impossible you say

Looks like someone finally touched the untouchable/broke the unbreakable/shook the unshakable:

John Locke, 60, who publishes and promotes his own work, enjoys sales figures close to such literary luminaries as Stieg Larsson, James Patterson and Michael Connelly.

But unlike these heavyweights of the writing world, he has achieved it without the help of an agent or publicist – and with virtually no marketing budget.

Instead the DIY novelist has relied on word of mouth and a growing army of fans of his crime and western novellas that he has built up online thanks to a website and twitter account.

And it’s John Locke!

And they said it couldn’t be done. It’s nice seeing people make it in the self-published world. I can’t wait for that DIY ethos to take over, man.

He has already made a fortune from the business world and private investments.

But like with his other money making schemes he puts the secret of his success down to spotting a gap in the market with the arrival of the ebook, the Kindle, and online publishing.

He saw that many successful authors were charging almost $10 (£6) for a book and decided that he would undercut them – selling his own efforts for 99 cents (60 pence).

SHOOT THE GAP!

some more links

I really enjoy reading and writing about reading and writing, which probably doesn’t need to be said but it gives me an opportunity to explain all the links I’m about to share. I’ve had entries dedicated to link sharing before, but then I was mostly making fun of myself. I don’t post as regularly as I once did, but that’s the fault of a sudden up-tick in personal obligations and working on my book. Read: I don’t need a virtual space for creative blow-holing anymore — I’m using all my mind-water to put out fires in “real” life.

I do still read a lot, however, and the following annotated links are to articles and essays that I found interesting enough to bookmark in my “for_blog” folder. I originally wanted to turn each of them into their own entry, and I still could, but time, time, and time:

Michael Idov’s article “My Two Days As A Russian Tabloid Sensation” is funny, but the best parts are his insights into modern Russia vis-à-vis its literature. After complaining about the seeming absurdity at the core of so many recent and critically lauded novels, he asks an old friend and well-known Russian author Alexander Garros if he wouldn’t prefer to write a book about something closer to reality. Garros replies: “Sure I do.  But you see, when you start writing out the details of everyday Russian life, the absurdity just overwhelms you. At some point, you give up. Your characters start flying around, they sprout fangs and tails. Because that’s the only way to stay true to the material. Russian reality is too phantasmagoric to fit into realist logic.” Sometimes I think the same think about my country.

This right here is a conversation on E-Books and self-publishing between Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath, and I’m sure lots of people really got a lot out of this.

Leave it to Tom LeClair to ask the oblivious questions: “[I]f New York remains a Great American City, and is the center of publishing, and is the home of many of our most celebrated fiction writers, why haven’t we had in, say, the last decade, a Great New York Novel?” Maybe it’s too hard to write well with your head rammed all the way up your own ass.*

This one is for the hipsters: Guess what? Selling-out has always been an important part of getting published. BONUS: the article includes a beer ad featuring Ernest Hemingway.

Jennifer Egan and the Pulitzer Prize have teamed up to save American literature! The author of this fluff piece talks about experimentalist fiction and how much more accepted it’s becoming, and he mentions Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book: “[H]is latest book sees him cut up Bruno Schulz’s novel Street Of Crocodiles and create a new ‘novel’ out of the remaining words. Vanity Fair called Tree of Codes ’very, very cool.’” I’m not a big fan of Foer, in fact I think he’s a bit of a hack, and to me this sounds like even further evidence that’s he’s still out of ideas, like most people who write literary fiction. It is cool though that Vanity Fair had the courage to say what everyone in this country is thinking: “Where are all the really, really cool books?”

I was planning on using the previous article as an introduction to an entry on Pale King, but I don’t particularly want to write an entry on Pale King. I much prefer Wallace’s short fiction and non-fiction to his novels, and I have no desire to read this one (for reasons I’ve already talked about). Instead, I will talk about this: “Inside David Foster Wallace’s Private Self-Help Library” is an amazing article, and (New Critics be damned!) really gives you some insight into who he was and what he was trying to do with his work.

*Clarification: I’m not singling out Tom LeClair, I’m speaking about the city as a whole.

everybody wants an e-book

Just a note:

E-book sales are up 193% this year, and I bet that rascally iPad is to blame.

the amazon single

This is interesting:

Amazon on Tuesday announced it will be trying a new format for the Kindle e-reader which it is calling the “Kindle Single.”

Longer than a magazine article, and shorter than a full novel, Amazon says the Kindle Single could be the “perfect, natural length to lay out a single killer idea…well researched, well argued and well illustrated.”

Kindle Singles will be roughly 30-90 pages in length (10,000-30,000 words) carry a lower price than a full length book, and be available in their own section of the Kindle store.

First thought? Like the article points out, this would be the perfect format for serialized fiction, something I’d love to see make a comeback. Short isn’t in itself a bad thing (I’ve got Roth on my side), and if e-book novellas get people reading serious fiction, then have at it.

e-book armageddon

Discussing e-book pricing and its affect on the world of publishing seems to be the hot topic in the world of literary journalism nowadays, that is if the amount of articles on the topic that keep popping up in my Google news feed means anything. Most of them can be summed up succinctly: e-books are easy to make and should be cheap and people want them to be cheap but then the publishers won’t get any money and neither will the authors (here and here and here).  The publishers need to hold onto their industry bottleneck in order to survive, and to say that cheap, infinitely available and infinitely reproducible products threaten that hold is an understatement.

I hope we’ll always have publishers because I hope we’ll always have books (the old-fashioned paper kind), but really, what else apart from physical production do you need publishers for? Not promotion — not anymore. Tastemakers? I suppose some people would think so, though I’d prefer a more varied array of groups working with and against each other to promote what they think is the best – maybe, say, a large amount of independent publishers that cater to a variety of different tastes. And then we’d have all sorts of book reviewers that also catered to various groups of types of readers, with the big, national/international reviewers picking the best and most interesting from those sources, and ideally/theoretically, the cream of the crop would rise to the top!

Ok. Now I only need to gather around me a group of reader-followers and we’ll sit and wait for the publishing world to end, and when it does we’ll be ready to set out and build our perfect book world. Hurrah!

the wall street journal and the decline of fiction/$

There’s an interesting article up on the Wall Street Journal about the rise in popularity of e-books and the effect it’s had on the size of authorial advances. According to the article, not only is it becoming even more difficult to break into the literary fiction market, but also once you’re published it’s nigh impossible to live on what you make. A quote:

Priced much lower than hardcovers, many e-books generate less income for publishers. And big retailers are buying fewer titles. As a result, the publishers who nurtured generations of America’s top literary-fiction writers are approving fewer book deals and signing fewer new writers. Most of those getting published are receiving smaller advances.  ”Advances are down, and there aren’t as many debuts as before,” says Ira Silverberg, a well-known literary agent. “We’re all trying to figure out what the business is as it goes through this digital disruption. “

The biggest mistake the author of this article makes is to equate the current publishing business model with the publishing business. Digital reproduction, distribution and consumption of books is going to have the same affect on the industry as it did in music and film, and the industry’s failure to transform is going to result in the same thing: a long, protracted contraction of the market until new ways of doing business are created and implemented. Authors would do well to learn from the independent film and music communities. Things are going to change, and even Mr. Doctorow thinks that’s a good thing:

Not everyone believes that the shift to digital publishing is necessarily bad for writers. Novelist E.L. Doctorow, who has taught creative writing for 23 years at the NYU Creative Writing Program, says the industry may be transforming away from big corporate-owned publishers back to a cottage industry like it was many years ago. The shakeout could help prune an overcrowded market.

I can’t wait.