Publishing News

Even the book’s publisher seems to have realized that Krauss’ praise is over-the-top and a bit icky; a commenter at Conversational Reading reported that his ARC of the novel featured an abbreviated version of the blurb.

It’s easy to ridicule Krauss for this hyperbolic extravaganza, but in her defense, she’s not a critic or an ad copywriter; she’s a novelist. She didn’t get paid to write that phalanx of clichés, and chances are she’d have preferred not to. It was a favor, intended to help out a fellow author.

The conventions and excesses of blurbology do invite mockery. (The term “blurb” is sometimes mistakenly used for the publisher-generated description printed on a book’s dust jacket — that’s actually the flap copy. “Blurb” really only applies to bylined endorsements by other authors or cultural figures.) Like anything that people would rather not do, blurb-writing usually isn’t done very well. So why is it done at all? Because you, dear reading public, persist in giving credence to it. Please stop.

For those unfamiliar with the process, here’s how it works. Once a reasonably finished draft of a manuscript has been completed, the author, at his publisher’s insistence, begins the grueling and humiliating process of begging blurbs from better-known writers. The aim is to score praise from established authors whose work has a similar appeal — a wacky, gay-positive memoirist will try for Augusten Burroughs or David Sedaris; a female writer of mordant short stories approaches Mary Gaitskill, and so on — but these can be nearly impossible to obtain.

The most prominent authors are inundated with such manuscripts, far more than they can ever read, especially if they hope to get on with their real job — which is, of course, writing their own books. Many have adopted a blanket no-blurb policy, and most of these will at least occasionally wind up departing from that policy, usually for personal reasons. They might do it for a good friend or a former student, or as a favor to their editor or agent.

So when publishing people look at the lineup of testimonials on the back of a new hardcover, they don’t see hints as to what the book they’re holding might be like. Instead, they see evidence of who the author knows, the influence of his or her agent, and which MFA program in creative writing he or she attended. In other words, blurbs are a product of all the stuff people claim to hate about publishing: its cliquishness and insularity.

And, in fact, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in publishing who wouldn’t agree with that judgment. Everyone seems to hate the process, from the authors who are compelled to plead for blurbs to the publishing professionals who have to lash their authors onto it, to the blurbers themselves, who often wind up walking a knife’s edge between honesty and generosity. It stands to reason that, if many blurbs are bestowed for extraliterary reasons like friendship or professional collegiality, then many of them are insincere.

Faint or highly strategic praise is a sign that the blurber was less than enthralled by the work. Perhaps in such cases the blurber ought to refuse to endorse the book at all, but this is hard to do if the author knows you’ve already read the manuscript. It would invariably lead to awkwardness and hurt feelings when the whole point of agreeing to do the blurb in the first place was to avoid both. “A sweet tale of first impressions, second chances” — to take one example from a blurb for a book that shall remain unnamed — is a quintessential example of noncommittal blurbology. (“Sweet” is, in my experience, not a word anyone uses to describe a novel they genuinely like.)

When even mediocre works get glowing blurbs, you end up with praise inflation. Without a doubt Nicole Krauss truly admires David Grossman, an Israeli author of impeccable international credentials but a relatively small American audience. He’s older and more accomplished than she is, but she’s had more success stateside and was recently named one of the best 20 fiction writers under 40 by the New Yorker. Like many young authors who have scored a hit among their peers, she’s eager to do what she can to draw more readers to a novelist she regards as a master.

But to convey the full power of her enthusiasm, Krauss has to distinguish her blurb from the usual run of exaggerated approval. Even a practiced critic can testify that positive reviews are the hardest of all to write, so when a relative novice is obliged to ratchet up her compliments to the stratosphere in, say, 100 words or less, is it any wonder that the results are atrocious?

Most of the people involved in this system are well-meaning: Blurbers want to help other authors, publishers want to win more attention for their books, and authors want to do everything they can to prove that their publishers’ faith in their work has been justified. The result, however, is broken and borderline (sometimes outright) corrupt.

A few celebrated authors have made a point of regularly seeking out and championing books by writers with whom they have no connection — Stephen King is the most prominent example. (That said, I haven’t found King’s recommendations particularly useful.) But overall, blurbs just aren’t very meaningful. Yet, apart from a minority of skeptics, much of the public still seems to take them at face value. One British publisher claims to have seen research showing that as many as 62 percent of book buyers choose titles on the basis of blurbs.

Anecdotal evidence from online discussions and personal experience confirms this baffling preference. “I liked [Sara Gruen's] ‘Water for Elephants,’” said a woman I spotted studying a copy of Lynn Cullen’s “The Creation of Eve” at my local bookstore, “so maybe I’ll like this one, too.” (Gruen called Cullen’s book “enormously satisfying.”) I haven’t read either book myself, so I can’t weigh in on any similarity between them; for all I know Gruen meant every word of that praise. But when I suggested to this reader that blurbs can be unreliable, she glanced at me as if I were the one with the ulterior motive, nodded vaguely and drifted away, book in hand.

Referenced in this article:

The Guardian invites readers to outblurb Grossman’s literary admirers.

Conversational Reading complains about Krauss’ ‘painfully overwrought blurb.

James Spackman of Hodder & Stoughton describes a study on the power of blurbs by Book Marketing Limited.

We’re so accustomed to thinking of copyright as the foundation of a writer’s livelihood that it’s difficult to imagine how authors could survive without it. Yet we may need to start doing just that.

Our current copyright laws and (often ham-fisted) attempts to enforce them have many critics, but you don’t see a lot of people advocating their complete eradication. They don’t really need to. The biggest threat to copyright comes from the advent of digital reproduction, which has made piracy much, much easier. Reform could well be beside the point; copyright seems poised to die the death of a million cut-and-pastes.

If that happens, and authors can again expect to make nothing from the sale of their books, how will they get by? The majority of authors, of course, can’t make a living from book sales as it is. They teach or work for the phone company or scrape together enough grants and fellowships to keep a roof over their heads. It’s possible that writing books will become a hobby rather than a profession — like, say, golf — for all but the tiniest minority of superstars, people so famous they can charge fees to make personal appearances.

Writers are understandably dismayed by this scenario, but readers ought to be, too. The eight hours or more per day that your favorite authors will spend servicing air conditioners or drafting marketing reports is time they won’t have to devote to writing their next book, the one you’re so eager to read. That means fewer books from some of our most talented novelists, and perhaps fewer yet from historians and other nonfiction writers; the research for their work can take even more time than the actual writing.

If this comes to pass, we may indeed see a revival of the patronage model Greenblatt describes, with wealthy fans supplying the writers they admire with the funds they need to concentrate on their work. In truth, we already have an indirect version of this in the form of arts foundations underwritten by private donors. The notion of a writer being personally sponsored by a rich individual may strike the contemporary American as distasteful, but as Greenblatt points out, unless you want to dismiss the entire corpus of Western literature written before the 1700s, you have to admit that the arrangement can produce great books.

Still, it’s a system inclined to serve the interests of the rich, and it’s not like we need any more of that. Recently, the technology that led to this dilemma has also offered a potential solution in the form of crowdsourced patronage. The best-known of these new funding platforms is Kickstarter, a website that allows people to raise money for all kinds of projects, including books (and magazines and bookstores). The would-be creator presents a proposal consisting of a written description of the project, a list of premiums awarded to donors depending on the amount they pledge, and, most important, a video pitch. The creator sets a funding goal and a closing date for the proposal. If the full amount isn’t reached by the time the proposal expires, the creator gets nothing.

The donors to a Kickstarter project don’t own any rights to the results, but their donations can win them such unusual benefits as having characters named after them in a forthcoming novel. The author may promise to write an ancillary short story about the supporting character of their choice. Other authors provide special signed editions of the book or, in a few cases, even a chance to offer input while the work is in progress.

On Kickstarter, book proposals have attracted from as much as $85,000 (for a memoir about psychedelic visionary Terence McKenna, to be written by his younger brother) to as a little as $324 (to commission original cover art for a self-published e-book). The more modest the goal, the more likely it will be met. At the very least, a Kickstarter project looks like an excellent way to cadge money from friends and family without having to face them in person with your hand out. The average successful proposal seems to run a few thousand bucks — not as much as a traditional hardcover book advance, certainly, but more than what many writers might get from a small press.

This fundraising method is perfect for modest projects aimed at a limited, but still keen, readership. The earnest confessional poetry of Anne Jackson, for example, would never find much favor in the poetry establishment, but there are enough investors moved by her story of creative struggle following a close friend’s death to contribute a total of $11,700 for an e-book of “poetry, photos & stories behind them.” Quite a few traditionally published poets would regard that as a decent advance. It helps that Jackson already has a following as a result of the spiritually oriented self-help books she wrote for a traditional publisher — and that she’s young and personable.

Many aspiring writers fantasize about the audience they’d find if interlopers like publishers and agents would stop coming between them and the reading public. Publishers, they complain, fixate too much on superficial assets like a mediagenic face or personality, influential connections, an established name or a promotional “platform” instead of just concentrating on literary merit.

To judge by what works on Kickstarter, however, democracy won’t offer any improvement. Those flashy garnishes are exactly what the public cares about. The most successful book projects have an already-established audience, an attractive creator, a high-concept premise and/or an affiliation with someone famous. Above all, as Rob Walker observed in the New York Times, a stand-out video presentation is crucial to sealing the Kickstarter deal.

April Winchell, the founder of the humor site Regretsy.com, for example, raised an impressive $65,ooo to publish a book of fake Finnish folklore and pay for a trip to Finland by calling on her established fan base and putting together a hilarious video. Does anyone really care much about the book — or, for that matter, about an edition of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” in which every instance of the word “nigger” has been replaced with the word “robot”? Probably not. Yet both pitches are amusing enough to elicit a surprisingly large number of small, what-the-hell pledges.

A classic midlist novelist who published two books with small presses but couldn’t place his third, Scott Morris managed to raise $12,700 to help him keep working on it. Would he have been as successful if he didn’t look like the popular conception of a ruggedly sensitive writer, or if his video didn’t feature several handsome and vaguely familiar actors (the guy who played the Winklevoss twins in “The Social Network”!) talking him up? Hard to say.

Whatever the merit of these individual projects, it’s hard for a reader to get enthused about a system in which the worth of a writer’s next book is judged by his or her ability to make a catchy video. The correlation between those two skills is far from obvious, as Jonathan Franzen demonstrated in the promo video he was obliged to make for “Freedom.”

With primarily visual works — comics and art or photo books — Kickstarter seems a great way to solicit the extra cash needed to produce top-drawer work. Comics creators have flocked to it, hoping to finish discontinued series or add color to black-and-white books. But can it bring us the next Ann Patchett or Robert A. Caro? Or is that another part of our future that will be determined by billionaires?

Until last week, Mortenson was simply a celebrated humanitarian, but a “60 Minutes” exposé of both “Three Cups of Tea” and CAI has accused him of fabricating some of the incidents in the book and mismanaging the charity to the point of impropriety. Playing a key role in the segment was author and journalist Jon Krakauer, a disillusioned donor and former supporter of Mortenson, who has also published an 89-page article detailing Mortenson’s transgressions at the website byliner.com. (This article, “Three Cups of Deceit,” can be downloaded for free through April 20. After that, it can be purchased via Amazon.com’s Kindle Singles program. Krakauer has announced that he will donate the proceeds to the STOP Girl Trafficking program at the American Himalayan Foundation.)

It’s unfortunate that the Mortenson affair is being presented as a publishing scandal rather than a philanthropic one, because the case against the author (the lying) is less compelling than the case against the nonprofit director (the cheating).

“60 Minutes” and Krakauer have produced evidence that, contrary to Mortenson’s account in “Three Cups of Tea,” he was not taken in by Pakistani villagers and nursed back to health after becoming lost and debilitated during a descent from a mountain climbing expedition in 1993. They also contend that Mortenson misrepresented another incident in the book. He says he was “kidnapped by the Taliban” for several days; his “captors,” one of whom runs a respected research center in Pakistan, have indignantly insisted that they are not Taliban and that he was entertained as an honored and entirely voluntary guest in their ancestral homeland.

That’s the lying part. The cheating involves the excessive entanglement of Mortenson’s finances with those of CAI, a relationship characterized by the organization’s former treasurer as Mortenson’s treating CAI “as his own personal ATM.” Perhaps understandably, Mortenson considers CAI to be entirely his creation and therefore at his disposal whenever he needs something (chartered planes, say) to help him promote the cause. CAI pays the promotional expenses for “Three Cups of Tea” and its sequel, “Stones Into Schools,” but receives none of the royalties and very little of the income from Mortenson’s speaking engagements.

No one is quite accusing Mortenson of stealing, nor are they questioning his commitment to CAI’s mission. However, Krakauer presents persuasive evidence that Mortenson’s refusal to document any of his expenditures in the U.S. or in Central Asia — indeed, his refusal to be financially accountable to anyone — have made CAI dysfunctional and far less effective than it claims to be. No one knows what the money is spent on, and no one seems to be monitoring the results. At one point, CAI staff resorted to fabricating documentation in order to comply with an audit by an independent accounting firm.

At least some of the schools Mortenson takes credit for building are “ghost schools,” empty structures without students or teachers. Krakauer, after speaking to several former CAI employees, charges Mortenson with repeatedly subverting “efforts by his Montana-based staff to track effectively how many schools have been built, how much each school actually costs and how many schools are up and running.” Achievements that Mortenson claims in this department are not derived from verifiable records or facts, so any donations solicited on the basis of those claims could be regarded as obtained under false pretenses.

The evidence of Mortenson’s financial improprieties is solid; just how much he may have lied about the recuperation and kidnapping stories in “Three Cups of Tea” is both murkier and a bit irrelevant. It’s worth asking: Would it matter much whether either anecdote were true if Mortenson’s charitable work were above reproach and impeccably conducted? Would we even be having this conversation if CAI weren’t a hot mess?

“Three Cups of Tea” belongs to that category of inspirational nonfiction in which feel-good parables take precedence over strict truthfulness. Its object is to present a reassuring picture of the world as a place where all people are fundamentally the same underneath their cultural differences, where ordinary, well-meaning Americans can “make a difference” in the lives of poor Central Asians and fend off terrorism at the same time. Heartwarming anecdotes come with the territory and as with the happily-ever-after endings of romantic comedies, everyone tacitly agrees not to examine them too closely. “Three Cups of Tea” is a wonderful tool for eliciting donations for the very worthy cause of educating Afghan and Pakistani children, which is its purpose.

Comparisons to fabricating memoirists like James Frey are misguided. An artful account of the memoirist’s own experiences is all that the memoir has to offer its readers; if it doesn’t approximate the truth (at the very least as the author saw it), then it’s in bad faith.

But what “Three Cups of Tea” provides is something else, a feeling of comradely motivation and a symbol of plucky American virtue in the person of Greg Mortenson. If he has to massage some facts into a better story in order to create sentimental enthusiasm for his cause, many of his fans are more than willing to give him that. Pointing out that a couple of these stories aren’t true strikes them as self-serving nitpicking and pettifoggery that, above all, misses the big picture. “Greg is a man who has done more good for more people than anyone else I know,” read one comment posted to an interview with Mortenson about the controversy at OutsideOnline. “Yes, he’s fallible. But the work that CAI is doing literally transforms lives.”

Only maybe CAI isn’t transforming lives, or not transforming them nearly as well as it could or should be. This is the issue that has been half-buried by the fuss over whether or not Mortenson prevaricated about his stint in the village or being kidnapped. It’s understandable that journalists like Krakauer or the staff of “60 Minutes” might see such yarns as an outrage, but Mortenson isn’t a journalist and neither are most of the people who read and loved “Three Cups of Tea.” The far more substantive financial allegations against Mortenson are at risk of getting tossed out with the bathwater that amounts to the 50th iteration of the “lying memoirist” scandal.

Yes, that’s aggravating, but here’s the thing: If Mortenson spun an uplifting tale about the kindness of Pakistani village folk because it made for a better story, the media is now doing the same in how it chooses to cover his wrongdoing. Yet another mismanaged charity is not an especially buzz-worthy subject. But we love to read about lying authors and negligent publishers and all the other ne’er-do-wells who are dragging our literary culture to hell in a hand basket. (Never mind the recent revelations that John Steinbeck made up big chunks of his beloved memoir “Travels with Charley” — it was ever thus.) Lying makes for a fun story full of opportunities for righteous indignation, but cheating at a once-esteemed charity is just a bummer. And the best story always wins.

Further reading:

“60 Minutes” segment on Greg Mortenson

“Three Cups of Deceit,” Jon Krakauer’s long article about Greg Mortenson and the Central Asian Institute

An official statement from Greg Mortenson about charges against him

Outside Online’s interview with Greg Mortenson about the “60 Minutes” expose

Eisler told Jason Pinter at the Daily Beast that he’d been exasperated by the way his previous publishers had marketed his books — everything from boring covers to a failure to understand something called “automatic resonance.” Eisler has also done the math (which he lays out in considerable detail for Pinter) and believes that, as handsome as the two-book deal St. Martin’s offered him was, in the long term he can make more money on his own.

Other successful conventionally published genre writers — the most celebrated of whom is J.A. Konrath — have mined their out-of-print backlist for self-published e-book sales and done well. This week, the estate of Dame Catherine Cookson, a bestselling author in days of yore, announced that it will be selling 91 titles from her backlist exclusively for Kindle, largely because conventional publishers haven’t shown much interest in reprinting them.

But Eisler is noteworthy for turning down a cool half-million dollars for two new books, a much bigger gamble than deciding to Kindle-ize a bunch of titles that were languishing out of print to begin with. He’s willing to do (or hire someone else to do) all of the work his previous publishers did, and he thinks he can do it better. “I’ve always believed the writer has to be an entrepreneur and CEO,” he told Pinter, “with all that entails.”

Hocking, on the other hand, is ready to say goodbye to all that entails. In a series of impressively sensible blog posts, she explained to aspiring authors all het up about the riches awaiting them that they shouldn’t think it was easy. “This is literally years of work you’re seeing,” she advised. “And hours and hours of work each day. The amount of time and energy I put into marketing is exhausting. I am continuously overwhelmed by the amount of work I have to do that isn’t writing a book. I hardly have time to write anymore, which sucks and terrifies me.” To the New York Times, she said, “I want to be a writer. I do not want to spend 40 hours a week handling e-mails, formatting covers, finding editors, etc. Right now, being me is a full-time corporation.”

What does this mean for readers? Well, for fans of these particular authors it may signify that they’ll pay less for an Eisler book in the future and more for the trilogy Hocking just sold to St. Martin’s. The low cover prices of Hocking’s self-published novels (the Kindle editions run from about $1 to about $3) have played a key role in their success; plenty of readers were willing to take a shot on a book that cheap, and then (and this is key) they bought the sequels because they liked the first.

Hocking is hoping that her fans will also get better books in the future; she’s complained more than once about the trouble she’s had finding freelance editors capable of catching the typos and grammatical errors that keep turning up in her novels. (Who knows, maybe Eisler’s readers will get worse books?) Hocking’s novels will finally be available in bookstores for all those readers who don’t have e-readers and don’t want to order the print-on-demand paperbacks available from online retailers. And you probably aren’t going to be seeing Eisler’s new thriller in any airport bookstores. Both Eisler and Hocking are great promoters of their work, however, and chances are they’ll thrive no matter how they decide to reconfigure their marketing for their new publishing plans.

It has become a mantra that today’s author — whether self- or conventionally published — must learn to promote his or her books. Some, like Eisler and Hocking, happen to be good at it, but many aren’t. People often become writers because they’re introverted or awkward in personal encounters and have poured everything they want to say to the world into their work. What usually gets lost in the perpetual refrain about authors becoming their own marketers is that there’s no particular connection between writing talent and a gift for self-promotion.

Consider Thomas Pynchon, Emily Dickinson, J.D. Salinger and Harper Lee — all writers labeled reclusive. Others — David Foster Wallace, Denis Johnson and Cormac McCarthy come to mind — have been press-shy or have found public appearances excruciating and have made them only grudgingly, as a concession to their publishers. I suspect that writers like Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett would likely have felt the same. Many authors have resigned themselves to the task of relentless networking (“social” and the old-fashioned kind) but still hate it and therefore aren’t much good at it.

With all due respect to Hocking and Eisler (and I’ve got plenty for both), I’d rather have “To Kill a Mockingbird” than any of their novels. Even though they are much better at interacting with their fans and orchestrating their careers than Harper Lee is, Lee (in my opinion, at least) is the better writer. Today’s conventional wisdom, in both traditional and indie publishing, decrees that someone like Lee might as well not bother; however good her book is, it won’t find an audience unless she’s willing and able to make hawking it at least a part-time job.

What this means for readers is troubling. Even if the next generation’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” gets published, the author’s inability to promote it effectively may prevent it from reaching the millions of readers who would otherwise embrace it. And while Harper Lee never published a second book, I want the writers whose work I admire to have as much time as possible to write as many books as they wish. As Hocking so astutely points out, the hours spent in self-promotion are hours spent not writing.

Further reading:

The New York Times on Amanda Hocking’s book deal

Barry Eisler tells Jason Pinter about deciding to self-publish his next novel

Amanda Hocking’s blog

Catherine Cookson’s agent announces the republication of Cookson’s backlist for the Kindle