A Self-Publishing Book Review Sob Story

This article in Salon.com, while mainly a whiny and self-pitying lament, does shed some light on one aspect of the recent changes in book publishing. Publishing is not what it used to be, and neither is book reviewing. It used to be that a published author stood a decent chance of getting a professional review from a newspaper or magazine book reviewer. Apparently, there ain’t no days like those anymore. The article’s writer – a previously published author with in-crowd connections who was once able to garner such blessed reviews – couldn’t even get responses to his emails once he decided to self-publish his latest awesome novel (which he only resorted to after it failed to get traditionally published). The kicker is when he moans that If this can happen to him, imagine how horrible it must be for the 99 percenters of self-published writers, those of us without his hoary ties to people-in-the-know and his track record of proven, if admittedly minor, success.

What we 99 percenters know, of course, is that when it comes to getting (legitimate) reviews of our self-published fiction, we have always relied on the kindness of strangers.  We quickly exhaust our social network supply of potential reviewers (we exhaust them in every sense) and after that it’s all “word of mouth, baby”. Recently a publicist for free-ebooks.net (one of the many ebook sites with an experimental business model, this one a subscription service) asked me if I knew how to convert downloads into reviews. The only answer I could give was “maybe give them stuff” – not money, but rewards of some kind, benefits in kind, more free books perhaps. Goodreads Giveaways are supposed to work like that. The winners are supposed to submit reviews after they receive and read your books. I have no way of knowing if they actually do that. I’ve done four giveaways so far and am beginning another one this week for “Prisoners of Perfection” but there seems to be no tracking mechanism for the reviews or ratings.

Yes, it’s difficult. For every thousand downloads-to-strangers you might get one written review. That’s just a guess, nothing scientific, but it seems to correlate with my own experience. Star ratings are somewhat easier to come by, but are not the same thing at all. People who take the time to write and post reviews of self-published books are practically mini-gods to self-published authors. We can’t thank them enough, even if they trash our work. At least somebody said something! Otherwise, how can we even know that we exist? Self-publishing used to be called vanity publishing, but all publishing involves a degree of vanity. The Salon article shines a bright light on that little secret as well.

The article’s conclusion is “I can tell you that self-publishing is not fun.” I didn’t feel too sorry for him. If what the author reallt wants is reviews, only that, his best chance is to give away his book for free and to give it away for free in as many places as he can. He probably still wouldn’t get a boatload of reviews, but then the question is, how many are enough? How many reviews would it take to make it all fun for him? How many readers would it take? How is 1000 strangers reading your book better than 999? What difference does the one thousand and first make, in your everyday life? Where do you draw the line between fun and not fun?

A friend of mine once told me her philosophy of gardening, and it’s stuck with me ever since, especially in regards to self-publishing. One tomato is great, she said. Anything more is “abundance”.

Related articles

• 77 Ways to Find New Readers for Your Self-Published Book (Book Review) (thiscollegedropout.wordpress.com)
• If You are a Writer of Stories, You Should Focus on Storytelling (katmicari.wordpress.com)
• Say Goodbye to the Play-by-Play Book Review (themillions.com)
• MBR: How to Spot a Phony Book Reviewer (thiscollegedropout.wordpress.com)
• Book Reviews: Easy Way to Promote Others, Your Own Blog, and Improve Your Writing Style (lindathorlakson.wordpress.com)
• How I overcame snobbery to self-publish an e-book (telegraph.co.uk)

Stalker

I was happy to see that Tarkovsky‘s great film “Stalker”, indeed all of his films, are available for viewing through YouTube, thanks to the saner copyright laws that exist in other countries. I hadn’t seen Stalker in something like thirty years, and had only recently reread the book it is based on (“RoadsidePicnic”), so I was glad to see the movie again this morning. (I had tried to rent it recently in New Zealand but it was hard to come by there).

There is much to be said about the film, more than I can muster at the moment, so I will only jot down a few impressions here.

One, there are very few shots in this fairly long film. Many of the shots are slow and lingering, lasting far longer than practically any single shot in any contemporary film. It made me feel that most modern culture has been subjected to a general speeding-up process, as if the puppeteer controlling our musician/filmmaker/writer/dancer artist-marionettes has been ordered to jerk them around faster and faster and faster.

It’s a thoughtful and contradictory film, about faith and lack of faith, that wants to believe in miracles but doesn’t see anything good in them. Grace is only for the most wretched and even then only to help out them out of their misery.

The Zone is a place of unnatural wonders and yet we see absolutely none of them in the movie. The only supernatural occurrence we ever see is in the final minute when the Stalker and his companions have already returned and they have nothing at all to do with it.

The movie has much more in common with the book than I remembered, especially on its emphasis on The Room – the place where one’s deepest desires are fulfilled. In the book, only the unselfish wish is granted, and selfish ones are punished. In the movie, your deepest desire truly is granted, but you cannot know what it is. No one really knows themselves. This has such awful consequences on one character (Porcupine, a Stalker who is not present in the movie except as legned) whose own experience is so daunting that none of the others dare enter The Room. To even ask for one’s deepest desire to be fulfilled is terrifying. This is the heart of the movie.

In the film, the Writer is asked what he writes about – the reader, he says. It doesn’t make sense to write about anything else. When Tarkovsky was asked about the audience for the movie, he said “I am only interested in the views of two people: one is called Bresson and one called Bergman”. In this way Tarkovsky belittles the commercial artist in favor of the genuine. Of course, some figures are both – Picasso comes to mind.

The black dog in Stalker is a wonderful red herring. Mysterious and menacing in the Zone, it turns out to be just a dog who follows them home. We imbue strange things with their strangeness. Once familiar they become family.

The three who venture into the Zone naturally come face to face with themselves, in the end. As the old saying has it, “wherever you go, there you are”. Even in the middle of the most unusual place on Earth, it’s just you and your own little life. On the one hand, how pathetic! On the other hand, merely existing ought to be miracle enough for anyone, and everything else – love, joy, beauty, your deepest desires – all of that is extra.

Related articles

• Watch Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, the Russian Science Fiction Film That Inspired The Ocean’s Pelagial (metalsucks.net)
• The Stalker (1979) (misternizz.wordpress.com)
• Zona: Geoff Dyer’s personal take on Tarkovsky’s Stalker (gerryco23.wordpress.com)

Reading: Nikolai Leskov

Another magnificent 19th century Russian writer, Leskov’s collection The Enchanted Wanderer is out in a new translation, and it’s a great reading experience. In some ways it’s like nothing I’ve read before. His characters are so vivid, such striking people from a world as real as real and as foreign as foreign. There’s a certain toughness, a kind of noir or hard-boiled sense in his stories, which feature ordinary people, serfs and soldiers, often runaways and others on a hard path in life, people who find amusement in cheating someone out of their woolen socks on a forced march to exile in Siberia. At the same time, they take their old-world icon-centric Christianity extremely seriously, and struggle to find any common ground with their Moslem/Tartar border neighbors. In one extraordinary passage, two highlanderscompete in an “amicable” battle of “flogging it out”, in which they sit face to face, left hands holding each other, soles up against soles while with their right-hands they take turns whipping each other across the shoulders and onto the back. The winner gets to pay an exorbitant price for a high-quality mare. The loser wishes him well, assuming he is still alive. Saints and martyrs abound, and loyalty knows no limits, while neither does treachery or deceit. The law is the law, after all, and a renegade serf without a ‘passport’ is fair game for anyone to take advantage of.  Leskov gives you a world he seems to know inside and out, with a style and language as bold and masterful as anyone’s.

Recommended: 2666 by Roberto Bolano

A great reading experience is one that sweeps you up and carries you along like a powerful current. At least that’s how I often felt while reading this book. The force that moved me was not the characters, of which there are many, or the various plots, of which there are also many, but the writing itself. There is something about it in this novel that made it feel at times more real than real and more true than life itself. The title, 2666, suggests a year far off in the future from where the narrator is looking back at these times and places. Although this is never explicitly stated, it does give the writing a feeling of distance and dispassion, ingredients especially needed to make it through the roughest parts of the book, the heart of the matter, a rendition of the unsolved serial killings of hundreds of women in a Mexican border city in the 1990′s. In this section of the book, Bolano not only brings those artrocities before us but uses the opportunity to tell the individual stories of the unfortunate victims, who are almost all poor young workers in assembly plants, with families and lives that are otherwise lost in statistics and headlines.

The novel is both a whole and a sum of its parts. There were a number of things about it that made me reluctant to read it in the first place. For one, I usually don’t like fiction about writers, or about academics, or about serial murders, or about World War II or Nazis, and yet, despite the fact that this book includes stories about all of these things, it does so from a more fundamental vantage point. It is always about a person, not the trimmings, a person who only happens to be born in a certain time and place and is therefore subject to the tides and events occurring therein. There is no difference between the little German girl who loses her adored older brother to the war and the young Mexican girl whose sister goes off to the big city in search of work. The journalist who finds himself covering a pathetic boxing match in the middle of nowhere is as out of place as the civil servant who finds himself saddled with an unexpected railroad cargo. It’s not that these are mere victims of circumstance, but that each of them is presented with situations of their era and are forced to respond, and it is those reactions that define their individuality. This is the same truth for all of us.

There is not a lot of happiness in this book, but it’s not intended to be a naturalist panorama that encompasses all of the human experience. Just because the book is long does not make it an “epic”. I’ve seen it compared to Carlos Fuentes’ “Terra Nostra“, because both are big and great books by Latin American writers, but they have very different ambitions. I’m not sure what I would compare it with – perhaps “Berlin Alexanderplatz” by Alfred Doblin, and not due to their length but to the feeling they give you of proportion, of the enormous complexities we face in this world and our very solid limitations in dealing with them. I don’t have any qualms about using the word ‘masterpiece’ in talking about 2666. Bolano talks about that very subject in the book, where he describes masterpieces in literature as like fantastically beautiful lakes high up in the mountains that you come across unexpectedly and that take your breath away. This book was just like that for me.

This quote

“I too believe in the intrinsic goodness of human beings, but it means nothing. In their hearts, killers are good, as we Germans have reason to know. So what?”

And this one

“History, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness”

2666, Roberto Bolano

The Mysterious East

What’s mysterious is how Amazon is reporting the US and India together in its KDP Reports section. There seems to be no way of separating the data for us poor outsiders, so for example I have no idea why the sudden surge of Snapdragon Alley this month, which bumped its way back up to around 1400 downloads after having slowly declined towards around 400 a month over the past year. Could it be … India? Is it even free in Amazon India? One never knows. It’s still rated  in their absurd categorizations like this:

#11 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Children’s eBooks > Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror > Spine-Chilling Horror

One has no idea how they come up with these things! I don’t think anyone’s spine has ever been particularly chilled by Snapdragon Alley (although I do agree with one recent commenter, who said it was the best of the four book series, which kind of makes me feel bad for readers of the other three, which are not terrible, but still … i don’t think of them as sequels but more as re-mixes, like dub music)

Anyway, nothing else has shown such a surge, but remain steady there on Amazon at around 200 per month for Zombie Nights, Orange Car with Stripes, Freak City, Death Ray Butterfly, Ledman Pickup, Dragon Town and Happy Slumbers. I’m just glad Amazon is keeping them all free for this long, and expect it to end at any moment.

Adopted Books

My thanks to the commenters on my previous post, wherein I said mean things about a beloved classic of science fiction, Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card. That book had been recommended to my son by his sixth-grade teacher, a friend of mine whose taste in books has been generally very good, at least as far as sixth graders are concerned, and my son has been enjoying our reading of Ender’s Game to some extent, though he does chafe a bit at the cliche of cockroach-like aliens and perpetual intergalactic war. He likes the hero/genius/child, of course, and how he outwits, outplays and outlasts ™ the mean stupid bully child. But enough of that.

What I meant to jot down some thoughts about is how we, and by “we” I mean readers, all tend to have a set of books that we adopted, often at an early age. These books are almost pets, almost friends, and stay with us for life. Ender’s Game is one of these books for many people. I’ve had a number of such companions in my life, and regardless of their perceived “quality” or stature or fame they all have incalculable value to their “owners”.

Then there are the ones that got away. My mother was a librarian, so I spent a great deal of time in my youth in libraries, and at one point I was enamored with any kind of fictional sea-faring adventure. I still read Joseph Conrad and Jack London and Richard Dana and Herman Melville but back then the books I read were for kids or young adults, and I couldn’t find enough of them. They were full of terms like fo’c'sle and aft and bilge and jib, none of which meant anything at all to me, but the seas were rough and you could get washed overboard at any moment. There were no monsters in these books, no aliens, nothing inhuman but the ocean itself and the first mate, who was always dreadful.

I cannot remember the authors or titles of any of those long-ago library books. When I look into it I recognize nothing of what I find. The names and words are long since gone. I’m pretty certain, though, that if I found them again, I would be stunned at how simple and probably silly they were.

I went through a fairly long period of reading science fiction (never had much use for fantasy or magic except in fairy tales) but then it stopped appealing to me, almost all at once, in my mid-twenties, which is now some decades ago. I still enjoy some science-fictiony elements in more speculative fiction, but flat-out world-building with fake languages, too many limbs and unpronounceable names is beyond my scope for now. I’d rather make fun of such stuff, which I’m doing a little of in my current story (The Lemon Thief’s Ex-Wife’s Third Cousin) wherein one of the characters works for a newspaper, translating headlines into non-existent languages because you  never know. Sometimes we adopt genres as well as books and authors. I guess I think of science fiction as a sort of pet rock, pretty to look at, and sometimes even amazing. Sea-faring adventures, now there’s a genre that’s pretty much come and gone.

(somehow I’m reminded here of one of the tidbits from Bookstore Lore: The Stupidest Questions Ever Asked in a Bookstore. A person comes into the bookstore and asks “where are your non-fiction books?” The snotty clerk (ahem) says, “well, you see that sign over there that says ‘fiction’? “Yes,” the unwitting customer replies. “Everywhere else,” says the rude clerk, “is non-fiction.” – Naturally, the customer was looking for a book on serial killers. In America, “non-fiction” translates almost always into “Serial Killers”.

Life as journey

The Insufferable Gaucho, by Roberto Bolano, does an excellent job of illuminating this idea, that life is a journey, that one choice leads to another, and one path becomes many paths, and we end up far from home, and far from who we were, or wanted to be, or thought we would become. The story accomplishes this insight without ever revealing that intention. By the end you feel you have gone a long way with the character.

A fine line

This sentence in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle made me call BULLSHIT out loud.

“His mother died of typhus when he was very small and i suppose that’s what led to his strong interest in women’s clothing“

There IS a difference between magical realism and random crap. A fine line, maybe, but it’s there. So much of this book is just RC. I started out with five stars in my head, like i always do. Then it was down to four with all the masturbatory bits and the one dimensional (i e prone) women, but it’s down to zero now. Then there was the computer security so-called genius whose password was three characters long and easily guessed. If it’s supposed to be humorous, it just isn’t.

Can’t really recommend it. At 3/4 done i don’t even know if I’ll finish it. Just don’t give a shit at this point.

The best parts are the war stories, but they read like a movie script. As a famous critic once said, “the book is both original and good. Unfortunately the parts that are good are not original and the parts that are original are not good”

In the end I returned it for a refund from kindle, selecting ‘offensive content’ as the reason – from among their provided choices. In some ways it was offensive. All these women being ‘defiled’ all the time. Give me a break.

Kafkaesque and Not

One item in my endless list of pet peeves is when I come across a blurb or book review that compares an author to Franz Kafka, because the main thing about Kafka, to me, is that there is, and was, no one like him at all. Kafka was a very odd duck. His stories are a strange combination of humor and terror, but critics tend to focus on the latter, ignore the former, and accentuate his pervasive strangeness borne from his deeply felt sense of alienation. To me, there is no difference between Kafka the person and the stories he wrote, and for a work of fiction to be like Kafka, the writer would also have to be like him. You can smell a counterfeit almost instantly. His unique eccentricities were authentic, never cooked up for effect.

It always makes me pause to begin a book by a writer who has been compared to Kafka. I know it’s not (always) their fault that this association has been made, but it still makes me nervous. I recently had this unfortunate experience with a book by China Mieville, who was also compared to Orwell and Raymond Chandler, and who seemed to me to have nothing in common with any of the three except for the fact he used words to convey a story.

Yesterday I came across a story on line by Hiraku Murakami, a writer I’ve been meaning to get to reading for several years now. I quite enjoyed the story (which I linked to in this blog), so I downloaded a sample of his ‘Wind-up Bird Chronicles’ from Kindle, enjoyed that sample, and was about to buy the whole book when I looked him up on Wikipedia and sure enough, there he is being compared to Franz Kafka! “Oh no!” I cried in my best Mister Bill imitation. “Why do they have to do that? This guy is nothing like Franz Kafka. Sure, there’s an element of absurdity. Sure, there is a male first person narrator. Sure, he seems to have issues with women (apparently they all have to be “slim and lovely”) And sure, he writes fiction. But come on. Really, people? Franz Kafka?”

Well, I bought the book anyway and I’m enjoying it despite the ominous reference to that certain author. I hope to continue to enjoy it. I would just like to make a public plea, to any of the four or five people who will ever encounter this blog post, that if you ever feel inclined to compare a writer to Kafka, please, for God’s sake, think twice.