Still Life with Book Maven

You might have heard that here in the DC/Northern VA area we received a snowfall somewhat larger than usual this past weekend. Snowmageddon! The Snowpocalypse! Ragnarok is at hand…

Over on Twitter, The Washington Post Book World’s Deputy Editor Ron Charles (@RonCharles) put it into perspective when he commented that his “saintly mother-in-law” closed the local Christian Science Reading Room because of the snow: “The last time was Pearl Harbor, I believe.” Pennsylvania Avenue is deserted. The Metro isn’t running above ground. Even (gasp) Tyson’s Corner Center closed early yesterday!

Gracious, gracious; what WILL we all do? Seriously: First we must take care of family, friends, neighbors, and strangers who don’t have power or shelter. 

But after that? Snowball fight! Then back inside to read, knit, cook, talk, drink, read some more, and watch movies. Mr. Bethanne and I have been alternating stories in print with stories in Technicolor. Since Friday, I’ve read “The Seven-Year Bitch” by Jennifer Belle, “The Pluto Files” by Neil deGrasse Tyson, and finished “Matterhorn” by Karl Marlantes. We’ve watched “Dangerous Liaisons,” “The Great Escape,” “The Lives of Others,” and “Out of Africa.”

It was the last which inspired today’s post (you might have been able to guess that from its title). You might believe that I’m going to write about Isak Dinesen (the pen name of Karen, Baroness von Blixen) and her beautiful prose (and I do love her prose), but that’s not what struck me on watching the movie. (Tangent: While Meryl Streep’s performance as Karen Blixen is wonderful, Robert Redford’s Denys Finch-Hatton is a caricature, and the 1980s faux-backdrop cinematography in some scenes set my teeth on edge.)

One of the “signs” that Karen is intrigued by Finch-Hatton is when she wanders into his room at Nairobi’s Muthaiga Club and discovers his well-stocked bookshelves. When Berkeley Cole surprises her in the midst of her snooping, she sighs over Finch-Hatton’s “beautiful books” and asks “Does he lend them?” 

My brain itched a little after that scene, but it wasn’t until a later one in which Karen and Denys are putting his books away on shelves in her beautiful farmhouse when I realized why I felt that itch. None of the books had jackets!

Well of course none of the books had jackets. The story takes place in the early 20th century. Book jackets as we know them, including blurbs, artwork, sometimes an author photo, and always some form of publisher promotion (even if only a colophon), weren’t commonly manufactured until the 1920s. The books that Finch-Hatton and Blixen owned were still lovely and often individually distinguished items: Their endpapers, marbled edges, embossed covers and stamped spines make those volumes special.

However, even if the covers of those pre-advertising-explosion halcyon days give you title, author, and publisher, they don’t give much of a hint about what’s inside.

How did people find out what to read?

I suspect that word-of-mouth and book reviews had something to do with it. Bear with me for a second; I come not to bash paper books, but to consider a possibility. One of the things many readers and folks in publishing have derided about the rise in e-readers and digital publishing is that e-books don’t have dust jackets/book design/information (of course, eventually they’ll have all that and more…), things that readers have come to take for granted over the last decades.

I wonder: If we don’t have the same number of immediate ways to evaluate a book, might there be a resurgence in reader reliance on reviews and word-of-mouth marketing? What do you think?

As of today, February 1st, I have been using Twitter for one full year. Before I tell you about what’s gone on in the past twelve months, let me offer a couple of comparisons:

In May 1996, I’d been using email for a full year. It was pretty nifty, but not much had changed for me.

On the other hand, by May 1997, I’d discovered eBay — and that totally changed my life and views of what the Internet might accomplish. In fact (and no one, save a few hardy, hoary souls, will remember this), I went to BEA that year and pitched a radical new idea: an online-only bookstore called Prioress Books (my idea was to sell books in my academic specialty, medievalia). I never wound up actually stocking/selling from that virtual store, but I knew which way the wind was blowing very, very early.

My point is that some tools make life easier (email) and other tools change life dramatically (online commerce) — but the ones that change life dramatically nearly always depend on something that came first. If we hadn’t had email, there wouldn’t have been any eBay.

Similarly, if we hadn’t had Facebook, there wouldn’t be any Twitter.

Let me try to explain without going too far down any particular social media rabbit holes. Basically, Facebook (which is considered obsolete now by many people) had one component called a Status Update, a little box where you told friends what you were currently doing. The Twitter developers realized that the Status Update all by itself might be a kind of “money shot” (forgive me!), an instant win.

They were right.

In 12 months of tweeting, I’ve learned more, made more contacts, and accomplished more professionally than in the previous 12 years, all because of Twitter, and I’m not kidding. Let me quantify it for doubters:

– I’ve made new friends. To try and list everyone who has become my friend would be futile: Some are friends and colleagues, some one or the other, some are just acquaintances, and others seem to exist just to amuse me. After all, that’s the beauty of Twitter. Each user gets to decide who makes it past the gate. But many of the new friends I’ve made are people with whom I’ve now spent time in real life and with whom I’ll continue to spent time in real life. Twitter has connected me to real, true, interesting friends who live both near and far that I never would have met without the app.

– I’ve engaged in new endeavors. Chief among them is Megaphone, the “Get the Word Out!” Division of Book Maven Media, but Twitter also inspired the burgeoning #FridayReads, #TwitterBookClub, and the fabulous Roundtable Luncheons (now in NYC and Boston!).

– I’ve made it into media, including blogs, magazines, and Page Six of the New York Post — all because of conversations and situations I’ve jumped into on Twitter.

– My profile has grown in ways I could never have dreamed of with traditional media/networking methods. To my delight, I now have more than 5500 followers on Twitter. Since I only follow 800 of those people, I know that my tweetpower isn’t simply due to autofollows. I’m providing some kind of value to my followers, and that may be the most exciting thing of all to result from Twitter.

Some tools help us to communicate — other tools help us to change our behavior. Twitter may not last forever (and Twittermania certainly won’t), but its effects on the ways we connect online and offline will reverberate for a long time.

If you’re reading this because of Twitter, or if you’re reading this and you love/hate Twitter, tell me: What has Twitter done for you? Do you agree with me, or not?

I’m not going to go on about this too long or give too many details, but for the first time I am experiencing that unique pre-authorial state known as “being in sub,” meaning that my book proposal is “in submission” with editors. Yes, editors are reading my deathless prose, and I am near death. 

Not really! Haha! Not at all! I’m just fine, thankyouverymuch. These Things Take A While. 

Well, actually, they do. There are many reasons why being “in sub” can drag on, and I’ve only been in sub for a short time (longer than a day, less than a week, seems like a decade…). I have miles to go before I sleep — or get that kind of happy telephone call that agents love to make. (Lalalalalal, can’t even hear you when you mention the alternative!)

I’m making a concerted effort to sit on my hands and not call my long-suffering agent, who in the few months we’ve been working together has no doubt experienced her first very premature gray hairs. Fortunately, I have a few supportive author and publishing pals who have proffered virtual hot-water bottles, and one of them was this wonderful blog entry from YA author Kiersten White. It answered a few questions for me but mainly made me feel less nervous and alone.

Maybe it will do the same for you if you, like me, are fortunate enough to be in this position. It’s anxiety-producing, but isn’t this the kind of anxiety we writers have always wanted?

This morning I woke up thinking about not being at Digital Book World, or DBW. (However, one of my contacts told me that the coffee ran out by 10 a.m. The horror! The horror!) I have too much going on this week (read: am behind on deadlines) to have gone to Manhattan for the debut event, and so many people whose thinking about books and our industry are there whom I adore and revere. In other words, I woke up sulking.

But as I started thinking about what is going on at DBW, I also started thinking about why it’s being held. After all, we do already have a little publishing-industry event held annually called Book Expo America. Do we need another book event? How will these two conferences be differentiated (and I haven’t even mentioned Tools of Change…)?

I knew I was onto something when I opened Twitter and found novelist and publishing pundit M.J. Rose wondering why there aren’t more authors at DBW (NB: there are only two on panels this year). Will DBW wind up as the “delivery” conference and BEA as the “content” conference? UPDATE: M.J. has blogged about this issue, too, with a focus on authors and publishers working as partners.

I’d like to hear from everyone else. Is that desirable? My take is that in a time of more and more overlap and more and more need for “Authors as App” (also an M.J. idea as a panel for next year’s DBW — Mike, Guy, I’m volunteering now to moderate that panel!), it isn’t even possible. But (as usual) I could be wrong. 

Tell me what you think — and those of you on the ground at DBW, please share the skinny on what everyone is saying about author presence/lack thereof this year.

Blogger’s Note: I haven’t seen any blog posts or articles about this, so I hope that at least a few of you will send me links. I know I am not the only person thinking about this.

For most of last year, I used a BlackBerry Pearl with a text-messaging keyboard. Basically that meant I could type with just one thumb, if I learned the somewhat obscure protocol behind pressing the buttons once for one letter, twice for another, sometimes with words popping up automatically…it was too much for my aging brain. Now I use a BlackBerry Tour and it feels as comfy and familiar as the Smith-Corona I brought to college.

Oh yes, my class was probably one of the very last to matriculate with electric typewriters rather than PCs. I do not miss typewriters one bit, unlike the many Famous Authors who claim that only the soothing rhythm of the keys could propel their great works forward…Yawn. Typewriters made it tough to revise, tough to make your own work better before you even turned it in to a professor, let alone beastly to rewrite if those were the orders of the day from said professor. By the time I started my first post-graduate job, I was working on a word processor and thought it made a great deal of sense. 

In other words, I’m not much of a one for looking backwards when it comes to communication devices. I don’t hold up a Luddite banner proudly, and while I often write in pen and ink, agreeing that it allows me to compose differently, I would never, ever give up the ability to type on a screen.

What I do think we should consider giving up, however, is the QWERTY keyboard. I won’t bore you with a recitativo of its history, since you can insta-Google that; I will say that it was invented because of a need to prevent the typebars in mechanical typewriters from clashing and crossing. 

The one thing that makes sense about the QWERTY keyboard is its width. If human beings are going to type with two hands, then a keyboard needs to be comfortable for the average handspan (the QWERTY keyboard is famously friendly to the lefthanded English speaker; you can type nearly twice as many words with just the left hand as with the right).

I keep wondering what kinds of ideas, prose, and poetry might be unleashed if we had a different system for typing up text, one that was just as useful for different languages and alphabets (different keyboards for all? Or just one?). 

Are there new alternatives to the QWERTY keyboard?

NB: From time to time, I’ll write about issues that affect us as readers under this new category, “Caveat Lector.” 

Not that any of you do this, but I read the New York Times Sunday Styles section first. I learn so much! I believe, for example, that the front-page bottom Gucci ad banner can predict that state of our fiscal mindset. When times are good and things are flush, that ad might display a whimsically oversized bag in some kind of luxury pelt or skin; when wallets are lighter and belts get tighter, then you see, for example, this week’s so-taupe-it’s-nearly-beige practical platform sandal.

This week I also learned that at least three (three’s a story!) young men and one woman in the metro NYC area are trying to live the “paleo lifestyle,” meaning they eat “large quantities of meat” and believe in “fasting between meals to approximate the lean times that his distant ancestors faced between hunts.” According to the article, they radiate rude good health and have “glowing skin.” The diet and exercise regime (based on something called “CrossFit”) can supposedly make extreme physical fitness possible. I won’t even go into the group’s arguments about nightshades…they seem to have forgotten that the “hunter-gatherer” didn’t have meat all the time, but often existed for long stretches on nuts and berries.

What interested me once I’d finished the piece was the fact that the paleo thing seems to be all about strength and physical health. As any 21st-century human knows, what we eat and how we exercise also affects our brains — and how we think and relate and solve problems has changed over the many centuries since the “paleo lifestyle” was common. We know that certain foods have certain effects on our organs (oysters! chocolate!) — do we know enough, yet, about which foods promote intellectual activity (Mom always said fish was “brain food”) to advocate heading back a way of gathering and consuming that was last used by people who hadn’t yet created the wheel, let alone the platform sandal?

It’s — how shall I put it? — food for thought.