Reading

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Changes at Dreamtime Publishing

Thursday, August 25th, 2011

Dreamtime Publishing, which published two of my nonfiction books, Open Your Heart with Reading and Open Your Heart with Geocaching, is going through changes.

This impacts my life, of course, but why am I sharing it with you?

Because, like mortgages, you don’t always end up with the same players in a book deal that you started with.

Here’s an example. An editor is excited about your novel, talks the marketing department and any other relevant people at the publishing house that it’s a good bet, and you’re offered a contract. You sign, ecstatic. You begin work with the editor on your novel. Then she (and mostly it’s going to be a she) gets an offer for another job—at a different publishing house, in Paris, an internal promotion, it doesn’t really matter what: for you, what matters is that she’s gone.

Your book is now officially an orphan. The publisher will honor its commitment to you, of course, but your editor was your book’s champion. Someone else will take it on, but they won’t feel the same about it.

Changes.

In my case, the change should be a good one. Dreamtime Publishing has been sold to the publishers of Transformation Magazine. The books have been out for some time and a new publisher will, I hope, breathe new life into them.

Change can be wonderful, and horrible … but it’s always difficult, especially when you’re dealing with your writing … your books are, after all, a part of you. But finding the silver lining is an important part of being a writer. Master that and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Tags: change, orphan book, publishers
Posted in Books, Getting Published, Publishers, Publishing, Reading, The Writing Life, Words, Writing | No Comments »

The Fat Lady Has Sung: We Are The Fat Lady

Tuesday, July 19th, 2011

So Borders, the book-and-music superstore, is officially no more. Do we care?

Well, yes and no. Someone on one of my discussion lists noted that it was a handy place to check out books, drink coffee, and meet friends, and that may well have been part of the problem: while the coffees were indeed expensive enough to cover rental on a small table for a time, this was, after all, supposed to be a bookstore.

Yet walking into one some time ago—before the many closures began—one could have been forgiven for thinking otherwise. Everything was on offer at the front of the store except books: notepaper, games, office decorations, cards, journals. All very nice, but isn’t that what stationery stores are for? Where was the seriousness, the intent to read, to be challenged, to think, that one automatically associates with books?

Not at Borders, anyway.

Borders Store Closing

I’m not trying to be a curmudgeon here. Any bookstore is better than no bookstore at all, and I did in my day work as community relations manager for two different Barnes & Noble bookstores; frankly, the same issues can be taken with that chain as well. But let’s be honest. Do you really buy substantial amounts of reading material in full-priced bookstores?

As a published author who needs to sell her books, I hope you do. But as that same slightly impoverished author, I know that I don’t: I can’t afford to. I buy most of my books used (which benefits their authors not at all, unless by chance I write a glowing review for them on an online bookseller site), and when I cannot find the book I require used, I buy it from—you got it—Amazon. This despite the fact that I live next to a town with three independent booksellers. The tourists and the summer residents buy books there; I’m always pointing people there; at Christmas I make some special purchases there. But for daily fare it’s Tim’s Used Books for me.

Or Amazon. I think I heard a collective gasp when I said that. Shocked, you are, shocked that gambling goes on in this establishment. Amazon delivers to my post office box (they’d deliver to my door, but in my rural village we don’t have mail delivery), and they deliver with the best price. That’s hard to beat. I wish it were not so. I wish I didn’t contribute to the cycle that makes it so difficult for midlist authors to make a living … but as a midlist author, I don’t have much choice.

And I’m far too old to start living in a garret now.

So there it is. Where does your conscience allow convenience and price to take over? I am unsure about it myself. I won’t shop at Walmart, but I will shop at Amazon. I’m not sure what thay says about me. I do know that in some ways, I am the fat lady, I am the one who helped trigger the end of a bookselling tradition that many people out there are mourning.

Tell me what you think: tell me whether I’m alone in my confused ethics here. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Tags: Books, booksellers, bookstores, Reading
Posted in Books, Publishing, Reading, The Writing Life, Words, Writing | 1 Comment »

Why Read Fiction?

Thursday, July 7th, 2011

This was the title of a rather depressing piece in Salon magazine some weeks ago, but it’s served to create some debate. My colleague Margaret Frey had this to say:

Jeeze, that Salon article is certainly depressing! Particularly with comments like this: ‘This takes faith — belief that it can be done and trust that the author can do it.’

It takes faith to breathe in and out, but I’ve never considered not doing it. And … what? It’s too much effort to open a book because you might be disappointed? What a miserable whine! Sorry, but many of those well-hyped personal narratives have turned out to be fictions in and of themselves. As is the case with any form, some are good, others not so good.

Yes, a reader of fiction has to be willing to give himself or herself over to the dream, the experience. What that has to do with moving furniture and throwing a party that may or may not be successful is beyond me. Of course, as readers we ‘might’ be disappointed.

But embarrassed? I don’t get it.

If reading fiction is drudgery then by all means don’t do it. Take a walk, have a drink, get laid. Maybe this folds into Franzen’s piece: read fiction for the sheer love and joy of it. Or don’t do it at all.

Here’s a wish that I never get so old or cranky that I forget the delight and surprise of a fine short story or novel, the kind that carries me away, thrills me with its language, puts me behind the eyeballs of the other and makes me understand all over again how silly and cruel, how wondrous and ordinary, how absolutely maddening we are as human beings. And how utterly beautiful the world can be and yet by a mere turn on a dime how lives and perceptions can change, becoming stark and bleak, woefully indifferent, lonely and desperate.

That’s why I read fiction. For me, a fictional narrative is a song to ourselves, a prayer of sorts that our crazy brief lives mean something. Not all fiction delivers. But the really good, inspired works do, and there are many fine stories still being written. It’s a matter of hunting them down or even stumbling over a gem by chance or stray recommendation.

Does that reaction take an act of faith? Maybe but more like patience from where I sit, even with the awful knowledge that I’ll never get to read or write everything on my ‘to-do’ list.

If I ever get so ancient or crabby that I can no longer love what I’ve always loved? Shoot me, please.

(Margaret A. Frey writes from the foothills of the Smoky Mountains with her husband John and canine literary critics, all of whom prefer walking to writing. Her work has appeared in a number of online and print publications, including Smokelong Quarterly, Notre Dame Magazine, flashquake, Thema and most recently Foliate Oak Literary Magazine and Ken Again. Margaret is currently wrestling a longer fiction dealing with the lives and livelihoods of American miners and their families, those rightly credited for ‘keeping the lights on.’ She can be contacted at mafrey@tds.net)

So … do you read fiction? Why or why not? Let me know, and then you’ll be … beyondthe elements of style!

Tags: Fiction, Reading
Posted in Fiction, fictional characters, literary fiction, mystery fiction, Reading, Words | No Comments »