Authors Can Save Barnes and Noble

Authors can save Barnes and Noble. All they have to do is sell their books. Imagine if Barnes and Nobles had an author in every day. Not to sit behind a table but to sell their books. Not an author signing but an author selling. The author sells their book and then signs it. They will never beat Amazon at their game nor Starbucks or small cafes. But what Barnes and Noble does have is a physical presence and they have books and they have real live authors.

I sold 24k of my last book at a single Barnes and Noble last year. An unknown book. I did it all by talking to people coming in the front door. Most people are looking to discover a new story and guess what there is an author there to tell them all about a new story. Their own. And they can sign the book. It is a resource a sleeping sales force that Barnes and Noble can unleash right away because authors have a vested interest in selling their own books.

Look not everyone wants to talk to author when they walk into a Barnes and Noble but one in four  do. I counted it out and I sell a book about every fourth person. People are interested in the story the author has to tell and then they are interested in the author. The biggest advantage Barnes and Noble has is there are real people in those stores and real authors selling their books would cost them nothing. I impacted the bottom line of many Barnes and Nobles after four hours of selling my book and the managers were grateful. My sales swung the total revenue for the day.

This is a no brainer. The resource is there waiting to be tapped. An army of authors who just want people to read their books. Somebody just has to invite them in. The customer gets to hear about a new book, have an interesting conversation, and then get a signed book. And the author sells their book and now has an active role in controlling their royalties. It is a win for the author and more importantly the passive art of selling books will be gone for good, replaced by a motivated sales force of people going to the customers...authors.

Finally, yes it is a cyber world, but we are human beings. And humans like to talk to humans. An author can demolish any online sales model with this simple model. Give the author cards with a cover of his book. The customer walks in. "Can I give you this card? It is actually a book I wrote... "

www.williamhazelgrove.com william hazelgrove

Adjunct Hell

Years ago during my writing career I dipped in and out of teaching like a drunk going back to the same run down bar. I was the aspiring writer coming into the purview of the full time professors. I usually got the crappy classes nobody wanted at eight AM and it was usually first year comp. I taught at a very prestigious expensive private school. Two of them in fact. When they had faculty meetings the room was full of adjuncts. In the middle sat the anointed full time professors, all five of them. The other twenty five teachers were adjuncts. This was at a school that charged 40K a year in tuition.

So I learned quickly there were two worlds. The hotdog money world of the adjuncts (2500-3500) a class and the tenured full time 70k+ world of the professors who generally didn't speak to the adjuncts. My brother is a full fledged professor and he told me many times that the adjuncts came and went so why get to know them. So you show up at a class with no fanfare at all. You were hired months before and then you never saw anyone again. You teach your guts out for a class or two and then you get in your car and drive home. That's it.

No collegian conversations. No going out with your colleagues over lunch. No dinners with the University President. You are on the outside, you are the lone ranger, the interloper, in fact you don't exist. The students call you professor  but they do not know the dirty secret .You are not really employed, you are a contract player who will probably not return.Hey what are you teaching next semester?  You demure. You don't know. If enrollment is down you wont be teaching anything. And then you just disappear. That's what happened with me. You just don't get another class.

So you get the word that your class was taken by a full time professor. You try and get another class but suddenly it is like you never taught at all. You are unemployed. So you do what any self respecting writer would do...you sit down and write a book. And never look back.

Al Capone and the 1933 Worlds Fair

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

 

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

Archiving Your LIife

Went down to the University the other day and dropped off ten computers and my son for a weekend at college. I got to stay in a dorm room and the Archives of the University added ten old computers to my earlier manuscripts. The Archivist looked at the coffee stained behemoths and shook his head. "What kind of operating system are these?" I told him they were Windows...maybe the first one.

And then I shipped off the son and walked around the University. Ok. Seven novels later and I am back where I started. So this is what I did after I graduated. I wrote novels that ended up back at the University in ancient computers. And what does it mean that there is up in the library a room with all my manuscripts and ten old computers that in theory will give up my efforts from the last fifteen years. And will give some scholar a glimpse of my life. I don't know.

I go to the English building and it is locked. Of course. Summer. Duh. I stare in the window and look for the guy who sat in those classes. So I just walk around campus aimlessly like that Undergraduate did so many years before. That night I go get a drink then come back to my dorm room. Laying in the bunk bed I can see the campus from my window and the library. In the other part of the dorm my son sleeps.

Everything is truly a circle.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
The Pitcher

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


 

Rewriting Old Manuscripts

You really should burn old manuscripts otherwise somebody might offer to publish them and then you have to rewrite. The problem with old writing is it is old and you just didn't know what you were doing. You thought you did but when you go back through that old prose you see someone who just wasn't there yet. Still, there is a story that might be worth something.

So you start hacking. And I mean hack. Like cutting the book by fifty percent and even then you aren't done Because the story is buried in seaweed and just about every other growth. You have to hack through the forest to see if there is a story worth salvaging and you wont know until you are done. And so out goes every bad metaphor you thought was brilliant and every overwritten scene and every sideshow and backstory.

Out the door one two three. And then once that is done you will have something that may or may not stand up on it's own. It is just amazing that at one time you wrote so badly. Like I said, really burning would have been much more painless.

www.williamhazelgrove.com

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
 

Price is an issue in Publishing and then again...

If you follow the Amazon struggle with publishers then you know it is about the price of the ebook. This is what the war is being fought over. Should Amazon be allowed to undercut publishers and get a bigger cut of the profit.  It is true that people are price driven but then again there is that thing called quality. When I sold books at the Printers Row here in Chicago of The Pitcher I sold twenty five books.

Now I charged full bump and I had three hardcovers priced at twenty seven dollars. The people buying The Pitcher seemed to not care at all. Well you say that is because you had a captive market and no competition. Actually no. Right across from my booth was a discount bookseller who started at eight dollars a book and worked his way right down to one dollar a book. And he was not quiet about it.

As my people were paying sixteen dollars for my book and then twenty seven the guy selling discount books literally yelled across the aisle ALL BOOKS ARE A BUCK. Still people did not flinch they simply wanted to read the book. Now in Ebook land the .99 title is king. But there is a sneaking suspicion that people would spay 2.99 or 3.99 or 7.99  if they decided that was the book they wanted. And yes there are people who live for the cheap book but they are always there.

My point is that if someone wants your book they will pay just about anything for it. Price may be king in some areas but a good book has a funny way of setting it's own price. Or market.

www.williamhazelgrove.com
 

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
 

If You Want To Be A Writer...Then go for it!

                                                        Review of Hemingway's Attic
William Elliott Hazelgrove has written an excellent book for writers and those wanting to become a writer. Oh, now this isn't about the how-to or how-to-write or even how-to-get-published or how-to-market your book. Nope, however what this book is, is it's about the lifestyle of being a writer and what to expect. As an author of 19 books, I could relate all too well with that William wrote about. As strange as it may seem, and for the most part, the real world doesn't consider writing to be a "real job" and William, working off his own experience, shares with us, how rocky the road can get.

One of the aspects I took away from this book is two-fold. As a writer, the two main keys for success are perseverance and confidence. And speaking from my own experience, I couldn't agree more. You have to have thick skin to survive in this business, but that doesn't mean you cannot still have fun. I love the comparisons to Hemingway as even I have a deep respect for the man. One quote from Hemingway that serves as my mantra is, "Writing is easy, all you do is sit at a typewriter and bleed." And this is one of the points that William makes in the book, if you can't stand the heat in the kitchen, then get out. But, if you are going to stay, then make it work and just do it.

But all in all, the main theme of this book, the whole enchilada so to speak about this book is this, Be true to yourself, if it is the life that you want, being a writer, then claim it and make it so. If you want to be a writer, then make the commitment to do it.I truly appreciate the helpful tips and advice William gives throughout the book but this message is the one that counts more than any other. Here are just two quotes from the book to illustrate his points, "If you want to be a writer then GO FOR IT!' and "You are a writer anyway. You will never retire. NOW IS THE TIME . NOW IS YOUR LIFE ! Stake yourself a year and start living the writers life."

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "If you want to be a writer then GO FOR IT!' May 6, 2014

By Dennis Waller TOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase

www.williamhazelgrove.com

FREE Download Hemingway's Attic
http://www.amazon.com/HEMINGWAYS-ATTIC-surviving-as-writer-ebook/dp/B006QRDREM

 

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 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
 

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
 

Those Oscar Blues

So American Hustle didn't win. So Gravity didn't win. So Matthew McHero  is himself in ten years. So Ellen DeGeneres gave movie stars pizza. So Jim Carey was really funny. So we saw U2 being the last Great Rock band again. So we saw lighting and set design people accept Oscars for things we never knew existed. So it seemed everyone died last year. So Robert Deniro said writers are twisted and neurotic...at least someone got something right. It still was the top of the mountain for just about anyone on the planet. At least for a night.

And then we watched a  movie from a book written by a slave a hundred years ago win Best Picture and beat out 2001 A Space Oddity. And maybe Matthew McHero should have said something about AIDS instead of rambling about himself. Maybe we just all want to live where it is warm now and look like a million bucks in a dress or a tux. And what are those after the Awards parties like? Does Bono ever take off his glasses? Does the Edge take off his hat? Probably not.

And how did Pink become everywhere. And wasn't there someone else who could have sung Somewhere over the Rainbow than the bionic woman who is so blond she looks like a Goddess from the planet Teutonic. But she does spin very nicely at the Grammys and so it was different to see her with her clothes on . And so we are left with that funny feeling again that Mickey Rourke cited in the movie Diner while staring at a rich woman riding a horse..."did you ever wonder that there is something going we  know nothing about?"

Absolutely.

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

The Road Not Taken

Actions have consequences. You get to a point in your life where you see your choices and what they mean to how your life turned out. Went over to a friends the other night and had dinner. His house is paid for. He has had a successful business. He can retire and do nothing. He and his wife travel. They go to warm climates in winter. They go skiing when they feel like it. They buy a new car when they feel like it. They have no kids.

And you cannot help wonder about the road you have taken. I have kids. I have a mortgage. We cannot buy a car when we feel  like it. We cannot travel when we feel like it. I chose a high risk way of life a long time ago. It does not get much riskier than being a writer. Maybe being a motorcycle rider in one of those cages you see in a circus with a stick of dynamite burning in one hand. That might be comparable.

So there is no doubt I will keep on writing until I fall over at the table. My kids are many and ensure college will keep us well anchored to massive debt. And you cannot help but feel jealous even though you know this is silly. By the time you get home the questions are looming. Should I? Did I? Maybe I...then you crawl into bed with all that young breathing in the night.

Yeah...Ok. That's right.
You close your eyes. 

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