The Brutal Truth About Publishing

The brutal truth is that publishing is harder and easier now. Anyone can produce a book and put it out there on for a Kindle download. The time from conception to e-publication is measured now in nanoseconds. Literally someone can write a book one day and publish it the next. It might not be any good but they can tell friends and neighbors to look them up on Amazon. But here is the brutal truth: no one will buy it because it will be a speck of sand among millions of other specks.

And so publishing in a strange way has become more rarefied. More exclusive. The dunning of millions of authors cancels out the playing field. The noise from three million books reaches a critical mass where no one can get their message out. Except for the few. The few who are published by the mainstream large publishers who put the muscle behind the book to blow right past the Hoover Dam of published authors. And they do it the old fashioned way; with lots of money.

Start with the million dollar advance. This author has a huge advantage over his kindle published brethren. For one he or she can make a living as an author. Right there the stream is narrowed drastically. But the publisher now has to make that million dollars back and they do it by pumping money into pushing that book. While the kindle author tries to get his book reviewed, five thousand galleys go flying out to bookstores, reviewers, bloggers. Publicists and marketers follow up and the word shoots out that this is a big book. The noise of all the self published authors is drowned out by a single tidal wave of publishing muscle.

Then the buzz starts and the author and the book steadily climb onto the bestseller list. The self published author sells a few copies and then simply disappears. Now there are exceptions. There are now authors selling a million ebooks on Amazon. We have all heard these stories and they are inspiring. But for the majority of authors who decide that watching their Amazon rankings tick a few times down and seeing their name in print is worth more than the years of learning their craft, the fate is a dismal one. Utter obscurity.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once said there is no greater difference than that between the amateur and the professional in the arts.  This is probably more true today where the amateur runs to immediate gratification while the professional labors on in pursuit of their craft. There still is no substitute for first rate work even in the age of the internet and the digital word.

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

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/

Got the Kindle Finally!

All my books are available on Kindle (Kindle Books)so I figured I better go get one. I had been eyeing them for a while and when I went past the GOING OUT OF BUSINESS sign on Borders I swung in and eyed their KOBOS and almost bought one for the low price of seventy bucks. But after talking to the salespeople who would soon be walking the streets they let me know in their own way the KOBO ereader was not so great. Well, it's kind of slow one saleswoman said in beneath her breath. Say no more. After asking about several books Borders didn't have I beat it out of there and headed for Best Buy where I bought my KINDLE!

I haven't read one book on it  yet but today is the day. But I went into my library to grab something and there were all my books. I usually don't even think about them but suddenly they looked antique. Don't get me wrong I will still be a book reader of pulp and circumstance. But I know the way I look at CD's or records that the old delivery vehicle is on a time limit. Books will not be relevant to my seven year old the way they were to me. It is just a fact.

And maybe because I had to wrestle with the kindle environment for the last few weeks (In Kindle Purgatory)getting by books out there that I came to understand more about the power of the digital word. Even going into Borders hit me differently. Of course Borders is going out of business. The brick and mortar modality of selling books is already behind the curve. Those books just sit on the shelf and don't say a word. I can shoot out my chapters to people and they may ignore them they may delete them they may block me, but I just did something pro active while the muted pulp sits on the shelf.

The word I got was that Borders got into the Ereader market too late and that was one of the reasons they went down like the Titanic. The truth is publishing is changing at nanosecond speed and authors bookstores and publishers are still adjusting. Whoops. My phone just went off. That was my Kindle newsletter. I guess it's time to open the box and fire up my ereader. Maybe I'll try The Help. Everyone is reading it and of course it is the book Borders did not have. Guess I'll just download it. There...Done.

William Hazelgrove Website
Rocket Man Kindle or Paperback

Catcher in the Rye for the Recession Generation....

The Dark Side of Facebook

When I first got out of college I got a job selling WATS lines for the phone company in Chicago and one of the perks was I could go up to the "Switch" at all hours of the night and walk past the tech guys and put on headphones and plug into a million conversations. I would even take dates (what a loser right) up to the switch and give them a pair of headphones and we would listen to the million voices talking into the analog void. It was amazing to think that each voice intertwined with the other represented a human,but it was also scary in a way because it trivialized each voice until it no longer represented a human, just a sound wave zooming through a huge trunk line.

Fast forward to Facebook with it's strange access into the million voices of our creation and after you get past the hype and the pictures then you end up with the obnoxious guy oin the train or the coffee house who won't stop his conversation about his kids, his family , his sex life and you are part of it. Facebook pledges to give us all a new way of interacting (so says Newsweek) and maybe it will or is it just that weird social network thing taken it's logical movie fueled zenith that will eventually end up like Myspace as a feeding ground for child molesters and porn stars--another footnote to the early days of the Internet.

But Facebook's dark side is it makes something out of nothing and by contrast knocks everyone else down to nothing. Take the couple who crashed the White House all under the guise of getting their pictures on Facebook with the President. Their ten nanoseconds of fame came and went and was cataloged into the cyberstream along with everyone out crying out for attention. Zuckerberg's prototype was rating girls on a primitive site that preceded Facebook. Then Facebook became the domain of colleges and one could make a case maybe it should have stayed there. Is Facebook really that different from the primitive girl rating site and arent we all rating each other by the life we paint in cyberland?

 We have already been privy to conversations we never wanted to know where people complained about their husbands or wives only to find out they were sharing it with the world. The Social Network is a great movie in the story of the creation of Facebook and we know that it resulted in a twenty six year old becoming a billionaire. Isnt that really what Facebook is all about? A billion dollars to hear the million voices at the switch?

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January

What the Internet has done for Writers

Obscurity. It is the nemesis of all scribblers. You want to be heard. You want someone to register that all those hours you have deposited in the bank account of art and dreams and vision and cracking the universe will matter. Does a tree fall in the forest if no one hears it? That is our horror, that you write for no one. That all those strange looks and mutterings about Jim or Stephanie or John wasting their time in their room in their office in the attic in the storage room have been vouchsafed as fact and their tombstone is a testament to the naysayers who will finish with a single epigram: they were just  kind of strange.

And it was a one in a million shot to be heard beyond friends family and neighbors who read your prose and smiled condescendingly, murmuring, well, it's sort of depressing. Depressing! Depressing! We are talking about the human condition, love, death, sex...Life! Oh, well, I just found it depressing, but that's just my opinion. Back to the writers group, back to the closet. Morons Morons. Bourgeois morons! They do not understand what I am doing and all I get back are rejection letters from my one conduit; New York City. We are sorry, it just doesn't fit out needs. Another publisher may feel different. Hundreds of those. The boxes of manuscripts in the basement grow and grow and you cannot get your heart and soul out to one damn person! Then came that silly network the defence department had built, the Internet.

Suddenly the stranglehold on publishing was broken. Just like that. The great wall of indifference that turned away ninety five percent of all writers had been tunneled under with a piece of fiber optic cable. Ethernet bound, your prose shot out into a blogosphere and voila! Published! Instantly! And you got instant credible feedback because it was no one you knew. The writers group had just gone global and anyone anywhere in the world could give you their two cents. But here is what really happened, the Internet validated millions of writers because they found an audience, the world.

So now a writer no longer toils in isolation. Before my first novel was published I had been writing for seven years with no portal for my work. Just grunting it out in storage rooms, apartments, basements, with no one but some trapped people in a writers group to give me feedback. And of course my girlfriend, then wife. Poor baby. But now you will read these words, and yes, I am a novelist, but more than that, I am a writer hacking it out every day. And I am heard.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man will be out in January

Citizen Kane in our Time

Black and white spooling along in the darkness and my son shrugs when I tell him this is one of the great movies of all time. Sure it is. But you watch it and you see why. Wells was onto something with his spoof of the great media mogul William Randolph Hearst. Especially in our media age of conglomeration where Fox fronts for Murdock's agenda and those that cross him cross at their peril. Presidents beware, Hearst is alive and well. But Orson Wells is the boy genius who put it altogether.

That's what comes across when you watch the movie. Wells. He was laughing his way through having a studio give him the money and the means to make his movie. Having one hell of a time as he took over the Enquirer and made a name for himself and played Hearst through his demise. And of course Wells was playing with fire and paid the price. He found himself black listed after the movie. His later projects never had the lustre nor the backing. The Magnificent Ambersons was finished by the studio.

But genius shines through. And Wells original vision is there at a time when movie making was pretty dull. Along comes this man who breaks just about every rule with angle shots, lighting, montages, the whole structure thrown on its head . But Orson Wells is the star of Citizen Kane even in his bald mask getting wheeled around his estate as a broken down old Kane. And in that moment he is Kane. He had made his opus and would pay the same high price as his character: isolation, broken health, loneliness. Art and life imitating each other over and over again. 

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January

Excuse my rant about the New York Times Book Review

Ok, Steve Martin wrote a novel. We are used to celebrities writing novels. It seems comics and actors and divas and old rockers all finish up their career with a literary jaunt into the world of fiction. When Keith Richards is writing memoirs covered in length by the NY Times then all bets are off. It is not that we don't understand why these people are covered in the media...they are celebrities and get all the goodies on the tree. I get that. But the NY Times  Book Review purports to be the last stop on high culture where there should be some merit to being covered...besides being a comedian.

But I think after Alec Baldwin got his book reviewed when he wrote about his divorce including rant at daughter then we saw that truly the bar was that if you are famous and you write something the NY Times Book Review will cover you. So much for a literary bar. Nora Ephrons latest book on female aging disguised as novel disguised as Nora Eprhon and Steve Martin headlined the Sunday Book Review. Ok Nora has written some books and is a bestselling author. Fine. Steve Martin is a funny man who plays the banjo. Ok. And he certainly deserves a book review of his novel about the art world because he is...Steve Martin a funny man with a banjo.

You see where I am going. In the same review section Morris's last segment of his Roosevelt Biography was reviewed. Very good. Well deserved. And there were reviews of novelists and memoirs and children authors. But the space is limited and most people dont' get their books reviewed in the NY Times Book Review. So why burn it over a guy with an arrow through his head? A wild and crazy guy who starred in Parenthood and who is genuinely a funny man but not a very literary man. And Steve Martin will not be impacted at all if his book is covered by the Times.

But the lone novelist. The unheard of writer who really needs a break loses out when the NY Times Review pads the section for the latest star dust. It does matter to the man or woman who cannot be heard. So I wind up my rant by saying, hey, stick to your guns. Let the funny man be funny. Let the writer be heard.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January

Going back to High School for a Book Speech

He could feel the breath. He could feel the touch. It had not happened quickly. He had come to give a speech. A writers speech. Several writers speeches. He had been distant at first. The teachers had grayed. They had mellowed. Ceased. The rooms still were warm. It was November after all, almost Christmas. The RCA loudspeaker bellowed the announcements of seventeen years since. He watched a clock he had seen with unlined eyes.

The speech was automatic. He had already given enough. He went to the BOYS room. There were no men in this world. Just teachers and BOYS. He went into the tiled museum. Palace of his own pimple forays, kinky hair inspections. The mirror was the same. He looked better than then. He was uglier then. Uglier by comparison, but quite beautiful and gawky for sixteen. The stall was still small and he sat where he had sat for years. Graffiti had vanished of course. But it was his BOYS room and he became again. He had some time and crept around.

 He was able to leave and float back. He could feel him now. He could feel the sixteen year old heart pumping fresh ideas, wounds, voracious pride. He walked past a blue locker. He had pulled on the lock before. Moments of books long gone and papers wasted. Moments of mussed coats and gloves--a scarf. Maybe there was a picture. Maybe. He could feel him now.He walked past athletic pictures of his time. Black and white ghosts long ago. He was not among them he was sure of that. He was never that official, but he was among the faces. A stairwell dimly lit. It was dimly lit with the half light of his time also. He had run down it unthinkingly. He never thought then. He was an expert of emotion, of being. He was Zen master of his short destiny. He was contained.

Yellowed wood of a gymnasium peeked through a door. The smirks and squeaks of young feet and muscles stopping and starting with abandon. There were no warm ups. There was no warm downs. There was the moment of motion taken from other moments and replaced just as deftly. There was the fast breaths of hearts barely tested, barely creased. Still he walked on, floating down hallways of a biology class, a french class. They had sat in front of spring windows, dreaming of the outdoors. The sun had played beyond in the fields with real creatures just below. Crickets, cicadas, frogs.

The long light of heat played down the sweet dusty scent of books and papers, pencils and erasers. They held their chalk to the boards he daydreamed too. They held their chalk while he laughed, humoring, encouraging, they laughed too. He could smell the lunches. They were indescribably brown and warm. They were milk and brownies, potpies and carrots. Trays of them floated down the corridor. He waved through the food of lusty appetites. He waved through the scent of unspent inertia. It was the fuel of little Gods--American high school fare. And he was there too.

Passing on a cold morning across the courtyard. Full of confidence, worried about his hair, his face. To be preoccupied with one's looks again. Oh this would be a luxury. He was talking with friends, cracking jokes, laughing at nothing. Cold breath as he passed back into a corridor, passing pictures and trophies again. Dead matter of his time.Then suddenly he was back in the old wing again. Back to the window he began from. There were the uprights of the field. The snow fence was up and the field browned. A coach he met didn't remember him. He shook his hand and walked on. But he remembered him. He remembered him as a God of his time. He was a naysayer, a maker of destiny. He had told him once he looked like an All American. How could anyone forget that?

He would have to speak again soon. He would have to become who he was. He stared at the goal posts. They were tinged with cold again. They were tinged with his cold of days waiting for breaks. There would be a Christmas break and he would be free. There would be a spring break and he would be free. There would be a summer break and he would be free. Absolutist, all of them. Free from their luxurious drudgery.

Still the uprights gleamed and he lingered. He looked for him coming from the parking lot. He looked for him bouncing with abandon. He would bounce with a scant dearth of years lived. He could not have thought he would look again at forty eight. There are no such parallels. Sixteen year olds are not required. The bell rang and he braced himself. He touched the old wood of the windowsill. He touched the cold of the glass. He had touched these before he knew that. The field was fading with the day. He was leaving. A glance again--winters gold, youths maiden, life's opium, a necklace of unlined moments from his alma mater days.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January

The Delicate Dance of Agents and Authors

It is a marriage. You have a courtship then a honeymoon then a working marriage and then at some point a divorce. You never like to think of getting divorced when you are married but it happens. But lets back up to the courtship. You are a writer and they are an agent. You have something they want and they have something you want. It should be symbiotic and so you start out by courting them. You send out your manuscript until an agent accepts and you go on a date.

Usually the first phone call is all hugs and kisses. They love your work and you love them because they promise a way to the promised land. The phone calls are all feel good and you get off feeling like you could leap tall buildings. Then you enter the honeymoon. They are submitting your work to editors. This is unbelievable. You have just jumped ahead ninety percent of other authors. You have a conduit to that mysterious world of publishing. Now is when you have your first quarrel usually. The rejections start coming in and you question the agent. Why did you submit it to them/ How about this person? This is a minor quarrel and you roll on.

Now here is the first fork in the road. The agent does or does not hit pay dirt. If he does not find a home for your book then you are looking at a quickie divorce. You might drag on a while but lets face it the bloom is off the rose and agents are in business to make money and if they can't make money off you then those calls will not be returned and those emails will go un-answered. You simply fall out of love. It happens. But if the agent sells your book then you go to the next level.

Now your are in a thriving working marriage. You have made the agent money and you have made money. Everyone is happy. This could last a very long time especially if your book does well. Maybe a lifetime. But, unfortunately, a lot of times the contract is paid off and the royalties dwindle and the followup book might not pan and then you enter that declining era in the marriage where no one is happy. You feel like you are not getting enough attention and the agent doesn't want to wast time on projects that won't pan out. So you divorce.

As an author you have to be very attuned to this cycle in author/agent relations. You want it to all work out the best but you don't want to be delusional either. If it feels like a bad marriage it probably is and you best be on your way to divorce court. There is nothing worse than thinking someone is doing something on your behalf when they aren't. So go get a divorce, then jump right back in the saddle and start dating again.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Meeting Ernest Hemingway's Son--Bumby (Jack Hemingway)

One day I was working in the attic when Virginia Cassen the head of the Hemingway Foundation said to come on down. I had been in the attic for about five years and had gotten used to the tourists who went through the home and was more than glad to say a few words about writing in the attic. When I came down the stairs there was a man in a blue blazer and tie. He was bald with a thin mustache and was laughing at something when Virginia said, Bill, this is Jack Hemingway, Ernest's oldest son.


Now I had read all of the short stories of Hemingway's early years in Paris. Up in Michigan, Fathers and Sons, Cat in the Rain, My Old Man, The Doctors Wife and in some of the stories there was his son. At the end of A Moveable Feast Hemingway described seeing his son at the train station, "blond and chunky and with winter cheeks looking like a good Voralberg boy." He was either giving him a bottle while he wrote or meeting him with Hadley his first wife to go skiing in the Alps or going fishing. "Bumby" was his son during the happy years, the apprentice years of learning fiction in Paris and if Ernest ever had a time when his family was together it was during those first five years before he and Hadley divorced. In this way Jack Hemingway was a living literary character.

And now here was this man with a twinkle in his eye holding out his hand. He asked how I liked writing in the attic and we made small talk about the difficulties of writing good fiction. Jack was in for a dedication of the Hemingway house and so he didn't have much time for a young writer who had perched in the attic. After shaking his hand one more time and a kind "good luck with your writing "he left to get interviewed by a waiting camera crew. I returned to the attic.

Now it is ten years later and I haven't really thought about Jack much who died in 2000. His daughter Mariel Hemingway went on to fame and fortune, but Jack had a quieter life, working as a salesman, stockbroker, conservationist after serving in WWII. But you do have glimmers of people. His picture sits on my mantle, a moment in time. There was something about his rumbling laugh and the ready smile, some sort of heightened sensitivity to life that surely his father carried. It's hard to peg meeting someone connected to a legend and you sure don't want to over do it. The man who valued "one true sentence": would hate it if I summed up our brief meeting and said anything more than: I met Ernest Hemingway's son and he seemed like a great guy.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man will be out in January

That Fifty Cent Second Novel

Ran into an old friend from high school the other day while I was typing away in a coffee house.
We hooked up and went to a bar and passed the time and that's when he told me had picked up my second novel at a library sale for fifty cents. He said the library was cleaning out some of their beat up paperbacks and mine was on a table.

He proceeded to then tell me how much he was enjoying the book. He wanted to know all about my research and had I really lived in the South. As we sat at the bar he started to bring up obscure scenes I had really forgotten all about. He described moments that were very touching for him and said there were moments of drama that made made him forget I had written it.

He then began to ask me how much I had been paid for the book and wanted to know if I got a royalty when  book was sold by a library for fifty cents. I told him no and when I told him how much I was initially paid he said he had no idea that someone paid that much for a book.  I told him that was a different time and I explained the seven years it took me to write the book and the research and the grind to find a publisher and all the hell every writer goes through trying to get their work out to the public .

Again, he said he had no idea. He made me promise not to tell him how the book ended. We sat drinking for a while longer and then traded phone numbers and that was it. I thought about it later as I went home on the train. A book you spend years and years writing someone picks up for fifty cents. It's a good thing writing is not about the money.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/