Amazon is competing now with Libraries

Just when you thought the world of publishing couldn't get any weirder, it does. Why don't we just call publishing an entity of permanent change. Amazon is getting into the world of the librarians with brown brogans and reading glasses. Except the authors have to go along. I was contacted as I am sure many of you were who have books with Amazon in their kindle collection. KDPSELECT is the name of the program and basically you let people read your books for free...well its free to them. Let me explain

So Amazon has a big fund that you as the author get a part of when people read your books. The PRIME members get access to this vast library for free. They get to read your work and you get exposure and some remuneration. It is the wild west of ebooks and everyone is trying all sorts of new marketing gimmicks. Since libraries will now be heavily into Ebooks with lending going on in cyberland like never before, Amazon is hearing some footsteps and figured they  would create their own library.

And what does the author get out of it. For the bestselling authors it is not such a great deal. They probably lose on this deal with a smaller cut, but for the mid list authors who are still developing market presence it might not be such a bad thing. You can take the Kid Rock approach and not offer your stuff on Itunes because you believe people should pay for a quality product, but writers want to be read and this might get you a few more.

The cynical view is authors are just getting ripped off again, maybe, but then again you have to take the long view. I have tried it for ninety days with my books and I am not sure if it will make a difference or not. Maybe there are some who will not take a flyer on my books for the price of an ebook but with the enticement of a free download, a Hazelgrove novel might be just the ticket. Or maybe I'm just another writer getting screwed over again. Who knows.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man...one mans war with suburbia

Brands and Platforms in Publishing

If you are trying to get published or have been published and are bringing out another book a couple words that will creep into your conversations with agent and publishers will be brand and platform. These are very important now to publishing as they try and stake out their territory in the wild west of an increasing kindle driven world. For authors these twin words are cautionary tales and will inform your decision on how best to publish. Lets take platform first.

Your platform is your launch vehicle for your books. It usually consists of a website or a blog or if you are really big a television show or radio program. Those platforms are the big guns obviously, but for most of us we have a web presence that gives us our platform. Publishers are wrestling with the big question of platform which is what type sells books. Does a website really drives sales? Does blogging drive sales or is it all so much white noise. Nobody knows for sure but you better have a platform just in case.

Which brings us to brand. A brand is more esoteric than a platform. A brand is truly a name. Say Danielle Steele or Tom Perotta. These are brands. People go buy these books when they want to read romance or something more literary. The name is the brand. This is obviously much harder to achieve but it is the word now that is hurting mid list fiction...you know those novels that come from obscure writers and many times never see the light of day. Used to be publishers brought these authors along and turned them into brands, not so much anymore.

Now we must arrive with our platform and brand fully formed. This is the realities of publishing fiction today. True, publishers still take chances but they are few and far and in between. The Maxwell Perkins of yesteryear are not only dead and buried but most people cannot even remember the mindset anymore that moved an editor to take a flyer on a novel they loved. Not that there is nothing new under the sun.

Hemingway recognized brand very early and cultivated is image as a macho adventurer of the world who wrote big stories about big people. Hemingway branding still goes on today. You can buy Hemingway furniture and eat in Hemingway restaurants. Less may be more but today you better have more than less if you want to brand anything.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man--the story of the recession generation

Why Are Books Sales Up?

According to the New York Times books sales are up after Black Friday and I'm not talking about Ebooks. We are talking about the old pulp and cover books. Booksellers were surprised to find people reaching for the Desotas of publishing when everyone had written off the old paper and ink behemoths as DOA. But people have a funny way of surprising you and readers surprise everybody. Like writers, readers do not follow trends.

Speaking for myself I have becomes less enchanted with the ebook. I had thought this would be my preferred way of reading with the quick download of yet another book right after finishing one. But I missed the physicality of a book. I missed looking at the cover and knowing how much more I had to read and getting jelly and coffee all over the pages. I missed turning down the pages and throwing it in my backpack to whip out at a coffee house.

Of course the thought is that the IPOD will be the format for the IBook and the kindle will spread like wildfire and of course it has. But books are not songs. There is a difference and reading Virginia Woolf will not be the same on a small lit up screen. It just isn't. But of course economics dictate the day eventually, but readers are not to be corralled so easily. They might just buck the trend of the buck. As Mr. Fezziwick said in A Christmas Carol...there are more important things than making money sir.

So there is.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Cable Book Pundits and the New Low

We have all become used to the punditry of cable television hawking books. It has become standard operating procedure for guests to appear on Fox or MSNBC and hawk their books. Usually the host will do this for them so it is not so awkward. And we have become used to Bill OReilly hawking his books every show and Glenn Beck hawking his books and novels. They do have the platform and it is just another way for them to cash in. But Chris Matthews unfortunately seemed to bring it to a new low.

I like Hardball. Chris is a little over the top but he generally uncovers something worth knowing. He has written a book on John Kennedy. This we know. He had talked about his book a few times on his show and left it at that. But last night Cable book punditry hit a new low. I was watching him on my phone when he started talking about his book tour. He began to mention numbers. He said he was giving speeches where over a thousand people showed up. He said he was speaking in the prestious blah blah hall and there had been eighteen hundred people. He said people were lined up outside to see him and hear his talk on Kennedy.
 \
I was watching all this on my phone in the car. Not something I recommend but I looked at the small screen because this was odd. Then Chris set the new low for humility and crassness when it comes to using your own show to promote yourself. "I recommend you buy this book because it will make a great gift for loved ones at Christmas."  He said this looking at the camera and the self serving nature of his announcement, said almost like he was talking about someone else, made me pull over.

In that moment he had destroyed the credibility of his show. All that followed bounced away. I am sure the publisher suggested this to him or maybe Chris just figured he'd go for the gold. But he was hard to listen to after that one. He is a rich man and it is amazing he would throw his own show under the bus and turn it into a one man commercial for himself. But these are the times we live in right?

Maybe, I'll go back to network, you know, where they give you the news, and don't sell books.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man...the Suburban nightmare

Falling off the Kindle Train

Uh oh. Fell off the kindle train. Burning the eyes. Yeah I know it is supposed to be like print but I found myself squinting all the time. Maybe its just a coincidence but reading from the little screen just stopped appealing to me. I will still use it I guess, but a book sure feels better. And I know you can make the type bigger and all that. I just think I'm tired of reading from devices.

We lived in ether world now and it's getting worse. Tech is robbing us of personal moments and I don't know this just felt like more tech to me. And I'm a tech freak so I think the burning eyes and the feeling of not holding a book just bothered me. Maybe the gadget thing wore off. You know, you get a new phone and its great for a bout a week and then it just becomes your phone. No big deal.

Anyway. I'm back to buying books. Whew. Expensive man. A hardcover is like twenty one bucks. What the hell. I could download it for half the price! But I dont' know. I read The Art of Fielding and The Help on my  kindle and when I see the book in the store I still want to own those books. I just own some bytes and yeah its cool to look at the cover and read the inside info of a real pulpy book.

I know with the color Kindle Fire it will get better. But old dog new trick. Maybe. Or maybe I just want to own something again. Like a book.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Buying Eggs

I needed eggs the other morning and so I jumped in the car and started driving for a local farm where they sell eggs off the back porch for a buck seventy five. I had scratched up the money from my pants pockets (times being what they are) and set off on my Sunday morning drive back into the rural America. The far west suburb of Chicago I live in is ground zero for where the boom died. On my drive toward the farmer I saw old stone entrance posts and gates of STONEHAVEN  or CREST FARMS with bright red flags advertising luxury homes. On the other side was only corn fields.

And I drove feeling more anxious. Hadn't these morons learned yet? That Americans could no longer afford luxury homes and that the market nay the culture for these type of homes had passed. In these high weeded lots sat several desultory McMansions that someone had taken a flyer on and like the pioneers of old found themselves isolated in a country they knew not. Like a wave retreating these fields will return to the Prairie grass. 

But I felt anxious. Something seemed terribly wrong. America seemed to have bet on all the wrong things. The thought that a million dollar home could make you feel better about yourself seems so delusional now after four years of super recession. And yet the red flags are new and the sign is freshly painted. COME PICK OUT YOUR DREAM HOME. I slowed down to look and then I stopped and just stared at the lonely landscape of American capitalism gone bad. I saw no American dreams here.

And so I finally reached the old farm house with the swinging sign EGGS and pulled up to the back porch. I crunched across the drive and swung open the door to the nineteenth century home. The cooler whirred and the box for money sat there open. I threw in my dollar seventy five and fished out a dozen eggs. No one was up in the house and I shut the door quietly and walked back to my car. Then I drove back toward home with my eggs and I felt strangely peaceful.

Funny that just a simple task like buying eggs off a farmers back porch should give me such serenity. But maybe I had just touched a time when all the choices were simple. A man produced eggs and sold them to his neighbors and expected the money to be left behind. Simply amazing.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Points For Reading the Nutty Books

When I was learning to write fiction I felt I had to read all the books that made no sense. I started with Ulysses and then went to Finnegan's Wake and then finished with The Sound and the Fury and then to really confuse myself I read Infinite Jest. Quite certain I had completed my literary education by not understanding the prose of these very established writers I sat down and wrote my own very plain and simple novels. A bit like learning classical to play rock and roll.

And now I am reading the review of 1Q84, Murakamis's new novel and the review of the book makes no sense and I am quite sure the book makes less. Still I think, I should read this. And even the reviewer had a hard time getting over the fact that this nine hundred plus book made less sense than a mad hatter in a mad house still he felt it was a worthy book. And of course this begs the question of who is left to tackle these type of nutty books now.

Well writers  for one. They will read just about anything set in front of them that is deemed literary and cutting edge even if it make absolutely no sense. And of course this begs the question of does this type of reading help the writer. Yes and no. It did help me read Ulysses. It did not help me to read Finnegan's Wake. The Sound and the Fury maybe. Infinite Jest, sadly, no. I just didn't get the necessary kickback for me, but of course others might just find these books incredibly rewarding. And I am a slave to the dictum that writers should read the difficult books.

And what about the reading public. No. For the main these books will find few mainstream readers and maybe they shouldn't. They were not written for the mainstream anyway.  But then who is reading them and do you get points for attempting them? Saul Bellow once said there is no place in heaven for men who read boring books. Hmmm. I wouldn't say boring, but certainly nutty would fit Murakami's book that people will buy even if they don't understand it.

Maybe it is just that another human wrote something like Naked Lunch or Finnegan's Wake and you are really curious as to what the hell they are up too...even if you have no idea.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Vapidity of Modern Fiction

Why is it I can go read a bad F. Scott Fitzgerald short story from the Saturday Evening Post, one of his uncollected stories, that he himself disparaged and critics overlooked at just mainstream tripe of his day, and that story has more heart, more soul, than the  modern novels of our day. I try and read all the big books out and like many I am excited to launch on a new journey into the literary fiction of our day but after all the spun gold of New Yorker prose, I find something lacking. In short...where's the beef?

The beef would be heart and that does not exist in our modern writers. At least the ones I read and I read a lot of bestsellers. Now I dont' read everyone but there is this qualitative difference between the old writers of fiction and the new ones. The new writers write stories that read like long magazine pieces that don't seem to lower themselves to the soul of pathos or bathos. They may even call it sentimentality. But there is a curious lack of warmth in a lot of these writers that the writers of old seemed to possess.

If you read  something like the Baby Party which is a story of Fitzgerald's about two men who get in a fist fight on a suburban lawn then you might think this is lightweight fare but in fact it is a dead on treatment of the absurdity of bourgeois life but also the devotion to children. It is so alive, so breathing with life that we know these people and feel their pain and sorrow. When I finish a novel of today it is a bit like skating on ice and just about as cold.

So I go back to where is the beef? Is it television and the Internet? Maybe so. But those old writers are softening we need to go back too after our revved up Kindle reading where the emotion flat lines in the long highway of over educated prose and we yearn for those humanist values stripped out of our smart fiction that can be shattered like so much over spun glass.

\My prose bitterly proves the point.  

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

The Books Most People Don't Read

I was going through my library and had to write down the books that influenced me as a writer. As I went through the books I realized I would never read them now. I simply don't have the time. It is a sad fact that if a writer doesn't read these books early on he or she will probably never read them. How many people would pick up Ulysses or The Sound and The Fury, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners, Light in August, or Finnegan's Wake and read it now? Most would not. Sanctuary, Under the Volcano, Dr Sax, On the Road. These are just a few of the books but the point is that if I had not read them when I was trying to learn how to write fiction, I probably wouldn't.

Work will knock out reading time. Kids, family, the Internet. I am amazed that I took the time to read a lot of these musty novels but it made me realize that if I had a different life where I would have had kids or a real job or taken a different road then I would have never read these books. But reading is the backbone of a writer and those books skipped are skipped for good. There is really a very short window to explore the old writers and that is really true today

Who knows how many writers are lost because they simply didn't have the time or read and develop their craft. It takes years of reading and experimenting before a style develops. Most people simply don't have the time and now of course I can barely keep up with reading current fiction. And I think about the books I didn't read and never will now. I can only take solace that at least, for a while, I took a stab at the the books most people don't read.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

NPR Interview in Hemingways Attic

The thousand and one things of rewriting

There has to be a thousand and one things you do in rewriting and more. Thank God you don't have to do them twice. But it is all those changes that comprise the final draft that hopefully will not come back to you again. And it is the tweeks that change the work. The big work is mostly done but then comes all the nuances that make a novel a novel. The minor changes of one word for another or the addition of a paragraph setting the stage or just the breaking down of dialogue and exposition all change the novel in ways that are immeasurable.

It is really at the end that the glaring moments taunt you. After rewriting something ten times or more you think you have caught the big inconsistencies or mistakes but of course they are the ones that are embedded in the text and your eye has become used to them. When they do make themselves known it is amazing because you have read that passage so many times and never have seen it.

Then you start back through swapping out words deleting sentences, breaking up chapters, combining chapters, fleshing out characters. It is amazing how some scenes stay so thin, so under imagined. So you go back at it and basically rewrite those scenes from the beginning to the end. And then of course you have to read it again to get out all the fat again. Fat is a big one. A paragraph bunches up and literally doesn't look right. Crowded. It looks crowded.

So you thin you fatten. The book is an accordion you expand and contract expand and contract. This goes on for months. This goes on for years. And finally you reach a point where you have completed the thousand and one things and you think that is it. No more. I am finished. Until you discover the one thousand and second.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man...the American Dream gone bad

The old cars of the middle class

Old cars are making a come back. Or maybe it's just because I drive old cars. Used to have really nice cars with really nice payments. Five hundred. Four hundred. Big thirty thousand dollar monsters that broke down pretty quickly just the same. Amazing how that new car smell went away so quickly. I guess there is a spray out there you can get so you can keep it going. And those first dings. Rough man. And then that first time you don't get by the wash and your thirty five thousand dollar ripoff looks old.

That sucks.

So then you get rid of it or you pay it off and it becomes your old car. Ten years old with a one hundred and fifty thousand miles. You quit washing it years ago.  You just keep it going. You don't have any payments and you don't want any. Now you have two old cars and the air goes out or a window doesn't close or a door doesn't open and the upholstery smells like a junkyard with that sun baked smell of old clothes in a trunk. And the floor is covered in leaves and dirt and old junk food wrappers.

But it still runs.

And so you cruise around with your loud muffler and then some dude pulls up next to you in a Beamer. You look over and you feel the pang. Man I want that car. I want to get into a car that smells good and looks good and I want that new feeling man. Because if your car is new then you are new. You just feel better about everything. And that lasts about... a month. And then you are staring down those payments and you start thinking about the fact you are paying up to five hundred bucks a month just to get from point A to point B.

No thanks.

And so the Beamer dude pulls ahead and you get your jalopy up to speed. Throw in a CD of old songs you dig. And look for a McDonald's. Life aint so bad.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man...losing a house should not be this funny

Kindle and our Libraries of Old

My fondest memories are rolling through the Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore and finding new books to read. I always read what I wasn't supposed to be reading because I wasn't supposed to be reading it. Rosemary's Baby or a book about drugs called Tuned Out or just about any flashy cover on the paperback rack. But then I disappeared into the stacks and looked for my Henry Huggins books or Romona and Beatrice or Tom Swift or the Hardy Boys. Then I would sometimes just walk the stacks and find the big picture books from World War II and sit down and pour over the photos of battle and gore and marvel at men who actually went and fought and died.

Finally, I would check out my books and walk home in the crisp twilight with the excitement of the books under my arms. I still feel that excitement when I walk into a library today. Something about a building of books just gets my mind rolling. All that possibility in those carpeted aisles with the lady in the beehive and reading glasses glancing at those that would disturb the inner sanctum. The slightly harried younger woman working behind the front desk that are forever cataloging books or trying to find a missing library card because a mother and her kids are imploding.

Communities are defined by their libraries. It is one of the first things a town builds. And the biggest towns (Chicago) have incredible libraries. And it is hard to believe that world might go away. Maybe not be anytime soon, but the Ebook is the first foot in the door of a world where people don't have to leave home to go the library. The library as we know it with the cranky women keeping order and the pulpy smell of old books could well one day be reduced to a server.  A strange thought.

Amazon  just opened up the Kindle to libraries.That means people like myself can now zap a book into my reader at my kitchen table and never leave the house. The overwhelming advantage of the Kindle or any Ereader is one of convenience. It is simply easier to plunk a book out of thin air and read it. There is none of the driving to the bookstore or library and parking and paying for gas and searching out the book. You simply do it in seconds. This doesn't bode well for bookstores or libraries.

The faint erosion of library traffic will not be noticeable at first. There are simply too many people who prefer books. But as times passes, the people who grew up on Ereaders will not reach for a book the way we don't reach for an eight track tape or a  record. The medium has simply passed. And it is a sad thought that our collective isolation from technology might just spread to even our libraries.

I don't know. Even if all the books are gone, I'll still go to the library and walk the stacks. Me and the lady in the beehive with that sweater she is forever pulling together, looking over her glasses. Shhhhhhh. People are reading. For now anyway.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man...one mans fight to get out of suburbia

Ban Lifted on Twain Book "Eves Diary"

Seems Mark Twain knew all about book selling. Ron Suskind writing the second he scurries out of government has nothing on him. Salaciousness sells. Just ask the author of the Palin tell all Joe McGinnis. Sarah had  an affair with a basketball player. And he was black. Or Suskinds contention Obama doesn't like women. Even that sells in a sort of reverse misogynistic boys club man cave oeuvre.

But Twain wrote Eve's Diary in 1906 and it was too racy for a library in Charlton Mass and was banned for one hundred and five years. Talk about being out of print. The book about the relationship of Adam and Eve had racy pictures that one Hattie L Carpenter (librarian) did not care for and started the  ball rolling. The ban held and patrons of the library could not find the racy little book anywhere in the stacks.

And Twain knew even then it would be good for sales and called the banning parties "freaks of of the Charlton library." But now all has been forgiven.The book has been restored and people can now read Eves Diary dirty pictures and all. I suppose there is nothing new under the sun. Sex sells. Even anti sex sells. I am sure Hattie L. Carpenter would not have let Joe McGinnis's book into her hallowed library . Maybe she wouldn't have even let that misoginistic Suskind tell all in the door either.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Political Correctness in Novels

I was reading Chad Harbach's novel The Art of Fielding and cruising along and then I just stopped. I had tripped over a word and at first I thought it was a typo, something that slipped through the proof reader if there is such a person anymore. But then I realized the word was intentional and that the novel had fallen victim to the dictates of political correctness. The word I had known for many years and seen millions of times in other novels and is still used in current vernacular. So why then had the editors of Harbach's novel deferred to some silly twenty first century that someone was being offended?

Now this word does not easily slip off the tongue. The novelist must always write by ear and that means if it sounds right then it is right. African American is clunky in prose. It just stops the flow because of it's amped up meaning. This is not the word Harbach bowed to by the way. But this is the first of the clunky words that  novelists have to deal with. I have written several novels about the South where I used black or blacks to describe some of the characters. And of course in speaking I had to use the famed Nword as well. But to have put African American in the prose would have violated the connotation of the word I chose.

Now Harbachs word wasn't even that loaded. If you had to rate it for political correctness it was down on the scale at about a five out of ten. So what was this word. Are you ready? Freshpersons. Right. Freshpersons for freshmen. So obviously the group that would be offended by freshmen is women. But the word freshpersons was so jarring it stopped the fictional dream cold. We all know freshmen describes men and women, but the long reach of political correctness demanded this silly exercise in semantics.

So I started thinking about the pressure of political correctness in novels. We all heard about the washing out of Huckleberry Finn with the removal of the Nword. This kind of tinkering or mindfulness of present day sensibilities is not the purview of the novelist. He or she is not writing for the current day but for all time and to have the hand of political correctness intrude on the pallate of the artist violates the vision for the work. It is a bit like opening a door to bright sunlight while watching a movie. You really don't want that reality in your story.

But everyone has to deal with the times they live in and Chad might have written this way anyway. So maybe it is just me. Maybe freshmen is anachronistic and not really the wore anymore to describe the first year of college. Maybe freshpersons is the twenty first century word now. Freshpersons. Sounds like something you could eat. Or throw away.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man
"Rocket Man is a hilarious, well written novel about one man's search for the New American Dream." James Frey, author A Million Little Pieces and Bright Shiny Morning


"The funniest serious novel since Richard Russo's Straight Man, rich with the epic levity of John Irving and salted with the perversion of Updike." Chicago Sun Times

Afternoon of an Author

You do it Stopping by a library for the Wifi connection you take a stroll in the stacks with your Kindle. Irony upon irony. You float along eyes scanning and the the H's begin and you see the first cover and then the next. It is your hometown library and they have multiple copies of all your books. And so you thumb that first one that you agonized over for seven years. It is well thumbed and someone has scribbled in pencil on the first page. Some of the pages are bent. The library pocket has your birthday stamped and followed by a dash How long until that final date?

The second book has been brutally abused. A good sign of anxious readers. The pages are even more worn, some turned back to mark a spot. Someone has dumped a glob of coffee that stained the cover page brown. You slip through the pages that took another seven years to produce. It is quiet in it's plastic cover that the small publisher had created but had now dimmed and turned to a yellowed plastic. The third novel looks like it just came off the shelf and has not seen the same action of the others. It was a quieter novel though more violent. The publisher had gone all  out and the author photo looks like that of a very prominent successful man of the literary world.

The fourth novel, your most recent has truly been abused. The cover is dog eared and coffee seems to have been dumped on several pages in wholesale quantities. Maybe jelly stains on a few other pages. There were more local references in this one so maybe people thumbed through quickly. The book already looks older than others but it is of a cheaper quality, more modern, less heft.

So you slide the books back and wonder what testament there will be to a person reading now. With a kindle there is none. You read and download another Very convenient, fast, changing that physical interaction. None of these old battle hardened soldiers of the public library. You wonder how long they will last now that the digital age of books is here.

You walk on. Your afternoon is almost over and it is time to go back to work. Just a little less enthusiasm as you open your computer. You sigh as your Kindle warms up.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Selling Fiction

You start off just wanting to get published. No small feat. This can go on for years. For me it went on seven years. Ridiculous you think. Seven years trying to break into print, but then you finally do and that first goal of just getting into print is quickly supplanted with the second goal: you want to sell. Why this should be when you were so satisfied, so happy to just see your name on a book cover that you should suddenly up your goal to this much heavier weight to bear. But you do.

And now the writer is confronted with the marketplace. Strange amorphous beast who seems to not give a damn about you or your book. You have in your mind a great populace passing on your book with a whispered, read this, it's great. But you have no proof this is occurring just your own faith in what you have written. Shouldn't that be enough? A man who self published a book never misses a chance to ask me if I have seen the reviews on Amazon. I assure him I have. In his mind those reviews will push his book along unit the world has seen the reviews and read his book.

But of course the other million books are also crying our with their reviews. And those dismal Amazon rankings tell the writer of fiction he must do more. And so you do. You tweet, write, post, talk, push, review, you do what you have to do to get the word out. If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it did it really fall? Probably not. And this comes to the writers basic fear: obscurity. That you will pass along and your books will not be read.

In nonfiction the hook is easier. You can tie it to what is happening right now. Fiction is trickier. The story has to be tied to something current and that is tough. Because the times are always changing, but your book is not. Your story is a constant. So you have to break it down to who will read your story. You hope everyone, but the truth is certain people will buy your books. Maybe women, maybe men, maybe kids. And you have to go find them.

Giant publishers confront this daunting task every day and only succeed with a few of their books. The rest of their titles are lottery tickets they hope will be a winner. But we know the odds on the lottery. So the best thing the writer of fiction can do at the end of the day is write a really great story. That you can control. Chasing the market is a futile gesture and bound to failure. But you can impact that basic law of selling fiction: books are still sold by word of mouth. To have someone say at the end, that was a great book! Is the ultimate marketing plan. 

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man 

Rocket Man is a hilarious, well written novel about one man's search for the New American Dream." James Frey, author A Million Little Pieces and Bright Shiny Morning

A clean well lit coffee house to write in

Rewriting is mind numbing. The same thing over and over and over. Four hundred some plus pages you climb over like a runner who just keeps going around the same track trying to improve their time just a little. Each time you start again you hope this might be the final lap, but there is always that nagging suspicion that one more time might be the charm. To pull this off without losing your mind requires boat loads of coffee, sweets, and lots of company and white noise. You have to trick your mind into not wandering off and never coming back. So you haunt every coffee house you can find.


The first coffee house works for a while until the Internet dies. They complain that their WIFI has been going in and out and of course when you are there it just up and dies. You need the Internet. Not for the rewriting but for the breaks to give your mind release. You need something to distract you between chapters and after eating lunch and caramel rolls and drinking coffee you feel it is time to go find somewhere with WIFI. You run down the street to a little dark coffee house run by a tough woman who gives you a hot chocolate. You plug in and start again. That's when you hear it.

You need background noise not the greatest hits of love songs from the Seventies. Afternoon Delight gets you off the chair to hunt down the tough Chicago woman who is reading The Inquirer behind the counter. Pardon me. But could you put on some classical music or jazz? The flat expression. NO. She goes back to the Inquirer. You sit down again to Mandy, It Don't Matter to Me, Have you Ever Been Mellow. That's it. You can't wall it out. Olivia Newton John doesn't belong in your novel. You unplug and give the tough broad from Chicago a dirty look and head out into the snow.

Starbucks. Ah, you know the menu. A good place to plug in. Consistent. You bust in, a man on a mission. Every table is taken. Worse the one table with an outlet is taken. You stare at the lone man drinking coffee by himself. You have an hour of battery time if only the sonofabitch would leave! No, you aren't ready to order yet thank you very much. You stand around and glare and glare. Nobody cares and nobody is giving up their table. Shite! You head back out and down the street. Desperate for a clean well lighted place to write in or at least a place with an open table.

You head into Cozi Cafe and find a corner table with an outlet. You plug in, order some really bad coffee. Sit down and begin again. Wifi works. There are sweet rolls. There are no people. It's as cold as a morgue, but you can work here. At least for a little while.

www.billhazelgrove.com/

Corporations are not people

I used to know a guy in college who always said, you are either for me or against me. Usually he wanted help in some way and everyone had a good laugh. But there is no laughing now. Sixteen million people unemployed with a double dip recession looming, one quarter of all mortgages under water, houses worthless, and a vanguard of zealots running for President who want to destroy Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare. See Paul Ryans plan if you doubt what I am saying or watch Governor Perry in the debate last night.

These are the times of you are either for the people or against the people. Ideology aside. Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, green whatever, this concerns the people. Black, white, yellow, brown, it doesn't matter your color. The people are on the line right now. The American Jobs Act will be unveiled and it will help middle class people. It will help the people. Even if you are employed and doing very well, this plan will be better than doing nothing because we might have a chance to get things going.

Corporate America will bail out nobody in the United States. They are in pursuit of other markets. They are in other countries where the emerging middle class has buying power. They are after those consumers. They are sitting on trillions and are not going to employ Americans because the American consumer has been shucked and left with only the husk. There is no more money for the corporations to mine. This is a basic concept. There is no Buy America. The buyers have left the country for ports where people can buy. And corporations are not churches, they do not have our best interests at heart. They could give a damn.

Mitt Romney was wrong. Corporations are not people. They are not feeling creatures. They are entities created to make money anywhere in the world. America to them is like a service station where you can pick up some gas and a few goodies, but you are on your way somewhere else. The right will try and obstruct Obamas plan. They have already begun. But they are not obstructing the Presidents plan. They are obstructing the people.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man  One Man's Search for the new American Dream. James Frey

The Helps Point of View

Novelists use lots of different points of view. First person is preferred by many because it is close to the reader and comfortable for the writer. First person is very American. Ever since Huckleberry Finn came long with his Missouri patois of Mississippi river idioms a love affair was born with the down home insider who gives us the real low down as we navigate our way through the novel. Many first novels, mine included, are first person narration because a single point of view naturally coalesces around the main character

The Help uses multiple points of view. Mostly in the first person of the characters. Faulkner did this in Absalom Absalom and really became the benchmark for this type of narration. Multiple viewpoints gets around the restriction of first person which is you are stuck inside the head of one character. This can be tricky in a novel that moves around and we have to have insight into areas the main character might not necessarily be involved in. Authors use tricks like the ones I used in Tobacco Sticks of sneaking my character around, putting him outside doors and literally peering in keyholes

But in Katherine Stockett gets around this problem in The Help by using the view points of the  maids and one of the women who also it turns out to be a writer. This allows us to move around in the story and yet get the inside scoop which is the essential element of The Help which is the maids point of view. So in that regard it works very well. The risk of multiple narrators is that the author cannot pull it off or these switches are jarring to the reader. When I first started The Help I was sad to leave Abilene, but then along came Minny who picked up the slack with a more fiery blunt point of view.

Stockett gets in one jam and that is The League party where she goes omniscient or third person. She could not afford to be stuck in any ones head there because it moved around too much . But this chapter is by far the weakest and yet it is a center point of the novel. The third person is just too removed and we don't feel the pain or joy of the characters. She must have agonized over this decision and found it is the only thing that works. In a sense it is a violation of the POV, but I too cheated in Tobacco Sticks and went to third person for a brief chapter.

The novel dictates the point of view and so the only rule is that which works for the book,. Multiple narration clearly works for the bulk of The Help. Ultimately it is the authors call and demonstrates the basic maxim of all fiction. There are no rules.

http://www.billhazelgove.com/

Why does the Tea Party hate the Unions?

If you are populist party why pick on working people? I mean what did they do to you but work and try to get a little ahead and raise their families and own a home and maybe a couple of cars. What is wrong with people who want just a sliver of the pie that the rich gobble up like a feral cats? If the Bush tax cuts expired and the rich kicked in then half of the deficit would disappear tomorrow. Poof. So why does the Tea Party want to bust the unions and get rid of middle class entitlements if they are really the party of the people?

Or are they a shill for corporations that exploit the dark crevasses of the American psyche. Our secret xenophobia of the other that creates a birther movement because we have an African American President, then starts in on middle class entitlements like they are a Socialist plot. Could there be any bigger power play in America than dressing up a woman in Patriotism and folksy idiotic Alaska ditties, outfitting her with a great body and looks that can kill and then having her say every heinous thing about working people that gets fed to her by a network designed to break the backs of the working class?

So why does the Tea Party hate Unions? Are they an extension of the heinous government that offers Medicaid to the poor, Medicare to the elderly, tax deductions and Social Security for the middle class? Its like the woman from Wisconsin I talked too who said she hated the teacher unions, but whose husband was in a union. But that's different. They aren't radicals she said. Teachers are radicals? Oh I get it now. Those people in puffy jackets with a hats and scarves in Madison Wisconsin are radicals. My daughters first grade teacher a radical. Right.

But really. Mr. Hoffa calls the Tea Party a bunch of sonsofbitches and can you blame him? They are trying to eviscerate working class people. Wouldn't you call them a bunch of sonsofbitches. I'm not in union. I don't have a pension or retirement. I will will work (write) until the day I die. Should I bust the union because they are covered and I'm not? Thinking of it that way it does seem like class envy.

So that must be it. I think I will trade off my two degrees and years of doing what the hell I wanted to be in a Union and work my ass off. This must be the reason the Tea Party people hate them because they envy the unions for their jobs and their benefits. Wow. I guess things are pretty bad when we are envying a bunch of people working on assembly lines and in factories,warehouses and mills.  Or those rogue teachers in their cinder block luxury offices grading papers in schools without air conditioning.

 Sonsofbitches. All of them.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man First Chapter--The American Dream Gone Wrong