Case in point: When I was getting my MFA, a classmate of mine won the Associated Writers Program contest for his collection of stories, and it got published by the University of Massachusetts Press. The person who was the contest runner-up, and who therefore didn’t have his collection published, was a young writer named Tom Perrotta. Now, if Tom Perrotta had won that contest, would you know who he was today? Possibly not. The writer who did win that contest, though he subsequently published a novel with a trade press, you likely haven’t heard of. Or, if you have, it’s because he’s made a name for himself in the blog world and has gotten a book contract as a result of that. In other words, to the extent that he has succeeded (and he’s a good writer), he has done so despite his having had his story collection published, not because of it.

Back to Matrimony. With a first novel that had weak sales as her ammunition, my agent, who’s both respected and powerful, had trouble selling Matrimony (In the case of Swimming Across the Hudson, she sold it in less than a week, based on the first fifty pages), and were it not for the fact that someone very high up at the house she eventually sold it to loved the book, it might not have sold at all.

In the end, I’m one of the lucky ones. Matrimony was published by Pantheon, a terrific publishing house, and I had the considerable support of a great editor, publisher, publicist, and sales force. The house spent money on coop and advertising and sent me on a long book tour. The reviews were well-timed and very positive. Within ten days of publication, Janet Maslin reviewed Matrimony very favorably in the daily New York Times. Two weeks after that, Jennifer Egan did the same in the NYTBR. At the end of the year, Matrimony was named a New York Times Notable Book.

All these things had a marked impact on sales (I know: I follow the numbers very carefully), as did the fact that I spent much of the past year and half putting the writing of my next novel on hold so that I could help publicize Matrimony. You don’t go visiting sixty book clubs for the mere fun of it. It takes you away from your family and friends, and from your next novel. And, in my case, book groups weren’t even the half of it. I lived on the Internet, guest blogging, getting my book out to bloggers big and small—all, it’s been clear, to Matrimony’s benefit.

Matrimony, let me be clear, is not a sexy book. It’s about the fifteen-year history of a marriage, and it’s character-driven and quiet. There are no pyrotechnics in the novel. It’s a book that easily could have gone nowhere without a lot of hard work on the part of Pantheon (and now Vintage,) and some additional leg work from me. In the end, Matrimony sold a good deal more than five thousand hardback copies and Vintage has high hopes for the paperback. And yet it didn’t sell astronomically. It did more than respectably, but if my publishers were relying on me to pay the bills, they’d be in trouble. I say all this because, if anything, the relative success of Matrimony is a testament to how tough the book business is. It took everything—a publisher that really got behind the book, great reviews, a really good cover, an author willing to drop everything else to help with promotion—in order to get the book to do even this well.

Which brings me back to my original concern about our feast-or-famine book culture—and, ever so indirectly and in the name of making this conversation at Booksquare an ongoing discussion, to the question of the demise of the LATBR. I have read with interest both what Steve Wasserman and what Kassia have written on the subject. I know much less than either of them do about the book review section. I live on the East Coast, and I never read the LATBR regularly. I wrote one review for Steve Wasserman and one for David Ulin, and both my novels were reviewed in the book review’s pages. I agree with Kassia that there’s good and bad criticism in print just as there’s good and bad criticism on the web. And it may very well be that the LATBR had it coming to them. And newspapers, it is true, are a business in trouble, and a sense of entitlement isn’t going get a book review section to come back.

All that said, I think there’s something that a book review section at a major newspaper offers that may be harder to find on the web. That’s the all-important inadvertent reader. Someone, that is, who would never buy the L.A. Times for the book review section but who nonetheless is stuck with it when the paper arrives. He ends up glancing at it and discovering a book he hadn’t known about. And seeing it next time he’s at the bookstore. And maybe buying a copy. What I’ve been trying to argue in this post is that it’s the inadvertent reader and the inadvertent book buyer who’s crucial, particularly for literary fiction, where the number of potential readers is so small and needs desperately to be expanded. This is why coop is crucial, why independent bookstores are crucial, why book review sections are crucial. They’re all avenues for making us aware of books we otherwise wouldn’t be aware of.

Now, the web can do this too, certainly, and a lot of the literary blogs have done a great deal to call attention to books that otherwise wouldn’t be known. But I think inadvertence occurs much less frequently on the web. Yes, a person who loves literary fiction might learn about a book on The Elegant Variation that she otherwise wouldn’t have known about, and that’s no small thing. But what about the person who doesn’t love literary fiction—or, more to the point, doesn’t realize that she in fact would love literary fiction if only it were placed in front of her? If you’re reading The Elegant Variation, you’re already part of the choir. But the choir is going to have to get a lot bigger if writers of literary fiction are going to make a go of it.

We all need inadvertent readers. In the same way that Michael Chabon developed a strong gay readership when, as a result of Mysteries of Pittsburgh, people mistakenly thought he was gay, I’ve gotten some inadvertent readers based on the title of my novel. Someone sees a novel called Matrimony and they might think they’ll be reading Jodi Picoult. Then they read Matrimony and discover it’s the farthest thing in the world from Jodi Picoult. In certain cases they’re angry—they feel duped—but in other cases—this is what a writer hopes for—they discover that there’s more to life than Jodi Picoult. That is one of the things I’ve been doing in visiting book groups: expanding my reader base and, in the process, trying to educate people who might otherwise be reluctant to leave their comfort zone about the pleasures of literary fiction.

In any case, it’s not an either/or proposition, and in this publishing climate, the loss of every book review section, every independent bookstore, every book blog cuts deep. The publishing world knows how important the New York Times Book Review is, which is why publishers continue to advertise there even when it’s not seen as cost-effective. The fact is, it is cost effective, certainly in the long run, because the loss of the NYTBR would be a huge, almost unfathomable blow.

I believe individual readers should have the same attitude toward writers that the big publishing houses have toward the NYTBR. Protect what you value. Buy books. I can’t tell you the number of times people have said to me, “I loved your book so much I lent it to five friends.” This is flattering, but it doesn’t help me with Bookscan. Every time a used copy of Matrimony gets sold on Amazon, that’s another sale that doesn’t get counted. People who are committed to books need to support writers because if they don’t there won’t be any of us left.

OK, at the risk of having ended on a preachy note, I want to thank Kassia again for having me as a guest blogger, and having allowed me to be so long-winded!

Fine print: Joshua Henkin’s website. Go. Buy Matrimony: paperback or (yay!) Kindle edition. Comment below — it’s free!

Thank you to Joshua Henkin for this great two-part look at book clubs, sales, and the industry.

I have pretty much always known that I wanted to be a writer. Having my first short story “published” in ’78 was what clinched it: The Magic Swingset—a piece I’d labored over for two weeks, illustrated and painstakingly copied onto yellow legal paper, was stapled onto the wall outside the principal’s office, complete with broody photo of 12-year-old self. Everything about the experience seemed to suit me; long hours in soothing solitude, lost (with license, for a change) in my own thoughts. Meetings with admiring editors–or in this case, teachers.

“The Internet,” I was told bluntly, when I asked about cyber-marketing, “isn’t part of our publishing model.”

That magic moment when I—a lone bookworm in a family oriented towards finance—not only read the finished product, but then got to see other people read it, and react. True, my parents voiced doubts about a career in the arts; they were clearly worried, already, about setting their spacey, pre-teen daughter free to make her way in the real world. Some of the more direct reactions were also less than appreciative: Tommy Windle dismissed the story as “dorky.” Which struck me as self-evident; I was, after all, a dork.

But all that really didn’t matter. What mattered was that I’d found a process that felt intrinsically right. I imagined doing it for the rest of my life. And three decades later, much of my writing life is more or less as I imagined it would be. I still love the long hours spent hunched over my laptop, the enjoyable lunches with mentors, agents and editors. The moment I held my first novel–The Painter from Shanghai—was nothing short of miraculous, thanks to the fabulous job my publisher did with the book’s presentation. I’ve loved, too, hearing from the reviewers and readers, none of whom to date have called it dorky (though one young critic did call it “hyperbolic”).

What’s different from my childhood imaginings is the enormous work it has taken simply to get people—enough people—to read it. Or at least, read about it. Especially online.

I’ll say it up front: I’m a novelist, not a blogger. My clothes might be hip (a latent backlash against years trapped in dorkdom). But my writing, most definitely, is not. It sprawls lazily across the pages; is reined-in and rewritten, cut and sculpted and pondered, and then cut some more. I love the freedom the novel as a literary form offers for this process; months or years to muse and daydream and refine, the deadline usually far-off, the readership misty, unformed. And yet, these days, it seems, the bulk of my time goes into—well, blogs. (Blogs. The very word would have been enough to make my sixth-grade self giggle. It sounds like a name from The Muppet Show.) These short, sharp little sites and pieces can be vastly engaging and informative, and I’ve found several that I truly love. That said, they feel like the very antithesis of the way I write; tight deadlines, immediate readerships. Instantaneous—at times cacaphoneous—response.

Still, in the past four months I’ve gone from blogging ignoramus (I’ll admit it; in 2007 I wasn’t ever quite certain what a blog was) to someone if not proficient then certainly functional; kind of like my mom with her VCR. I can do the basics: daisy-chain from blog to blog, track authorities, price ads. On occasion I’ve even designed my own banner. I email scores of bloggers, praising their efforts and their wit, then (more self-deprecatingly, of course,) praising Painter. Perhaps one in four will write back to me, interested in seeing a book. Off goes the book. Back online go I. I also blog in the verb sense. As in, when asked, I eagerly offer up blogs like this one, which attempt (obviously, with very mixed results) to adopt the hip quips and savvy, “I could care less that I’m so smart” tone that all good bloggers seem to have. Half the time I feel like a mom at a nightclub; overdressed, way too old to be here.

But I’m also aware—as my 12-year-old self was not–of the realities of the post-millenium publishing world. I know that the Internet can spread word of a new novel in a way traditional ads and book tours can’t. And that readers today—or at least, many of them—have come to expect the dimensionality only the Web offers: the instant gratification of seeing a book’s sales-rank and popularity, both in numbers and reader comments. Of reading reviews in twenty-six different languages. Of Googling an author to see what else she’s written or posted or perhaps just to see what she looks like. And then, of course, blogging about it. I also know this particular, quivering tip of the publicity frontier is one that most publishers—at least traditional ones—have not yet crossed into. It was fact made clear to me early on in the publishing process; not only by mentors and fellow writers, but–with disarming honesty–by publishers themselves. “The Internet,” I was told bluntly, when I asked about cyber-marketing, “isn’t part of our publishing model.” That doesn’t mean that publishers aren’t aware of or don’t care about the Internet’s power and scope. It simply means that—as with so much else in a hopelessly understaffed, underpaid and overwhelmed industry (built on a cyber-free business model that—like Keynsian economics—makes no sense in real life) it remains an unproven region, one that most publishers simply don’t have the time, expertise or money to explore.

Which leaves it up to us—the authors (like me), some of whom (also like me) leap eagerly in to fill the gap. Why do we do it, when we’re clearly so ill-equipped to do it, and really (like me) should be working on our next novels?

In part, it is due to the vicious cycle of authordom; something that—like ARA (Amazon Ranking Addiction) and pyramid-scheme MFA programs and the uncorruptible, absolute power that is Oprah—my preteen self could also never have imagined. But the truth is this: if you want to write your next book, your first book has to sell. If you want it to sell, in today’s world, you have to help.

And while no one yet knows quite how much, the Internet does help—I can attest to that. When I take out a set of blog-ads, my Amazon and B&N rankings jump. When one of my blog reviews makes it to the Huff Post and Yahoo news, they jump more. When Barnes and Noble puts me on the front-page of their “recommended books” site as a Discovery author, the number there jumps too. Of course, no one—apart from Amazon and B&N themselves– knows precisely how many sales that represents. But, absent having the book stapled to a public wall somewhere where I can actually count the people who read me, it’s the best proof I’ve got I am selling; so that–when I finally stop blogging–I can get to work on the next novel, in good faith.

Of course, there are other, more vicarious gratifications in the blogging world for an oldish, first-time author like myself. Like many, I can’t resist the autoerotic urge to self-Google, though I’m worried it’s hurting my eyesight… But all the stuff I find! The Shropshire County Council (is that in England?) is recommending my book to readers! NYPL has 87 holds on it today! A teenager in Singapore is putting off her homework to read Painter a little longer (“going to stop procrastinating SOON, I hope” she writes)! Of course another S’pore teen (a lot of Painter chatter in Singapore, for some reason) reports bleakly:“I was force to buy a story book cos I always nv read books. So I randomly choose a book. Its tittled: the painter of shanghai….its so thick! I dun think I can finish it in a year….” This particular blog-entry is titled “Hi, Bitch.” I would venture its author thinks reading is for dorks…….Which, I suppose, sort of brings me back full-circle. It’s not quite Tommy Windle. But it’s close. In the end, then, maybe things aren’t so very different from how I imagined them after all. Not, at least, if one pictures the Internet as a very, very long wall, with my novel stapled up on it, in a school full of student bloggers. (In Singapore.)

Of course, that doesn’t change the fact that I’ve now spent two days on a blog while my next novel languishes—achingly unwritten—in my bookbag. Perhaps I, too, should stop procrastinating. SOON. After all, at some point books—not unlike spacey preteen daughters—must be released to make their own way. In both the cyberworld, and the real one.

You can find Jennifer Epstein’s website here. And buy her book (c’mon you know you want to!) here.

From three-page short story to 550-page novel

My new novel, Salvation, began as a three-page short story, “Cannibals,” published in a literary quarterly a few years back. My agent and I were putting together a collection of stories, and this one didn’t fit. But she was smitten with the voice of this story and wondered if it could be longer. I had no idea if it could or couldn’t. I gave it a shot. And a three-page-long episode became a five-hundred-and-fifty-page life story.

My Agent

My agent, Denise Shannon, has her own agency, representing a variety of fine authors including Francine Prose, Gary Shteyngart, Karen Russell, Aryn Kyle, Samuel H. Huntingon, Ehud Havazelet, Kevin Canty, Mark Slouka, and many others. She has a lot of experience and a great sense of the marketplace. Her hunches regarding my work in the past have been proven 100 percent correct. And she loved this book.

What is Salvation about?

Salvation is set in rural Iowa in the 1950s. In a nutshell, the story is a funny/sad survival fable in the Ugly Duckling mode. The book traces the journey of Crane Cavanaugh, beginning with disfiguration in the womb as the result of an attempted abortion and ending with celebration in the world as an award-winning science genius.

Crane and her two half-siblings grow up illiterate, ignored, and unfed by the three adults of the household, all depraved, former gospel circuit practitioners who are now squatters living under the civic radar in a dilapidated shack.

When Crane’s prostitute-mother runs away from home to join the Iowa Sate Fair as a stripper, the authorities intervene. The cabin is condemned and the kids are sent to separate institutions to live. Crane is assigned to convent life. Here, her long-sought education begins, but it goes too fast and well—she’s too smart. Science is taught from the book of Genesis in the Bible. Crane rebels. The nuns give up and put her up for adoption.

Crane is reborn as Princess Hopkins by an adoring middle-class adoptive mother who takes Crane home to live in a ranch house a stone’s throw from the condemned shack where she was born. Loved to pieces at home, mentored happily at school, yet haunted daily by her grim past, Princess/Crane inhabits parallel worlds. She learns to use her scientific precocity and formidable intellect to make her mark—and if more than the usual number of social blunders and sexual humiliations follow in her wake, she somehow retains an inner continuity that keeps her unfazed, cheerful, and forgiving.

Note to Self: Never Use the Omniscient First Person in a Long Work

The point of view of the story was what I’ll call omniscient first person: a candid, sincere, trustworthy narrator describes the world around her—and her precarious place in it—in a way that includes details she couldn’t possibly observe firsthand. Never do that in a novel. It is too hard to consistently maintain the same, precise cognitive scope of omniscience over hundreds of pages and scores of episodes with dozens of sub-characters floating in and out.

Why I Didn’t Change the Voice

The voice was what made Salvation different. Salvation possessed a coming-of-age plot. The Midwestern setting was sturdy and unexotic. There were many original details in this character’s journey—such as an intuitive precocity in tracking the feeding and mating habits of competing ant clans—but the overall theme of a character surviving a deprived childhood and finding her rightful place in the world—that was anything but new. It was the voice that made the whole book feel fresh. The candid, forgiving, cheerful way this character tells you the particulars of her story are what make her memorable.

The Submission Process

My agent was determined to find an editor who would fall in love with the book as she had. There were several rounds of submissions as she tweaked her list of candidates at publishing houses of all sizes, looking for someone with the means and the interest to take a risk on Crane Cavanaugh. It was from the great, young editors at the small literary presses that we got the response we were looking for. We went with Tin House Books. Editorial Director Lee Montgomery bought the manuscript—with the proviso that it would need substantial revision.

Small Presses: People Not Just Policies

Tin House is based in Portland, Oregon, in—yes—a tin house. They have enjoyed an outstanding reputation as a literary quarterly since their first issue came out in 1999. A few years back, they expanded into publishing books. Lee Montgomery is a wonderful writer, whose memoir, The Things Between Us, was published by Free Press and won the Oregon Book Award in Creative Nonfiction. Lee’s short fiction collection, Whose World Is this? won the John Simmons Iowa Short Fiction Award and was published by the University of Iowa Press. To work with me on the revision, Lee assigned Senior Editor Michelle Wildgen, herself an extraordinary fiction writer who won Prairie Schooner’s Virginia Faulkner Award with a story that became her novel, You’re Not You, published by St. Martin’s.

More Focus on Fewer Titles

At every stage of the publishing process, my agent and I were dealing with people, not just policies. My agent has this to say about the advantages of publishing with a small press: “Small presses provide more focus on fewer titles… and everyone throughout the process really knows (and has read!) your book.” We were asked for input on the cover and our input was taken seriously. We were asked for input on the publicity and our suggestions were incorporated. But before the publicity or the cover, there was that little matter of the revision.

Really Revising

My editor had made extensive notes on the novel. My agent had her own list of questions. And I had some thoughts of my own as to what wasn’t working for me. The more soberly I addressed all of the feedback, the more certain I became that the omniscient first person was an unsuitable point of view through which to tell the account of an entire life. (Anyone who knows of a successful example out there, please tell me!)

As hard as we had all worked on every page of the manuscript, I put three hundred and fifty pages of my character’s life story in the wastebasket. I ended the book with the character on the verge of the first major success that will propel her (with plenty of ups and downs) through the decades to come. During this process, my editor combed through the book six or seven times. She was available via e-mail days, nights, and weekends.

Flexibility in Scheduling Publication

When we all agreed that Salvation was the book it wanted to be, Tin House was able to schedule publication within a matter of months. Cover designers, type designers, copy editors, proofreaders, and publicists all worked on compressed turnaround schedules to meet the deadline.

My Editor’s Experience

My editor has this to say about her experience: “I felt a writer as talented and lauded as Lucia could only help us grow the reputation of the book press, and that while we did a lot of work on Salvation, just looking at the original draft, it was clear to me she was certainly skilled enough and serious enough about her writing to find the right path. You could just see the intelligence and the care in the book, and this amazing prose throughout, that told you it was worth pursuing.”

The Ugly Duckling

When I think back to that three-page sketch, I am in awe of both the inner processes and the professional collaboration that helped bring Salvation into being, then coached it assertively into finding its rightful place in the world. Kinda like my character. Talk about the Ugly Duckling!

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You can buy Salvation right here and learn more about the book here.

Many years ago, in a graduate writing workshop, the professor—who has authored a long list of novels I admire—surprised us by beginning class with a warning. He instructed us to spend as little energy as possible on the classes that we taught. He told us to keep time with our students to an absolute minimum.

“Teaching, critiquing, working with them. It’ll suck out your writing soul,” he said.

The class got quiet. We were sorry. We’d clearly extracted a good chunk of his.

Was he right? It can certainly be hard work—reading student writing, answering questions, giving advice. Sure, it can be draining. But it’s both my hope and suspicion that mentoring, when done willingly and wholeheartedly, can have the opposite effect. It feeds the literary soul.

And, it might just be integral to the future of literature.

Now, I know I’m not making any sort of revolutionary statement by pointing out that people don’t read much anymore. I was lucky. My hippie parents didn’t allow me to watch television. It didn’t feel so lucky at the time, but, because of it, I read. My mother always had a book in her hand. We played word games in the car and on napkins at Perkins before our pancakes came, and she paid me ten cents a line to memorize poetry (I think I still remember ninety cents of Blake’s “Tyger, Tyger”). My father read poetry to me aloud. Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson. We had shelves and shelves of books—to which I had full access, and I read everything I could get my hands on. I remember reading novels and thinking how amazing it would be to actually write one of those things.

You don’t need hippies for parents to read, but these days, I think, young writers, more than ever, require guidance and inspiration. It’s no longer a given that students—even writing students—love books. I’ve had some tell me proudly, in fact, that they never read.

I was initially skeptical of writing programs. I thought that young writers should go out and see and do things. Study ancient African history. Figure out how to build a proper compost. Figure out how to build a proper house. Live. Read. Write. If you want to write, you will. You won’t be able not to.

And there’s some logic in that.

But it’s important to remember that we no longer live in a world where writers are automatically fed and primed by what they have around them. Instead, there is wonderful, delicious, big-screen TV, prechewed entertainment, video games. Kids don’t have as much free time—there are activities and sports and more activities and carpools.

Out there—it’s no longer a book world.

So we create one. I still advise students to double major if they choose to major in creative writing as an undergraduate, but writing classes do provide an environment where we can bring reading and writing to the forefront. Teachers can inspire—and be inspired. In the best of worlds, it becomes a symbiotic relationship.

My mentoring has helped me enormously. It helps in the immediate sense that I’m reminding myself of good exercises, different things to try–but also in that it puts me outside myself, it give me another lens on the world. In addition to teaching, some years back, I helped run a mentoring program for middle school girls, and I was astounded by the difference just a few hours with a kid can make—for everyone involved. I have hippie parents, so I can say it: there’s some sort of energy transference between mentor and mentee. And, in that, something happens.

And I don’t think it’s a soul being sucked.

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Check out After Hours at the Almost Home here. Read an excerpt, play on the Unbridled Books site here.

Nearly a decade ago, when I haltingly embarked on the project that would become The Painter from Shanghai, I was nothing if not flattered when people in my writing workshop immediately began comparing my novel to Memoirs of a Geisha. Well, actually, I was something else—mainly, surprised. Like most of the apparent universe, I’d devoured Arthur Golden’s runaway bestseller (my husband still refers to that weekend as “the time Jenn left me for the geisha”). But Painter struck me as a completely different endeavor. For one thing, it was set in China, a country I’d spent well over two years living and traveling in, and one I found radically different from Japan (where I’d lived for five). In fact, my first reaction upon detraining at Guangzhou Station in 1986 was a stunned astonishment: apart from Chinese characters (appropriated by Japan from China thousands of years ago, and somewhat awkwardly adapted to its own, radically different language), the Middle Kingdom seemed to share almost nothing with it’s smaller, more homogeneous neighbor. It was loud, rude, exuberant; cluttered, colorful, vividly alive. Watching Chinese citizens barrel across streets against the light, laugh and curse musically on the street and jostle good-naturedly in a ticket line, I—who had just spent a quiet year with a family in Kyoto–felt like a schoolchild let out to recess.

Of course, the fact stands that my novel–like Arthur Golden’s–begins in a brothel. Unlike Memoirs, though, it isn’t centered there. At heart, The Painter from Shanghai is less about prostitution than cultural mergings and clashings, and art, and a painter’s pain-filled but ultimately triumphant quest for self-realization. As I imagined her, Pan Yuliang—the real-life figure at its center–was a woman who battled fiercely against preset gender roles and aesthetic norms, during a uniquely tumultuous moment in Chinese history. So while I—like Golden–tried to take an unflinching look at the daily degradations and misogyny inherent in a life of prostitution (and it should be noted somewhere that a geisha is far more than a prostitute—as anyone who has read Memoirs should know) I was far less interested in the brothel itself than the fierce individualism and artistic sensibilities that (I imagined) separated Yuliang from her coworkers there—the same qualities that would eventually drive her transformation into one of China’s most controversial and daring modern artists. And then, there was the writing. As I’ve said, I thoroughly enjoyed Memoirs, and certainly admired Golden’s clear, elegant writing style. For my own part, though, I was trying for something very different; something more experimental; something that played with words and rhythm and image in a way that (hopefully) evoked–if not Joyce or Woolf–then at least the impressionistic daring of Pan Yuliang’s own paintbrush.

For all my efforts, though, my book continued to be compared with Memoirs. People to whom I described the project congratulated me beamingly, as though I’d taken on the Geisha sequel. Writing instructors glowingly referenced it in recommendations they wrote for me. Well-meaning friends pointed out where Memoirs had failed them, as though to caution me of the same pitfalls. Rather than fight the trend, I ultimately opted to embrace it, mentioning the comparison preemptively in agent queries. The responses I got went in two directions: at least one agent (I’m fairly sure) didn’t even read the manuscript before offering me her unqualified and enthusiastic services. Several others declined with polite (if unwritten) yawns, implying one Asian prostitute was quite enough.

The shadow of Memoirs reached, in fact, well beyond the point that a fabulous agent (who did read the book) took me on and promptly sold it to eleven publishers, both here and abroad. I have no way of knowing how many of these sales were on the strength of the kiss of Geisha’s kiss. I do know, however, that my two English-language publishers both agreed that marketing it after Memoirs made sense. Norton’s catalogue introduces Painter matter-of-factly as “evocative of Memoirs of a Geisha,” a description that is now writ, in bold, on the book’s Amazon page. Penguin went a step further, putting a round, red sticker on their (quite lovely) trade paperback’s cover that cheerily notes: “If you liked Memoirs of a Geisha, you’ll love this!”

“Don’t we want the book to be seen—well, on its own terms?” I asked my agent, hesitantly. But it was hard to argue with the common logic: Memoirs was a book people knew, loved and identified with. Referring to it offered an immediate hook to readers. Hooked readers, as everyone knows, leads to bagged revenue. And after seven years without an income, two college tuitions to save for and two years at a pricey writing program to pay off, income was something I couldn’t afford to eschew.

All this, by the way, is a quandary faced by other books as well; my friend Charlie Leerhson’s terrific new biography, for example. Crazy Good—based on the astonishing true story of Dan Patch, a former grocery-cart horse who “was the most significant pop-culture figure in the first half of the 20th century”– labored under the inevitable comparisons to Seabiscuit before finally getting picked up by Simon and Schuster. Charlie acknowledges that such automatic comparisons “give reviewers something to wrap their minds around, and thus can get you noticed and remembered.” But on the whole, he says, he considers it disadvantageous.

As far as the Memoirs hook goes, my own views are still unformed. Certainly, the comparison was picked up by reviewers—to mixed effect: Library Journal signed off its very nice, starred review by noting that “fans of Arthur Golden’s Memoirs…will enjoy this engrossing story of a woman forced to choose between following her heart and pursuing her art.” Entertainment Weekly, on the other hand, began its rather sniffy short take like this: “More than a decade after Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden’s best-seller still inspires imitators like The Painter From Shanghai….”

Happily for me, though, the New York Times not only loved the book, calling it “luminous”, “vivid,” “an irresistible story” but also refrained form making any literary references at all. Even more gratifyingly in some ways was the South China Morning Post, which compared my book to a “cross between Zhang Yimou’s movies and Chen Yifei’s oil paintings.” Granted, this may not hook American readers, most of whom probably couldn’t pronounce Zhang and Cheng’s names, much less get the reference. But for me, it’s worth at least a few sales.

In the end, while it’s been interesting to have traveled this far with a geisha, I do hope we’ll part ways at some point—even though (I’ll admit it) I plan to set my next novel in Tokyo. During World War. I do, however, plan to avoid the brothels. And if the book is pegged to anything this time around, I hope it’s War and Peace.

You can find Jennifer Epstein’s website here. And buy her book (c’mon you know you want to!) here.

I’ve been invited to guest blog on Booksquare about the realities of writing for a small press. My debut novel, The Legacy (April 2008), published by Medallion Press, is a historical romance about the destructive nature of secrets. Set in 1525 Wittenberg, Germany, the novel follows the arranged marriage of a printer to an ex-nun during the Early Reformation period, playing out an intimate love story on the canvas of history.

The Legacy is the first book I ever wrote. Not just the first to sell, but the first I wrote. I finished it back in 2001 in blissful ignorance of market trends, distribution, print runs, sell-throughs, etc. I had a story to tell, and figured out how to tell it my way. Of course, very soon thereafter, I realized that maybe I wanted other people to read it, too, and so I joined a chapter of Romance Writers of America and started sending my pretty baby “out there,” certain that New York would snap it up.

My arrogant innocence quickly morphed into jaded understanding. The “book of my heart” was an impossible sale. While many people were interested in a romance set in Martin Luther’s Early Reformation Germany, none of them were editors who thought they could actually sell the book in the marketplace. I received several “good” rejection letters praising my voice, my characters, and my sexual tension, but those comments were always followed by a perplexed, “I’m not sure where it would fit on our lists,” or “I don’t know how I would sell this, but if you’re interested in writing a Victorian romance, I’d love to see it.” I discovered what many other newbie writers have: if it isn’t set in England or America, folks, it’s a hard sell. I had already started on a sequel to the manuscript before I realized neither would likely sell, put them both away, and moved on to writing contemporary paranormals.

Then a funny thing happened on the way to my dreams. A new small press opened its doors in 2003. The publisher, Medallion Press, was founded by Wrigley heiress Helen Rosburg, an author and book lover searching for a way to bring outside-the-box novels she loved to the people who wanted to read them. Medallion doesn’t have guidelines for the books they buy, only that they have to love them. I watched this new company grow and take steady steps toward success and finally decided to submit my manuscript to them in 2005. To my shock, Medallion bought the book.

The whole process has been an education for me. Would I sell to a small press again? Well, that’s a good question. Let me answer that by examining the pros and cons.

(Note: According to the founder, Medallion has shed its small press designation and is now quantified as an “independent press” because of its financials.)

First the cons: there are some major differences between a small press and say, a major New York publishing house. First, because of smaller print runs, it is unlikely my book will ever have the chance to hit the New York Times bestseller list, something every author dreams about. The distribution numbers just aren’t there. Whereas some of my author friends have seen their books go into six-digit press runs, that isn’t going to happen with mine simply because of capacity. Smaller numbers mean readers aren’t going to be able to find my book as easily as they would the ubiquitous Nora Roberts, for example. Therefore, while my publisher does have distribution into all the major chains and retail outlets, and co-op money to spend for shelf placement, their distributor, IPG, also has to convince booksellers to stock the book in large enough numbers so that readers will perceive it is as an “important” book. If the book isn’t physically present in a store in numbers “too big to ignore” (forgive me, Helen Reddy), than the likelihood of hitting any lists is minute.

Secondly, while a smaller house can afford to take a chance on books that are unusual and different, and while they can sell those books in smaller numbers and still consider them successful, a large number of returns on a book could do a lot of damage to their financials. Booksellers are aware of this and are always concerned about ordering from smaller houses for this reason. They have to ask, will the money be there for refunds if the book doesn’t sell? The demise of Triskelion showed just how critical that question is (reportedly, a large number of returns hitting at once started the publisher on its downward spiral toward bankruptcy). A bookseller might buy conservatively as a result, if at all. Valid or not, the perception that small houses can’t handle big returns is a problem difficult to overcome, such as when industry professionals (agents, booksellers, authors) assume the house is an e-publisher because they’ve never heard of it (in fact, Medallion Press is not an e-publisher, but rather a bricks-and-mortar Illinois-based company).

Third, being newer means the house is still establishing its procedures while it reaches out to the marketplace. New authors and new houses sometimes make mistakes, and the learning curve occasionally catches up with us. Additionally, because of smaller dollars to spread around, the advances and contract terms for new authors are not the kind one might see with larger houses, although the royalty rates are more than competitive.

Now that we know what some of the cons are, it’s time for the pros. Why am I happy I took a chance on this company?

Because Medallion Press had the cajones to take a chance on me. The romance genre market is trend driven. Because of its outside-the-box setting and characters, The Legacy is a book no other house in the traditional romance market could have published, and I’m delighted Medallion had the vision to see what could be done with a strong niche market. Wonderful books are seeing the light of day that might not have, and I’m not only referring to my own. Look at Medallion’s list (http://www.medallionpress.com/) in every genre and you’ll see what I mean.

In addition, since the working atmosphere is more intimate and flexible, I had input on my incredible cover. Medallion takes pride in their covers, and they are being noticed everywhere. How important is a cover? Ask any author who ever got a bad one, and they’ll tell you how dramatically it can affect sales. Medallion’s covers trumpet the importance of the writing within, and the company ponies up the bucks to place ads featuring the covers prominently in each of the genres most important magazines.

Medallion authors are racking up awards after awards, showing that there is a recognition of quality writing, no matter how small the press, and devoted readers are taking notice. Devoted readers spend money. Let’s be frank: if my book and its sequel, The Promise (May 2009) sell well, it is likely I might come to the attention of a house willing to pay larger advances and offer more flexible contract terms in the future, or I might even be able to negotiate a more lucrative future deal with the house I’m at. In other words, I’m getting a chance to strut my stuff, and that is worth the price of admission.

Would I recommend that new writers or writers trying to reinvent their careers consider signing with a small press? If they do their homework, understand the tradeoffs, pick a house with good financial backing, a strong history of sales, and a commitment to quality, and they are willing to endure a few growing pains, then yes, a small press is definitely something they should consider. I’m certainly glad I did.

If you get a chance, please stop by my website at www.tjbennett.com and read excerpts, send me an e-mail, check out pictures of conferences I’ve attended, and comment on my blog. I’d be interested in hearing what Booksquare readers think about the unusual settings and subjects of my books.

Now for the contest: comment on at least two of the blogs TJ’s touring on this week for a chance at a free book and a $40 gift certificate to either B&N or GermanDeli.com (a German foods importer). Details and blog tour schedule are at www.tjbsopinion.blogspot.com. If you win, BS really likes sausage (hint!)

“Does anyone die?” the literary agent on the stage asks me.

“Yes,” I say, hoping that will help. “Two people.”

The agent leans forward, “Did you kill them?”

“No,” I say, honestly, and the agents nods sagely.

“Next!”

I leave the hall of aspiring writers who had come to pitch their stories for one minute each on this cold Saturday feeling that, apparently, I have not had enough go wrong in my life.

It’s not for lack of trying. I’ve been working on my memoir of personal ruin for three years. It’s the story of how I came to buy a typesetting company in the Midwest with my mentor and business partner. We had great plans to rebuild the company, which had gone into receivership, but had a stellar reputation of fifty years of composing pages for all the big New York textbook publishers. (How do you make an algebra book sensational?)

My business partner called our plan “benevolent capitalism,” which meant “Make money, and share it with the people who make it possible, the workers.” And initially, we did succeed. We doubled sales and added plants in Baltimore, Syracuse and even the Philippines, where we paid triple the going “offshore” rates.

We had two hundred employees in seven plants, and then it all went south, or rather East. The publishers bought each other—from 1999 to 2002, Reed Elsevier alone bought up ten of our customers—and then they shipped the work off to India.

As things got worse, I almost got out. I was on the verge of selling to one of those Indian competitors, and getting a check for $4 million. But it wasn’t to be. In the last year of my business, I had to fire every one of those 200 employees and as for my business partner, well, let’s just say I really wasn’t lying to the agent.

In the end, I did end up with millions. $2 million of debt. I was ruined. But I thought it would be useful to others to know what I had discovered in the school of hard knocks, punches, and we’re going take all of your lunch money from now until the next millennium.

I wanted to share what I thought was madness, like an employee turning away a customer’s project because “the scheduling system says we’re full,” when we are literally firing people for want of work. And therein is my problem. I had struggled to make the book honest.

But that’s not what the agent or the publishers want. Simple reality was too simple. “Only $4 million?” one publisher asked me. “That’s not that much compared to Enron or WorldCom.”

Is it any wonder that Steven Frey and his ilk turned their own lives of blandness— like a two-hour stint sobering up in a detention cell—into months of confinement with illiterate killers they taught to both read and to learn to love again?

Or, is it any surprise that each new book is therefore expected to top the last one in morbid excitement, “I was a teenage drunk.” “I was a teenage drunk abused by the church.” “I was an drunk infant beaten by Church trained chimpanzees in a thought experiment designed by the head of the New York Stock Exchange.”

And after all of these, is it still confusing why people aren’t buying books like they used to?

But I refused to do that and a month after being chided by the agent for not committing homicide to make my book more saleable, I met my publisher at a writing conference in Pittsburgh.

“What did you like the best?” I asked after he had accepted the manuscript.

“The honesty. I could imagine this really happening to you or to me, or anyone. But,” he added, looking down at the floor, “I can’t promise that will sell any books.”

[BS: But, wait, there's more! Read David's article at Salon (trust us, read it) and visit his website. Also, buy the book. You know you love buying books. Finally, we are not good with guessing games, but we suspect we have uncovered the identity of the mystery publisher mentioned at the end of the article. David's book is published by Soft Skull Press.]

• You can’t stop a tidal wave with a fork
• David Silverman
• Amazon Link

Sex Parties in Omaha—that was once the non-unassuming title for my latest novel, a title eventually abandoned for the vaguely more chaste Devils in the Sugar Shop (though I suppose it does bring to mind The Devil in Miss Jones, that Georgina Spelvin vehicle of the 70s that holds the distinction of being the first modern adult film to feature a shot of double-penetration). I hadn’t initially intended on calling the book Sex Parties in Omaha, but whenever people asked after my next project, and I mentioned the working title, people got all tickled. At otherwise civilized book clubs, where I’d been invited to discuss my other novels (novels with less direct, less sordid, more giddily cryptic titles: The Phantom Limbs of the Rollow Sisters, The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God), the women would put down their cups of chamomile and politely ask what was next, and what would be its title; I’d loosen my lips and let slip the naughty little thing, and they’d yelp with delight. So I became attached to the title—it seemed a healthy mix of the filthy and the ludicrous.

However, some women, albeit amused, confessed they’d never buy a book called Sex Parties in Omaha. If they were reading the novel at the coffee shop, might people mistake it for a guidebook? Might complete strangers take them for Midwestern libertines? And there’s the practical fact that sex doesn’t always sell—getting good placement in bookstores could prove challenging with a title that hints so at dereliction. Or maybe not. Maybe the book could inch into becoming a succès de scandale. Maybe it could be sold with a plain-brown-wrapper-cum-marketing-gimmick. Maybe publicity materials could include condoms that inflate to feature the book cover. Cocktail napkins with my phone number scrawled across it? Because as much as we’d all like to be J. D. Salinger, frigid and inaccessible, the fact is, to be noticed, a literary novelist has to be prepared to put out like Georgina Spelvin. (Hey, I just tricked out my book’s MySpace page! Check it out!)

But actually, the more troubling aspect of dubbing the novel Sex Parties in Omaha was not the sex in the book, but the lack of sex in the book. At the risk of turning off potential readers, I’ll confess that the most explicit sex scene in Devils in the Sugar Shop is one in which a man and a woman kiss for an hour. If the book was called Sex Parties in Omaha, those readers longing to be debased would be disappointed. Sure, there are sex toys, an erotica writing workshop, and a suburban swingers’ party; there’s a stalker inspired by vintage pornography, and a swarthy dwarf who photographs himself in the nude, and an adulterer’s attempt to be seductive in an email. But ultimately it’s a bedroom farce with its bedroom scenes partly inspired by Edward Gorey’s faux-Victorian picture book, The Curious Sofa: A Pornographic Work by Ogdred Weary, which only hints at the unseemly—the artist’s eye is gentlemanly turned away from all the saucy goings-on. On one page of The Curious Sofa we see only a woman’s hand through a steamed-over window of a car, her fingertips pinching a grape: Herbert, “an extremely well-endowed young man” has invited Alice for a ride in a taxi-cab, “on the floor of which they did something Alice had never done before.”

Though such tongue-in-cheekiness would seem too coy without Gorey’s illustrations, his withdrawn ladies and gents with the comically wide, melancholy eyes and skinny extremities, I felt that I needed to take a slightly similar approach. As I wrote the first draft, I knew all along that I wanted Sex Parties in Omaha to end with an example of the titular events, but I also knew that writing sex scenes can prove catastrophic—group sex scenes doubly so, I’d imagine. Triply so. Quadrupley.

I once heard a reading by a famous writer’s un-famous writer-husband, and his novel excerpt was an inept portrait of a nympho—complete with descriptions of her “full pubic bush” and “pendulous breasts.” A literary sex scene can, with only a single ill-conceived adjective or soft-porn cliché, render a book impotent in one fell swoop, and it’s been known to happen to even our best writers. Certainly, I meant for Devils in the Sugar Shop to be a comedy of manners, but I didn’t really want the joke to be on me, the prose purple with things engorged and throbbing and heaving.

Ultimately, this trickiness in writing about sex, or even talking about sex, became part of the very subject of the novel. The women in Devils in the Sugar Shop have jobs that require they be provocative, yet they seek solace in discretion. They think they want the truth in their lives, personally and professionally, but when the truth presents itself, they retreat into the safety of euphemisms and carefully orchestrated misconceptions.

And Ashley Allyson, an erotic novelist in Devils, addresses directly the challenges of sex-writing. She becomes frustrated in the erotica-writing class she teaches, her students seeming to have no insights into what’s arousing. One of her students, a woman named Mrs. Bloom, is writing a book called Lolita’s Baby, an imagining of the sexual journeys that Lolita’s teenaged daughter might have embarked upon (had Lolita’s daughter not died at birth). In an early draft of Devils, Mrs. Bloom reads aloud to the erotica-writing class, a reading which goes on for a good three pages, an excerpt as ridiculously raw and pornographic as I could make it. I essentially dealt with the problem of writing subtly about sex by turning over the book’s one sex scene to the least subtle person in the book. Mrs. Bloom, a feminist newspaper editor on the verge of madness, takes Devils hostage in that chapter, and goes the full Georgina Spelvin; she double-penetrates the reader with raunchy excess. I used words that my agent said she’d never heard before.

My agent, though no prude by any means, suggested I cut the excerpt. She said it didn’t fit with the rest of the book. Essentially, she saw through it for the tawdry thing it really was—a profane joke. So, in the published version of Devils in the Sugar Shop, Mrs. Bloom’s dirty book is reduced to the phrase “finger-bang,” a phrase that proves controversial in the workshop, and leads to a semi-heated discussion about the intricacies of writing about feminine pleasure.

Perhaps if you email me, I’ll send you Mrs. Bloom’s excerpt from Lolita’s Baby, if I can be sure you’re of age. A pornographer must be careful in this climate.

—–
Okay, we’re back just for a brief commercial announcement. We strongly urge you to check out Devils in the Sugar Shop for yourself. Also, please hang out for a while at the Unbridled website (check out the publisher’s blog…anything and everything you ever wanted to know all in one place). And while Timothy is a delightful email correspondent, he also has a website. It’s here.

Oh wait. Releasing your first book might count. Rejections, reviews, and people telling you that your life’s work is all wrong (and they should know, they have an idea for a book). Our friend Joan Kelly, author of The Pleasure’s All Mine: Memoir of a Professional Submissive gives all of us hope. She ca–oh we can’t do that, it’s far too easy– she saw, she won the high school game, and she posed for her own book cover. And, after some gentle (hey, you read the book!) arm-twisting, she’s here to tell about it:

Joan says:

I had all kinds of grandiose fantasies about what might happen once I sold my book, The Pleasure’s All Mine: Memoir of a Professional Submissive. Oprah’s book club, Fresh Air with Terry Gross – hell, I even imagined Phil Donahue going back on the air just in time to have me on his show. (Note to Phil – I am still grieving your absence.) What I hoped for more than anything else, however, was that my book would get me laid.

And not just with anybody. From seventh grade through my first two years in community college, I went spectacularly unnoticed by every single guy I felt attracted to. Wait, that’s not true – sometimes they noticed me just enough to reject me in humiliating ways.

How satisfying would it be, I wondered, if even one person from my past came across my book and decided to get in touch? I know, I’m thirty-eight, there have to be more important things for me to think about than whether so-and-so from ninth grade will see my naked ass on my book cover and finally be open to the idea of kissing me. I’ll be honest with you – in the wake of my recent mini-book tour, there’s not a lot of other important things going on. It’s basically back to writing, naps with the cats, and praying for tax time to come and go already so that business picks up again. The thought of hearing from someone who knew me before my skin cleared up and I learned how to shape my eyebrows was too seductive to push away – sexual redemption by way of trade paperback.

No word yet from Oprah’s people or the New York Times Book Review, but a few days ago I got an email that answered all my narcissistic prayers:

Have to say, I think you win the award for post-high school blossoming…

And while it was indeed from someone who wouldn’t have given me the time of day at age sixteen, none of my daydreams could have prepared me for this particular blast from the past. The note was from one of the popular girls in high school.

Erin (not her real name) hung out with the cheerleaders and football players, was a homecoming princess, an editor on the school newspaper, and got to make out with a number of the boys I liked back in the day. I always thought she was gay anyway, even before I felt like I might be partly or wholly gay, but I never considered there might come a day when she’d be gay for me. If I had ever had occasion to think about it, I would have thought that she would stay closeted her whole life, even to herself, which was the style at the time for a lot of gay kids where I grew up.

We had one class together junior year, in which my twin sister and I got on her nerves for dicking around in the back of the room instead of covering our assignments. (We wrote for the school newspaper, too, for about two weeks, before getting kicked off for laziness and poor attitude.) She never even spoke to me back then, and when I first got her note, I thought, “she just wants to confirm that I’m the pervert who wrote that book, so she can tee-hee about it with her popular girlfriends.” We’re having our twentieth high school reunion this summer, by the way. And although she’s still friends with some of the young women from her group in high school, she doesn’t seem like the kind of person anymore who tee hee’s at other people’s expense. Or certainly no more than I do, so who am I to judge…

So I wrote back and asked her if she was gay. (There were a couple of small-talky emails in between, but we got right to the point pretty swiftly.) I added that I had thought I was gay myself for the first couple of years after I quit smoking, lest it sound like an accusation. (I hesitate to admit that in a way; I wouldn’t put it past Big Tobacco to incorporate it as some kind of homophobic propaganda – “keep smoking our fags, or turn into one!”) I told her I didn’t know what I was anymore, besides a sex maniac.

Having seen what I looked like on my book cover, she said it was only fair that she send me a recent photo of herself. She’s cuter than I remembered her being, too, and I asked her what she thought about meeting for coffee some time. She’s all girl on the outside, but acts like a butch-y top – she said yes to the coffee date, then called me the day of to tell me she was taking me to dinner instead. She made reservations at two fancy restaurants before picking me up, and let me choose once I was in the car. She totally knows how to treat a girl, and all I can think about now is kissing her again.

What does any of this have to do with book promotion and publishing trends and the usual Booksquare subject matter?

Nothing.

I just wanted to tell all those boys I liked in high school, who made out with her instead of me but never did get in her pants: Looks like I might get to bang the hell out of her tomorrow night. See you at the reunion.

• The Pleasure’s All Mine: Memoir of a Professional Submissive

You essentially self-financed your the tour for your first book (My Life
Uncovered). Is Red Dress Ink supporting this tour?

I am my own entertainment marketing and pr firm. Red Dress Ink has been a wonderful back up support system, but they don’t finance author book tours. I don’t think any publisher finances an author’s book tour unless the author is of a John Grisham or Stephen King or Nora Roberts caliber. Based on my experience in the entertainment industry, I find the publishing industry on the whole to be incredibly antiquated in their marketing approaches. But that’s okay. It gives me wide open space to be incredibly creative and playful with my own marketing — which I have TM’d as “Narrative Marketing.” Everything I do now is under my umbrella company — a Narrative MarketingTM Agency called Focus Media, Inc. Focus is an acronym for Finding Opportunities Creating Unified Success, because at the core of me, is the desire to inspire others and be a catalyst for positive change. Like Madison, I love connecting the dots — whether its in business or interpersonal relationships. Under Focus Media, Inc. I create organic narrative driven branded entertainment properties for myself and for others whom I believe in. My approach is also holistic. I believe you need to look at the sum parts that make up the whole. So I like to be involved in creating the content of those sum parts that will include organic built-in narratives to drive the product, brand or lifestyle from conception through distribution.

Marketing dollars are scarce for most authors. How did you prioritize your
spending? What was worthwhile and what was a waste of money?

I cut back on my book tour this time, choosing to do less and spreading the travel out so that I would have time to rest and work in between and not wipe myself out. I also decided to dovetail my book tour with other events; so an invitation to a bat mitzvah in Toronto got coupled with a reading, and a desire to go to Charleston, SC where I’ve never been turned into a birthday present trip for my mother coinciding with a reading. What’s worthwhile is stopping in every bookstore of every airport I’m in and signing books and promoting it to travelers and booksellers. Well, I’m not so sure how worthwhile it is, but it’s fun and exciting.

As for prioritizing my spending — part of it is an experiment to put a little money in many different aspects of marketing to test the waters and see which ones work best. The 300 pink handkerchiefs turned out to be a big hit — now people ask me to sign them as limited editions. The branded coffee sleeves and bookmarks with calendars (a la The Funeral Planner) also received wonderful reactions. But I carefully chose promotional marketing items that were an organic fit to the narrative. The media training was definitely worth the money. The website for both the novel, the grief guidebooks and the business was the best thing I ever did. Hiring an outside pr firm — not so sure — I think there’s no one better to promote your novel than yourself. And ultimately, it was more cost effective for me to hire an assistant and do it myself as I did before, unless you have big bucks to pay or can make it a pay or play deal. I can’t say much more than that — because these experiences and findings are going into one of my next novels.

How does one go about setting up a book tour? It seems so easy, but surely
the details are daunting?

Again, this is going into a novel, so I can’t say too much — but I think this happens to be natural fit for me. When I was 8 years old I wrote a story called The Tall Tale of King C. My story and I were chosen to represent my school at Oakland University’s Young Author’s Conference. My mother recently reminded me that I was so proud of my unexpected accomplishment that I called the local paper, The Birmingham Eccentric, to tell them about it, but when I called the operator for the number I apparently asked for the Birmingham Excedrin. My mother said I was promoting my work then and I’m still doing it now. Of course, I eventually learned to divine the difference between painkillers and characters with free-wheeling imaginations.

Unlike many authors, you wholeheartedly embrace the essential self-promotion
aspect of the job. Where does this marketing savvy come from?

I think I answered this in the question above. I guess at the core, it comes from a deep sense of pride. I’m proud of my work and I’m not afraid to share that. I believe that I have something valuable to share and that if it inspires me — it will inspire others — because in a deep spiritual sense — we’re all one anyway. So my self-promotional desires come from pride and my marketing savvy comes from a playful competitive spirit to see just how clever I can be against my own wit. I like to outwit my own wit, if you will.

I imagine that part of the business of writing is developing a marketing
strategy. Is this true, and, if so, what are the key elements to consider in
developing a plan?

Again, unless someone out there wants to retain the services of Focus Media, Inc., I’m going to save those answers for one of my novels. But I will say this, or rather write this — that if you want people to remember you, your product or your brand — you need to tell a good story. It’s my experience that information conveyed as facts are not as easily retained as information conveyed via story.

You’re promoting The Funeral Planner and Lights Out Enterprises. What about
your other work? How do you remind readers that you have a previous book.
Does the promotion on the current title impact sales for My Life Uncovered?

The nice thing about doing a book tour is that the booksellers (for the most part) automatically include your earlier titles — so it’s a built-in format to promote all of your work. And yes, doing the book tour for The Funeral Planner has helped spur sales for My Life Uncovered.

Initially, I was not concerned about promoting “My Life Uncovered” — in fact, I was timid to promote it because I didn’t want run the risk of being stigmatized by earlier misconceptions transferring over to my new work. Earlier misconceptions included my belief that people out there judged “My Life Uncovered” by its cover in more ways than one. Though not the Italians because for some reason it’s done incredibly well in Italy! I think that many people automatically assumed from the title that it was pure autobiography or they simply didn’t get the fact that it was an entrepreneurial sex comedy in the same vein as “Sex in the City” — and by the way, far more tame than that! Then I thought that maybe it was just a bad year for “porn”. After all, the cable networks at that time were afraid to consider it because the cable series “Skin” crashed and burned and because there was such a public backlash over Janet Jackson’s right breast.

Ironically, long before it was a novel, it was a treatment for a television series with a bidding war for the rights to it and before that it was an idea for a serial magazine story that Premiere Magazine wanted just before its parent company imploded sending all the executives interested in other directions. My Life Uncovered was also the first Red Dress Ink title to become part of a distribution-triage-campaign. RDI thought if they published more books that there would be more readers. They discovered that the third new title of the month was minimized by reader’s budgetary constraints so they’ve gone back to a two-title per month distribution plan. And I’ve since learned that readers now look at me quite differently — now that I’ve got two novels under my belt — and that seems to make all the difference. “My Life Uncovered” is now viewed as part of my greater growing collective work and rightly perceived as fiction with a greater interest for it… and now there is renewed interest in it as a TV series. Go figure.

You mentioned that you tap into a network of friends from many years of
working in Hollywood. How do you make this type of relationship mutually
beneficial?

I’m not sure what you mean by this question. Do you mean in terms of my novels or in terms of Lights Out Enterprises? I’ll go with the latter — Lights Out Enterprises has a Talent Team of A list Hollywood talent on board to write, direct, and produce Life Bio Videos for pre-need clients. That includes the co-creator and executive producer of “In Living Color”, the producer of “Something’s Gotta Give” and “What Women Want”, the writer of “Murphy Brown” and “Cosby”, and the comedy writer of “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno, to name a few… in addition to myself (my film/tv credits and relationships). Here’s an example of that means: Let’s say my client “Jack” loves movies and his favorite actor is Dustin Hoffman. Because I grew up working in the industry with Dustin’s agent, I call him up and say, “Hey, would Dustin entertain the idea of narrating or making a cameo appearance in Jack’s life bio video?” This actually happened and the answer was yes. So it helps that I have these long standing relationships in the industry. Now this Life Bio Video, by the way, is not only for viewing at an end of life celebration, but can be pre-purposed (as opposed to repurposed, or multi-purposed, if you will) and shown to friends and family at say, Jack’s 50th birthday party, and again at his 60th birthday party, etc. And maybe along the way, we’ll do updates with more cameo appearances from the likes of Dustin Hoffman. But all that is being cleverly designed into the narrative about Jack’s life, integrating his friends and family and storyline that identifies and celebrates the essence of Jack. Involving my Hollywood friends in the creative process is mutually beneficial for all of
us, because ultimately it’s about being able to be creative with people you like and generate some income from it along the way.

Two books in, what have you found to be effective when it comes to
marketing? What have you found to be ineffective?

Effective: Tenacity tempered with Timing on all fronts.

Ineffective: Paying a PR agency for their “efforts” is not good enough. The entire business model for PR makes no sense to me. What’s the point of it without results. I think PR firms would be more effective if they were pay or play or if they had a some sort of commission from the sales of the book.

You’ve tackled the porn industry and the world of funerals. What’s next?

The White House… and various other stories in negotiation so I can’t really say more than that at this time. Check back with me next month.

• www.TheFuneralPlannerInc.com
• Lynn Isenberg