Publishing A Book During A Pandemic

Herny Knox's Noble Train  will be out May 12, 2020. It is my fifteenth book. I have published in almost every situation imaginable. I have published during wars (First Iraq War) during horrible downturns in the economy (2008 recession/depression/) I struggled for years to get my first novel published and was handed the proverbial 250 rejection letters before finally a small publisher took a chance. Since then I have had good advances, lived the literary dream, movie deals, bad deals, lawsuits, triumphs, crushing defeats, and comebacks.. I have had to start over many times in the last thirty years since graduating college and deciding to become a full time writer. But I have never, ever published a book during a once in a century Pandemic.

It is like publishing into a void. Its not that the normal promotion hustle until you drop of modern publishing is hard enough...this...this is like publishing a book in a ghost town. It's not that I have stopped working, I work at home of course, it's just everybody else has and so I might as well be yelling into the night. All the pop-sickle stands are closed. Everyone has gone home. My publisher has gone on a three week furlough. The libraries where I give one hundred paid speeches a year are all closed. The trades are all working from home (PW Booklist, Kirkus) and I have yet to see a review. Only my agent has stayed at her post and so we are like the last of the Mahicans, two warriors not sure what battle to fight.

What makes this different is that the great Ferris wheel of publishing which is vast has for the moment just stopped and everyone is just waiting. Think of a party where you are the last guest and you are walking among the empty champagne bottles and picked over food. My editor let me know the books were in the warehouse last week and I should be getting my advanced copies. This is a good thing. At least the book will come out. But the question is then what? Barnes and Nobles is for the most part closed. The independent bookstores are closed. Amazon is still chugging along but busy with getting the nation toilet paper and hand sanitizer.

So I have to say publishing a book during a Pandemic is different. Maybe this is how authors felt when the Nazis marched into France. A sort of...now what? But it's your job. And so in a way I am back to where I started with my first book when no one knew or cared who I was. So I have a book that has just been published. I have a book and I better get to work selling it any way I can. I have always thought the authors job is also to sell so I have begun doing lots of Zoom presentations. I have always done lots of social media but it was always in support of larger efforts. Now it is back to square one. A brick at a time. More Social media. More zooming. Zoom might just be the ventilator of publishing for authors until the mighty Ferris wheel starts again. Just keep it all going...at least until a vaccine or a therapy. 

The New Art of Selling Books

Selling books keeps morphing. Before it was the bookstore and then it became the Internet. Authors were the man sitting behind the desk who magically sold books at signings. This was the golden age. The public wanted the book and the author was there to give it to them. We have seen  lots of photos of the dapper author sitting behind a table with one arm up and a book under his pen. Then the Internet came along and knocked that author right on his duff. You now sold books on the net and hours logged on social media hopefully converted to book sales.

Then came the ebook. Game over  or so everyone thought. Surely the Ipod was a cautionary tale and books would soon be devalued as a quaint artifact of the printing press era. Certainly Kindles would rule the day. But then a strange thing happened...readers rebelled. They quit plugging in their Kindles and what do you know a song is different from a book. Something about an intellectual exercise and readers prefer something tangible versus bits and bytes. The ebooks revolution fizzled down into the black screen of an ereader on a bright sunny day.

So people went back to buying books. But there is a different way to sell now. The author cannot sit behind his table any longer. He must get out there and "hand sell" his book. This was the way books were originally sold before conglomeration and mass culture. The bookseller would introduce the customer to a new book and the customer would buy. What a concept. So we are now in a new era. Authors... get out from behind your tables.


Madam, President The Secret Presidency of Edith Wilson

Why Hemingway Doesn't Appeal to Students Today

In my Lit Class at the private college it occurred to me that the Hemingway ideal is dead. It is not just that I have the class read the The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber and they don't get it but more than that they don't get the references or the world Hemingway painted. Now I wont say that he inhabited this world because Hemingway was consciously painting a world even then that was fantasy. It was a world of Big Game Hunters and the heroic ideal set in the Natural World.

But for students of 2015 this simply doesn't compute. The setting the mil yer the characters. They are not familiar with the Big White Hunter or Francis McComber a rich man who would hire a guide for a safari or his wife a socialite who has only contempt for McComber. More than all this they are not familiar with Africa as a wild place where men went to hunt animals as a badge of honor or at least a head mounted on a den wall.  Even when Hemingway was writing this he was writing a memory that most people in the thirties didn't possess as the way the world was.

Lets face it the whole Hemingway sell was one of looking back to a time or a world when men were men but for modern Americans then they could at least look back at he frontier that had been declared closed just thirty years before. But the fantasy like James Feinimore Cooper or Jack London painted a world of adventure that simply didn't exist for twentieth century Americans. But for twenty first century Americans that world doesn't even exist in Memory.

Consequently for the Dystopian set there is  no point of reference. Who the hell is this guy and why is he hunting a lion and why wouldn't you run from a lion? Hemingway was dated shortly after his death if not before. I don't think we can say he is dated now maybe simply not relevant even in the passing sense of being able to empathize or at least find the thread that allows the modern mind to participate in the fictional dream.

This would rankle Hemingway I am sure. He was the modernist smashing Victorian convention in his time. But sadly, not in ours.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

The Funny State of Literature

The vapidity of winter probably is a good metaphor for what has happened to literature in the year 2015. It is cold out. Zero. The wind whips against the windows and nothing really moves. As I read Richard Fords Let Me Be Frank With You it is clear what has happened to serious writing in this early part of the twenty first century. It has gone the way the of the LP and the CD. It is simply not relevant to a large segment of the population.

Harper Lee is bringing out a rejected manuscript. Why would an old woman do that who has a secure place in literary history? But of course content is king and so the more the better. Amazing this modality should nibble at the stalwart of classic lit but there you have it. We don't know if she wanted it out there or someone else but it doesn't really matter. What matters is there has been a watershed and there is no going back.

We are writers brought up on filmic imagery. Our scenes are much more relevant to a Parenthood than a reader of E. M. Foresters A Passage to India. It happened to the music industry. The same juggernaut that has pumped out elevator vocalists from American Idol now pumps it out from Dystopian set pieces like Divergent or randy Army manuals like Fifty Shades of Gray.  It isn't so much that any of this is so bad its just that it is not so good.

Then you read Richard Ford and you remember again that literature was never about that. It was about cracking the existential moment. The wonder of being alive in the year 2015. And it is still there but people would have you believe it is not. There is much more money to be made in pulp than art. But like the winter that howls even now. There is that suspicion we are mortal.  And the great consolation is this.

Literature will live on despite our best intentions.

www.williamhazelgrove.com

The Pitcher...Library Guild Selection

 

Mark Twain and Subscription Books

We have authors putting 104,000 ads in the New York Times. We have authors who are starving and cant get their books in Barnes and Noble or just about anywhere else. We have authors who don't even bother and self publish on KDP and take their royalty checks Amazon sends them. We have Big Publishing screaming from the rooftops about the evil empire. We have the digitization of books following the digitization of music. When was the last time you bought a CD?

The first thing that hits you when you walk into Barnes and Noble is how does anybody sell anything anymore. There is just so much. And of course you cannot find your own book as an author unless you are the one percent who posted that ad (paid for by the wealthier authors) to complain about Amazonian treatment. And it is ruled by the few. We probably have the same gap in publishing that exists in the rest of the country. The few reap their profit while the many choke on the crumbs.

And yet the more things change the more they stay the same. Did you know how Mark Twains Books were first sold? They were not sold in stores. His books were not deemed worthy. They were sold by subscription services. In other words they were sold by mail and by door to door salesman. Subscription books were not deemed worthy of review then but of course that didn't bother Twain. He sold into best-sellerdom and beyond.

And now as the powers that be hack it out we are turning back to those subscription days. In a time when we are watching on our own individual screens our individual shows we now get our individual books recommended to us by Bookbub and Book Guerrilla. It is the future and it is now. Small bookstores will be that individual as well. Loyal patrons relying on their bookseller to hand sell them a book.

Mark Twain would get it. He surely would.

www.williamhazelgrove.com


www.williamahazelgrove.com

Afternoon of an Author

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a piece in his later years called Afternoon of an Author. In it he went through his routine and it had all to do with writing. It is not uplifting as Fitzgerald knew he was on the far side of his career and his life. But at least it was still about the writing. In Afternoon of an Author there is not one smidge of promotion time. He did nothing to push his books and of course now he is the giant who sells hundreds of thousands of copies each year.

Now here is the new Afternoon of an Author. Writing 10 percent. Promotion 90. Time online. Incalculable. We are certainly living through the transition from print to the digital book. And for the authors it is unbelievable. We have become the bookstore in that we have to put our wares out there 24/7. It is in fact nuts. The days of Hemingway and Fitzgerald where all one did was write are so over it is hard to believe they ever existed.

Fitzgerald had a great line in Afternoon of an Author. Slag of a dream. That is how he saw himself at the end. Certainly as we grind through one cyber promotion after another you certainly feel like the slag of a dream...begun a long long time ago.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

The Hawk Who Came through the Window

Writing along when a hawk came though  the window outside the stairs leading to my office in the top of the garage. I opened the door and was met with a wide wing span and very large talons and an expression that did not care for me. The hawk landed several stairs down and blocked my exit. He did not move. I waited and he turned his head and watched me.

So I sat down after I grabbed my phone and took a couple of shots. The hawk did not care. He just kept his one eye on me and we began our waiting game. When I first moved into the house I found the head of a bunny on the roof. Apparently a hawk had decided he no longer needed it and left it for me. I had to go out on the roof and retrieve the bunny head.

And this hawk was big enough to do that. He covered the stair and didn't move. It had been a normal Monday up until now. Dealing with old and new problems. Trying to get things moving and I was headed downstairs for coffee when I met my predatory friend. I always admired the way hawks soared far up in the sky, drifting on the air currents. It did look like pure freedom.

But one of us had to go. I did have to get on with my day and the hawk I assumed had to get on with his. So I waited and watched him and he waited and watched me. And then. As if he had just had enough. He turned and flew out of the garage. I went down the stairs and looked up and just caught him flapping away.

He had his day to get to and I had mine.

www.williamhazelgrove.com

Getting Those Trade Reviews

Ok we are talking Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Booklist, Library Journal. The Pitcher was covered by all four. And I am not talking about paying for any of them. I am talking about getting reviewed on the merit of your book. Which brings me to the first point. Write a good book. That is the best thing you can do to help yourself get these coveted trade reviews that sell to the publishing industry and the libraries. Now after you write the very best book you can write then here are some pointers.

Send your book in early. Say four or five months before your publication date. This is standard. Send an ARC if you have one but if all you have is the finished copy then the send that. And do not send it to a general mailbox send it to the editor who is reviewing your particular genre. Now I am really talking about fiction here since that is all I have written. Everyone of my five novels including the last book have been covered by the trades.

Which leads me to another truth. Once you get one of your books covered by the trades it is much easier to get your next novel covered. They know you do quality work and are much more willing to look at your next effort. You may have to send in several copies as they do tend to get lost and some gentle email follow up helps.

But I go back to my original point. All this is lost if you don't have the book. Write the very best book you can. The trades will follow.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher


 

Just About Everyone is an Indie Authors

I am an Indie Author though I came up the traditional side. I was with Bantam and received the advance commensurate with large publishers and did the big media People, NY Times, Chicago Tribune, NPR and then everything changed. But even when I was with Bantam I was essentially an Indie author. Just about everyone is really.

And how would you define an indie author. Try this one. Thou that cannot get shelf space in the bookstores. That would knock out just about everybody except for the chosen few. And while my books are in the bookstores they do not dominate in any form except for the Indie Bookstores who have actually taken a hand in selling and have read the book and believe in it. After that I am one of the many spine out at best.

But even when I had the two books come out with Bantam they had a short shelf life. They were there and then they were gone. And one of them hit the National Bestseller list but even this was not enough to keep my book in front of the public. The media I received I had to take a hand in and in fact everything good that happened with my books came from me pushing very hard.

So this whole Indie versus traditional is sort of silly. I don't care if you are with Random House or some little three book publisher. Your fight is still the same. It is simply the fight to be seen.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The PItcher

The Luxury of a Book

I was thinking about going on vacation and I thought I should download a book for the week. But then I realized I didn't want to read on my Kindle. I wanted a book and I thought what a luxury. Funny thought but there it was. Something not tied to a computer. An actual pulp based reading machine that needs no power and is glare proof and I don't have to plug it in. And it doesn't say something to me I don't want to hear.

And I even saw myself browsing for the book. Wow. Picking up books and looking at them and putting them down. Why it was something out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. A real honest to goodness interaction with something that does not glow or buzz. And it does seem luxurious. To sit in a chair by a lake with a book. Something about sitting by the lake with my kindle just doesn't do it for me.

And so that is what I will do. I will treat myself to a book. Hell I'm worth it. I can pay a little extra to have the tactile sensation of turning real pages. I don't have to justify the drive to the bookstore and the extra time it will take.

Sometimes....you just have to go for it.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher...a Real Book
 

The Pitcher is #1...How Books Are Sold Now

            The Pitcher is currently #1 in these categories.

• #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Literature & Fiction > Contemporary Fiction > Urban
• #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Teen & Young Adult > Literature & Fiction > Sports
• #1 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Urban Life

 

The Pitcher is selling more right now than monster Bestsellers published by the largest publishers. Book selling has changed permanently. The fight between Amazon and traditional publishers is really the last Battle of the Bulge in a war that has been going on for some time. The fact is that books used to be sold very differently.

 

The stage was narrow because of the physicality of bookstores. Literally stores could only stock so many books and so the Big Authors or Bestsellers were put out where everyone could see them. These books were purchased first and behind them were some obscure midlist authors that were purchased occasionally. Finally was everyone else who never saw the light of day. There just wasn't room.

 

Now in the digital age authors are on equal footing. Of course the Bestsellers dominate the bookstores and always will but people are shopping with their computers and that is taking the lack of space out of the equation. Independent bookstores are still vital because they do bring forth the undiscovered but for the digital shopper the author can bring him or herself forth and have the same displaying power of even a giant like Grisham or a James Patterson.

 

Now a book must still be good for the digital world. No amount of behind the scenes pushing can make a bad book last.  It may sell but books especially in the digital world are sold by word of mouth and eventually the bad book falls. But if your book is good and you work hard then you at least have an equal chance as the big boys.

 

It is truly a different world out there.

 

www.williamhazelgrove.com

The Pitcher

 

The Changing Face of Literature

Chapters are getting shorter and shorter. At least mine are. I don't know if literature is changing or I am but the last two books have about sixty chapters with 220 pages. And people tell me this is the way books are going. Our shrinking attention span demands these shorter bursts. Of course flash fiction is the new kid on the block that may or may not be the future.  Hard to say.

But I cant help but wonder if the internet has done its dirty work and is starting to rewire all of us. It would make sense that something we spend hours and hours interacting with and reading would change all of us. At the very least we might rebel against longer discourses that tend to take a while to get to the point. The point in the internet world is usually in the first sentence. Don't bury the lead right.

But fiction is a building process. A river if you will that we have to get used to the water first. And this takes a little time and a little acclimating. Sometimes the water is cold and rough and we have to find our way across. Then we get out payoff. But maybe we don't have the patience for that. Maybe we want to jump in swimming or not at all.

Anyway. I will try for some longer chapters next time. Maybe to just prove I can still swim.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The PItcher...on Summer Sale
 

Novels Are Changing

Novels are changing. Mine have changed. Is it the influence of computers...the Internet? Hard to say. But they have changed. Yes there are the big  novels still being published but the market seems to be moving toward the staccato chapters that tell a story in bursts. Short novels for people who are extremely busy. The cousin of flash fiction is surely the novels of sixty scenes crammed into two hundred pages.

That is not to say this is bad. I have moved along as a writer to the point where I want to tell a lot of stories versus just a few big ones. I would say I spend an inordinate amount on the net and maybe there is some spillover. I thought it was just me but I spoke with a writer in LA who said he sees the same thing. Novels are just shorter and the chapters are many.

Literary novels once upon a time were composed  of long scenes. But that was for people who did not have a phone beeping every few minutes or House of Cards or Game of Thrones cued up. But of course we reflect our environment and novelists should be of their time. So I will end this now. My phone just went off.


www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

 

The Words You Should Hear From Your Agent: I Love Your Book!

I love your book! If you don't hear that then move on. I have heard everything from you are going to make a million dollars to  keep writing baby. I have heard agents say they like my work they can sell my work they see my work as highly marketable. But those three words I love your book are really what you are looking for. Why? Because if an agent doesn't love  your book then they will not do what it takes in a very tough market.

It is a litmus. A bad agent is worse than no agent at all. Because you sit around waiting to hear and a lot of times you are waiting for nothing. Many agents have lots of clients and you could be way down on the food chain. That means they are not pushing your book and that means you should move on. But many authors don't and their work suffers.

So you really want to hold out until you get those three words. I love your book. You probably want an exclamation point after that sentence. You really want someone who loves your book almost as much as you do.  And that is someone hard to find but worth the wait.

www.williamhazelgrove.com

The Pitcher

The Writer and Teaching

Writers have always taken shelter in teaching. The Universities are brimming with writers. That's because it is friendly territory. You can actually talk about what you do without someone giving you that cross eyed look that always follows with...so what is your day job? And this is because writers are suspect. You are doing something that keeps you at home and a lot of times you don't even get out of your robe. So teaching is a respectable alternative.

I have been speaking in a lot of schools lately and you can not help thinking...what if. What if I had become a teacher. Would I still write? Probably not. The rub is this. Once that weekly paycheck comes then all that motivation goes out the window. And time becomes a scarce commodity. Lets face it after reading student fiction and grading it and commenting on it  then by the time you start on your own work you are already played out.

Still the security and the camaraderie and the higher calling of helping others is alluring. Writers twist in the wind and a lot of times they just blow away. There are no support groups or rules of the road. It is pretty much every man for himself. So who can blame someone for swinging in with the pack and taking a pension and a paycheck.

But then...you really do have to follow your destiny. Besides, who would give the author talks if everyone became a teacher?

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

Selling A Novel In Todays Market

I was coming out of a Literary Festival the other day and I saw something that made me think we have passed into a new world. There was a car and on this car were the trade reviews and quotes from a novel with a picture of the cover on the side of the card. These were painted onto the car and not just temporary. I began to read the reviews from Library Journal, Rick Kogan, Booklist, Kirkus written on the back and the hood and the sides of the car.

My assumption was this was some self published author who figured why not put his book on his car. But no. This was a press that did this. And so we have passed into the age of anything goes. Some might see this as evidence of clever marketing or some might see it as desperation against the titanic wave of cultural marketing that is now our society. So lets take it as a marketing ploy.

Do people sit in their car and read reviews from Library Journal on the trunk of the car in front of them? No. Would they buy a book they saw on the side of a car? Would they remember a Publishers Weekly quote streaming by on the hood of a car? Who knows. Probably not. But the point is that this publisher has reached the point of trying to advertise their book on the same footing as a real estate agent selling houses.

So again...desperation? Market savvy? Idiocy? Who knows. I did read the reviews and I did stare at the cover. Too bad I can't remember the name of the book. I'll just have to catch that novel as it passes by at sixty miles an hour next time.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

Max Perkins and Writings Evolution

What is amazing is that Max Perkins took so many writers and created their books for them. What he did is unheard of now. You are a writer in 1935 and you take your manuscript to New York and bang on the door of Scribners and Sons and ask to see Max Perkins. He sees you and then he takes you out for drinks and he actually reads the inchoate mess you have in a shoe box that is maybe an idea and some fleshed out pages and then he calls you back and says I think you have talent and I will put you under contract for a  book.

Yet this happened again and again. From Here To Eternity was not a book until Perkins suggested to James Jones he write something about the War and Jones sent him a few chapters and then years later there was a book. The point is this type of literary development is unheard of now. You either come up with something ready to go or you don't even bother. The inverse of Perkins day is now where writers have to do it all. Then writers just had to come up with an idea and show promise.

But by the end Perkins time passed even him. His style of developing literary writers was already falling by the wayside and when he died a way of publishing died with him. There will certainly never be another Max Perkins and those writers who did very well by him are gone too. They probably didn't realize how good they had it.

Who does.

williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher...Sometimes a dream is all you have
 

Publishers and Social Media

I am doing a speech on Selling Books Through Social Media tomorrow and it occurs to me very few publishers really understand Social Media. Take Simon and Schuster who paid a guy six figures for his tweets that were supposed to be the ruminations of a guy on an elevator with the Masters of the Universe. You know Wall Street Guys. Problem. Turned out he lives in Texas and made it all up. But S and S will go ahead with the book of his tweet hits.

So that shows they don't get it. Social Media is ephemeral and not quantifiable. It is an effort to throw a pebble down a mountainside and see if you can get an avalanche going. But there is no certainty a pebble or a boulder will get the landslide going. Think of it as a Sonar Ping going out into the ocean and hoping it will hit something and that ping might then come back with information and maybe something that will lead to sales.

But to take the ping as evidence of a pending sale is wrong. The ping is the ping. And even if you have a million pings that does not mean those people pinging back will plunk down money on a book of tweets. The leap is mighty. But as the saying goes there is a sucker born every minute and that guy in Texas has to be laughing his ass off.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher....sometimes a dream is all you have

When Writers Run Out of Gas

Watching Downton Abbey. Self proclaimed junkie after Breaking Bad. Season finale fizzles like a wet balloon sputtering around the room and then falling on a bare light bulb...sizzling in flaccid relief. Such over burndened metaphors would have been a relief to the turgid soap opera Downton became at the end. It would seem Julian Fellows lost his way but probably after five seasons he probably just ran out of gas.

Lets face it it happens. After the early seasons built around the verisimilitude of the era and the characters drawn so handsomely to the early twentieth century standards of gentlemen and their servents we were destined to drift aftter Matthew Crawley left the series and we lost our great love story. But more than that Julian burned through his material after World War I ended. This gave the series natural drama and we remained focused on the main characters.

But then history paused and we were left with flappers and F. Scott Fitzgerald besotment done badly by the upper class and worse by Rose wannabe flapper who goes for African American jazzmen and then forgets about him after matriarch in training Mary's wrath. The point is the soap opera moves in when the writer moves  out because then we just have drama for dramas sake with no underpinning.

Alas Julian probably should just shut it all down instead of ending the season on the beach with the servants and strange little sublots that wither and die like vines in a toripid heat. If this overwritten it is only because Downton was so underwritten and I wanted to right the apple cart.

I still have some gas left.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher...


 

The Fantasy of Max Perkins

I have been reading Scott Berg's Biography of Max Perkins and it is really just unbelievable. This man was something of a Saint and after that he was Santa Claus. And after that he was brilliant. It really is a world Gone with The Wind. Take the financing of F Scott Fitzgerald after The Great Gatsby tanked in sales (unbelievable right) and he was broke again. Perkins would then gin up a collection of short stories and front him the money. Or he would front him the money against a possible movie sale on the novel he was working on or on serialization rights. Or he would just loan him the money.

Or how about discovering Ernest Hemingway and going to bat for words he could not bare to utter himself. Perkins could not stand profanity yet he went against the owner of Charles Scribner's and Sons to pull for Hemingway's right to include such words. Or how about discovering a young Fitzgerald and sending back the novel three times (This Side of Paradise) for rewrites and then going against the powers that be at Scribners and threatening to resign if they didn't publish him. And he had just started there!

Or how about taking Tom Wolfe's novel Look Homeward Angel and editing it from a the rambling mess to a cohesive book and then doing it again for his second novel that was more than a million words. And taking the author into his house while he did the editing and enduring his  verbal drunken abuse all the while he did him the biggest favor anybody would ever do for him by publishing what would have been an unintelligible mess.

These stories of go on and on. I have a great editor and I have no complaints,  but Max Perkins belongs to a different world when writers were Gods and editors were angels of mercy. Pure fantasy in the year 2013.

www.williamhazegrove.com
The PItcher...Sometimes a dream is all you have