How B&N’s Fourth Quarter Affects New Writers

Hat tip to author Maya Reynolds who highlighted the most interesting 400 words out of a much longer and more boring document, the Barnes & Noble, Inc. Q4 2008 Earnings Call Transcript. And I’m going to highlight just two points from what she posted.

I’ll call it the Good News and the Bad News.

The Bad News: “The year 2008 was by far the most challenging retail environment we’ve ever experienced. In fact, it was the first year in which our comparable store sales declined every quarter.”

So book sales in the stores are down. B&N has responded to this by controlling “store payroll”, which, if I understand correctly means layoffs and closing stores. However, I can’t but think it also would determine how many books they are willing to buy from publishers.

If bookstores buy less from publishers, publishers will buy less from agents, agents will accept fewer submissions from writers. But writers are not submitting less to agents. On the contrary, agents have been flooded with queries, and in some cases, the levees have broken.

The Good News: “We . . . plan to return to the business of offering customers digital content inclusive of eBooks, newspapers and magazines. We have a large number of assets in place to enable us to sell digital content, our ecommerce platform is solid . . . We operate a world class in-house service center and our recent acquisition of Fictionwise has enhanced our ability to conduct digital transactions.”

So maybe bookstores will buy more ebooks from publishers, publishers will buy more from agents, and agents will accept more submissions from writers.

Lori Perkins,
Author of THE INSIDER GUIDE
TO GETTING AN AGENT (Writer Digest Books)
L. Perkins Agency
(718) 543-5344
agentinthemiddle.blogspot.com
visit ravenousromance.com

After nearly five years with the Dijkstra Agency, my colleague Jill Marsal and I have opened our own agency the Marsal Lyon Literary Agency. Our new agency handles all types of fiction and non-fiction, including foreign and all subsidiary rights. We are both thrilled to be working with their client list under the new agency! I handle women’s fiction, with an emphasis on commercial women’s fiction and all genres of romantic fiction and young adult. My particular interest is historical fiction of all types. I am also interested in non-fiction representing authors in the areas of memoir, pets, environment, parenting and current events.

Why Authors Need Agents

Yesterday I highlighted a blog talking about why an author needs and editor, and today I happened across this delightful post/paeon to an agent by a fairly new talent Seanan McGuire, author of the upcoming urban fantasy Rosemary and Rue.

Almost two years ago, a friend of mine sent me a letter introducing me to another friend of hers, one who happened to be a literary agent. The Agent and I started chatting via email, taking it slowly, navigating the wilds of acquaintance and understanding long before we reached the point where representation would become an option. It was a courtship, rather than a barroom hookup, and I am incredibly grateful for that, because anybody who’s met me knows that my full attention can be an exhausting thing. She gets my full attention a lot.

A year ago today, we stopped courting.

The past year has been an amazing ride of wonderful, dizzying, confusing things, and The Agent has been there every step along the way to explain, encourage, and assist. I call her my personal superhero for a reason — that’s exactly what she is. Books on writing will tell you that the best thing a working writer can have is a good agent, and they’re right, but what they won’t tell you is that it’s even better to have a good agent who understand you, understands the way you work, and is willing to see what you can do together.

And if you haven’t read it yet, be sure and check out Lisa and Laura’s agent-finding story too, which happened just days ago.

The Hearts of Men Centuries Dead

“The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall; nations perish; civilizations grow old and die out; and, after an era of darkness, new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again, and yet live on, still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men’s hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead.”

–Clarence Day, Jr.

(I snatched this quote from an agent’s site, The Literary Group and the photo is by Dagny Willis, featuring ruins of a house in Alaska.)

Why Authors Need Editors

There’s a fascinating discussion over on Elizabeth Bear’s blog about whether an editor hones a writer’s vision or crushes her unique genius into cookie cut dough. (And I literally mean vision because one of the issues is whether to include more visual description.) I was quite struck by something E Bear said in the comments:

A good editor is a professional whose skill involves bringing out the writer’s truest voice. And the skill of a writer is not self-expression: that’s a very high-school interpretation of art. Self-expression is the egotist’s excuse.

Art is about communication; it’s about evoking a response in the reader. Oftentimes, a writer is too close to her intention to see the real effect on someone else, because she can see what she intended.

If we were talking about the visual arts, it’s the difference between a child’s drawing and the landscape of a trained artist. A writer who has not learned to judge the effect of her words on an audience is making the equivalent of kid scribbles.

It’s the difference between home movies and Citizen Kane.

Nobody cares about your vision if you don’t have the chops to make the other guy see it. And that’s a skill, a learned one. And one which a good editor helps a writer exercise, by showing her where she’s failed to make the connection.

My editor for this book is a very good editor. She’s up for a Hugo this year, for a reason: she’s one of the best in the business.

I have a peculiarly wired brain: it interprets the world in manners somewhat different from most people’s. Most of my work in becoming an artist has been the work of learning to translate between what I know about a story and what I need a reader to know about it. It’s a crude and stopgap form of telepathy, but it’s all we’ve got.

None of this, of course, makes it any more fun to hear that a book one has been working on since 2002 still needs significant revision, because it’s not very good yet. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say it’s heartbreaking, and ten years ago I would have been totally on board with the idea that My Native Genius Is Going Unrecognized.

But the fact of the matter is that that’s self-indulgence, ego defense, and denial, and good art is not created by prima donna fits. It’s created by sweat and failure and trying again and again to get it right.

But at least now I have somebody else helping me see ways to make it better.

You must not think that I take all of any editor’s suggestions as gospel: I assess them all, using my own hard-earned critical skills, and I decide which ones will improve the book. And I have no qualms about saying no if I think an idea is dumb.

You decide what hills you’re going to die on. And I’ve refused offers on books because I didn’t agree with the editor’s vision of what the book should be.

This is a potent reminder. Just because you become a multi-book selling author, it doesn’t make writing come easily or automatically. It doesn’t mean you no longer have to keep asking yourself the hard questions, like how much do you write to please others and how much do you trust your own vision? It doesn’t mean you get a free pass from painful revisions.

There are published authors whose first book is fabulous, but who let their later books slide into stale formula. Other writers just seem to keep growing with each book. I know which kind of writer I aspire to be.

UPDATE:

Thank you to Mossy Creek Designs (ban) for this poster!

www.myspace.com/mossycreekdesigns
www.mossycreekdesigns.etsy.com
www.mossycreekdesigns.blogspot.com

Literary Acclaim or Big Money?

Nathan Bransford asked this question on his blog a while back (Nov.19, 2008).

Would you rather have Omar Khayyam.

Take the Cash and let the Credit go. 😉