The Zoo*: Week Fifteen
Today is the fifteenth in a series of posts by San-Diego-based writer Thomas Shess who has decided to keep a journal on his journey to find a publisher for his novel.
Ad Pulls Zip. In early August, I ran a classified ad in the New York Review of Books’ big summer edition hoping that maybe one vacationing literary agent might have taken his/her copy to the beach and notice my small bit of cheese. OK, we all know how to spell naïve, but I spent a lot of time making sure it wasn’t cutesy or desperate. Bottom line: I got zip for my $86. Sigh. I anticipate the next call will be a snicker from number one son, Zac, who inherited his mother’s common sense: “Dad, you could have spent the dough on a good bottle of wine.”
Literary Agent Scoreboard. As of last week, my terrific and heretofore unread completed novel has received 45 rejections from literary agents from Nome to Terra del Fuego. I’m batting a sad zero for 2005. I’m not giving up. If Charles Lindbergh could fly solo across the Atlantic in the Spirit of St. Louis without a windshield, I can get one agent to read my book. Things could have been worse-with a bad side wind Chuck could have landed in Iceland with no media to greet him. Speaking of Iceland, the unkindest cut to date came in the form of a “mass printed” rejection slip from my two hometown agents. I’ve been at cocktail parties in the home of two of them. How quickly they forget. Yes, I’m serving hors d’ouvres with that bottle of whine.
Web vs. Blog Undeterred by Random House not calling… again (don’t you just hate that?), I decided to take a look at web publishing. I quickly learned that a web publisher is different than someone who puts his/her book on a Blog. Here’s how: A web publisher site can filter requests and be the cash register. It’s tough to get a blog to cough out literary nickels like a broken slot machine.
Ground Floor in a Quake Zone. For an expert’s opinion on web publishing I called Joseph Maillander, an LA-area web publisher, who has a terrific web site (Here’s his take: “…First and foremost, you are getting into something on the ground floor, and anything can still happen. `Think of all the boats you’ve missed,’ a friend said to me recently. Here’s one you’re sitting in that’s actually leaving port. Secondly, I find that the stigma attached to self-publishing disappears with a web presence. This is particularly true for readers under 40, who generally look at large publishers with a high degree of suspicion, as we all should….and I find personally that books are relatively easy to promote on the Internet, and promotion itself is less yucky than with printed titles…”
How Goes Web Publishing? Joseph Maillander continues “…The idea of web publishing long works of fiction is not taking off quite yet, except among a certain class: call it the traveling class, who can read books on Blackberries while moving about, or who can print them out at home should they choose. We can blame fiction itself for this, which too often falls short in competing with other media. But the other greatest hurdles in web publishing are, in order, the absence of incentivized cogs (such as bookstores) in the supply chain, the satisfactions still attendant to taking a printed book outdoors or to a cafe, and the problem of spreading word of mouth among one’s less tech-savvy peers…”
Writer’s Block Cures. Last week, I was called on the carpet for making fun of green tea. Innocent as charged. Green tea cures my occasional writer’s block. But the call from a chiding colleague did remind me of Tom Bush, a veteran Business Week writer, who was my first editor. He claimed, all you have to do to cure writer’s block is to complete the article research before you start to write. Unfinished research is the leading cause of WB. Also, if the blank page is still overwhelming, I go brew a cup of green tea. It’s cheaper than penicillin. And, my fall back remedy is to click on I-Tunes preferably a vintage jazz work by Les McCann and Eddie Harris called “Compared to What.” If that doesn’t do it-check your pulse. Or, bribe yourself by booking a trip someplace uber nice if you just get the damn thing done.
* Because it’s a jungle out there.
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