Category Archives: Fiction

The Author of Tomorrow

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Except for the Stephen Kings of the world, authors these days are expected to take a big hand (and perhaps the only hand) in the multiple activities of book promotion, even when the book has a commercial publisher. But that isn’t the end of it. Deciding to write a book presents the author with numerous chances for do-it-yourself consternation.

Start with the title. Author Scott Martelle (whose excellent Detroit: A Biography I read last year) thought he had the perfect title for his new book describing the search for the body of Revolutionary War naval fighter John Paul Jones. What he’d dreamed up was Jones’s Bones: The Search for an American Hero. But in a recent post, Martelle describes his publisher’s growing unease when people who didn’t know what the book was about couldn’t guess the subject. This led to fears that search engines wouldn’t recognize it, either, and as Martelle says, “if Amazon’s title search engine can’t find it, let alone Google, the book may as well not exist.” Thus began the search for a new title, one he doesn’t like as well, but which supports the notion of actually selling a few books.

Martelle’s book also went through some cover re-designs to try to prompt the John Paul Jones connection. No dice. (J.P. looks a little bemused by all this, no?) At least Martelle had his publisher’s help with that. Authors who publish independently have to work out cover designs for themselves. Some hire a good designer and benefit greatly from it. Some go the DIY route, with predictable results. Some of their creations are at this website, whose tagline is, “Just because you CAN design your own book cover doesn’t mean you SHOULD.” (For how it can be done right, see the AIGA’s 50 2012 award-winners.)

Don’t forget the interior design choices that await self-publishers like booby-traps in the swamp. Fonts, type size, page layouts, etc. Stuff you never notice when it’s done right. Did you ever pick up a book in a bookstore, probably a rather thick one, and see the type is reeely tiny? Put that baby down again. Or buy it, and schedule an appointment with your optometrist. Or you might grab a rather thin book, with generously sized type and lots of leading (space between lines). Hmmm. Not much book for my bucks.

Now a fresh opportunity to answer that eternal question “what can go wrong?” appears in the form of software that “for the first time lets anyone add a synchronized soundtrack to digital text.” Music, ambient audio, sound effects.

O.K., our hero is walking in the woods? Birds chirping. It’s evening in the U.K.? Obligatory fox barking (if you watch British mysteries, you’ll get it). Caught in traffic? Honks and screeches. Maybe a faint tire hiss. The phone rings? Infinite possibilities.  You get it.

Booktrack, which is offering this incipient catastrophe and major time-sink has developed a library of more than 20,000 audio files to make the author’s job “easier.” Now did I want a heavy knock or a more tentative one, or something more like a rap. Rap, rap, rap. Two raps might be better. Really, I kind of liked that first one . . . .

Booktrack already offers books on iTunes that have been audio-enhanced by Sound Professionals. Reviews are good, and sales of early titles have been brisk. A lot of readers like this experience. They say they get more out of the book and remember it better. But when I go back to re-read a paragraph, does the serial killer re-ring the doorbell? What if I go out for lunch, does it keep ringing? What if I stop reading to bite a hangnail, does it ring too soon? Obviously, I should try out one of these books before exposing my skepticism.

The developers’ optimism is scary. “For the first time, any writer can now add a synchronized movie-like soundtrack to their story . . .” I’m surprised to learn there isn’t any talent, or skill, or expertise involved in movie soundtrack development, just like for book cover design, just like for promotion, just like . . .

Rich Reading

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Book-Lovers’ Warning: Book Drum is a website where you may end up spending a lot of time. U.K.-based Book Drum’s slogan is “Beyond the Page” and that’s exactly where it takes you for the 176 books it includes far. Each volunteer-produced book profile includes multiple sources of enriching content:

  • Bookmarks: page-by-page commentary and illustration of the text
  • Summary: objective synopsis of the book
  • Setting: description and illustration of the main places or themes of the book
  • Glossary: foreign, invented and tricky words deciphered
  • Author: biographical information, interview videos, links and photos
  • Review: subjective analysis and evaluation of the book
  • Map: a world map pinned with descriptions of places significant in the book

The wide variety of books they’ve profiled—which feel like they’ve been taken apart and put together again—include many favorites, past and present. Classics from Dickens and Hardy and Austen up to and including Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. With Book Drum’s help, I may finally get past page 50 of Gravity’s Rainbow.

I took Book Drum for a test spin using one of my favorite books, Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I reviewed maps of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex. I read descriptions of the “life and times . . .” The bookmarks were fascinating—like the notes in a cleverly annotated classic, but with pictures! I know this book well, but I’d missed so much. I want to read it again, with Book Drum humming in the background. The volunteer contributor of content for Tess is novelist herself and freelance writer, as are many of the Book Drum contributors, while some are academics, recent graduate school spawn, and the like.

Book Drum sums up the diversity of its content in this way: “Whether it’s video of the Rockettes in The Catcher in the Rye, the Italian opera tracks that accompany Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, the historical context and maps of The Odyssey, stunning South American photography for In Patagonia, or video of Kabul kite fighting for Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, we take readers beyond the page to enjoy interactive content alongside their favourite books.”

Book Drum also has begun publishing for e-readers, with two titles so far, Heart of Darkness and The Turn of the Screw. This link takes you to the Amazon page for the latter, where you can See Inside. It’s the same principle as the website, but feels pushy. I might get used to it, but my initial reaction is I’d rather seek out the enriched content than be distracted by its intrusive presence. Similarly, I usually read the notes of a traditionally annotated book a chapter at a time, rather than constantly break the tenuous thread of my thought.

The site uses the Wiki approach, so anyone can contribute. Last spring, the Book Drum editors sent out a call for content for a profile of A Tale of Two Cities. Now I find this out! I wrote something very similar a few years ago when I was trying to convince Audible.com to offer companion .pdfs to some of its books, like those with lots of characters or foreign-named ones (think Russians!). It’s hard to keep track of the players without a program. I proposed one-line chapter summaries for people whose listening gets interrupted for a few days or weeks– “Where was I?,” a glossary to cover old-fashioned terms, foreign phrases, and special uses–also harder to follow when you just hear, rather than see, them. I even included a link to the raucous song the citoyens danced to in the blood-soaked Paris streets. So Book Drum has found a happy reader with me!

Thanks to writing buddy David Ludlum for sharing this resource.

Experiments

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The fall 2013 issue of Glimmer Train includes an interview with short story writer and novelist Peter LaSalle, based at the U of Texas, Austin.   LaSalle talks about his new book, Mariposa’s Song—the story of a 20-year-old Honduran immigrant girl working in a rough Austin nightclub. The story itself unwinds like a song, one very long song, in one very very long sentence.

Experimental fiction has always had its devotees and its detractors. One reader’s bold innovation is another’s annoying gimmick. The ultimate test, of course, is, does it work? Ten, twenty years on, when the glare of newness no longer blinds us, do people still read it? You’ll think of examples of successful experiments immediately (and will have forgotten the others, perhaps):

  • Benjy’s stream-of-consciousness story in Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury
  • The discovery of magical realism in Gabriel García Márquez’s 100 Years of Solitude
  • David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, which starts six stories across time in forward chronology, one through six, then finishes them, six through one, ending up where they began
  • A Visit from the Good Squad, by Jennifer Egan, creative in so many ways,  including a chapter written as a PowerPoint presentation.

The staying-power of the last two is as yet unproved Cloud Atlas was much-praised upon publication, won several awards, was short-listed for the Booker Prize and made into a difficult movie; A Visit from the Goon Squad won a Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and is being turned into a tv series. [!]

Succesfu experiments–and even some of the marginally successful ones present readers with new tools for discovery, new ways to understand the author’s fictional world and the characters in it.

A 17-year-old boy recommended Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) to me. You could see in his eyes the delight of the new and, he hoped, iconoclastic. The book is presented variously in typewriter script across the page, in regular type in columns up, down, around and diagonally across the page, as poems, photos, letters, straight text, and it contains a 42-page index containing a great many entries for “more” and not so many for “less.” When Danielewski wants the reader to speed up the pace, there is a single word on the page. A lot of impenetrable analysis has been done on this book; I’m inclined to think the author was having fun. He just has a complicated brain. And he succeeded in something Faulkner was unable to do. He convinced his publisher to publish some words and sections in color.

Similarly, Night Film by Marisha Pessl is currently receiving much publicity. It’s a suspense novel that includes scraps of movie script, newspaper clippings, photos, website screenshots, police reports. Most intriguing, it’s available as an audio book, for which, though I love audio, this book seems particularly ill-suited.

Books in their digitized forms open up new possibilities for integrating bits of film, photos, audio, alternative paths, puzzles. They have the potential to burst open like a piñata. Authors already are creating vines and mini-movies as promotion for their books; integrating them is the obvious next step that some already are taking. I’m reading the New York Times’s non-fiction The Jockey on line. Audio, video, straight text. I would say “can’t put it down,” but I’m not holding it, I’m watching it unfold before me.

I don’t know about Mariposa’s Song, though. One long sentence. Other new forms, jangled and multimedia as they may be, are perhaps a better fit with our modern attention span.

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Anticipation

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Starting to think seriously about my next vacation—only a few weeks away now—prompted by yet another flight detail change from United. The trip will start in Budapest, then float south along the Danube to Bucharest. On the journey, the boat will slip easily through the Iron Gate, the gorge separating Romania and the Carpathian Mountains on the north from Serbia and the Balkan mountain foothills on the south. Dams constructed over a 20-year period, ending in 1984, have turned what used to be a wild stretch of river into something more like a lake.

But the Iron Gates of my imagination, the ones I hope to see in my mind’s eye, are as they are described in Alan Furst’s thrillers. In his books, set in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, the Iron Gates were a perilous passage for desperate people—spies, refugees, terrorists, anyone caught up in the tightening net of loyalties and politics of a looming World War II:

“He would have to cross the Russian lines, would have to go through the white water at the Iron Gate, where the Duna [Danube] came crashing down onto the Wallachian plain to form the border between Romania and Bulgaria.” – Night Soldiers

“Europe was lost behind them—after the Iron Gate they were in a different land, a different time, running along the great plain that reached to the edge of the Black Sea.” – Night Soldiers

A few days in Budapest, an infamous spy town, is another something to look forward to:

“On 10 March 1930, the night train from Budapest pulled into the Gare du Nord a little after four in the morning. . . . In the station at Vienna, a brick had been thrown at the window of a first-class compartment, leaving a frosted star in the glass. And later that day there’d been difficulties at the frontiers for some of the passengers, so in the end the train was late getting into Paris.”—Kingdom of Shadows

“Difficulties at the frontiers”—we can imagine exactly what those difficulties were—“for some of the passengers”—and exactly who those terrified passengers were. Laced with foreboding, those lines open Furst’s thriller Kingdom of Shadows.

Other than a literary interest in things Budapestian, I have a family history interest as well. Legend has it that my grandmother (who died when I was a toddler) was a pastry chef in Budapest before immigrating to the United States. The disappointing kernel of the story is that none of her six daughters learned the art. She came from the generation that wanted to put the Old Country behind it. Truthfully, she had to have been quite young—twenty?—when she came over, so “chef” may be a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s a pleasant thought and one that will require eating as much pastry as possible in homage.

Another feature of this trip is a three-day add-on excursion into Transylvania—ancestral home of my grandfather, who came from a tiny village annexed to the marginally larger village of Székelykeresztúr (“Holy Cross” in Hungarian) in 1926. Google maps gives the larger town no more than 12 streets. My grandfather’s home was about eight miles from the medieval walled town of Sighisoara, birthplace of Count Dracula. I have Transylvania roots, for sure.

So, of course I enjoyed reading The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova, about a woman researching her family’s history who traverses that part of the world and at every step finds connections to Our Vlad.  “Genuinely terrifying,” said the Boston Globe.

Lots to look forward to, and I have my reading for the trip all lined up:

I’ve provided links to amazon.com, in case you want more info about any of these books, but of course would encourage you to make any purchases at your local independent bookstore!

Higherbrow Reads

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Enough lately on these pages about the best thrillers of the year and Amazon’s uninspired list of fall pre-orders. Let’s chat about a more literary endeavor—the announcement of the longlist of books nominated for the 2013 Man Booker Prize. This prestigious 45-year-old prize is awarded to the “year’s best” English-language novel coming out of Britain and the Commonwealth. Culled from some 151 candidates, the 13-novel longlist will be reduced to a shortlist of six to be announced in early September. On this first list are authors from Britain, Zimbabwe, New Zealand, Canada, Malaysia, and Ireland.

Says Robert Macfarlane, chair of the five-member judging panel, “This is surely the most diverse longlist in Man Booker history: wonderfully various in terms of geography, form, length and subject.  These 13 outstanding novels range from the traditional to the experimental, from the first century AD to the present day, from 100 pages to 1,000 and from Shanghai to Hendon.” And, for the first time, one entry (Richard House’s four-part political thriller The Kills) was first published digitally. The author, who is also an artist and film-maker, provides an enhanced edition with video that can be accessed at http://www.thekills.co.uk. (Anything featuring the rooftops of Istanbul captures my immediate interest!)

The nominees (with links to mini-bios) are:

What? You haven’t read them all? No surprise there, since five of the books (McLeod, Harris, Mendelson, Catton, and Lahiri) were still unpublished as of the longlist announcement, though their publication dates have been quickly moved forward. That all these late-appearing but apparently worthy books are by women is interesting, but perhaps only coincidence, since eight of the authors are women.

While the Booker is one of the world’s top literary prizes—or, perhaps, because it is—over the years the judges and awardees have come in for their share of sniping. Occasionally, critics have thought a choice unworthy or made because a chief competitor was politically awkward. Among the 15 Booker winners I’ve read were a few I didn’t much like, but on the whole they are a strong group. You could do worse.

Here are the ones I’ve admired most (OK, I didn’t actually read The English Patient, but I saw the movie three times) and highly recommend:

  • Michael Ondaatje – The English Patient (1992)
  • Arundhati Roy – The God of Small Things (1997)
  • Ian McEwan – Amsterdam (1998)(audio)
  • Peter Carey – True History of the Kelly Gang (2001)(audio)
  • Yann Martel – Life of Pi (2002)
  • Aravind Adinga – The White Tiger (2008)(audio – absolutely brilliant!)
  • Hilary Mantel – Wolf Hall (2009)
  • Hilary Mantel – Bring Up the Bodies (2012)

Enjoy!

Cream

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Books I read 002In front of an airport rack of books, I count up the number of titles I’ve read, usually almost none, and I do the same at B&N’s New Arrivals table, where I generally find four or five that are in my “done” stack at home. Such a sense of accomplishment to have read books other people haven’t even bought yet!

So, of course I file away January’s inevitable lists of the “best books of the year” and fell even further under the thrall of listmania when I discovered the ambitious “Best Fiction of the 20th Century”!  This meta-list compiles and compares rankings of “best books” from several notable sources: the Library Journal list, the Modern Library list, the Koen book distributors list, and the Radcliffe Publishing Course list. The lists contain 221 separate works.

About this exercise, compiler Brian Kunde says, “We may take exception to what got on the lists. We may protest over what was left off. But we do learn what others considered notable in our culture — and discover how much of it we’ve neither experienced, thought about, or heard of.”

That’s the truth! The books at the top of the list are familiar, at least by title, but nearer the bottom, memory goes sketchy. Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (#99)? Reynolds Price’s Kate Vaiden (#192)? Colin Wilson’s The Outsider (#219)?

Some of the books I’d like to check off (Done!) on these lists, did I read them or just see the movie? After the 11 TV episodes of Brideshead Revisited (#144), does anyone actually read the book anymore? TV and movie versions may have aced out the print originals of I, Claudius (#53) or 2001: A Space Odyssey (#94), too. Some books I might have read a long time ago, did I really read, or just mean to? After a few decades, memory may have resolved the matter in my favor.

The Modern Library website provides separate lists of the 100 Best as determined by its Board AND by the online votes of some 217,500 “readers.” A comparison is instructive. While the board leads its list off with Ulysses, The Great Gatsby, A Portrait of the Artist  as a Young Man, Lolita, and Brave New World (four of which I’ve read—yay!), the top ten in the reader list includes seven books by either Ayn Rand* or L. Ron Hubbard (none of which I’ve read), plus The Lord of the Rings, To Kill a Mockingbird, and 1984. The readers don’t get around to Ulysses until slot 11. How many of them have actually read it, I wonder, and how many just think they should have? I confess, I have not. Slogging through Portrait of the Artist  . . was enough, and while I used to know all the words to the song, “Finnegan’s Wake,” I haven’t tackled the book.

*A footnote about Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: Idaho state senator John Goedde brags “That book made my son a Republican!” He’s introduced a bill to require every high school student in the state to read it and pass a test on it to graduate.

Kunde takes the existing list rankings and creates a composite score—a ranking of rankings. The top 10 using his method are:

  1. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  2. 1984 by George Orwell (that’s worth a re-read now)
  3. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
  4. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
  5. Lolita by Vladimir Nobokov
  6. Ulysses by James Joyce
  7. Animal Farm by George Orwell
  8. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
  9. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
  10. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

I’ve read them all, except that big lump in the gravy, Ulysses. But these are the best 20th century books, the world has moved on, and the list is old. Only four books on it are from the 1990s and less than eight percent were published later than 1980. As time passes, more of late-century works may achieve the recognition that eventually came to other books—most notably, the now #1 ranked Gatsby.

Not that sales are a reliable measure of quality, but when Fitzgerald died in 1940, The Great Gatsby was a commercial failure, having sold fewer than 25,000 copies since its publication in 1925. Today it continues to sell 500,000 copies a year.

Exploring further:

“The Best English-Language Fiction of the Twentieth Century: A Composite list and Ranking.” by Brian Kunde.

“In Search of the Century’s Best Books” by Brian Kunde

Modern Library’s “Top 100”

Advice from the Masters

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Some of our America’s best writers, “masters of the craft,” have set down their fiction-writing pens to ruminate about writing itself—what makes it good, even great, and what to avoid like the dread passive tense. I just discovered a treasure chest of these literary gems assembled by Maria Popova in her brainpickings blog—“a free weekly interestingness digest.” The collection includes advice from authors as diverse as Fitzgerald, Didion, Sontag, Bradbury, and Orwell.

Some of these authors dispense pithy observations, such as Stephen King’s “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” Some authors’ advice is more ecumenical. Elmore Leonard’s famous 10 Rules for Writing is not in this collection, though widely extracted and republished (without permission, I understand, as they are in a copyrighted book he’d prefer to sell). His book includes this revelation: “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

Leonard and Hemingway are masters of the spare style, but not everyone can write that way, not everyone wants to, and not every subject fits that style. Trish, in her comment on last week’s blog, reminded me about Leonard’s admonition to “never open a book with weather,” perhaps the dullest subject imaginable for hooking a reader. But if that rule were followed to the letter, by every author, we’d miss these opening paragraphs:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. . . .

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. . . .

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.

This is, of course, the opening of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, which chronicles the impact of the dawdling obfuscations of the befogged panjandrums of Chancery Court (trusts, estates, land law, guardianships), who delay the proceedings of the cases that come before them until the parties are dead and the fortunes involved have disappeared into the hands of the lawyers. The beginning, in both its plodding tone and fog-bound, muck-mired description, freighted with symbolism, sets the reader up perfectly for the entire 1000-page novel. Much different than the writer who observes his fictional world no more acutely than to note the sun was shining.

Finally, and perhaps an observation that can apply to any fiction—from spare Hemingway to florid Dickens comes from Kurt Vonnegut. Hemingway might condense it to “Be interesting!” What Vonnegut proposes is that the style a book is written in says everything about the author:

The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not. Don’t you yourself like or dislike writers mainly for what they choose to show or make you think about? Did you ever admire an empty-headed writer for his or her mastery of the language? No.

Now, there’s a challenge worthy of the most ambitious writer. Maria Popova, with her interestingness blog would seem to be on the right track. Or, as Mr. Leonard says, “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.”

An Author’s Handshake

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Pondering?
When you crack open a novel, you’ve already committed to read at least a few chapters. Rarely would you abandon it after the first few paragraphs. Not so a short story. Its opening—even its first sentence—is crucial. First sentences “establish the authorial confidence that is absolutely necessary for successful fiction. If a reader is going to follow you, it’s important that they know from the very first line that they can trust the story.” It’s the literary equivalent of “You had me from ‘hello,’” the journalist’s hook.

The above quote is from an interview with author Josh Rolnick in the spring 2013 issue of Glimmer Train. He and the interviewer talk about the importance of “opening narrative space,” which is an arty way of saying making the reader believe “anything can happen.” One of the most memorable opening lines is, and we all know this one, whether we’ve read Kafka’s novella or not, “One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin,” although I’m positive that in the translation I read an astonishing number of decades ago, those last two words were “giant cockroach.” Kafka never exactly says. Whatever. You absolutely can’t stop there.

Examples of short story first lines I think compel further reading:

  • “The Potts girl walked into the café preceded by her reputation so that everyone was obliged to stare.” – “Sundowners,” by Monica Ali
  • In his first dreamy meditations over the case, Mr. Fortune remarked that it suggested one answer to the hard question why boys should be boys.” – “The Dead Leaves,” by H.C. Bailey
  • “In the autumn of 1971 a man used to come to our house, bearing confections in his pocket and hopes of ascertaining the life or death of his family.” – “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine,” by Jhumpa Lahiri

The first line of Rolnick’s own short story, “Funnyboy,” like the three above, is filled with plot possibilities: “I glanced out the window as my train pulled into the station and saw the girl who killed my son.” From that point, this story could travel anywhere, though you sense not anywhere particularly good.

But the opener needn’t so effectively forecast the coming drama, like the examples above. It can draw you in through its description of a particular time and place or the mood it sets, like Lauren Groff’s opener for “Delicate Edible Birds”: “Because it had rained and the rain had caught the black soot of the factories as they burned, Paris in the dark seemed covered by a dusky skin, almost as though it were living.” You want to take her hand and go there with her.

Writing the first few sentences of a short story is laying down a marker. “I promise to show you this,” the author says. They create a door you must open, a street you must walk down. The page you must turn.

On Form and Format

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Image courtesy of www.freeimages.co.uk

For this week’s blog post, I’m referring you to an April 20 guest post—Follow that Thread!—I provided to Debra Goldstein’s lively blog, It’s Not Always a Mystery. That post builds on an intriguing essay by John McPhee about the complexity of organizing all the disparate pieces of the long, non-fiction narratives he writes so superbly. Many of his considerations apply equally well to fiction writers, who may not choose the most obvious way—strict chronology—to organize their work.

Two of the recent entries in the “Reading . . .” section of this website are cases in point. The book The Lullaby of Polish Girls (being published next month) moves back and forth in time with every chapter, but is set up to be easy-to-follow. In The Expats, a thriller I listened to, rather than read, the shifts in time and place were somewhat harder to follow, because I (mowing the lawn) couldn’t scan for a chapter title or detail to reorient myself. Still, it worked, though it’s the kind of book that could have been written chronologically and the chapters shuffled afterwards, so that the hero has only the information she should have had at any given point. In fact, I’m not sure how the author, Chris Pavone, kept it all straight otherwise!

To talk about structure in a purely mechanical sense, have you noticed that not only books, but individual chapters are becoming shorter? In the book I’m currently reading, some chapters are less than a page long, which works because most chapters switch voices from one character to another. But even in books with a single narrator, chapters may be little more than individual scenes.

This format is coming into vogue as a response to mobile devices. Authors and publishers envision people reading in short bursts, on iPads, smartphones, etc. I find all those breaks a little jarring (and they create lots of wasted space—less “book”), but it isn’t awful. What do you think?

The Changing Publishing Scene

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Writers—and some readers, too—are worried about the massive shifts in the publishing industry, including whether it will be possible to make a living as a serious writer for very much longer, not that it was ever very easy, and what making authorhood impossible means for the diversity of ideas in the cultural marketplace.

My professional organization, Sisters in Crime (it’s worth joining just to be able to say that!), recently released a new report on the state of publishing, based on expert interviews with 15 individuals involved, in various ways, in the industry. They asked about books in general and mysteries/suspense/thrillers in particular. The experts they talked to echoed the rather gloomy predictions heard for the last couple of years regarding the challenges the industry faces.

Given the difficulty new writers have being published, many are advised to go-it-alone. But “understand the risks,” one prominent agent said. Yes, it’s easy to self-publish with today’s technology, but publishing does not necessarily lead to sales and income for the writer. Because about 300,000 print titles and an almost uncountable number of ebooks are published each year—think of it as a thousand new books a day—the necessity for and burden of promotion and marketing are enormous. Accomplishing this shifts the emphasis entirely onto the self in self-publishing.

The few self-published books that have achieved financial success have encouraged many more writers to try to follow in those footsteps, creating such a rising level of background noise level, even excellent books go unnoticed.

The implications of the rise of e-books has yet to sort itself out. And, because of a number of economic pressures on publishers, the bar for new authors is constantly being raised. Worse, publishers aren’t interested in mid-list authors—“they want bestsellers.” Authors want to write bestsellers, too, but most won’t. The Great Gatsby sold poorly when it was first published in 1925, but now it is one of the most highly-ranked English-language novels of the 20th century (second-highest in the Modern Library’s list after Ulysses.) As of today it ranks #10 in Amazon’s bestsellers’ list, 4th among novels. For authors whose publishers aren’t banking on returns 88 years into the future, the emphasis on bestsellers is a problem.

The one bright spot for writers of mysteries is that the genre retains its popularity in this fast-changing environment. Mysteries account for 24 percent of ebook sales, though only 15 percent of the dollars, which means their prices are discounted compared to other books. Mysteries are 21 percent of library ebook collections and 24 percent of their print collections. And “cozy mysteries,” that less-sex-and-gore subgenre perfected by Agatha Christie and still practiced by many authors today are actually increasing in popularity.

Exploring Further:

“The Slow Death of the American Author” – Scott Turow’s recent, widely circulated lamentation in the New York Times

Sisters in Crime – membership organization promoting the professional development and advancement of women crime writers

The Modern Library’s lists of 100 best novels; one list selected by its board and one by readers

Cozy Mysteries Unlimited – website for cozy fans