Hey, There's A Dead Guy in the Living Room

Let's Save Our Fictions For Our Novels

BENJAMIN LEROY

This week the online writing/publishing community has been abuzz with the plight of Mandy DeGeit, the writer whose confounding story about her experiences working with Anthony Giangregorio and Undead Press went public.

Briefly outlined, Ms. Degeit submitted a short story, “She Makes Me Smile,” to Undead Press hoping to be included in the company’s anthology, Cavalcade of Terror. As it turned out, according to Ms. Degeit, the story was accepted by Mr. Giangregorio and all appeared to be going well.

When a finished copy of the book showed up at her house, she noted that the title had been changed to “She Make’s Me Smile.” Disappointed with the added apostrophe, but still excited to be included in the anthology, she found more changes had taken place during editing though nobody from Undead Press ever discussed them with her. Those changes included the following:

(From Ms. DeGeit’s blog) “Let’s see: They turned a non-gendered character into a boy, they named the best friend, they created a memory for the main character about animal abuse. They added a suggestion of rape at the end…”

Significant changes by Ms. DeGeit’s account—one would be hard pressed to disagree—and changes that were never run by Ms. DeGeit during the editorial process. She submitted one story and received approval, but the final product didn’t really match.

Confused and disheartened she reached out to Mr. Giangregorio and asked what had happened. The surprisingly vitriolic exchange, included this from the publisher “as for the story. the editor had a hard time with it, it was very rough and he did alot to make it readable. despite what you think, your writing has a long way to go before its worthy of being printed professionally. we did what we had to do to make the story printable. you should be thankful, not complaining. ah, the ungrateful writer, gotta love it.”

And…we’ve got enough red flags at this point to start a parade.

(1)    If a story isn’t very good, I fail to see why a publisher would acquire it.

(2)    Publishers/editors don’t rewrite major parts of a work. They especially don’t do this without consulting the author.

(3)    A little respect goes a long way in our interpersonal dealings. I’ve never had a discussion with any author I’ve worked with that sounded anything like the above exchange.

 

I don’t know Mandy. Neither do I know Anthony Giangregorio, but I’ve found the resulting online discussion fascinating. Like these kinds of dustups do, this brought out a bunch of Internet Lawyers suggesting that Ms. DeGeit sue the publisher. And, even more curiously to me, more than one person stepped up to share a similar story and said the only reason he/she didn’t come forward before was for fear of being blackballed in the publishing industry. Blackballed by the guy running Undead Press?

For serious, Internet?

Let’s be clear about something—Some guy publishing books from his garage doesn’t have the power to blackball anybody in the publishing industry. I know a lot of people in publishing, even the people who are whispered about as the biggest people in the industry, and there isn’t one of them who I believe could or would, in this day and age, blackball an author. If a guy like James Frey can still make cash in this factory even after his troubles with Oprah, what are the odds that somebody who stood up to a guy who runs a publishing company that probably hasn’t ever been mentioned in any of the traditional publishing magazines is going to be permanently barred from the picnic?

Zero.

We don’t gather as a group to compare notes. There is no shared database to cross reference when considering a project. Also, there are no secret handshakes or passwords. I’ll be honest when I tell you that I’m not anybody special at the country club—in fact, most members probably wouldn’t recognize me, what with my junior status and all—but if there was a secret blackball list, I’d know about it before this guy would.

I’m not sure where this controversy~! will all end up. I’m guessing it disappears in a few days. But in case it needs to be heard somewhere tonight—dear author, we love you. Please continue mastering your craft. Please do not chase after fishhooks that look appetizing but will only cause you pain. Research before submitting (there was plenty of discussion about this guy before this most recent incident). And, for the love of all that is good in the world, quit worrying about secret publishing cabals potentially exerting negative influence on you for calling out trouble when you see it.

It won’t happen.

I promise.

Sincerely,

Publuminati Member #66613
AKA (Ben LeRoy)

 

Maybe I'm Just Getting Old

BENJAMIN LEROY

Greetings from this neck of the woods.

If you’ve taken a look at the Tyrus Books website in the last few days you may have noticed two books that look a little out of place mixed in with titles from Reed Farrel Coleman, Craig McDonald, Bill Cameron and other crime writers I’ve worked with since my time at Bleak House Books. It occurs to me an explanation might be in order.

Last year I attended the Houston Writers Guild’s Annual Conference. While there, I took a dozen or two pitches from aspiring crime writers. As is the case with most conferences, I met some really cool people and heard about some intriguing books that I’m confident will find homes with other publishers. In between discussions of shootings, poisonings, and other violence, a young woman stuck her head in the door and said something like –

“Hey Ben. My name is Miah and I don’t write crime fiction, but I like some of the things Tyrus has done. I’ve written a book and though it’s not right for you, I’d like to give it to you anyway just because.”

The details are a little foggy here, but the important takeaway is that the pages for Miah’s book, Sweet Land of Bigamy, were added to the collection of whodunits. And, because I’m blessed with the memory of a goldfish by the time a conference draws to a close, I’d likely forgotten pretty much everything everybody had said about their books.

A few months later I flew to Portland for the Willamette Writers Conference, and I took the pages from Houston with me to read on the plane.

Like I said before, there were some really good crime novels in the mix that weren’t a good fit for Tyrus, but have probably already found homes elsewhere because they were well done. I’ve discussed before that it’s necessary for me to have a visceral reaction to new material if I think Tyrus should publish a book.

I read the first few pages of Sweet Land of Bigamy and was grabbed immediately. By that point, I’d forgotten about Miah’s introduction and was likewise unaware that I wasn’t reading a crime novel. As the title suggests, it’s a story about bigamy, more specifically a woman who is married to one man, but is unable to stop herself from getting married to another man while the first husband is away for months as a contractor in Iraq.

It is beautiful. It is emotionally charged. It is funny. And it is sad.

But it was not crime. Nor would fit into the other, vaguer category I use to describe what it is we do—dark literary fiction. To be sure, it was literary. Absent, however, was a dead body or the existential examination of the effects of violence that have long been a hallmark of the books we publish.

Or is that completely true?

There was the emotional violence that rises as a unavoidable consequence of the protagonist’s dilemma. It even manifests itself in physical violence at one point. But those arguments would be a stretch at best.

Then it occurred to me, I have insisted for years that what I care most about as a publisher is better understanding the human condition, especially as it relates to everyday people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances. And Sweet Land of Bigamy is full of that.

So I made a decision, then and there, that I wanted to publish the book. I called the author and discussed it with her. After a bit of a “are you serious?” conversation that likely sounded as though your narrator was medicated, we agreed to move forward. Sweet Land of Bigamy is now scheduled for a summer 2012 release.

I’ve kept the announcement a little off radar. Partly because of my work with other initiatives like Prologue Books, but also because I wanted to figure out how to announce my departure from the one path that had defined the publishing companies I’d been associated with over the years. How does one, organically and naturally, let people know that in addition to walking along the fringes of what a mystery novel is he might also be interested in skirting the edges of romance? And how does one, in this culture of elevator pitches and 30 second explanations, let people know that to him, it all boils down to the perils of being a flawed human being trying to understand our place in the universe without sounding like a pretentious jackass?

Well, we’ll see how it goes.

And to keep this even more meta-Dead Guy blog, I’d like to point out that the second book in that same line is Linda Hull’s The Big Bang. Linda is a client of our very own Josh Getzler. The Big Bang is scheduled for fall 2012.

For anybody worried about me losing my edge or anything like that, you’ll be happy to know that we also have books from Reed Farrel Coleman, Loren D. Estleman, and other straight up face punching tough guys coming out later this year, too.

 

A Flimsy Excuse and a Gift

BENJAMIN LEROY

I'd like to make a confession.

I'm tired. Exhausted in the way that comes with being on the road for a long stretch of time. A week ago this past Monday I started my day in Madison, took the bus to Milwaukee, then flew to NYC for a few days of Edgar Award festivities. I did my best to make it to all of the cocktail parties, talk to friends, meet strangers, and celebrate the books and people that make this community such a fascinating and great place to spend time.

Then, before the sun rose on Friday morning, I jumped on a plane heading from NYC to El Paso Texas. Well, that's not exactly right, there was first the matter of a layover in Atlanta. Then El Paso. Then a three(ish) hour drive east into the heart of West Texas (Ft. Davis) for a writing conference. Also, because I have long been fascinated with one, very random town in West Texas, I drove an additional five hours roundtrip so that I could hang out for thirty minutes in the town of McCamey. I had hoped to find the old McCamey hospital and locals to talk to, but the restaurant it had been suggested I visit was closed (permanently?) and all I got was a trip to a Dollar General where I picked up a hat and a warm bottle of Dr. Pepper.

After a brief detour into New Mexico on Sunday, I flew out of El Paso on Monday to Cincinnati for work meetings. It should be noted that, as best I know, there are no direct flights between the two cities so I ended up flying El Paso to Atlanta to Detroit to Cincinnati, arriving a little before midnight, at which point I picked up a rental car and drove the forty minutes from the airport to my hotel.

The last two days have been day long meetings, team building exercises. And, like I mentioned earlier, I'm exhausted.

To beg your forgivness for this otherwise thin update, I'd like to offer a gift -- Prologue Books (one of the two companies I oversee) is giving away William Campbell Gault's, Don't Cry for Me, the Edgar Award winner in 1953 for Best First Novel.

In a few weeks we will discuss the book with a variety of crime fiction luminaries and would love to have you be a part of that discussion.

Books are available here -  For Kindle   and for NOOK 

Of Literary Expectations and Pretentious Metaphors About Construction

BENJAMIN LEROY

You know what I love? Books. Words. Stories. The pursuit of documenting the human experience—both fiction and non-fiction—by people who are brave enough to lay bare essential parts of who they are for public consumption. It isn’t a hobby of mine or a career path that I picked out of the classified ads. It’s a goddamn mission that I’ve felt compelled to follow since before I knew better. It isn’t about a paycheck or health insurance. It isn’t about “prestige” or “fame” or being a “gatekeeper.” If anything, it’s about kicking down the gate to make sure that the outliers and people on the fringes can not only have their voice heard, but their gospels pushed in the public square.

I am a zealot for words and stories. Not to put too fine a point on it, but they are sacred to me.

And I get my words from a lot of sources. Novels. Speeches. Religious texts. Memoirs. Protest songs. Love letters. I get immutable joy reading the stark poetry of box scores buried deep in the Sports section of the local paper.

My conviction isn’t to a job or an industry. It’s to the spread of words. So it took me by surprise a few months ago when I was at a writing conference and was asked if I was “scared” of the changes in publishing, especially as they relate to the indie author movement.

The answer, unequivocally, is no, I am not scared.

I offer no dismissive hand wave or condescending declaration of “Fools! All of them! What do they know?”

That’s not my bag.

If an author decides to self-publish (or any of the existing or forthcoming names given to the process like “go Indie” or “rebel style publishing” or “literary freedom fighter”), I’m good with it. Do your thing. But if you’re going to do your thing, I want you to promise me that you’ll do it right.

Because it’s only a button push away is not an excuse for disrespecting the legacy of the written word.

I’m not mad at people who opt to go around the old process. I don’t see them as the competition. My sleep is disrupted by plenty of things, but I’ve never woken up with a racing heart because anybody, anywhere has decided to self-publish a book. It isn’t money out of my pocket. And even if it was, even if every existing publishing company dried up tomorrow and I was left unemployed, I wouldn’t begrudge authors who opted to self-publish. There would be plenty of introspection and resulting evolution to follow, but I wouldn’t hold hate.

But I sure get pissed at people who create inferior products, make them available in the marketplace, and then cry when objective consumers find fault with the project. I’m removing the opinions of friends of the author, family of the author, and the ever present wannabe covert Literary Promotional Death Squads that spring up out of nowhere, squeeze off a few rounds from the Praise Gun, and attempt to suppress any negative conversation about a book. And, because I’m only focusing on words right now, I’ll eschew any discussion of cover design and formatting—two hugely important, not to be scrimped on details of what makes a book.

What you choose to write about is up to you. Present tense or past tense? First person or third person? Genre? Novel, novella, short story, flash fiction? All of those decisions are the writer’s. Based on their preferences, different readers will enjoy things differently. But a writer can always, in these matters, say this was my artistic choice, I was compelled to write like this.

Inconsistent head hopping? Typos? Random tense shifts? These things make Reader Bear weep and throw book across room. They are not artistic choices. They are the byproducts of sloppy work from people who know better or the unfortunately likely outcome of people who don’t.

Furthermore, Reader Bear doesn’t care if the writer hasn’t had the formal training of other writers or written ten previous novels, he isn’t reading books based on writer pedigree. He’s reading and judging books based on every other book he has read in his life. A writer’s ignorance of reader expectations isn’t a problem for anybody but the writer. This has nothing to do with LEGACY PUBLISHING STIFLED MY CREATIVITY~!

If you hired an Indie Contractor to build a house for you, and when Indie Contractor lifted the tarp off the thing there were nails and screws sticking out at 45 degree angles and the toilet was connected to the electrical system, you wouldn’t say, “Oh, cool, that’s your interpretation of how a house should be built.” You’d file a complaint. And you’d be right to do it.

Don’t mistake loose wires and uneven joists as a design choice. And don’t think those people who are familiar with how a house works because they have lived in one and visited a million others are going to accept shoddy work. Further, don’t mount the, Well, I was in another house built by ACME Builders and they had a crooked nail defense.

They shouldn’t have. Their negligence is not your opportunity to follow suit. And anyway, a crooked nail here or there, though unsightly and unprofessional is not the same as load bearing walls made solely from 1/8 inch sheet rock.

Writing and publishing—communicating your story to the world—is a practice and learned art. Because you’ve got a computer with a functioning keyboard and a word processing program makes you no more a writer than owning a 16 oz claw hammer and a pair of kneepads makes you a roofer.

If writing and publishing is new to you, I want you to know, I am not afraid of your brilliance. As a reader, I am also uninterested in excuses and unforgiving of sloppy work. Too many people have come before, holy work in hand, to show me the power of what can be done with words. It is what I’ve come to expect.

 

Need tips? There are all kinds of resources on the internet. One of your first steps might be over to Chuck Wendig and his blog Terrible Minds. He’s the kind of guy that asks the questions that will help you ask questions of yourself.

 

The Sometimes Non-Verbal and Often Anecdotal Cues I Notice During Pitch Sessions

BENJAMIN LEROY

Writing conferences are always a good time. I’m fortunate to have conversations with brilliant, creative types all over the country. That’s the kind of thing that sustains me. Recharges my battery.

That isn’t meant to suggest that every conversation is a blue ribbon. As sure as I am that there will be something exciting, I’m almost as sure there will be a pitch or two that kinda bums me out or has me thinking about dinner plans before I’ve heard the title of the book. Are all of those pitches for bad authors or bad books? Not necessarily, many of them just aren’t good fits for Tyrus/me, and because the inside of my brain is a poorly constructed county fair, I am easily distracted by things off the Midway.

So, Mr. Barnum and Bailey, what DOES keep your attention? you might ask. Here are five things that keep my attention—they are, by and large, completely unscientific and subjective, but so are many other parts of this process. I guess it’s par for the course.

(1)    A bright and sometimes crazy glint in your eyes.

Sometimes I’ll be sitting at a table waiting for the next person who is going to pitch me, and in will come some guy or gal, wide eyed and engaged, ready to go, already going (I imagine there is a similar county fair blinking and ringing in their brain). They’ll hit me up with a genuine, “Well hello!” and not in a Dale Carnegie way, but in a full on “Damn, isn’t it amazing that we’re all alive and doing things and people read books, and we can talk about my book?” way. Not infrequently this person will pitch a book to me that sounds batshit crazy, but intriguing if done right. These people seem to be fascinated by the same kind of fringy cultures and oddball characters that I know and love. Most of the time I can tell the difference between “bright and crazy” (good) from “dude who is going to mail you a raccoon skull crazy” (bad).

(2)    I don’t feel like I’m dealing with Al Gorythm

Every now and then I run into people who think it best to test market their protagonists and plotlines before writing a book. “But, Ben!” you may protest, “It’s good to know what the hot trend is!” I’ll address that issue later. In this case, I’m talking about literally test marketing characters and plots with focus groups. During my publishing career, I’ve been told, on more than one occasion something like—“I’ve got a friend over at Cretty Bocker who let me throw in the first ten pages of my novel when they were doing blind taste tests of apple strudel. Strudel makers share 85% of recreational interests with the reader I’m writing for. 73% of the strudel tasters gave my book an 80-89% ranking. 47% said they would buy the book today if given an opportunity. That number increases to 54% if Cretty Bocker throws in a 10% off coupon towards future strudel purchases, and my guy over there said he’d talk to the VP of Special Promotions to see about making that happen! Do you want to buy my book? Do you like strudel?” I get that publishing is a business. I still cling to antiquated notions that writing is not. To that end, I don’t believe in calibrating to the point of market testing.

(3)    “This isn’t my first book written, it’s my first book pitched.”

Everybody has to start somewhere. When it comes to writing, that often means with a crappy first book that ends up in a locked drawer. There is no mark of shame in writing a not-yet-ready-for-prime-time first novel. It’s a rite of passage. It is an invaluable learning experience. And it is something to be celebrated. That said, it isn’t necessarily (or even likely) that it’s something to be published. Having the humility to know the truth about your book, is a big deal. You’ll note the fraternity and sorority of high fives and snickers that come when many successful authors talk about their first (and unseen) books. When I hear that an author is pitching his/her second or third written book to me, but that it’s still eligible to be a debut novel, I get butterflies. When that same author tells me that it’s the third or fourth DRAFT of that second or third BOOK, I’m even happier, because I know the author didn’t simply sprint to the finish line of some cross country trek, but took time to look around, stretch, examine the scenery, and contemplate what exactly is the finish line? Gold medal approach, writer. Gold medal.

(4)    When I ask, “Have your characters ever talked back to you?” You nod.

This is one of those questions that, if posed to the general public, would likely result in a bunch of deer in headlight stares. Sounds all illogical. You, the author, have created this story. You set the protagonist down on paper and you push him from Point A to Point B. You are an omnipotent God of literature. Right? Well, except for the crazy phenomenon when the Rebel Angel turns around and shakes his head and says, “But that’s not what I’d really do,” and then you, as OGL actually listen. Ever have a conversation with a person you’ve created from Make Believe Land? Ever feel like you’re not controlling both sides of the conversation? Good, take a seat. Let’s discuss.

(5)    Write the book in your gut, not the book you just read or the tv show you just watched.

I know I’ve beaten this point to death over the last six months, but I can’t stress it enough. For this guy right here, sitting on the other side of the table, I don’t want to hear about Archeologist Masons looking for a lost Picasso being held captive by teenage vampires in Washington. (I’m sure somebody somewhere just got a plot idea, but feel free not to pitch me). When your cop is an obvious mural of Sipowicz, Crockett, and Officer Poncherello named Lieutentant Jackhammer Strongchin, I am DIALED OUT OF THE CONVERSATION IMMEDIATELY AND MY PHONE LINES HAVE BEEN PERMANENTLY BURNED TO THE GROUND AND MY TELEGRAPH MACHINE GOT LOST IN THE MOVE. Derivatives were bad in the financial crisis. They are likewise as bad in writing fiction. But I’ve always been broke, so maybe that’s why I’ve never understood the need for either.

Anyway, there are five things for you today. Take them. Leave them. See you on the road. I'm probably already there.

 

How Do You Like Your Blue-eyed Boy, Mr. Death?

BENJAMIN LEROY

If you know me even the littlest bit, you know that I have great affinity for a few things. Baseball. Traveling. Writing.

My Major League baseball allegiance is to the Chicago Cubs, a franchise perennially cursed by what one might politely label “underperformance.” Or if you’re more inclined to believe in tales of black cats and billy goats, plain old superstitious jinxes.  Though games give me joy on a day to day basis, it is only because under all of the tough luck and the losing, I’m able to squint in such a way that I have faith in the promise of “next year.” To look at the sum total of the franchise’s existence is to see generations of failures, some more glorious than others—tough jawed pugilists ultimately felled by the barrage dealt by opponents better skilled and/or less prone to catastrophic events.

I spend a lot of time on the road. I fly quite a bit, but I enjoy the inefficiency of driving. I prefer the ability to take unexpected exits, to change course in mid-trip, to stop whenever it calls me to chase after rabbits and to explore gimmicky tourist traps. Those flights drop me off in NYC or Los Angeles or Boston—fine towns, all of them—all of them overly familiar to me from personal experiences and the seemingly limitless portrayals in books, movies, and television.

I am more excited by the prospect of exploration in rural America. Once, when I gave up on the idea of driving across Texas and instead headed north towards home, I came across Picher, an abandoned lead mining town in the southeastern corner of Oklahoma. Had never heard of it, didn't know what it was or, for that matter where I was. I drove by run down restaurants, broken walls, and a sign declaring the town as home of the 1984 Oklahoma Boys Baseball Champs. Only later would I find out the town's tragic history and the story behind what I'd seen. This beaten down town off the beaten path that I ended up in randomly has come to leave a very real and indelible mark on me.

It will come as no great revelation when I tell you that I prefer books set in towns like Picher, inhabited by people that would live in a town like it. The characters I love are not unlike my beloved Cubs in that they come to understand lifetimes of heartache, but still lace up their boots each day, taking joy in the small victories of an otherwise failed war. It is an inglorious, but (and maybe this is me oversentimentalizing it all) an honest life that I can respect.

Nobody lives in Picher anymore, but there are towns I've visited with the same kind of feel. One of my favorite places on Earth—and one where I often dream of settling down without a cellphone or internet access or even a computer—is Wewahitchka, Florida along the banks of the Apalachicola River. It’s beautiful country. Slash pines along the highway. Water dropped all over the map including the Dead Lakes. Beautiful and haunting to see. But there are also dangers lurking on the land and in the water. Alligators. Cottonmouth snakes. I’ve discussed it in other entries on this blog and do not need to retread that ground now.

But it is related to what I want to acknowledge (which, coincidentally is also something I’ve previously discussed here).

Earlier today I found out about the death of author Harry Crews.

I always figured I’d meet Crews at some point. I know people who were close to him, I spend plenty of time in Florida, and I’ve got a lucky streak of running into people I admire. I didn’t feel urgency, even in the face of reports suggesting his poor health, because life works out in the end.

I often point people to the clips of Crews discussing writing on Youtube. I did so on this very blog back on January 5^th. I do it at conferences where I speak. I do it in emails sometimes to the people who submit books to Tyrus. What it means to me to be a writer is wrapped up, succinctly and forcefully, in a ten minute video interview of the author.

Crews’ writing is compelling for its rawness, its honesty, and its exploration of subcultures no less extraordinary than the worlds of superheroes and international badasses. His stories, both fiction and non-fiction are populated with the scarred, the broken and limping, the people who take punches, but find the strength to peel themselves off the canvas. Or at least try to get up. One can only imagine that Crews' style, like Crews himself was birthed and honed in the backwoods of rural Georgia, not all that far from Wewahitchka.

As Crews said (and was later used as the title of a documentary about his life). “Survival is triumph enough.” I believe that. Even use it sometimes when people ask me about the editorial guidelines for Tyrus.

Though I never did meet him and now most certainly won't (at least not this go-around), his impact on many writers that I admire will, for me, ensure his continued presence in the literary world. Proud. Honest. Punching.

Thank you, Mr. Crews.

 

The Inter-connectivity of All Histories | Down & Out

BENJAMIN LEROY

My publishing career started under dubious circumstances. At 18, I started a business with a lifelong friend. We filed for corporate status, printed business cards, and generally made asses of ourselves as we flexed muscles and tested out the grown up language of adults and businessmen. Had no idea what we were going to do. Hadn’t bothered to write down a business plan or, for that matter, chosen a business.

It took a while to develop, but eventually we decided to start a “multimedia conglomerate.” We wanted to bring together authors, filmmakers, musicians, photographers…hell, I feel like I’ve already rattled out this tired story a million times, and for all I know, I’ve done so on this blog a half dozen times. Things happened. Ideas got tested out, dreams were birthed and crashed, a few years passed, and we decided to settle on publishing books.

There were a couple of experiments to go through the process—short story and poetry collections that are rotting into the earth right now. Then, in the fall of 2001 we released John Galligan’s debut novel, Red Sky, Red Dragonfly. The company back then was called DIVERSITY INC., a naming relic from an old high school philosophy club my business partner and I had started back in the early 90s (to add to the pretension and the teeth rattling arrogance, I’ll let you know that it stood for Divine Intellectuals Violating Every Rational System In The Yuniverse, ah! the hubris of youth!)

Anyway, at some point there was a name change to Bleak House Books and we published about 50 books over the course of the next eight years. Like any other endeavor there were good times and bad times, close calls, and near wrecks, but we always persevered in some form or another.

As I am sometimes inclined to do, earlier this week I got caught up in the grip of the past, thinking about the journey from smart assed 18 year old kid to 36 year old whatever the hell I am now.

While at Bleak House, I had approximately thirty interns who worked with me during those eight years. The lastingness and depth of those relationships are greatly varied. But in the years that followed I provided recommendations and helped make introductions for some of them. By my best count, nearly a dozen of them went on to work at larger publishing houses or agencies or magazines.

My life is incalculably richer for having made the journey. The business side of things has, on the whole, been nice, but pales in comparison to the personal relationships forged. In addition to the people I discussed above, there have been authors, publishers, agents, librarians, and readers.

It’s this last category that brings me to the point of this entry.

Back at Bleak House we started a program called The Evidence Collection—signed, fingerprinted, and numbered collector editions of our titles. We had dedicated subscribers to The Evidence Collection that ordered directly from Bleak House (as opposed to buying from a store). Though it is nearly five years since we started the program, and three years since it ended, I can still see many of the names in my head. Most of them were strangers, names I was grateful to see on a spreadsheet, their purchases the validation I needed for what might have been a questionable idea.

One of those people—Eric Campbell—picked up copies of everything we published at Bleak House. He and I talked on the phone a few times back then about the Evidence Collection, about what was scheduled for publication way in the future, about our shared love of books. Solid guy.

As life goes, things started falling apart at Bleak House Books (by then a division of Big Earth Publishing) in late 2008. My co-worker Alison and I decided that it might be better to continue publishing with a new company than with the company we’d spent so much of our time and lives building.

In a dying economy and with a more developed sense of business than the 18 year old version of me possessed, we struck out looking for investors in our new venture.  We scraped together enough cash to open Tyrus Books, but it was lean and ultimately, without further investors, doomed to certain failure.

At Bouchercon in 2009 we ran into Eric Campbell. We talked about what happened with Bleak House and what the plans were for Tyrus. As it turned out, Eric had been interested in investing in another publishing company, but hadn’t had much success in working anything out.

No doubt you know where this story goes—Eric swooped into the picture in true superhero style, gave the company the stability to make it through the extra lean patch, and made it possible for us to continue with the line including new books from established authors like Reed Farrel Coleman and Victor Gischler, but also debut novels like Hello Kitty Must Die and Untouchable. It is not an overstatement to say that without Eric’s timely introduction to the scene none of those books would have been published by Tyrus, and who knows if they’d have been picked up elsewhere.

It’s two and a half years later and now Eric is the Publisher of Down & Out Books. Alison is doing some editing for him, and perhaps the hardest working intern I ever worked with, Krystal, who later moved to NYC to work for a larger publisher and then a distinguished agent, is doing publicity for Down & Out.

I don’t know how much longer I’m going to stay in publishing, but I know that it is in good hands as long as companies like Down & Out are around. I recorded a podcast with Eric yesterday to discuss his new venture, what he's publishing, and to talk about the new book Scoundrels released this week, edited by Gary Phillips and featuring new stories from SJ Rozan, David Corbett, Reed Farrel Coleman, Brendan DuBois, Kelli Stanley, Tyler Dilts, Travis Richardson, Eric Stone, Bob Truluck, Pamela Samuels Young, Darrell James, Lono Waiwaiole, Seth Harwood and Gary Phillips.

Tyrus Podcast - guest Eric Campbell

 

On the Road, Good News, & a Brief Update

Good news, readers!

(1) I'm on the road this week, and not really positioned to do a long post. So, no rambling piece from me this week. I will be short. Concise. And I bring good news.

(2) The good news is this -- I had to go to NYC this week for an award ceremony. The award in question? Barnes and Noble's Discover Great New Writers Award. My vested interest? Scott O'Connor's debut novel, Untouchable, was one of the three finalists in the fiction category. 

Where have you heard about Untouchable on this blog?

Alison talked about it back before it came out in February of 2011 here.

It seemed to have an impact on Dale here.

And I was even heard to make some remarks here.

What I mean to tell you is that things were pretty exciting this week and I got to attend a swank event. Twelve years ago when I started publishing books, this kind of thing seemed totally out of reach, the domain of big New York publishers.

Well, mark one up for the little guy and congratulations Scott!

The news from Publishers Weekly here.

A more detailed review of the judge's view of the book here.

 

Introducing Prologue Books

BENJAMIN LEROY

Today I helped launch Prologue Books, a project I've been thinking about for the last two years. I've talked about it, drawn it on napkins, and dreamed what it would be like to put it all together. And now it's done. Kinda.

A quick summary of Prologue would be that we're trying to trace the genealogy of genre.

The driving question behind Prologue Books is – How have the books and authors of other generations influenced today’s new releases?

To help shed light, we’re converting out-of-print novels into ebooks, in an attempt to better trace the genealogical roots of crime, sci-fi, fantasy, romance, western, and young adult fiction.

Greg Shepard of Stark House Press has been instrumental in helping to curate the Prologue Crime collection. We are also deeply indebted to Ed Gorman whose knowledge of and appreciation for the history of the genre is unmatched.

Here is the press release from today:

F+W MEDIA ANNOUNCES THE LAUNCH OF PROLOGUE BOOKS
Hundreds of Out-of-Print Pulp Novels of 1940’s-1970’s Now Available as E-Books

New York, NY –March1, 2012 – F+W Media announced today the acquisition of more than 250 out-of-print novels, spanning 1940-1970, to be reissued as e-books under the imprint, Prologue Books. These hard-boiled crime novels, written by legends like Peter Rabe and William Campbell Gault, served as inspiration for contemporary crime fiction.  Before, these old paperbacks could only be found at book fairs and used book stores, but now, they will be available to anyone with an e-reader.

“I envision Prologue Books not simply an e-book publisher for out-of-print titles, but as a living record of the crime, science fiction, and fantasy genres,” said Ben LeRoy, publisher of Tyrus Books who is spearheading the project. “There’s a great opportunity to shine the spotlight on authors who may have been significantly influential on the current state of publishing, but who have never really received their due for one reason or another. With the help of luminaries in the genres—authors, readers, reviewers—we are excited to find and share those stories.”

“I love and collect vintage paperbacks, so you’d think the concept of e-books would have no appeal for someone like me,” said pulp novelist, Christa Faust. “But the way I see it, having reading copies of these classic titles available in digital format is not only a great way to attract new readers, it also helps to preserve existing paper editions that are too fragile to be thumbed through. It’s old-school pulp for a new generation. A brilliant idea that’s long overdue.”

 

 

A Reminder

BENJAMIN LEROY

99% of the people working in publishing as editors or agents are in the business because they love books.

They have likely been reading since they were able to sound out words on the living room floor. Many of them loved words and books so much they majored in English during their college years. Will they always love the same books you love, or, perhaps more importantly, the book you wrote? Of course not, we’re all subjective human beings with different interests, fascinations, and tastes. In the same way that it doesn’t offend me that some people like the taste of okra, it shouldn’t offend you if I don’t dig your book the way you and others might.

You’ll also note that the math in my initial assertion is (a) not backed up by scientific evidence, and (b) is rather specific with regards to two job titles, and is not the blanket of “all people working in publishing.” On the first point, it’s a number I arrived at by living in the industry for ten years and meeting a whole bunch of people. I have extracted accordingly. As far as the second point, I raise it because there are many other people who are essential to running a publishing company that could just as easily be working at a music label or a computer manufacturer or a general widget company. Their skillsets are for running a business. The product is sometimes secondary, and is usually hostage to spreadsheets and forecasts. Instead of things like plot, pacing, and theme (the domain of the editor and agent), focus is instead given to things like, profit margin, consumer buying trends, and other jibberjabber that I can’t even properly qualify. Undoubtedly, some business types have come in from different industries hoping to apply widget practices to literary conventions and have ruined the party for all present. That doesn’t change the fact that other skilled business folks have also helped keep afloat a vessel, the S.S. Publishing Industry, through many storms.

These two different sides are usually good together. The business suit guy helps keep the editor/agent from indulging in some crazy whims about things that could be published. And, through some complicated osmosis that I’m still not completely sure I understand, the buttoned up Poindexter behind the calculator learns about things like Love and the Existential Struggle.

Here’s a sample transcript from a made up meeting between the two sides.

 

EDITOR: Oh my God! This book is so great. The protagonist is a man who accidentally ingested speaker wire and he falls in love with a poor country singer who can’t afford an amp, but absolutely has to play the county talent show. So the protagonist stands on stage with her (the singer), mouth wide open, and the music comes out of him, loud and clear, with the best acoustics ever… 

BUSINESSMAN: Who is going to buy that?

EDITOR: Me. And like, at least a dozen of my friends.

BUSINESSMAN: Is the singer a vampire? Vampires are biiiig right now.

EDITOR: Well, no…I mean…it wasn’t ever really discussed or anything. I suppose it’s possible. There wasn’t any evidence to suggest it, but…

BUSINESSMAN: Could you talk to the author, maybe? Vampire it up a little bit? Or, if the author doesn’t like that idea, could we set the county fair in some dystopian wasteland, where, if the singer doesn’t win the contest she is killed on stage in front of a cheering crowd and her body is harvested for organs in front of everybody. There was this show on HBO that…

EDITOR: Yeah, the book is basically a quirky love story. I don’t know how those things would fit with it…

BUSINESSMAN: Do you have any other projects to suggest? Maybe we should move on.

 

Editor has a problem. Huge fan of Speakerman and the Blue Ribbon(*), but the numbers don’t work. So now editor has to go back to the author and say, “Well, I love this, I really do. It’ll be with me for the rest of my life, but I couldn’t get the necessary in-house support. We’re not going to be able to publish it.”

Who is wrong in this situation?

Well, to the author, it’s likely to be whoever the hell “in-house support” is, and because that’s not a name or a single person, it can quickly become the company. And if enough companies reject Speakerman and the Blue Ribbon it can become the publishing industry as a whole.

Well, to Captain Numbercruncher behind the big mahogany desk, it’s the author for not writing what’s hot, and, instead, following the pesky gnawing in the gut to write a book that means something to the author.

To the editor, it might also be “in-house support” but in this case, editor knows the names and faces and knows that the business folks who stress over forecasting and budgets are the same people who have to make sure enough money is coming into the company to pay for editor’s salary and health insurance. So editor goes back to the other 300 unread books in the office and begins the process anew, trying to find a brilliant work that has a definable audience (preferably with disposable income for books) and speaks to the same part of the editor that was built on the living room floor and was fed with Ramen during four years of college.

It’s hard, I know, to be out of step with current trends, to be passionate about something brilliant while the world adjusts its bifocals. But as a writer, it is your mission to listen to that voice in your gut, writing the thing that means something to you. It’s the part of the process you have absolute control over. You have an anxious audience waiting behind the desk—agents and editors both who will do what they can because they believe in books. Are moved by words. See your brilliance.

 

 

* Because a whole bunch of people asked to buy SPEAKERMAN, I thought I'd at least give you a glimpse of the cover so that you can find it on the shelf at your local bookseller.

Thank You for Everything

BENJAMIN LEROY

It’s my birthday today.

At the risk of sounding sappy, I want to thank you for the present. I want to take this opportunity to thank all of you (even those of you who may be discovering this weeks later) for caring about the written word, for loving books, for not having fled the joy of reading. I’m looking at you, readers, authors, librarians, agents, publishers. Bless your hearts reviewers! For keeping the discussion going.

I travel a lot for work.

Sometimes by car. Sometimes by plane. Big cities, little towns, sometimes no town at all in the middle of nowhere. I am most at peace in the throes of movement. All of those miles are grist for the experience mill—everything I hear, see, taste, experience is part of a never ending quest to understand everything about everybody, everywhere. At the heart of that is a desire to understand myself and my place in the universe.

I’ve been blessed to meet many wonderful people along the road. Endlessly generous and warm people who reaffirm my faith in all of us. I have been invited into the homes of strangers to have dinner with families that have become extensions of my own. I have slept on the couches of people with beliefs very much unlike my own in matters of politics, music, sports, and any number of other superficial subjects that sometimes distract us from the greatness we can cause.

My own life is immeasurably richer for having been a part of the publishing industry, for having spent so much time with people who care so severely about what it means to be human and alive and everything that goes with it.

When I started Bleak House Books more than ten years ago, I had big dreams about what the future held. I could never have known just how lucky I’d be. The dreams may have morphed a bit, evolved as I have along the way, but they have never been any less fantastic than they were way back then.

For that and everything else you all have given me, I thank you. It’s the best present ever, every day.

At about this time each year I release a video made up of footage from my life during the previous year. Here is my 2011. My love to everybody in here.

Happy Birthday.

 

It’s about time for me to open up Tyrus Books for submissions. As faithful readers of this blog know, I had to close things down a few months ago because my plate was full of other things—forecasting, promotional planning for titles coming out this spring, a few secret projects, and some web development. All of those things were necessary (and continue to be necessary) to run a for real business (a skill for which I have no proper training other than experience).

But you know what else is necessary? Books. In particular, good books. Great books. Life changing bunches of words gathered on paper or electronically or surgically implanted into your brain cortex box. And that means, like a pig on a truffle hunt, I’ve got to go out and root around in the dirt to find some. That’s my job, yes. It’s also one of the things that matters most in life to me.

We can all sit back and lament the dying of a golden age of publishing and pretend like things were more prestigious fifty years ago, or that there was an inherent current of genius floating around publishing when it was ruled by old dudes in tweed jackets.

The fact is, we’re all connected in new ways, bigger, bolder, faster, sometimes scary, sometimes revelatory ways that Ebenezer Von Bookguy couldn’t have imagined even after his trip to a (then legal) opium den on the upper Westside of Manhattan. Our interests can be piqued by American outposts that aren’t so distant anymore and we can get the real story by the folks living it, as opposed to the imagined story by people who haven’t experienced it. Do you know what this means? Do you realize how it can fix the problem facing all of us?

That’s right, it can raise the level of understanding among the whole of the planet. The 90 year old great grandmother in Des Moines can nod along to the “hey, we’re all human” typings of a Mormon kid in Salt Lake City or a swamp rat along the banks of the Apalachicola River in my spiritual hometown of Wewahitchka, Florida. And this thing doesn’t stop at any border, because it doesn’t have to, it can beam on an arc all around the globe stopping in London or Tehran, Paris or Damascus, Moscow or Beijing or Nairobi.

Novel writing is not singularly the domain of folks who have done six years of college and who received their MFA in Creative Writing. It’s about finding the truth to life, articulating it in an honest and compelling way, and letting the universe take it from there. We can, in the course of hearing another’s story, excuse imperfect grammar and discarded literary conventions, as long as the story means something.

Tips for querying a publisher:

• Don’t announce yourself as the “next BIG NAME AUTHOR” in your query letter. That isn’t a decision you make. The reading public will let you know. Also, to that same point, don’t talk about how BIG NAME AUTHOR can’t write a book to save his life and you don’t understand why anybody buys his books. You don’t need to understand, you just need to know that people do.

 

• Don’t make some ridiculous claim that you’re a “surefire New York Times bestseller” in waiting. The metrics for the NYT’s list are mysterious and driven by a lot of factors. It’s not in your control or even in your publisher’s control whether or not you’ll make the list. Consumers and readers make it happen, and you can’t control them either.

 

• Not all reviews are created equal. Ok, so check this out, some of you might have read that and been like, “Ben, you’re buying into the old hierarchy of dynamic media and its hold on the myth of blah blah…” Here’s the truth—reviews are good for a few things. Primarily, I note, they help feed an author’s self-esteem (sometimes in negative directions) AND they give awareness of a book to the reader of the review. A glowing five snowflake review of a book on a blog nobody reads is great for column A (author self-esteem) but does little for column B (raising public awareness of a book). A review in a publication with wider circulation does much more for column B and ultimately column B sells books. If that publication is geared towards publishing industry professionals (bookstore owners, librarians, etc.), say in a magazine like Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Kirkus, or Booklist, all the better.

 

• Don’t do that parlor trick where you pretend to be a big fan of the publishing house and you say, “I consider my works to be like two of your authors JOHNNY STORYTELLER and PEGGY BOOKWRITER” whereas JOHNNY STORYTELLER and PEGGY BOOKWRITER have very little in common with each other. It is a highly transparent move. If you’re a legit fan of one of the house’s authors, great, say what you like about him/her. But don’t just grab two names and say, “Hey, the three of us could be Peter, Paul, and Mary! Because there are three of us!” I know it says to do that in some guides, but don’t listen to those guides.

 

• Realize that the other person on the other end of your query letter is looking to get really excited about projects that move her. Your book might be great, but it might not speak to the editor, and the editor, without question, has a better handle on what is going to get her excited, how a project fits into the editorial niche of the publishing house, and whether or not she wants to acquire the title. If she doesn’t want to acquire it, try to refrain from the “You’re an idiot! I’m the next Stephen Grisham Rowling! You just passed up the opportunity to make $$$!” Because that won’t help your cause. Besides, if that’s the way you’re approaching the intersection of art and business, it will end in a wreck every time. I swear to you.

 

• If you’ve self-published the book you’re now querying about and then decided that self-publishing wasn’t as easy as some people told you it was going to be, be up front about that. Some publishing houses will still look. Others won’t. That’s their call to make. Pretending the self-published version doesn’t exist and being all, “Oh, that? Yeah, uh, I, uh, printed like three copies for my friends to let them see it, but it’s not published published,” is a smidge disingenuous. PRO-TIP, if you publish three copies for your friends, don’t assign an ISBN to the book.

Two Paragraphs and a Hunch

BENJAMIN LEROY

This week we got some good news around the Tyrus Books compound. Our 2011 title, Untouchable by Scott O’Connor was selected as a finalist for Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers Award (fiction). We were thrilled back in early 2011 when we found out the book was selected for the Discover Great New Writers Program, but to have that book end up being named a finalist out of all the books selected for the program last year? That felt awesome.

(As a sidenote, the ultracool Dead Guy contributor Dale Spindel wrote about Untouchable a few weeks ago. You can re-read that here - http://heydeadguy.typepad.com/heydeadguy/2012/01/what-makes-a-book-a-mystery.html)

Untouchable started out special, and has continued along the path.

As I understand it, the book was originally shopped to larger publishing houses by agent Yishai Seidman of Dunow, Carlson, & Lerner. Though some folks at the big houses were excited by it, ultimately it got passed over for being too dark (and therefore, likely not marketable).

Then it ended up on my desk.

I’d like to tell you that I dug into it immediately, but that would be a lie. I don’t read things as quickly as I would like to (and if you’ve submitted something over the last few months, you’re likely aware of that already). I often require a kick in the ass a few times before I get around to reading something, and even then (this is terrible to confess) I read with an eye towards rejecting the book, just so I can put it behind me and get the agent off my case).

When Yishai called to remind me about Untouchable, I opened the file with my RejectionGun all set to go. But then a funny thing happened. I read the first two paragraphs.

At that point, two paragraphs in, I called Yishai and said—“I haven’t read the whole thing. In fact, I haven’t even read the whole first page. But I know I want this. Let’s get a deal done right away.”

And we did.

Was the book perfect at that point? Nope. The author and Alison worked hard on it to get it into the best shape it could be. But the essence of what makes a book great to me was there in full display even before the two of them fixed any of the particulars.

I had the same reaction the first time I dug into Craig McDonald’s Head Games, a book that would later go on to be nominated for an Edgar Award for Best First Novel. When that reaction hits, I trust it. It’s more than words on a page speaking to me at that point. It’s the I Know It When I See It phenomenon, and I can’t explain it any better than that.

Of course, you could buy a book based on the first two paragraphs and later realize you’ve made a terrible mistake. But in this case, the selection by Barnes and Noble for the Discover Great New Writers program happened and then later, The New York Times reviewed the book in the Sunday Books Section. The first novel I’ve ever been involved in publishing that did either.

Guess I got lucky.

Anyway, the winner of the award will be announced in March 7^th, and I’ve got my fingers crossed. If you’re so inclined to cross yours, too, that’s great.

Also, unrelated to Untouchable, but about publishing, I was on WGN's Midday News today. You can watch the clip here.

Down the Rabbit Hole of Trivia

BENJAMIN LEROY

Today I read an article/factoid/holysh#tidbit about the family tree of John Tyler, the tenth President of the United States of America. It turns out that the guy, born in 1790, who took office in 1840, has two LIVING grandchildren. I didn’t say great great grandchildren or great grandchildren. The two men in question, Lyon Gardiner Tyler Jr. and Harrison Ruffin Tyler, are his plain old fashioned grandchildren.

Here are some things about this that blow my mind.

John Tyler was alive when George Washington was President. Between the three generations of the Tyler men in question (including John Tyler Jr., the father of Lyon and Harrison), they have been around for ALL 44 Presidents. By comparison, three generations of my family including me, have been around for a paltry 15.

I’ll admit that I didn’t know much about the Presidency of Tyler before doing some internet research earlier today. Tyler ended up in office after President William Henry Harrison died a month into his term, having succumbed to complications of pneumonia.

Tyler was on the USS Princeton when the tragedy occurred. What tragedy? Yeah, I didn’t know about it either, but it’s fascinating.

Etc. Etc. Etc.

All of these facts and historical footnotes are fertile ground for the imagination. And though they captured my attention today, something else will grab it tomorrow.

I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, but I think it’s important to be curious. As writers, we never know what obscure historical event(s) can be discussed or re-imagined or re-plotted to serve our stories. I can’t get enough of these things, and how often, much later down the road, they give context to something I wouldn’t have otherwise understood.

Do you have any favorite historical footnotes? Obscure, but real characters who fascinate you and that you hope to work into your writing?

 

The Opportunity in Shipwreck

BENJAMIN LEROY

Those of us in the publishing and book world sure are living in exciting times!

It’s been a little more than ten years since I started my first publishing company (Diversity Incorporated, later to become Bleak House Books), and to say that things have changed in the publishing world, would be an understatement.

Whether or not people choose to read it or can even understand the language the handwriting is on the wall—the way things were ain’t the way they are today and even further removed from how they’ll be tomorrow. In talking to some of the people I know—authors, agents, and publishers—it’s sad to see some of them stubbornly clinging to their deck chairs on the Titanic.

There’s a lot of uncertainty going around. And it’s not limited to publishing. Scientifically speaking, a million things effect the evolution of books—emerging technologies, consumer habits, global economics, the threat of military conflict (both real AND ginned up), on and on, etc.

So when I see people tether themselves to the ship pretending that icebergs haven’t been struck and ignoring the reality that the navigational charts the captains of our industry have been consulting for  years aren’t going to offer them a path out of danger, I’m not sure what to make of it.

On the one hand—I’m sympathetic. There are, no doubt, many of us who figured the reality of what we knew might shift, but certainly not in the seismic ways that it has. It is frustrating and disorienting to be humbled by things like that.

However, significant change has come and each second spent ignoring it is one second closer to obsolescence.  There will be no miracle patch job. There isn’t a quick epoxy and duct tape solution for this one. Either learn to swim, row a life boat, or get really good at holding your breath.

If you love books, if you love the idea of stories being told in a way that brings us all closer (see the big issues above)—now is an exceedingly exciting time to be alive and involved. Throwing away old maps allows us to plot new courses.  Sure, we might get scraped in the bramble, but think of how good it will feel to see the new communities sprout up and know that we were involved.

Also of note—if you’re in the NYC area and plan on attending either the Writer’s Digest conference or Digital Book World, I’ll be speaking at both events.

At the Writer’s Digest conference I’ll be on a panel called “Ask the Editor.” Here is the description:

In this special session, we’ve gathered four publishers who are well known and highly respected for the fiction they publish. Attendees will listen to discussions on what publishers are looking for, how they decide who to publish, what they see as the digital future of fiction, what writers should expect from a publisher once their book gets accepted and much more. The floor will also be open to questions from the audience. SATURDAY 21^st, 9:00 a.m.

At Digital Book World I’ll be on a panel called “Talking to the Genre Fiction Reader: Publisher-driven genre communities” moderated by Sarah Weinman. Description is as follows:

The most obvious verticals for big publishers are genre-based: romance, science-fiction, and crime. In genres, publishers already have a title output large enough to build a community around. But does it make sense for many large publishers and some smaller ones to be building “communities” of science-fiction or romance readers, or does that strategy just leave the field open for a third party super-aggregator to take everybody’s business? A panel of large publishers with genre-based vertical efforts will discuss the development and future of communities built around genre reading habits. WEDNESDAY 25^th, 10:30 a.m.

 

Bringing Back Old Ghosts in the Interim.

BENJAMIN LEROY

This dispatch is late, and for that I apologize. We've received some really cool news at the Tyrus compound that I'm not at liberty to discuss at the moment, but that has made an exciting work day even more caffeine reliant.

So, I'm cheating this week and dredging up an old thing I wrote a few years ago for the Huffington Post. I'm about to start out on the road for the year, attending writing conferences, doing some academic style talks, and even popping up on television boxes in some markets. One of the questions that will, inevitably pop up will be "What's Hot in Publishing?!"

The piece below is a response to that. 

****

This fall I'll be traveling to a few writing conferences where I will sit on a panel with a few other publisher or agent types and we'll do our best to answer questions about the industry, trying to manage expectations but to also keep people excited about writing. Inevitably, the question will come up--What is the hot trend? What should I be writing?

I never have a good answer for that. I don't pay much attention to the trends, and conventional wisdom is that you shouldn't chase them even if you know what they are because by the time you finish your book, the train will probably have left the station.

That's why I believe it's more important to write by your gut and try to write something that won't feel dated in twenty years. Easier said than done, of course, but it's a goal. As a publisher I am deathly afraid that when it comes time for me to retire in a hundred years and I'm sitting at the head of the banquet table and everybody is going on about this and that, somebody will stand up with some painfully embarrassing book.

"And Ben thought Disco Gopher fiction would be popular forever," the table laughing at my expense.

So, what do I use for guideposts when evaluating fiction? You may need a decoder ring (I may need one, too), but here are three unlikely people who have shaped my vision of publishing:

(1) Mikal Gilmore--Gilmore's 1994 family memoir, Shot in the Heart, is a book that haunts me more than anything else I've ever read. Heartbreaking in its scope, terrifying in the brutality it portrays,Shot in the Heart covers the legacy of the Gilmore family including Mikal's notorious brother Gary who murdered two men in Utah and was subsequently put to death in 1977 by firing squad. I'm sure I've read the book at least five times and listened to the abridged audio version twenty times (there really, really should be an unabridged audio version), and have bought no less than thirty copies as gifts for friends, family, and strangers. The layers of family mythology are almost suffocating, and I have had more than one person return the book saying that it was too painful to read. I regret that I wasn't in a place to publish it when it came out originally (I was just graduating from high school), but have been on a mission since to find fiction that can match its honesty and weight. I cannot recommend this book enough.

(2) Raven Mack--I'm not afraid to admit that I was a pretty big fan of professional wrestling when I was growing up. From the first time I caught Ox Baker on an episode of Georgia Championship Wrestling back in 1983 I was hooked on the over the top personalities, the violence, and the theater of it all. When I got a little older and some of the finer myths of the business were exposed, I didn't turn away disappointed--I became fascinated by the depth of wrestling's carny roots and the intricacies of the hidden subculture. I don't watch it anymore, but I still read message boards that either directly or indirectly discuss it. One of those boards featured intermittent writing from a guy calling himself Raven Mack. It was clear to me, independent of the topic he was exploring, the guy was a natural writer and storyteller. He impressed me as a philosophical and literary heir to the great Harry Crews. There were tales of growing up in rural Virginia watching the same wrestling I grew up on, listening to some of the same obscure hip hop, metal, and punk that I listened to over the last 25 years, and having a passing knowledge of topics that only probably four or five other people besides me would find interesting. He's like the other cousin I didn't know about (Nathan Singer being the first). Raven used to put out a 'zine called The Confederate Mack and is now working on developing something called Rojonekku, and I find that his writing--peppered with references to fringe characters like Necro Butcher, Hasil Adkins and Swamp Dogg, sometimes simple, often brutal, always feels more authentic than most of what lands on my desk. It's clearly from the gut, raw reporting from one more undercover pocket of America.

(3) Tyrus Raymond Cobb--Anybody who knows anything about me knows that my two biggest loves in life are the written word and baseball. It was only natural that at some point there'd be a deeply committed, long lasting relationship between the two of them. Cobb was the kind of guy that fascinates me--blessed with unearthly abilities and an unparalleled competitive drive, he was a malcontent predisposed to great outbursts of alarming violence, deeply haunted by the inability to ever feel like he had made good. After great disagreement over his desire to be a baseball player at a time when the game was populated by ne'er-do-wells, ruffians, and hooligans, Cobb had left Royston, Georgia with two things from his father--a little bit of cash and an admonition--"Don't come home a failure." Weeks before the Detroit Tigers asked him to join the team, Cobb's mother unloaded a shotgun into Cobb's father, killing him. With the only man who could validate him buried in the ground, Cobb went on to play the game with a ferocity that resulted in injury to teammates, rival players, and innocent bystanders alike. When biographer Al Stump asked Cobbwhy he played so hard, Cobb responded that he was playing with the ghost of his father on his heels. When it was all said and done, Cobb was the leading vote getter in the first class of players inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. His .367 career batting average is still tops in the record books and he is widely regarded as one of the best baseball players of all time. And yes, Cobb is the naming source of Tyrus Books.

 

New Year's Resignations

This time of year is always a little bit difficult for me.

I am at once confronted by the results of the previous year compared to what had been planned, and at the same time, feeling the weight of outlining the next twelve months. There are plenty of holiday parties and New Year celebrations, and there are always the high points to celebrate, but I’m the kind of guy that tends to focus more on the shortcomings and the failures of the things left undone and the challenge of what lies ahead.

I sometimes find in the pursuit of goals that we lose our passion for the course we’ve set. The light at the end of the tunnel changes colors or directions or routes or disappears altogether. We’re then confronted with a choice of pursuing it to be true to the plan we’d made or acknowledging that things change and evolve and it might just be best to let go.

The same questions are raised in writing a book, especially those that take a few years to write. The things that interest us as authors, the truths we mean to explore, the characters we think we understand shift, become harder to hold, and as a result what was once seamless in the forefront of our mind becomes a bit more amorphous on the page.

On the one hand, part of us nags, “You’ve come this far, just finish the damn thing.” But another part of our brain hears doubts. In my case, it’s in the voice of the legendary Harry Crews—

The hard truth that Crews is espousing is good for writing and at least semi-applicable to our lives in general. Sometimes we know we're on the wrong track, but we're too stubborn or too prideful to stop or change direction.

And then another 365 days pass.

Have you been to that fork in the road? How do you choose your next step?

Recording the Past for the Future

 

This part of the story is hazy.

Back in the summer of 1984 (it could have been ’83 or ’86 or ’87) I sat on the living room floor of my grandparents’ house in Mission, KS being quizzed by my grandfather. The subject was baseball and the questions were endless.

It was then I learned about Williams, Ruth, and Gehrig. Heard stories about the Royals and before them, the Athletics. Heard about the time my grandfather and my father saw Satchel Paige pitch.

I was maybe eight years old at the time, a kid myself, imagining in black and white what it would have been like to see Dimaggio in his prime, circling the bases or Williams in the splendor of youth sending a ground ball screaming past the infield.

And I knew there was something to baseball larger than what could be understood at face value. It was a bonding agent between generations. It made me interested in the stories my grandfather could tell.

So much of who I am as a human being—and all of the offshoot compartments of that personality—is rooted in the choices of my grandfather.

He was born into the mining world of post-WWI southeastern Kansas. A series of unglamorous dots on the map with names like Arma and Scammon, where men broke their bodies and often their spirits digging coal from the earth. He was the son of a coal miner—a fact that continues to fascinate me and inform my world view to this day.

Back in the early spring of 2009 after having driven more than 3,000 miles from Wisconsin to the southern tip of Florida and then back up, I headed over to Texas with big dreams of driving I-10 into the dried up oil towns of west Texas. But somewhere east of Houston I realized that I didn’t have it in me, so I took a right turn and headed up north into Oklahoma along highway 69.

I didn’t know it at the time, but the same highway led into those old mining towns of Arma and Scammon, and even took me through the lead mining ghost town of Picher, Oklahoma (an event that would have larger repercussions on my life in later days). I took a lot of time in those small towns shooting video and still pictures trying to capture the essence of those towns wondering what it would have been like to grow up there during the Depression. My family had moved out and onto other things, but what of the old neighbors? Where were the boys who attended the same high school as my grandfather? Were the roots of their family trees planted deep in the hardscrabble Kansas dirt? What would happen if I knocked on doors that had once been familiar to my own family line?

I continued north on Highway 69, stopping at my grandparents’ house in suburban Kansas City, Kansas and, because I was so curious about what I had seen and the questions it had brought up, I ended up interviewing my grandfather for nearly 45 minutes on camera, hearing some stories for the first time—stories only he could tell, names only he knew. It not only gave me a better sense of where I’d come from, but also generated an endless supply of new questions.

My grandfather died two weeks ago. I drove down to Kansas for the funeral service, and then a day later headed back down to Arma and Scammon with some vague notion of letting the towns, the landmarks, and those people interred in the family cemetery know that he was gone.

Or returning.

Who, on this side, can really know?

I feel so blessed to have taken the random turn right in Texas that I did, and that I had my video camera with me when I went. The stories of these men—coal miners, baseball players, long lost uncles and cousins— have afforded their heroes a mythology not granted to them in life. They have worked their way into the marrow of who I am, including what fascinates me as a publisher and writer.

I hope you have a chance to take a camera or a tape recorder with you, too.

 

Killing Comfort for the Challenge

I hate winter.

The older I get, the less tolerance I have for the cold and the snow and the wind. Twenty years ago I would wear shorts in December and January—a misguided, but earnest middle finger to Jack Frost. My memory might not be what it used to be (what is, anymore?), but I’m pretty sure that I took a cavalier approach to dress all the way into the single digits.

Now? As soon as the thermometer even looks at 32, I’m scanning Expedia for a flight out of Dodge. I just can’t do it anymore.

Except sometimes I have to. I force myself into the elements, pretending that it’s some low budget reality show about my survival and that there are dozens of people around the world wondering if I’ll make it through one more day in the harshness of this Wisconsin weather.

That, dear reader, was a touch overly dramatic.

But I do it. When I read the weather report and I see what I figure to be Mother Nature’s biggest haymaker of the year, I rush out to be in it. My thinking is usually something along the lines of well, there might come a day when I have to survive this, and it’s better to find out in a controlled situation how the body will respond. Then I bundle up in four layers and scarves and hats, and I throw myself out into the snow or the negative temperatures and imagine myself as some Admiral Byrd type, always ready for the adventure and the blustery waltz with death.

As some of you might know, I like the idea and the practice of adventure. I like going down unmarked trails in out of the way places because of what it does to the senses. When there is uncertainty of outcome, your senses work overtime. You see things in ways you don’t normally see, taking note of details along the way. You hear things that force the microprocessors in your brain to interpret what was that? A rushing river? A roaring lion? And you know that real consequences linger in the balance. You have to pay attention.

The cold in winter makes you pay attention.

Is this what frostbite feels like? How will I know if it’s hypothermia?

This being a blog about books and publishing and not one about middle aged dudes describing an adventure from a Rogaine commercial, I’ll get over to my point.

We’re all gonna die. It might be the cold. It might be the lion. But sooner or later, some unseen hand will tap us on the shoulder and then...

I know that some people write because they want to entertain. They want to produce fast rides through bright lights that always (even if we forget for a second), reserve an airbag for us, so that we know we’ll see an approximation of happily ever after. And that’s cool.

But it’s also not my thing.

I want the uncertainty of unmarked trails. I want to travel with overmatched protagonists who have to ask serious existential questions of themselves along the way. Is today’s cold, too cold? I want the confusion of life experience, confronted, and processed on the page. I truly believe this type of storytelling can not be learned in a classroom or authentically articulated from a life lived indoors.

And that is why we must bundle up as the mercury goes down.

We head out.

 

Just Because You Can, Doesn't Mean You Should

BENJAMIN LEROY

I’ve been participating in social networking on the internet since 1994. Before AOL was widespread, before Myspace gave an outlet to models of dubious character, before Facebook made everybody’s information available to everybody, before we started thinking in 140 character tweets there were usenet newsgroups.

When I first got to college in 1994 I was unaware of the internet. Totally oblivious. I went to the computer lab to write a paper and learned about this mysterious universe of connected machines. Soon, school became an even more secondary part of my life. I was much more interested in reading through newsgroups to find out all sorts of trivia about the world. I read thread after thread about the Chicago Cubs, professional wrestling, hip-hop, punk, and a more culturally relevant Simpsons.

All out of the ether, like magic, I had new friends scattered across the country actively engaged in conversations about things that mattered to me. It felt so underground at the time, this business of trading information about local scenes, obscure musicians, and theories about television shows. When I tell you it was cool, believe me, I thought it was very cool. It was a fun time dinner party at somebody else’s house.

Those halcyon days of yore were also great because, unlike today’s internet, every marketing department, independent huckster, self-aggrandizing 21^st century P.T. Barnum types hadn’t invaded the community with bullhorns and spray paint. Sure, people traded and sold goods, but it was a willing community of sellers, buyers, and traders. Boundaries were respected.

Seventeen years later the interface of the internet has changed significantly.

For starters, there are a few more people online. Pretty much everybody, in fact. Everybody has an email address. Some folks have their own website, some folks have a Facebook page. Some have both. The neighborhood has been built around the Information Superhighway (that’s old timey slang for the internet for those of you who weren’t around back then).

One of the great things about the internet is that it allows people the opportunity to carve out their own space, to build their own presence. It’s easy to build a library of information about your life and to share it with others in the same way that you can customize rooms in your real house or how you can paint the siding whatever shade you want on your 3 bedroom ranch.

All very exciting! And new! And liberating! Life at hyperopportunity!

But every now and again I wish people would remember that social interaction online doesn’t mean that you should be devoid of tact. Your internet neighbors deserve the same kind of respect that your real life neighbors deserve. After all, we’re talking about REAL human beings on the other ends—real humans who sign up for Do-Not-Call Lists and who hate a mailbox flooded with junk mail.

There are few things more annoying than having a nice controlled online environment where you and a few friends (some of them strangers) are hanging out having a conversation and then somebody shows up with a trumpet and blasts out the same riff over and over again, screaming “Hey! Look at me! Help me! What are you guys talking about? Actually, I don’t care! I just want you to buy this!”

Just because the front door is unlocked doesn’t mean it’s a cue for anybody to bust into the party without knocking. Unfortunately, because it’s only the matter of a few mouse clicks to do it, a lot of people do it anyway.

Earlier this week I got an email from a complete stranger—an aspiring writer—who said that we live in the same geographic region and would I please read a sample of her book and give her feedback. No introduction. No description of the book. Nothing that indicated that she’d actually looked at our submission guidelines (that have been closed since last week’s post on this very blog). Would she have taken the same route in the real world with her doctor or an interior designer?

My online space—be it my website or a social media site—is mine. In the same way I don’t want somebody to hang a banner from the trees in front of my house without my permission, I don’t want advertisements cluttering my profile or sales announcements via comments that aren’t an organic part of the conversation.

I want what we had back in ’94, but with an even larger, more informed, faster moving community of real human beings.

 

The End of Clutter

BENJAMIN LEROY

As the end of the year approaches, it has become an annual tradition for me to take holidays off as a chance to organize and clean, hoping to donate as much as I can to anybody who might be able to use it. Before I break my arm patting myself on the back pretending that it’s all about helping others (and mostly it is), I confess it’s definitely satisfying when I look around and see less stuff.

Because stuff gets in the way of life.

The clutter of old things I used to think I couldn’t live without, but now can’t stand to live with, takes up physical and mental space that can be better served by absence.

I can apply this same principle to work. When I know I have an overflowing query pile, it nags at the back of my head something fierce. When I know that my to-be-read stack is deep enough that it’s going to take me days of reading to get caught up, I feel guilt. That gets in the way of my ability to be as efficient as possible in that part of my life.

I can fix that feeling (or at least give it aspirin) by doing things like closing submissions. And let this serve as that announcement. Submissions for Tyrus are temporarily closed while I get caught up.

But that’s only kinda relevant to what I wanted to talk about.

For me, one of the things that makes me reject a submission with the quickness is when I feel claustrophobic while reading a book. It might be too many characters, a convoluted plot, minutiae that doesn’t serve the story or have redemptive charm, or any of a hundred other things. If I feel buried by literary stuff, I do whatever I can to shrug it away (aka not reading).

So, as the holidays come and you work on your novel, be sure to keep your space clear of distraction—both by your computer/typewriter/dictaphone AND the world in your book. It’s what best for both of us. Unless I’m wrong and some of you enjoy the clutter. Do you?

P.S. We're still giving away books for the holidays. Details here.

 

Happy Thanksgiving

Benjamin LeRoy

Happy Thanksgiving everybody. I hope you have an opportunity to spend time with loved ones. I'm glad you're all out there writing and reading.

Way back in 2008 when I was at Bleak House Books and the economy was making like Evel Knievel over the cliff, I decided to give away books for the holidays. We tried the same thing last year with Tyrus and it was a wonderful experience. Because we're running the same program this year, I'm using almost the exact same language. It begins after the period.

Ok, so this is a little different and probably not what they teach at business school, but we’re not really MBA types—we’re in the business of making sure people have a chance to read and enjoy books, because we think books are the cornerstones of so many wonderful experiences in life.

Also, it’s the holiday season (whatever your holiday is, we’re cool with it), and part of the joy of the holiday season is making sure that people know they are loved and appreciated. If you’re here right now reading this, you’re already a part of the extended Tyrus family (even if you’re the crazy uncle that makes us a little nervous every now and then).

Here’s the deal—we’re giving away free books this holiday season. If you follow us on Twitter, you know we do this every now and then. If you don’t know about it, you can read a very sweet article about it here. No strings attached, no gimmicks needed, we just want you to read. Read more at the Huffington Post

So here’s part one: If you are strapped for cash, but you’d really like to give somebody a present so they know that you’re thinking about them and they know how much you love them because you want them to read, we need you to provide us with the name of the book(s) you’d like us to send, the address(es) of the recipient(s), and a personalized message from you (if you want that kind of thing). Yes, books can be plural, but you shouldn’t abuse the system, so be cool about it.

And here’s part two: If you’ve got a couple of extra dollars rattling around in the cushions of your couch that you won’t miss, and you want to help out with the shipping and handling costs, you can donate up to $10 (please, please do not go over $10) to our PayPal account (infoATtyrusbooks.com). We’ll list you by name or initials or nickname on the website. Your help in this matter is just as important as the books that we are giving away. Any left over money at the end will be very transparently donated on behalf of everybody to some literacy charity (we're taking suggestions).

For more info, click here.

 

Three Tips for Querying! (Because everybody loves a list)

Benjamin LeRoy

I’ve been noticing a bunch of activity in the query pile this week. Coupled with my recent visits to writing conferences, I figured now is as good of a time as any to talk about the business of submitting to an agent or a publisher. No doubt, for some of you this is a topic that has been beaten to death, and I won’t make any promises of anything groundbreaking here. I won’t be offended if you beam yourself away until next week.

Okay, now that the knowitalls  are gone, let’s discuss this in a frank and grown-up way. Even if it sounds like I’m being a jerk, I can promise you that I am not. I respect the hell out of people who decide to write.

(1)    Find the guidelines of the agent/publisher you are querying. Follow them. A mental checklist to follow would be to confirm that the person you are querying has an interest in the type of book you’ve written, that your book is within (or very very close) to the word count, confirm that the person is accepting submissions, and prepare your submission to spec. If the agent asks for 25 pages and a synopsis in an email, email that. If they ask only for a query letter be mailed to their office, do that.

Like I said, our query pile has grown a little more than usual this week. I’m assuming something got mentioned on a website somewhere. Some of the queries are going through the legitimate channel, following the guidelines from the Tyrus Books website. Still other queries are coming through an email address associated with F+W Crime. It should be noted that (1) F+W Crime doesn’t actually publish books under that name, and (2) it CLEARLY states on the F+W Crime site that “We are NOT currently accepting submissions of any sort.”

So, why are people submitting there? I don’t know. What am I supposed to do with those queries? Do I owe those people a response? A redirect? I don’t know. Part of me wants to be helpful and say, “Well, actually…” But then part of me is also working on forecasting for 2012, publicity efforts for new books, reading the books that we’ve already got in house, etc.

Tangentially, an idea for a novel is never enough for anybody to accept. The proof is in the pudding. Every now and then I’ll have somebody tell me at great length about a book they are going to write. As somebody who has written a few novels of his own, and knows how much the story can change from the excited discussion stage to “the end” stage, I can do little more than encourage an author to quit talking about the book and to write it. Don’t query something you haven’t written.

(2)    I want you to be confident in your book. For me, that means you’ve taken your time to polish and edit that manuscript into the best it can possibly be. One of my favorite authors, a guy I’ve had the pleasure of publishing for ten years, is John Galligan. By the time I see a book from him, he’s already gone through five, six, maybe ten drafts. He doesn’t show it to me until all of the nagging doubts are in quiet in his head.

Sometimes some people make Publisher Bear sad when they mistake confidence with arrogance. If your query letter says, “My book is a guaranteed bestseller!” or “I’ve got a legit connection to Oprah. If you publish this, we’ll count the money together!” my first reaction is to fill up the virtual recycle bin. This industry is so in flux that it’s nearly impossible to predict what tomorrow is going to bring. Couple that with there being no formula for making a best seller (if there was, no book would ever fail), and I start getting worried, super worried that the other another assertion, not yet voiced, will be, “I deserve a million dollar advance!” A conversation better left unhad.

That’s like showing up on a first date—a blind date, no less—with spaghetti stains on your shirt, talking loudly, asking questions just so you can give your answer, etc. etc. And nobody calls that guy back. Ever. So don’t be that guy.

(3)    Remember that if your book isn’t a good fit for a publisher or an agent, that isn’t a condemnation of you as a human being. Relative to the amount of queries coming in, the openings for new professional relationships with any given publisher or agent are few and far between. To be effective at what we do, we need to have the time to do multiple things for those people with whom we work. We can’t be the best we can be if we’re stretched too thin.

A’ight, I’m out of here to get back to work, but if YOU have questions about the querying process, put them in the comments section and we’ll keep the dialogue going.

Publisher Bear, out.

 

On Plagiarism and Scandal and Expectations

Earlier this week a full on scandal broke in the publishing world when Q.R. Markham’s Assassin of Secrets was called out for its liberal use of borrowing from other books. To be clear, it wasn’t simply a matter of a few overly coincidental passages, it was a study in cut/paste and find/replace, with whole paragraphs mirroring (with the exception of character names) the work of post-Ian Fleming James Bond books. Ed Champion dissected from the beginning here.

As it happens, the Internet Outrage Machine ™ freaked out. Many fine questions were raised. Who is Q.R. Marham? Did he really think he was going to get away with this? Is this some experimental, post-modern uber hipster prank on the publishing world?

My answers, in order are, (1) I don’t know. Some dude in Brooklyn apparently. (2) I don’t think it’s possible that he thought he was going to get away with it. (3) Probably. I’m not sure what purpose it served, though in reading earlier interviews with the guy, it sounds like he was a frustrated literary fiction author who likely wanted to make some statement about the state of publishing. To which I say—“The line begins back there, and you had ought not to cut in front of me.”

Another outrage popping up on messageboards I sometimes visit was—

“How the hell did the publisher (Mulholland Books, a division of Little, Brown) let this get published?! Whoever the editor was should be fired!!1!!one!! He/she didn’t even recognize these passages from the James Bond novels?!?!?!?11!”

I’m here to tell you, straight up, and with all of the honesty I can muster—I would have totally been busted by the same thing. There are maybe two or three books in my life that I’ve read that if I saw passages from them in a submission on my desk I’d recognize it for what it was. I’ve got Literary Alzheimers in most cases, and I can’t always tell you the protagonist’s name or what he looks like a day after I’ve read something.

If I’m listening to music, I can pick out riffs, guitar tones, harmonies, bass lines, etc. that have been ripped off. But that’s because I hear music in an entirely different way from how I read books. That’s the way my brain works.

“But if they’re going to publish a book in [fill in the genre here], they should be intimately familiar with what has come before!!!”

Yes, outrager, I hear you. But the practical reality of things is that publishing in a particular genre certainly requires understanding the conventions, the tropes, the formula, etc., but it also requires the vision to work outside of what has come before. It’s totally unrealistic to expect an editor/publisher to (a) read every book that’s come before, and (b) remember the passages, and then (c) publish quality original work.

 Not sure how this is all going to play out. Should be interesting. I hope it doesn't end up under the rug, but there's certainly been a weird radio silence from some of the players involved.

So You Want to Write a Novel in a Month

Benjamin LeRoy

November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), an exciting four weeks of caffeine fueled plotting and writing. It’s lesser known cousin, NaQuShtgunMo, begins December 1^st. For right now, let’s not worry about the future, and instead, take a quick look at what to remember if you’re trying to write a novel this month.

(1)    Sit Down, Stay There—Everybody talks about what they are going to do. Nobody remembers the talkers. It’s all about the people who actually do. The first step to running this sprint is sitting down and staying there. Focus on the screen in front of you. Visualize all of the cool places you might go and remember that the following things are your enemy (or at least a friend that you’re sick of seeing and you won’t be able to tolerate until next month): Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, other salacious websites, television programs, and movies.

(2)    It’s Going to Be Messy—and that’s ok. Take the adrenaline rush and keep your fingers moving. There isn’t any time for writer’s block. Let the book be a big sprawling beast that goes 150,000 words if you can do it. Your writing car has no rear view mirror and no brakes. Gun it. Swerve all over the road if you need to. It’s late night in Montana and there are no other cars on the road for you to worry about.

(3)    The Loony Toons Mirage Rigged Tree—Sometime a little after Thanksgiving you’re going to get to the end of the road. NaNoWriMo Avenue will dead end. Here’s a little secret though, it’s a mirage. If you need to keep going, you can. It’s a goal, it’s an artificial deadline, it’s November 30^th.

(4)    Resisting NaQuShtgnMo—Let’s fast forward to the second week of December when you’ve had a chance to put the final period at the end of your manuscript, still riding the caffeine high (or perhaps you’ve graduated to trucker speed), and you want everybody to READ THIS BOOK RIGHT NOW~! So maybe you get an itchy query finger and you’re ready to spray bookshot everywhere to all the agents and publishers you can email. That’s when you’re going to want to tap the brakes. The writing process is more than first drafts. The editing process is not a race and it’s important that before you send off queries or, in the new frontier, upload the book to Amazon, you make sure you’ve made the book the best it can be.

Alright, now I'm going to climb out of the driver's education car, hand you the keys, and stay out of your way. Go, go, go!

 

Losing Our Reference Points

Benjamin LeRoy

Hello from 30,000 feet.

Today’s post is one near and dear to my heart about the importance of travel. I’m on my way from Madison to Boston with a brief layover in Washington D.C. Once I land in Boston I’ll hop in a rental car and I’ll go…well, I’m not sure exactly. I don’t always plan things out.

Therein lies some of my friendly travel advice that also doubles up as writing advice. If you’re able to, because you’re traveling by yourself or with a group of like-minded folks, I encourage you to find your adventure by ditching the guidebook.

Sure, there are many wonderful things you can do in the Boston area—walk Paul Revere’s famous ride, visit Fenway, eat really good pizza at Pizzeria Regina in the North End—there are a million things to do, but most of those things have already been done by lots of somebody elses and if your ears and brain are tuned to the frequency, you’ve already vicariously done some of those things. It’s our shared travel experience.

You know when you crack open a book and you meet the protagonist and two pages later some lady shows up and the next three paragraphs are all about her emerald eyes or her fiery red hair and you immediately know that this is all just a set up for the sex scene that’s going to happen somewhere around page 200? And then, when that scene shows up you’re non-plused because it doesn’t live up to the hype and because you already had a feel for it because of every other sex scene you’ve read in your life it’s just kinda meh.

Unfortunately, that’s what happens when you hit the tourist spot. The magic that you expect and hope to find is often replaced by a “oh, wait, so there aren’t laser beams and pots of gold at the feet of the Statue of Liberty?”

A few years ago when I was hanging out with Peff Dog, he told me a story about a piece he’d written for National Georgraphic featuring America’s most famous witch, Lori Cabot. He met up with her in Dogtown—an an abandoned settlement from the 1600s on the north coast of Massachusetts outside of Gloucester—for an interview and to watch her perform ceremonies. There were other people there from Cabot’s group and a photographer from National Geographic. A unique experience to be sure and when the photographs were developed there were streaks of weird light running through many of them that the photographer was unable to explain and that Kodak said was not a result of defective film.

Oh yeah, and the place is reputed to be haunted because, as the story goes, when the residents of Dogtown decided that their proximity to the water made them susceptible to a naval attack they moved to Gloucester, except for the crazy and the infirmed who stayed behind with their dogs that howled in the night and could be heard from miles away.

Well of course I wanted to go to Dogtown immediately. And since Peff hadn’t been there in decades, he was game to go again.

A lot of that legend could be bullshit, but that doesn’t much matter to me. When I went there, I wasn’t sure what to expect, so instead of coasting in tourist mode, all of my senses were heightened because it was new. I heard barking in the wind. I saw things that weren’t there. I felt alive and in control of my own course instead of one 3-d participant in a welcome center brochure.

I’m not a scientist, so I can’t offer you any facts or empirical evidence for this next assertion, but I’m quite convinced that when we, as writers, or musicians, or filmmakers, or any other chronicler of the human condition are in foreign territory and one that may trigger survival instincts—we really see things fresh. Cliches disappear because we lose our reference points. And that’s not a bad thing.

Anyway, the captain of this here plane is giving the shut ‘er down signal, so I’m going to finish this piece right here. After I’ve landed at Logan I’ll go somewhere.

I just don’t know where.

(if there are typos, incomplete thoughts, poor grammar, I'll try to address the next time I get to an internet hotspot)

Staring Ugly Right Between Its Ugly Eyes

Benjamin LeRoy

I don’t believe in absolute evil.

That becomes an obstacle when I sit down to go through the queries I receive. Invariably, there will be a few pitches that describe serial killers from central casting who kill just to be evil and are evil just so they can kill. I don’t even finish these letters most of the time. I head to the ol’ typewriter and bang out one of these:

Dear SoandThis,

Thank you for thinking of us. Best of lucking finding a home for your novel.

Sincerely,

PublisherGuy

The problem with “evil” characters is that they often feel cut from cardboard, and I don’t learn much of anything from one dimensional diagrams of 3-D objects. I read and publish because I’m trying to better understand the human condition. I am constantly in search of answers to why we’re all here and what we’re supposed to do with the precious few years we’ve got. My understanding of bad guys shouldn’t be limited to regurgitated morality tales featuring Snidely Whiplash from the old Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons. Yet, there it is, in my inbox, like clockwork.  

Why?

Is it because the author’s understanding of good and evil is cartoonish in its complexity? Is it because the author is cheating on the whole “show vs. tell” thing? Is it because of the misguided notion that a reader needs the character dynamics unequivocally clear to make sure they don’t mistakenly clap when the good guy gets knocked on his ass?

If the good guy is anything like us—he can learn a lot from getting knocked on his ass. In fact, we should clap when he gets knocked on his ass, it gives him a chance to get up, to overcome or to die trying. The dramatic tension in books, as in life, is in the question of will we make it?

I’ve met people who have been accused and convicted of pretty much all the crimes I know. From battery to drug trafficking to embezzlement to murder. I wouldn’t lie to you and say that I’d invite all of them over to my house for a sleepover or anything, but I can also tell you that those people have told me stories that have changed my understanding of the world, have made me laugh, have made me see them as more than chess pieces from newspaper headlines. I make no apologies for the ugly actions of others and ultimately, if the universe works like I think it works, they’ll be held to account for their actions. Without fail, they’ve all been knocked on their ass, and they’ve all had to ask themselves the question—can I get up?

We are complex characters—as authors, as readers, as sons and daughters, as husbands and wives. Recognize that when you look in the mirror. Understand that when you hold hands with the one you love. Be mindful of it when you sit down to write your book.

You deserve it. So do your readers.

Love,

PublisherGuy

Benjamin LeRoy

I have tried starting this piece a half-dozen times since Sunday morning.

My original intention was to write a about ebook pricing and to be done before the first pitch of the Milwaukee Brewers game against the St. Louis Cardinals. I had a target. I had ammo. I had an itchy trigger finger and a bad disposition.

It also turns out that I didn’t have the whole story. So I read every single article on the internet about ebook pricing, including all of the hostile exchanges on messageboards and comment threads.

Before I go any further, it’s probably worth pointing out some personal history on the subject of ebooks. A history, I should note, that is in no way flattering and that might suggest you take anything I have to say on the matter with a grain of salt.

A few years ago Publishers Weekly profiled me as part of a series they were doing about 50 People Under 40 in the publishing industry. Here is the first line of that article—

“Publisher Ben LeRoy calls himself a “traditionalist,” insisting he'll never read an e-book…”

Whether or not it appeared in the article, during the interview I confidently said ebooks would someday be a part of the publishing landscape, sure, but not in any meaningful way and even then, not for a long, long, long time. I’d be dead and buried in the hard Wisconsin dirt before I gave up paper. And I wasn’t the only one.

And I meant it. Goddamn, did I ever mean it.

A book is bent pages. It’s that smell. It’s a cover to examine in the hopes of finding a clue to what will be inside.

Just seeing a book, even in its most generic form—on a library shelf, on my parents’ coffee table, in a reader’s hands on a crosstown bus—fills me, on an instinctual level, with incredible amounts of curiosity. I am excited about the possibilities of what could be inside, imaging, like I do, that some grizzled author on a distant shore has put an essential piece of him/herself into a bottle, and has, with the strength of Atlas, heaved the glass into the ocean. This is our rendezvous. The answers to the universe are between the covers.

If, at this point, you’d like to accuse me of being a touch dramatic about these matters, I’ll accept your charges. I will not apologize. I will drink the Hemlock. I will not deny books three times before the rooster crows.

Even if the whole of a book is so much more than paper and ink—the paper and the ink are, no doubt, an essential marrow. Right?

That Publishers Weekly interview was done in early 2008. By mid-2009 I’d left Bleak House Books to start Tyrus Books, where we made it a part of our plan to simultaneously release paper and electronic books for all of our titles. Sure, I wasn't reading ebooks, but I wasn’t so blind that I couldn’t see there was a market, and maybe that market was growing faster than I had anticipated.

It wasn’t until this spring that I got around to purchasing an e-reader, mostly justifying it to myself as a necessary component of quality control. And I did so begrudgingly. A child choking down asparagus because it was good for me.

After a week or two of using the device—storing submissions, proofreading forthcoming Tyrus titles, reading books I hadn’t read in years—I understood that things I was sure I knew, were actually different, and that most of everything I’d confessed to Publishers Weekly, was a bunch of bullshit. What I loved about books wasn’t actually missing. The musicality of the words and the connectivity of the human experience were all right there in battery operated glory.

Ben LeRoy, traditionalist was dead. Mea Culpa and all of that.

Now that I’ve come around, evolved, whatever, I think it important that in the embracing of exciting new technologies that make it faster, easier, and cheaper to produce books, we don’t lose the essence of what has always made books special.

I believe in the power and necessity of a skilled editor to make a book as tight as it can be. I think written art needs to be presented in as visually appealing a manner as art art. I know I have an over-invested interest in promoting and upholding the sacredness of books, but I always have. As a reader. As a writer.

I don’t know how pricing is going to shake out, and I’ve already given ample reasoning for why I should not make proclamations about the future, but price points of $.99 or $2.99 seem absurdly low to me. Perhaps it’s oversentimentality, but I don’t think books should be competing with lottery tickets or a Snickers as impulse items.

The only way I can figure it, for books to be sustainable at $.99 or $2.99 would be to cut back on the costs associated with producing them. Yes, printing and paper are gone, but editing and design should not follow. They are necessary. So is promotion. And most importantly—authors should get paid for the work they produce.

I know one of the current arguments is that books at a $2.99 price point make up, in volume, what they miss in per unit revenue. I am skeptical of magic bullets and this is no exception. But I’ll bite my tongue this time around and spend my time collecting bottles on the shore, doing what I can to get them to the market.

Joining the Chorus

Benjamin LeRoy

Last night we all got the news that Apple visionary Steve Jobs died. Before that had come across the wire, I was busy with a piece about the current Occupy Wall Street (and its sympatico cousins) movement. That piece is momentarily suspended so I can address the breaking news.

A confession—I’m not really a Mac guy. I’m not somebody who hangs out at Apple stores or harbors a fetish for the newest gadget that the company produces. On the other hand, I own an iPhone and an iPad, and until a few days ago when the hard drive melted, I used a MacBook for work.

The guy’s impact on our modern life would be hard to overstate.

People like that don’t come along often. Rarer still are those visionaries that do come along, significantly impact the scene, and manage to be half-understood/appreciated in their own time. I think it’s fair to say that Mr. Jobs was one of them.

A few quotes attributed to Jobs have been making the rounds of the internet. I would urge you as aspiring writers, as aspiring humans who would like to leave the world a better place than you found it, to swallow them whole and to make compasses from them.

I say all of that, not from a sensationalized place of group mourning, but because some truths are more universal than others, and Jobs, in a few words, gave clarity to some major truths.

There is nothing to be gained by adding anything to these words (and it’s quite likely I’ve already said too much). I only ask that as you work on your book, as you worry about hot trends or the size of an advance, that you really stop to think about the wisdom behind Mr. Jobs’ words.

“Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Banned Books But Why

I need your help.

I’ve seen a lot of space dedicated to Banned Books Week in the last few days. Most of the titles I’ve seen mentioned were classics like the Grapes of Wrath or Huck Finn. And while I’m glad that those books have survived the times, I’m curious to know—what has been banned lately?

To be clear, I’m not interested in stories of Harry Potter being pulled from a school library. I’d like to know about books that are current and edgy and for whatever reason, have been yanked from shelves.

Also, lest this be mistaken for something it isn’t—I’m asking out of genuine curiosity, because as I work on things around the Tyrus compound, I am, unfortunately, more oblivious to the things going on in the larger publishing world. I’m a headline skimmer and a fill-the-story-in kind of guy. I’m not proud about it.

If we can’t generate a significant list of recent releases getting thrown into a fire, I think we need to ask—Are fewer titles being banned because we’ve become more permissive as a society? Or is it because publishing houses aren’t willing to risk putting out edgy books?

(And by edgy, I don’t mean manufactured controversy.)

I can already hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth from the folks who are going to tell me that there are dozens if not hundreds of small presses putting out the edgy books I want to know about. But the unfortunate reality of things is that those books will never have to be officially banned, they can simply fall victim to financial  and logistical restrictions. Translated—they aren’t being bought because the shelf space is better occupied by the ninth James Patterson novel of the year.

If, as one theory might go, bannable books aren’t being published by large publishing, why is that? Is it a question of fear regarding the material? Is there something inherent in the editorial make-up of the publishing world that stops the gatekeepers from recognizing the necessary but controversial voices of the folks on the fringes? Or do people who could get it, get it, but don’t know how to market a book, or if there even is a large enough market to support the book?

As I think about these questions, I’m left asking myself what we mean by “ban” and as a follow up question--who has the power to do it. And what books haven’t been given a chance to be banned because they never were published due to lack of editorial vision?

 

The Stop and the Break

Ben LeRoy

When I sat down tonight, I planned on writing a brief and lighthearted recap of last weekend’s Bouchercon in St. Louis. But then things happened, my mood turned, and now I’m in no position to trade on small talk.

Last week, after a month of tweaks and fixes, we went live with a new Tyrus Books website. Included on the site were brand new submission guidelines. I tried to be more detailed than I’d been in the past, because no matter how hard I try to let people know who we are and what we do, I inevitably get submissions that aren’t right for us.

Those of you who have heard me speak at a conference or follow me on Twitter know that, even though we publish what is often called “crime fiction,” I’m not big on fast-paced thrillers, books about serial killers, or anything else with an inflated body count.

And it’s not that I’m squeamish. I’ve grown up on a steady diet of heavy metal, gangsta rap, video games, and pro wrestling. I own guns. I’ve talked to real-life bad guys who have done real-life bad things.

Back to the whole crime fiction thing.

In books, like in real life, murder is never just about the victim and the killer. There is always the shockwave that follows, that blows out from the scene to destroy families and senses of normalcy and to rearrange what we know about things in ways we could have never understood before.

I can’t—even when reading fiction—ignore the emotional impact of murder. The author may very well be ready to move on to the next page, but I get caught up in the “what if…” and “how would I…” questions that I’m sure would plague me in real life.

Sometimes I am the victim.

Sometimes I am the killer.

But the older I get, the more I approach it from the perspective of a son. Or a brother.

Not just the son or brother of the victim, but I often wonder what it would be like to be kin to the monster. What hell comes down on the family of the killer?

Sure, there is the horror of the crime. But there is also the horror of knowing that somebody who is close to you, who appears in family photographs, who laughed with you before things derailed is guilty of the transgression.

One of the most meaningful books to me as a publisher, as a writer, and as a human being is Mikal Gilmore’s stunning family biography, Shot in the Heart. In the book, Gilmore traces the history of his family, including that of his infamous brother Gary, who was convicted of murdering two men, hotel clerk Ben Bushnell and gas station attendant Max Jensen, in the Provo, Utah area during the summer of 1976.

In a testament to his writing ability, but also to the sometimes inconvenient complexity of human beings, Mikal Gilmore paints a detailed portrait of his brother that goes far deeper than the understanding anybody reading a newspaper could have gotten. Gilmore discusses the tragic roots of his family tree, the power of familial legend, and the fight to keep his brother alive, even after Gary accepted his sentence of death by firing squad. He talks about how hard it is to have a regular existence when everybody knows who you are. He gives some explanation for how it’s possible to be closer to the murderer than the murdered, but still end up a victim of the situation.

(Last year, in what I think was an attempt to understand better what happened with Gary Gilmore, I went to the scene of the Bushnell murder. I wrote about it for the Huffington Post here. )

A little over an hour ago the State of Georgia executed Troy Davis, a man convicted of murdering Mark MacPhail, an off-duty Savannah police officer working as a bus station security guard during the summer of 1989.

Davis’ pending execution generated spirited debate on the Internet. Doubts over his guilt were raised.  Political and religious leaders called for a stay of execution. Vigils were held. But in the end, needles broke skin, pentobarbital was injected, and a few minutes later, Davis, like MacPhail 22 years before him, was dead at the hands of others.

Words like “justice” and “closure” were thrown around. 

I make no claims about the guilt or innocence of Troy Davis. I wasn’t there. I didn’t sit through the trial. I, however, don’t believe in state sanctioned killing.

My opinions on the matter at this point are excess shouting in an already loud public square. But when I try to do the math of the situation—adding up two dead men, a lost father, a lost son, and all of the implications of being passive and active bystanders, I’m left with a painful conclusion.

We are all the victim.

We are all the killer.

And this is not a book.

What's Hot in the Words Department

Benjamin LeRoy

Firstly—thank you everybody for the warm welcome to Dead Guy. I look forward to adding what I can.

Secondly—let’s jump right into the fire. Let’s talk what’s hot. Let’s talk trends.

I spent last weekend in Denver at the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers conference, rubbing elbows with agents, editors, and authors alike. And, as it always does at some point, the question was raised by one curious party—“So, what do you see as the next big trend in books?”

Are vampires still the thing? Are we finally ready for the resurgence of the Da Vinci Code milieu? Is 2012 the year that the Western rides back onto the scene, white-hatted and triumphant?

My answer was the same as it always is. I have no idea.

I don’t have my finger on the pulse of anything. But let’s say hypothetically that I knew what was hot today or I knew what was going to be booming business in a year—I still wouldn’t say it out loud.

That’s not because I’m cruel. Nor is it because I plan on strategically shoving a bunch of Tyrus titles into the marketplace before anybody else can get there.

It’s because I’m not confident in the quality of books that are written to cash in on a trend. As such, I’d never ask an author to jump on a literary bandwagon.

My advice is to pursue the book that means something to you. I want to see the author’s guts on the page (not literally of course). In the most pretentious way I can possibly frame this (so that you don’t have to), I want to know that the author genuinely suffered and pained to write a novel. I want to know that the author walked through his or her life carrying emotional baggage for two—his own and that of his protagonist.

But! you might protest, “I happen to be very passionate about the coming trend.”

Fine. Write that book. As long as you’re passionate about it, you’ll get a pat on the back from me and a “Go get’em, Sport!” from the bleachers. My role in life isn’t to be an obstacle in yours.

It also isn’t to be an exploiter and perpetuator of things I don’t believe in.

You know that point when a new subgenre of music has evolved from fringe culture to begrudging mainstream acceptance and then finally is used in a McDonald’s commercial (because even Ronald knows that a gangsta version of the Hamburgler can slang two beef patties, special sauce, blah blah)? It kills me when I see the literary version of that on bookshelves, or being pushed aggressively on Twitter, or being pitched to me in the men’s room of one more conference hotel somewhere along the Interstate.

Yes, I know, publishing is a business, and yes, somebody is probably making good money off that, and yes, that’s the product people want right now. You’re right.

You’re right.

But I don’t want to participate or endorse or leave its half-baked legacy on my half-etched tombstone.

There are few things in life that mean more to me than the written word. I am a true believer in its power to educate, to illuminate, to bring us all together in some greater human connection that I can’t readily articulate. I know its magic when I feel it.

I also know that the most meaningful part of it is not cranked out on an assembly line or planned in a board room. It happens, organically and authentically. Sometimes out of nowhere. It hits like Holyfield and bites like Tyson.

Starting in the next few days, Tyrus Books is giving away Nathan Singer’s novel, In the Light of You. For free. For your Kindle, NOOK, etc. You can leave this one on my tombstone.