Raising the American Author (Who Won’t Slowly Die)

I am an author of literary fiction who grew up in a jobless, depressed area where people may always be "laboring harder for less and less" — the kind of town Jonathan Franzen (correctly) identified as a place Amazon chooses to build warehouses. My "publishing career" has been fitful. In 1994, my first published story won a Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren Award, and at the banquet I was slapped to attention before some bright literary lights, introduced to a Park Avenue agent, and, ultimately, received a year's worth of heart-stopping rejections from editors of a caliber I could only dream of reaching again. Nearly twenty years later, after riding out rollercoaster economies, raising kids, and writing after-work, I was again struck by good fortune when Kindle Singles picked up two of my stories and, nearly overnight, I acquired thousands readers and a renewed hope of living a literary life.

I care about the health of the American author and publishing as much as anyone who's been fascinated by the Amazon-Hachette fight. But my perspective on that spat — and the Department of Justice's anti-trust case against Apple, or related responses by Franzen, Scott Turow, Roxana Robinson, and others I admire — lacks the same End-Times savor you hear out there. I can't see Jeff Bezos as the Anti-Christ (Franzen's image) or Darth Vader (Turow's) because it's been my experience that if American authors — big and small — are indeed experiencing a "slow death," neither Amazon nor the Big Six traditional publishers will have killed us. Nor will we be able to blame the latest unthinking, amoral technology that we'll continue to use each day. We need to step outside the storm and listen close for the whisper inside to see what's killing America's authors, how they might be saved, and how we might give our nation's literature, overall, a boost in the process.

Where I grew up, books were a little removed from everyday life — luxurious and even exotic things. My mother was the only reader of serious fiction in my extended families. At our annual Labor Day picnic, I recall her once trying to talk about In Cold Blood, which she'd just picked up at the library, and my aunts ignoring her. She'd also kept the written records for our family, and in my scrapbook she reported that my first full sentence was, "I gotta read the book." I don't remember saying that, obviously, but either I'd been mimicking her or it had been hopeful parenting on her part, since I didn't read with any real appetite until my late teens. She'd also encouraged our reading with trips to the big library in the next town, on the Wednesdays she had the car for grocery shopping; on our way back to my father's plant after school, we'd take home two books each from the Athenaeum. My library picks were usually how-to arts-and-crafts books, but it was here that I began loving books, the things themselves, sniffing their rich, fragrant spines under my mother's tutelage, between the stacks.

No one we knew gave or received books as gifts, except Santa, who'd brought us full sets of the just-published Dr. Seuss and Step-Up-to-Reading series. Beyond the purchases I made at our annual Scholastic Book Fair — mostly to fit in, socially — I didn't spend money on a new book until eighth grade, and then it was a repair manual for my 10-speed bike.

My love of books, and my eventual compulsion to try to write one, didn't take root until I was 15, when, in the pit of the 1974 recession, my under-employed father moved us away to New York's North Country. Fueled by the spirit of the times and the "Mother Earth News," we moved to an old farm to become self-sufficient. There, aside from the St. Lawrence River, we lived miles from anything but other small farms. We were 45 minutes by bike from the library and nearly an hour by car from anyplace on the States' side that sold books.

By then my mother had filled our bookshelves at home with the International Collector's Library and Literary Guild editions. To make my new room a little less foreign, I decided to build a collection of my own. I pulled an old soil-sifter out of a shed, for shelves, and once I landed a part-time job down-river, joined the mail-order book clubs. Initially, I acquired titles on the basis of reputation. The Odyssey, for example, clearly deserved space on the top-rung of my sifter, as well as one of the new bookplates I signed with a calligraphy pen, even though I wouldn't get around to reading it for five years. Other books were bought simply because they were Good Deals. Particularly the matching sets.

That's how Kurt Vonnegut's early work got into my room, and why, that first summer on the farm — the loneliest year of my life — I ended up taking Player Piano to the hay loft. For some undiagnosed reason, I read very slowly back then, at speech rate, but Vonnegut always reads very quickly, and for the first time I got that shudder of recognition all passionate readers can describe — Life is just exactly like that!, I said to myself, in wonder and, a little, in delusion, as if I'd already experienced anything of the alienation corporate workers might feel.

Up till then, the only fiction I'd read of my own free will contained dwarves, but the isolation I'd begun to feel that summer — stuck deep in the woods and groping through the lostness of puberty — made the world I read most real. Or, at least, preferred. I needed more, and my attraction to books changed. Where, as a child, I'd most loved handling the artifacts themselves, I now craved the real stuff, the insides. I read more, very simply and literally, hearing each author speak directly to me as a peer. By the end of my senior English class, in which I was led almost sentence-by-sentence through Walden by a brilliant public school teacher named Eleanor Smith, who'd never told us she had terminal cancer, I'd felt compelled at the last possible moment to forget the portfolios I'd sent to art schools and apply as an English major, instead. I would become a Great Writer, I told Mrs. Smith, since she, and some others, and my own barn-sized ego had assured me it was my singular, certain fate. Not only do I gotta read the book, evidently, but I gotta write it, too.

Thus began a Seven-Year Undergraduate Experience (another story entirely) that concluded with earning a B.A. in Liberal Arts from St. John's College, "the Great Books program" in Annapolis. With a college-aged son of my own now entering a much more challenging world, I understand what a stunning luxury that experience was for someone like me, first in the family to attend a four-year college, but at the time, my arrogance and generous financial aid allowed me to approach this high-minded pursuit as my rightful duty. At St. John's, the western canon — as defined by Mortimer Adler, back then — is read in chronological order and discussed at the seminar table, through essays, and in oral examinations. Their promotional brochure made profound sense to me, and jibed well with the need to prepare for the End-Times which I'd often felt during my self-sufficient farm days, on the Eve of Destruction. Yes — I thought — the purpose of college should be to leave its graduates able to reconstruct Western Civilization from the ashes! In the same literal-mindedness with which I'd approached not only literature, but all of life, I'd thought: If you plan to be a Great Writer, what better way to prepare yourself than by first reading all the Great Books?

And there really is some truth in this italicized idea — a liberal arts education will give you the most durable intellectual stuff you'll need to do just about anything in life. It will not, however, guarantee job skills upon graduation. The despair I felt at being jettisoned from St. John's bell tower rivaled what I'd gone through in my family's move to the North Country. I'd had lots of jobs by then, but none of the skills I'd acquired felt compatible with the rarified vocation — to be a writer — that I could no longer postpone. Although I had worked happily in college libraries, sniffing and shelving books, all those choice spots seemed to have been filled in the outside world. So, I wondered — What's the next best place in a small tourist town for a writer to work?

A bookstore!

We had two independent bookstores in Annapolis in 1984. One, West Street Books, was a haunted, dozen-room, two-story used bookstore that was so fantastic it had floor-plans by each door, with stacks up the stairs and over the toilets. I'd spent full Saturday afternoons hanging out there, as a student. The other, on one of our cobble-stoned avenues, was Charing-Cross, which sold new books and would special order anything you wanted — a service which, back then, a bookseller could do far better than anyone else, and faster than an inter-library loan.

Neither bookstore was hiring, however. That left Crown Books, the new chain outlet on the colonial tourist strip, downtown. Crown was making a killing then, selling discounted bestsellers, cut-rate remainders and coffee-table books, with the largest periodical selection in the county. I was hired immediately as Assistant Manager. This was something to write home about, even though, at just a few cents over minimum wage, and with a 44-hour work-week, you could see me as someone still "laboring harder for less," but at least I would be doing so with books. And besides, don't most writers labor for less to write them? I never did get a clear answer about my over-long work-week, and it wasn't anything to discuss with the staff I supervised, but I later guessed that my Manager pushed us all a little so we could keep our sales dominance over the other Crowns in the area, and thus keep our staffing levels high. It also allowed our Manager a little independence in terms of choosing inventory — a reward from the Regional Office.

My real education in publishing began here.

By discounting all New York Times bestsellers, and displaying them by category and format (hardcover, trade paperback, and mass-market) against the back wall, our Crown franchise was all but guaranteed sales and foot traffic. You didn't even need to read the New York Times to see what's most popular — just walk in. And when you did, to get to the bestsellers you had no choice but to walk around the islands of everything else we sold. By discounting all books, and using the bestsellers as our "loss-leaders" — a new term back then? — we were virtually assured of making the sale of every bestseller in town. I don't recall ever seeing more than two customers at a time in our local indie bookstores, as a student — I being one, and a friend often the second — but Crown Books on Main Street felt like the World's Busiest Bookstore to me. During tourist months, or whenever the legislature was in session, we had two registers running all through lunch-hour.

We received lists each week from the Regional Office of what we were to sell, how many copies we should keep on the shelf of each title, and when and how many we would send back as a title's sales fell. This was years before big business would beat the rest of us at harnessing large amounts of computerized data. We did our "counts" of the physical inventory each week on foot, sent the numbers in on hand-written hard copy, and the Regional Office would decide what we needed; they'd send the stock back, along with posters and stand-up displays. We were also told which titles to put in the front windows, although we always had a spot to play with, and at night our staff — nearly all St. John's students — would sneak a favorite title out there, usually something that was no longer available as anything but paperback. They did this when they weren't trying to hide in the aisles to read. As Assistant Manager, I turned a blind eye.

None of this, in itself, was too great a cause for despair. After all, Crown Books claimed to be nothing more than a customer-focused retail outlet, and even though the discount-remainder sales model was new, Crown's advertising — the full back page of the Washington Post's book section each Sunday — wasn't claiming to do anything more than offer every book for less. And it was exciting for me, as a Soon-to-Be Great Writer, to see the growth of a new breed of trade paperbacks that year, especially the Vintage Contemporaries series, which brought the North Country's Frederick Exley back into print, and which introduced brand-new voices like Mona Simpson and Jay McInerny to people like me. Their paper smelled better than in regular paperbacks, and the new-wave covers made me want to spend the three-hours' net wage it would cost to buy them. (We didn't know, back then, that the pages would gray and spines split in ten short years.)

What was an occasion for despair were the pulpy, mass-market paperbacks. Any copy of a Great Book that Crown had on the shelves was usually in this format only. The same was true for all but the most recently published or translated literary books. Mass-market paperback is where all good books go, one day, to die — the nursing home of publication. The spines are fragile, the paper rough and weak, the print blurry, the smell — well, if the quotidian has an odor, that's it. Nonetheless, if you were a serious reader, the cheap mass-market titles were, in many ways, the real meat of the Crown store, because not only would each bestseller go into mass-market — usually after nine months, with a trade edition in the interim — but nearly every classic of the past remained there in print. We displayed these small books along the side walls, spine-out, under headings like Classics and Fiction, and at prices so low even a Crown employee didn't need to work more than an hour to acquire them.

Mass-market books were not worth the cost of returning them to the publisher. Instead, to get credit for the extra or unsalable copies our branch was told to shed each month, we tore off the covers and tossed the books — the "strips" — into the dumpster. The covers, like cereal box-tops, would be returned to the publisher for credit. We were warned it was illegal to use the coverless books for any purpose — including donations to nursing homes, prisons, Goodwill — and for that reason we were also prohibited from recycling them. Aside from the few we might smuggle out in a lunchbox, the mound of strips grew in the dumpster over the course of the week, waiting to be hauled out of town with the rest of the trash, to the landfill.

Our Manager used to assign this task as a right-of-passage to make sure that new employees, particularly the Johnnies, had the stomach for the Real Book Business — something like starting as fish-gutter in a cannery. That's how I'd started, in the back room my first night, sitting on a librarian's stool with a half-dozen open cases of books on the floor before me to denude and trash. As I ripped, I remembered a summer day in high school, when I'd wanted one particular title so badly I'd ridden my bike to the closest bookstore, on a college campus thirty-five miles away. It took more than three hours, with wind and rain worthy of an Abe Lincoln legend, to learn that the book was not in stock. Perhaps I should have phoned beforehand, but even if they'd searched the shelves in less than five minutes, back then the toll call would have cost me half the cover price. My remaining choices, after that disappointment, had been to either write the publisher directly via U.S. Post — beginning a process guaranteed to take more than four weeks to get the thing in-hand — or to special-order it from the college store and ride back after they'd notified me, likely by postcard. At least I'd spent that morning bike-riding in hope — that had been worthwhile, I told myself.

Recalling that as I sat that night in the back room of Crown Books, I worked slowly. I got drawn into the cover of each book I dismembered, and then into the blurbs and recommendations revealed on the first pages. Staff locked up the store around me that night so I could finish at my own pace. Seeing the pile of pages grow in the dumpster — already as many as I'd acquired at home in my whole life — I felt dully ashamed of what I'd done, and of what I would repeatedly do, in order to make rent and food, but not enough to keep my student loans afloat.

Soon I caught myself treating all of the merchandise roughly, even the new hardcovers. Who cared if I cracked a spine or two on a bestseller, or if an end-cap display got knocked over by the vacuum, and some corners dinged? They were disposable. They weren't books like I'd grown up with, were they? They were just products.

Can we trace the beginning of the (alleged) slow death of the American author back to the economies-of-scale and extreme-discount tactics of Crown Books and others? Not entirely. It is true that the Crown store in downtown Annapolis was probably most to blame for the decline of our two indie stores back then. On the other hand, Crown paved the way for competitors like B. Dalton's, Waldenbooks, Borders, and Barnes & Noble, all of which would soon penetrate new markets in other parts of the country, and so could be credited with helping American publishing grow over the past two decades. But certainly, no corporate-owned chain of bookstores has ever been anything but a threat to a healthy ecosystem of independent bookstores. Crown was just one, nearly concluded, chapter in the still-evolving story of publishing and book-selling.

Once you peel the emotion from the question of what's most threatening to working authors, the bald truth looks too simple — it's our current brand of free-markets. We're all working in them. And only a minority of American authors have ever been well-served by it. Not while alive, at least. In the early 1990s, in the MBA-driven days that "reengineered" every industry and made an "industry" of every artistic activity, when mergers and economies-of-scale were discussed as creative acts and Total Quality Management became something quantifiable — at that time, was it to best serve authors, readers, or even our national literature that publishing houses began devouring each other or giving seven-figure advances to a few celebrity authors, and only two-month's full-time pay to others? Again — not entirely. It was just market forces, working themselves out — the next step in the evolution of commercial publishing.

Every writer and book-lover should know this already. Whenever we're alone in the back room, facing our dumpster — we might feel sad, but we shouldn't be surprised. Some of us may have the cash and live in a place where we can take a stand and buy our books or have them special-ordered at the indie stores that remain. (And those editions must be new, by the way, for our purchase to benefit authors monetarily.) But once we remember, when buying books, that the easiest, fastest, most efficient way to use of our personal and fossil energy is also the most inexpensive — buying online —we're likely to do that most often, just as a book-selling business will build stores where there's a market — in downtown Annapolis, say, rather than in my old town — and to place its warehouses in towns that have no bookstores. Any bookstore that needs to generate revenue is going to do everything legal it can to outsell its rivals, including most indies, and to get the cheapest help it can to run it, and to dispose of its remainders as cost-effectively as possible. That's what it — and most of us — must do this to survive these days.

When my wife and I were younger, starting grad school at San Francisco State, one of our favorite ways to spend our Saturday was to take the 1 California line out to the five used bookstores in the City's Richmond District, stopping for lunch somewhere in between. The ride was a pleasant 40 minutes, one-way, and if we didn't find what we were looking for — which we half-expected — it still was no waste of time. We were always surprised by something new along the way, and life was a little richer for it.

We stopped taking these pleasure trips as we grew older, however. Not because four of the stores had closed, but because we, too, had been forced to put a higher premium on our time. Rents had tripled, our workplaces were (successfully) pressured to be more productive, and we'd had babies at the same time housing and labor markets became calibrated with a flood of new data that was being processed at lightning speed, in the air, all around us.

By the turn of the century, I'd learned I couldn't make a living writing fiction, and that very, very few people do. We couldn't afford to have me write, for work, even if we were to simplify and move to the woods — I'd been there. This truth was hard to accept because I'd had such great luck in the beginning. When the Chicago Tribune had flown us out for the Algren Award banquet, we were seated at the front table. Wayne C. Booth, whose Rhetoric of Fiction still had my bookmark in his "Narrators, Reliable and Unreliable" chapter, back home, gave me a long, stern handshake, as if waiting to make certain I believed in his praise for my story before letting my hand go. A gregarious Annie Proulx, who was to receive the Heartland Prize for The Shipping News that night, sat to my right. The President and Editor in Chief of the Tribune were also at the table, enjoying the company. I, dumbstruck, was too green to capitalize on this staggering opportunity, but months later Ms. Proulx introduced my work to her agent, who in turn took my draft novel — which I'd rushed to finish before next year's winners were announced and I'd become old news — to the desks of such greats as Daniel Menaker and John Glusman. In the interim, I'd also sought counseling for the first time in my life, because I could no longer sleep or focus — being so close to the possibility of succeeding at something I'd directed my whole life toward achieving had become, literally, too real for me. But soon, once it became clear that my novel wasn't going to be picked up at the pinnacle of New York publishing, I realized, sadly, that I felt more at-home accepting thoughtful, courteous rejections than I had been at the possibility of working with people of such stature. When my agent — who had a beautiful voice on the phone and was 10x more gracious on paper than anyone in my workaday world — calmly said, "I don't know what else to do," I thought, Umm — neither do I.

We were starting a family. I acquired the skills necessary to help raise our kids where we'd chosen to live, in San Francisco, just as my father had once taught himself how to castrate a calf. But working online was never so fulfilling, even in the non-corporate sectors, and I still couldn't put aside my need to keep a bookmark moving slowly through a novel, and later, as the kids got older, to spend one night a week writing at the Mechanic's Institute Library. That's where, in Poets & Writers magazine — right where I'd first seen the deadline for the Nelson Algren Story competition many years before — I read about former Village Voice editor Dave Blum's call for submissions to build up a new e-publishing series called Kindle Singles.

I was wary, at first. I didn't like "e-books". At a local book fair my wife and I had attended, we'd seen our first e-book in 1993 — a clunky, computerized tablet into which you manually loaded texts like software, via diskette. When the salesman had tried to warm up the small crowd by asking, What do you like most about a physical book? I jumped up and said, Sniffing it! He'd frowned, and explained that although e-books might not be able to reproduce the "fetishistic" qualities of real books, the improvements in such features as text-searching and font-adjusting would more than make up for it. I didn't buy it.

But Kindle Singles sounded legit, so I emailed a copy of my prize story — the rights were mine, after initial publication in the Chicago Tribune. That story, written in my early thirties, is narrated by an unreliable, first-person narrator in his fifties as he grows wistful about the fact that he'll never fulfill his dream of being a writer (a poet, in his case). It sounded like Blum was trying to build a more literary audience on the e-book platform. Perhaps, I thought, this piece might be just the thing.

He accepted it with an email in two weeks, and I called back in five minutes to agree to terms — after 15 years out of print. They designed a cover, formatted the file, and soon The First Light of Evening was live as a Kindle Single. A week later, it was in the top-ten, with thousands of downloads. To have readers again — priceless! Having living people leave comments or blog about you, or Tweet and Like you, and even send the occasional, old-fashioned email — well, that must be what clearing an arterial blockage feels like, I thought. And it opened the way for a second Single the next year. Soon my father was "reading" my stories for the first time on Audible, my kids have covers of my stories on their devices to remind them what Dad does on "writers' night", and I can talk with friends about "my work." It's all good.

We have managed to stay in San Francisco, a place that’s always felt like home, in part, because of the easy access we have — by bike, even — to several bookstores. We frequent these now with our kids. When we have occasions to buy a gift, we'll give a card to Green Apple Books — it introduces people to a bookstore we love, giving them an experience along with their book while supporting the local store. But the indies still don't have everything I want. When I need a copy of St. Athanasius' On the Incarnation, preferably in hardcover with C.S. Lewis's introduction? Well, I'm going to save some cash and gas and make a few clicks. Because one thing I've learned over the years, not only as a struggling writer but as a hanger-on in this city, is that cash and gas are time — your most valuable and finite resource.

We all know Amazon is outselling and out e-publishing its rivals because it's faster and better at getting customers' money by giving them what they want. We also know the Big Six (Five?) traditional publishers have only one ineluctable use for independent bookstores — and for Amazon, for that matter — and it's the same use Crown Books had for me. That is: to sell books.

What we do need to learn in this latest battle is that the apocalyptic rhetoric is a distraction if we really want to do something to help authors, and to promote what should be the ultimate goal of healthy publishing and bookselling — literature. No one has ever successfully tried to stop the growth of technology — only a cataclysm can accomplish that, and then temporarily. We choose to use technology to make things better, and if we find it makes some things worse, we make new technology and more choices. Will the vulgar increase like some Dark Empire with the proliferation of cheap e-books? Certainly, ugliness has never been more accessible, and research has shown that anger is the most viral emotion online. So we can expect to see more of that — if we choose to look. It's better to refocus on free will.

One of evil's strongest suits these days is the illusory, dramatic allure of inevitability. It's not inevitable that Amazon will become an all-consuming fire that kills American authors and publishing. There'd then be nothing left to burn, for one thing. It is true that Amazon, and the others, will do everything they can to control the market and drive e-book prices to wherever they want them to be. Once that's accomplished, they might do worse — lower royalties, for example — whatever works for them and is allowed in our untrammeled marketplace. But it's also true that, in the meantime, Amazon's business has provided nearly everyone with historic access to everything in print.

How best to support the struggling American Author? That, also, has never been the central question in this battle, and answering it isn't the key concern of Amazon, Hachette, or any publishing corporation. But I'm not sure indie bookstores, despite every good intention and idea, can do as much as is currently needed either, at least as far as literary fiction is concerned, and particularly with the mushrooming online market for second-hand books, where authors gain little but exposure. We need new thinking around real, working solutions, like what the Editors of N+1 suggest — that authors do something like unionize, or revise our tax code to ease up a little on Word Industry Workers. Scott Turow touched on the benefits of strengthening anti-piracy and copyright law, or even of following some Europeans in giving authors a bit each time their work's borrowed at a library. We might review ERISA, or begin taxing publishing corporations more equitably, or see if there are finer points in nonprofit status that independent bookstores could exploit for whatever altruistic services they provide the public. Most of this would require writers big and small work together, and with lawyers and other outsiders, but it's better than letting any publisher and distributor dictate prices or royalties for e-books and hardcovers without involving and directly benefitting the authors responsible for most of their real value.

Will Amazon, or any of the others, become the only publisher and distributer of books? That might be possible, but only if customers, authors, smaller businesses, and the law allow it. Customers might stop buying books as quickly and cheaply as possible — but that's not likely. Authors might stop publishing through any means possible to reach an audience — less unlikely, but still. And more and more we see the challengers — the alternative e-publishers and subscription services — growing and grooming their business only to be bought out. So don't look to them for long-term solutions, either.

It's the law that's always been the real restraint, in our country, when the disparities in our economy become too monstrous. That, and full-on economic collapse. An even broader survey, of the full online world — which is as complex as any other global entity — would show that an even larger concern to writers and publishers should be the future of the free Web itself, and the necessity of working with groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation to ensure that neither Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, or Facebook wall off entire e-continents and become separate economies and cultures unto themselves. None of us really question whether or not any single, commercial entity should be allowed to control our literary market. The real question is: What legal restraints do we now have, or need, to avoid One Big Publishing Organ? If the answer is Not enough, we know where to start. It won't be easy.

Meanwhile, Hachette's and Amazon's attempt to rally authors to one side or the other, or to pit big names and e-book and self-publishing writers against each other like hungry animals — all too easily done — seems like a diversionary tactic. If traditional publishers instead refocused on the best value they offer — on the expertise of their editors, designers, and marketers and publicists with deep networks — they'd be in an area where Amazon may not yet be as strong. And if high-end literary publishers decided to focus on manufacturing the most beautiful products possible — at least something without typos, sewn in signatures, and bound to last in buckram-covered editions, rather than on newsprint glued overseas — there would be a unique value that could save traditional publishers some part of the market they've always held. And one they claim to value most. But if the current battle is anyone's attempt to control the manufacture and flow of cheap, disposal commodities, none of the take-sides petitions we've seen so far will sway that. That's a market issue that's never been in the hands of writers, or readers, for long.

In truth, unless we're focused solely on Literature with a capital "L," it would appear that writers and publishing of every other sort are thriving these days, more than ever before. That's not bad. But as long as some authors have the tenacity and faith to commit some of their life's time to creating works of enduring value in our transitory world, and readers of a similar bent continue to seek out such works as a bulwark against the same churn, you might expect that a publisher or two might support them — and make a reasonable profit, though not a killing — by continuing to produce and sell long-lasting, beautiful books.

I'd buy that. May the best loss-leader win.

— The End —