sender. “It punched me in the stomach when I read it, and I have never forgotten it. The novel is unforgettable, too.”)

*

“Xavier watched two Legionnaires stroll out from the terminal to wait for the flight: dude soldiers in round white kepis straight on their heads, red epaulets on their shoulders, a wide blue sash around their waist, looking like they from some old-time regiment except for the short pants and assault rifles.”—Elmore Leonard

(In this, the opening line of Djibouti, the sender writes, “It seems to me that the way he plays around with grammar and punctuation, he gives you as much information about Xavier as he does about the soldiers he is observing. The soldiers are not the point: that Xavier is observant, intelligent and black, is.”)

*

“The door opened quietly and closed.” —James Joyce

(“That sentence from Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man was a revelation to me,” wrote a friend. “It is the context that makes the sentence so powerful—the fact that Stephen would be acutely aware of the door opening, but wanting to remain invisible he was unable to look directly at either the door or the prefect. It was the first time I really understood how much could be implied in such a simple sentence and how perfectly it could describe human experience. “)

***

Great stuff, all of it.

Feel free to add more favorite sentences in the comments below.

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Every travel writer fantasizes about the beautifully written narrative that he or she will craft after a meaningful journey. I’m no exception. Endlessly fascinated by the landscapes, culture, and history of my native Hawaii, I end up pitching many ideas to publications that run travel pieces. (I write, too, about other places—France and Fiji, Rome and Delhi, San Francisco and Carmel Valley.)

But as newspapers shrink their travel sections, as magazines like National Geographic Adventure slip away, and as editors imagine “packages” rather than “narratives,” or “charticles” and “chunklets” rather than “articles,” the chances to write long and languid grow few. It’s more typical to get an assignment of 400 words than 4,000, no matter what you propose.

It’s especially hard to write a sparkling piece when editors ask you to cover a lot of ground in such a cramped space. What is jettisoned first? Local characters and their distinctive way of talking. What goes next? Those descriptions that the veteran travel editor Thomas Swick calls “atmospheric,” because they put the reader into a place.

In such a pinch, we all reach for generic nouns and easy adjectives. Even if we know that the path to the universal lies in the particular, sometimes, it seems, we just don’t have space for the particular.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been sweating over how to compress all my complex ideas about one Hawaiian place into a few terse lines. I started by considering synonyms for town. Village was nice, because it offered the possibility of alliteration (“Seaside village below volcanic mountains”), but I ended up going with hamlet (“a tiny hamlet tucked between volcanic mountains and crystalline seas”). It was all I could do, in grasping for a shorthand description, to avoid picturesque, charming, and quaint. Clichés! I managed to slip in details: “a missionary church, white-and-green shacks, narrow streets” as well as “ a chaos of art galleries, colorful boutiques, and tourists in Hawaiian shirts or skimpy sarongs.” I hope that helps my readers see the place.

Swick, who was long the travel editor at the Sun-Sentinel in South Florida, posted recently about the clichés of travel writing: “Most are adjectives: magical, mystical, charming, exotic,” he noted. “But there is at least one verb: nestled.”

Uh-oh. That’s dangerously close to my “tucked”!

And the nouns? Swick notes that people rarely write about trips anymore; everything is an “adventure, or a “wonder,” or a “paradise.” The latter, he adds, is the most irresistible of all. “I thought its days were numbered after National Geographic Traveler used it on its cover story about Bali the same month as the Kuta Beach bombings,” Swick wrote. “But ‘paradise’ made a speedy recovery and now appears in almost any story about a place where palm trees grow.”

Swick generously let me quote from his post, “In Tireless Pursuit of Paradise,” and you can find more of his ideas on writing at thomasswick.com. Many travel writers I know reread his 2001 essay “Roads Not Taken” every couple of years to make sure they keep taking the right road in their prose. Another provocative essay on travel writing is one Paul Theroux wrote in 2003 for the Washington Post’s Book World. (I couldn’t find a link, but you can get a taste here.)

If you have a favorite example of a horrendous cliché, please post it in the comments!

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One of the advantages of working out of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto is the conversations—about writing, about publishing, and about marketing—that take place over lunch and on our listserv. Last month, a blog post by Joe Konrath titled “The Value of Publicity” and another by Michael Ellsberg, titled “The Tim Ferriss Effect”, sparked an e-mail thread about what sells books. According to Konrath, the publicity he got in the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the LA Times, etc. did nothing to increase his book sales. According to Ellsberg, a spot on prime-time CNN and an editorial he wrote for the New York Times did little to increase his book sales. So, if publicity doesn’t sell books, what does?

According to Konrath, good writing, an extensive backlist and proper positioning on Amazon are the keys to his success: “[M]y fame and my past have little to do with my current success. … The majority of my sales come from Amazon and my ability to use the tools they provide.”

According to Ellsberg, coverage on a popular single-author blog with a wide sphere of influence is what put his book on the map. (By the way, there is a distinction between publicity and marketing. Publicity means spots on radio and television shows, advertising, and articles and book reviews in newspapers and magazines. While publicity is short-lived—the biggest push done within the first month that a book is out—marketing is an ongoing effort that can last months, even years.)

Grotto writers chimed in with their own thoughts about what sells books and, with their permission, I’ve reprinted their comments here:

Zoe Fitzgerald Carter, author of Imperfect Endings: A Daughter’s Tale of Life and Death, agrees with Konrath and Ellsberg: “I certainly found that mentions in The New York Times, excerpts in O magazine, and getting reviewed in People did almost nothing in terms of my sales. And all that endless social media? Not so much …”

Heather Donahue, author of Growgirl: How My Life After the Blair Witch Project Went to Pot emphasizes the importance of “knowing your core audience, knowing that books are a niche business, and having a laser focus on the top 500 individual readers. Finding them. Knowing your tribe and building from there.”

“Having pieces in Slate, The Awl, and The Nervous Breakdown worked every bit as good as being on The View because you want to sell books to people who read them,” Donahue said in an interview. In addition to a Q&A in The Awl/The Hairpin, which The Rumpus cross-posted, and 21 Questions in The Nervous Breakdown, Donahue had an interview in Bust, two pages in Entertainment Weekly, and a healthy response from Facebook, where she has 1286 friends and 549 likes on her professional page. …She thinks the cumulative effect of the marketing she did was every bit as important as the publicity garnered by her publicists—both the in-house publicist her publisher assigned her and the one she hired on her own. Would she still hire a publicist next time? Yes, if she goes with a traditional publisher next time.

Janis Cooke Newman, author of The Russian Word for Snow: A True Story of Adoption and Mary, a novel about Mary Todd Lincoln, agrees that knowing your tribe is key. “While we like to think that everybody is going to find our books fascinating, the truth is that it is a niche business. One email blast to an online chat group of people interested in adopting from Eastern Europe put my memoir at number 200 on Amazon—at least for a couple of hours—and practically sold out the admittedly meager first printing. And at a recent appearance at a Civil War literary conference, the local bookseller ran out of my novel. National TV is cool, but finding your niche readers and making it easy for them to buy your book—even years after publication—seems to be the best way to keep those royalty checks coming.”

Constance Hale, author of Sin and Syntax and the forthcoming Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch, echoes Donahue and Newman’s sentiments. “Have a really sharp, really defined sense of who your reader is (emphasis on the “read”) and/or who would buy your book and then think really hard about how to get to that person, how to let that person know your book is out there. … Being in The New Yorker is highly cool, but again, does it put your name on the radar or does it sell books? Are New Yorker readers the ones who will BUY your book and READ your book and then TELL their friends to buy your book?”

Hale cautions, however, that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to zeroing in on your audience. “Every book is different. My readers are writers who want to write better, so I have taught anywhere that gets the title of the book on a course catalog (reaching tens of thousands of people), I have led countless workshops at countless writers conferences, I have given workshops in bookstores, I have worked on tags and SEO on my Web site, I’ve built modest but loyal FB and Twitter and mailing-list followings, and I give out teachers lessons plans for free. I put my book title in every bio I write. I accept all offers for any kind of publicity: I get up for drive-time radio, I write articles for free if I know it gets to my readers. I work closely with the publisher’s publicity people and I hire my own publicist to help me strategize. Not strategize how to get famous. Strategize about how to reach my readers/buyers.

“It’s a one-two punch. Publicity gets your name and your book on the radar, maybe helps you build cred. … Marketing identifies your market/tribe/reader/buyer and focuses aggressively to let those people know about the book and to make them want to buy it. Publicity lasts for a month. Sometimes you strike gold right away and get an instant bestseller. Marketing continues for years and can build slowly.”

Speaking from the perspective of a self-proclaimed “readaholic,” Jason Roberts, author of A Sense of The World, says the problem with some publicity is that it breeds familiarity with a book, not intrigue. You know those movie trailers that make you feel like you’ve already seen the movie? That happens with books, too. “Sometimes, a book has fallen off my To Buy list because of one article, one interview, one TV appearance too many. … If I had my druthers, I’d prefer a PR campaign that focused not so much on the book as a quantum of content, but as an experience. How will it surprise me, enlighten me, draw me in? Will it subvert my expectations, shed light on mysteries, go behind the scenes or between the lines? Is it, simply put, not only a book but a story? … Sell the experience, not just the facts. (And don’t sit around waiting for reviewers to tell you what that experience is; decide for yourself, and market accordingly).”

Gerard Jones, author of Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Book, reminds writers that although book sales are nice, they are not the only way for authors to make money. “I’ve gotten a lot of paying gigs talking to colleges and other institutions, and those can keep rolling in long after the shelf-life of the book. … In terms of perceptible Amazon up-ticks, the only broadcast media that ever helped were NPR interviews where I got to talk about the content of the book at some length (Fresh Air helped, but the biggest jump was after Talk of the Nation). Mass-audience radio never did squat, not even Howard Stern in his pre-satellite days, nor did TV. But a speaking agency picked me up and landed me a series of public debates after I appeared on the Today Show, which in turn led to other stuff. I also had a university events programmer tell me he was already interested in bringing me in but didn’t really decide until he saw that I’d been on Bill O’Reilly’s show. 
I’ve also picked up quite a few article- and editorial-writing gigs off my books, at least some of which were helped along by publicity. … 
I’ve found that initial sales usually don’t matter that much; publication is usually the beginning of a long trudge. But the rewards of the trudge can be a lot more rewarding than you think they might be while you’re still processing the realization that you’re not going to soar onto the NYT bestseller list.”

Although there are a number of authors who have launched bestsellers after strategically and methodically (as Hale puts it) building an online presence like Rebecca Skloot , (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks), Gretchen Rubin (The Happiness Project), and Ferriss himself, T.J. Stiles, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, cautions that no one really knows what makes a book successful. “When a book DOES succeed, publicity is usually an element,” Stiles says. “What makes a book succeed? If anyone could figure out a formula for that, then publishers wouldn’t lose money (or just break even) on 70% of the books they release. Only about 30% make money. Everyone’s in the dark—not when it comes to what makes a good book, but what makes a commercially successful one. So many great books don’t make money. … as William Goldman said about Hollywood, ‘Nobody knows anything.’”

{Meghan Ward writes book reviews for the San Francisco Chronicle and is working on the memoir Paris On Less Than $10,000 a Day. A version of this post appeared at meghanward.com/blog, where she writes regularly about the book industry.}

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