Along Publishers Row
By Campbell Geeslin
“There is a Wild West quality to the book business these days,” wrote Julie Bosman in her New York Times coverage of BookExpo, the annual publishing trade show in Manhattan at the end of May.
“E-books have exploded, surpassing print sales for some new releases. The struggle for many brick-and-mortar bookstores has deepened as their customers began downloading books onto their e-readers from home rather than heading to stores.” While e-book sales are impressive, especially in romance, mysteries and thrillers, they are not yet much in children books, reference books and many nonfiction categories.
Included in the coverage of the trade show was the news that Amazon had hired Laurence J. Kirshbaum to head its new imprint of general-interest titles. Amazon will bring out thriller author Barry Eisler’s next novel. He abandoned a six-figure contract with a publisher to go with Amazon.
But Steve Bercu, owner of BookPeople, a store in Austin, said that 2010 had been its best year ever. He joked that people in Texas “don’t even know e-books are happening.”
THE E-SALES BUMP: In March, the Association of American Publishers reported that e-book sales jumped 115.8 percent in early 2011. In January, revenues from e-book sales were ahead of both adult hardcovers and mass market paperback sales.
SUMMER FARE: Janet Maslin of The New York Times did her annual round-up of books for summer reading. She wrote, “The beach book has undergone a makeover for 2011. As the season’s traditional big names and story lines run out of gas, new variations on old formulas have emerged. . . .
“Even if you wanted retreads of the same old stories, they would be hard to find. Chick lit? SO over. Police procedurals? Done to death. Sweet little cottages on Nantucket? They need renovating. . . . It’s time to find new favorites.”
ADULTS ONLY? C. W. Smith recently retired from teaching creative writing at Southern Methodist University. His latest novel, Steplings, was published in June. PW reported that he and his publicist June Taylor had an exchange about a subject that has been mentioned in this column: When is a novel about kids so adult in subject matter that it’s unfit for teens to read?
Smith wrote to Taylor, “the two main characters [in Steplings] are a 17-year-old boy and his 11-year-old stepsister, but the supporting characters are the troubled adults. . . . I don’t know where it fits! I was talking to my agent Elaine Markson back in 1998 about my novel Understanding Women. She kept saying that she thought it might be a YA book. I said that I thought that the fact that the boy who narrates the book launches into a long rhapsodic praise of cunnilingus would probably prevent that.”
Understanding Women was published as an adult book but Booklist ended its review with, “Teens will adore Jimbo’s awkward obsession with lust.”
Smith’s comment: “So who knows? Maybe Steplings also walks the line?”
CLIFF DIVE: Writing a short story, author Roxana Robinson wrote in an e-mail to The New York Times Book Review, is “incredibly exhilarating. It’s like doing a cliff dive, the kind that only works when the wave hits just right. You stand on top, poised and fearful, looking at what lies below: you must start your dive when the wave has withdrawn, and there’s nothing beneath but sand and stone. You take a deep breath and throw yourself over, hoping that, by the time you hit, the wave will be back, wild and churning, and full of boiling energy. It’s kind of terrifying. It’s unbelievable fun.”
ABOUT KINDNESS: The Caldecott Medal for a children’s picture book went to A Sick Day for Amos McGee, written by Philip C. Stead and illustrated by his wife Erin E. Stead.
Stead told The New York Times that he and Mrs. Stead thought up the project in 2006, when they were living in Brooklyn. They now live in Ann Arbor, Mich.
“We were a little concerned before the book came out that it was too quiet,” Stead said. “It is very simple. It has very muted colors. It’s a quiet story with a very simple story arc. In a weird way, maybe that was what made it stand out. Maybe people were ready for a story about kindness.”
GIFT: Eighty-five boxes of manuscripts from a barn in Cornwall, the first part of a literary archive by John le Carre, has been given to the Bodleian library at Oxford.
Le Carre told The Guardian, “I am delighted to be able to do this. Oxford was [the fictional] Smiley’s spiritual home, as it is mine. And where I have the greatest respect for American universities, the Bodleian is where I shall most happily rest.”
Le Carre did not compose his prose on a computer, so these papers reveal how the author worked. A day’s writing in longhand was typed by his wife. Then tweaks, edits and rewrites were taped or stapled onto the original.
TOO MANY? Neil Genzlinger, a staff editor at The New York Times, wrote a review of four memoirs for the Sunday Book Review.
He began: “A moment of silence, please, for the lost art of shutting up.
“There was a time when you had to earn the right to draft a memoir, by accomplishing something noteworthy or having an extremely unusual experience or being such a brilliant writer that you could turn relatively ordinary occurrences into a snapshot of a broader historical moment. Anyone who didn’t fit one of those categories was obliged to keep quiet. Unremarkable lives were unremarked upon, the way God intended.
“But then came our current age of oversharing, and all heck broke loose. These days, if you’re planning to browse the ‘memoir’ listings on Amazon, make sure you’re in a comfortable chair, because that search term produced about 40,000 hits or 60,000 or 100,000, depending on how you execute it.“
Three of the reviews that followed were negative. Genzlinger liked the fourth book because the author made herself “the least important character in it.”
MORE MEMOIR: No one explains it as well as Russell Baker in Inventing the Truth. Baker wrote: “Nobody understood better than [Mark] Twain that a memoir is not biography, but an art form.”
STILL MORE MEMOIR: Joyce Carol Oates, in The New York Review of Books, wrote: “Of literary genres none has so diversely and so wonderfully flourished in recent decades as the memoir . . . the highly individualized, often short, lyric memoir of crises, of which William Styron’s Darkness Visible (1990), Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes (1996), and Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) are exemplary.”
