for sale: literary laundry

Must be the week for airing laundry of literary icons! Not only is a tell-all about reclusive JD Salinger about to break in book and film, but...Eugene O'Neill's shorts are for sale. Not THOSE shorts. I mean his real, bonafide boxers which can now be yours for a mere $1750. But even if you're not in the market for century-old skivvies, a visit to the purveyor is worth a trip if you're in the vicinity of Salisbury, CT.  Johnnycake Bookstore is a booklover's bookstore, the kind NYC used to be full of: stocked with first editions, myriad books you've meant to read and run by a friendly bibliophile who knows his stuff. (Sorry, Dan, I'm holding out for Virginia Woolf's corset.)

Proprietor Dan Dwyer chats up a customer

"With O'Neill's monogram upper left waistband, blue high-grade pima cotton, size 34, from Bullock & Jones, San Francisco. Provenance: Purchased early 80s by a book collector from Boston-area booksellers, who had acquired these, along with books and other ephemera, from the O'Neill estate when it sold off O'Neill's summer place in Marblehead Neck, MA."

new interactive literary novel

There's a new interactive novel out today--not from a game publisher or vimeo artist, as you might expect, but from old-line, mainstream, behemoth publisher, Random House. The writer is the award-winning Marisha Pessl, author of Special Topics in Calamity Physics. Night Film is her second novel, a thriller that she's made into an immersive storyworld with website screen captures, old media clippings and photos that link to cyber content. But wait. How can a hardcover novel formidably grounded in the ILR world – the tome weighs in at a 600 pgs. and 1.75 lbs – be "interactive"? Yep, you guessed it – there's an app for that. In the back of her book, just before the acknowledgements, Pessl invites readers who want to continue the storyworld experience to download the free decoder app from itunes or elsewhere. The app is a scan app that lets your smartphone or tablet "read" a bird image that appears on some of the pages. Like a next-generation QR code, the bird jumps you to bonus content. Pessl isn't the first novelist to provide her readers with "extras" in cyberspace (ahem!) but she's the first one I know of to do so from the confines of an analog book. Kudos to her and to the Random House digital team for having the vision to do so and the chops to carry it off.

think stocking stuffer

I know, I know. I'm dismayed, too, by the Christmas Creep. Some NY sidewalks (I'm looking at you, 125th) are already festooned with giant snowflakes. But one thing it does is remind you to stock up on little gifts. Funny, isn't it? Christmas comes on the same, foreseeable date every year, yet who isn't scrambling for prezzies in the last days before? Dominik Imseng, a Swiss journalist and copywriter, saves procrastinating gifters from being caught short this year. For the Mad Men and Women in your life, here comes Think Small, the story of the world's greatest ad. It's a delightful immersion in the ad world of the 1960s via the story of one of the most iconic campaigns of the era. $23.99 on Amazon, only 5 left at this writing. Secret Santas start your engines here.

how to get a book deal

1. Write something that isn't advertising.
2. Trash it.
3. Repeat.
4. Daily. For years.
5. Assemble 65,000 words you don't hate.
6. Spell check.
7. Spell check.
8. Describe #5 in a sentence. The most important product copy you'll ever write.
9. Embed #8 in a letter to a few excellent agents.
10. Spell check.
11. Repeat #9 and #10 until someone is kind enough to request #5.
12. Wait.
12. Wait.
12. Wait.
13. Realize that timelines in Publishing are way different than in Advertising.
14. Discover the five stages of rejection.
15. Repeat #14.
16. Until, one day, to your astonishment, an agent falls in love with your work.
17. Which makes you fall in love with the agent.
18. Happily, she'll take it from here.

future of publishing: not books, bookisodes?

These days publishers crying poverty thrust myriad duties on writers aside from meeting manuscript deadlines: gathering blurbs, providing jacket photos, hosting book parties, arranging reading tours, (travel expenses unreimbursed), even negotiating shelf space. One intrepid author I know regularly tours NYC bookstores and reshelfs his book, facing out. Now writers are expected to create industrials?

More and more books sold on Amazon are accompanied not only by reviews and reader ratings, but by promotional videos. (Sorry, image isn't linked, click here and scroll down to video.) Chilling glimpse of a future of publishing that sidelines books altogether, publishing manuscripts direct to screen.

hat tip to Corporate Rock

i'm grateful that literature is alive and well and thriving in many forms

One of the many things I'm thankful for today⎯books. Just finished The Help and A Gate at the Stairs, both novels I was sorry to finish as I so enjoyed being part of their worlds. I read them, however, without turning a page, downed them while biking around Central Park, hooked up to an ipod. At writer's conferences, I meet people who insist it's not reading unless you're holding dead trees in both hands. But I think that's like claiming that you can't hear Coltrane unless you listen to him on vinyl.

Of course, like most avid readers, I do love to turn pages. I just read The Humbling and The Anthologist in that delicious, tactile, old fashioned way. But reading the old fashioned way isn't always an option. Or, even the best one. David Griner, an advertising executive, is publishing a relative's diary in the form of tweets. Each day, an entry from a farm girl's 1937 "Line a Day" diary appears and, since the dates are coordinated, it is as if you're looking over her shoulder. The reading experience is enhanced by the fact it's published in a way that allows you to read the entries on the date that she wrote them. (Today's entry: To-day was Thanksgiving. Got off from school. -Nov. 25, 1937)

Next week, Rick Moody (The Ice Storm) is premiering a new story on Twitter. "Some Contemporary Characters" will be tweeted over the course of three days on Electric Literature, starting on Monday at 10 AM. A preview:

There are things in this taxable and careworn world that can only be said in a restrictive interface with a minimum of characters:

Saw him on OKCupid. Agreed to meet. In his bio he said he had a “different conception of time.” And guess what? He didn’t show.

It's the first time a writer who's a name in the handheld publishing world is debuting a piece of fiction on twitter. I'll be tuning in, thankful that literature, despite doomsayers, is being given new opportunities to thrive. Happy holiday, everyone.

image via Black Clock

of course, sometimes only the oldest handheld reading device will do

Lucky (yep, that's) me. I'm on a beach while my NY compatriots suffer under inches of snow. My family and I are at a resort that was chosen in part because it has wireless internet--or so says the literature. Why do I so often let myself be duped by the canny words of other copywriters? The "wireless" internet involves an ancient modem strung up on wires below a desk in the room. I'm pretty tech savvy (having a blog and all) but after following the 14 steps in the laminated instructions (printed in 7 pt. type), I finally cried uncle and called the front desk. The "technology servicer" was gone for the day, but the next morning spent two hours with me trying to get their system to work with a Mac. "It's not designed to work with Macs," he informed, rather accusingly--as if I was trying to log on with something preposterous, like a mainframe.  After spending a good deal of time on the phone with the nice folks at Applecare, he finally got it to work. But only if I sit at the desk, bolted to the modem with the shortest ethernet cable imaginable. It's as frustrating as being tethered to a cord phone again. But, hey, snow bunnies, I'm not complaining.

world without books

It's Sunday morning in August and I don't feel like writing. I feel like reading. Something offline. The Times, in its original, crinkly version. Then something bigger. Bookier. Something literary. Which makes me part of a dwindling crowd. According to Amy Stolls, Program Officer at the NEA, fewer than half of American adults now read literature.

Seems books are becoming an endangered species. (Hard to go to a party in NYC these days without a downsized publishing exec ranting about this.) I love my Kindle, sure, but it doesn't replace a book in the hand: the pleasurable heft, the solid page dense with vivid black marks by which you are channelled into an alternate universe--no power source required. (During daylight, anyway.) I use my Kindle to read in transit--on the subway or trains or planes when I am travelling and trying to minimize luggage. I load it with various newspapers from around the world (they update automatically!) and books which if I like them enough, I find myself buying in hardcopy to finish, parallel-reading them the old-fashioned way, because somehow, curling up with a Kindle in bed just doesn't provide the same satisfaction.

But do enough others feel about books as I do, enough to keep the enterprise going?

Sadly, Amy, in a POV from her perch at NEA, doesn't think so:

It's 2025 and you want a book⎯you being a senior who still fondly remembers books and a book being a non-voice-activated, tangible, artfully designed, paper and in-scented collection of human-generated original prose. Tmes are rough. An MP3 of the SparkNotes for "The DaVinci Code" has replaced the Bible in every hotel in America and Harry Potter is a middle-aged couch potato on welfare. You know this about Harry because you put him there in the videogame "Write the Next Harry Potter Sequel." Paper, pens, rubber eraser⎯they no longer exist. The last of the book critics wrote the last book review of a Post-it note from Pynchon while Pynchon was in the other room surfing YouTube.

It's 2025, and in the latest census, 87% of the population claimed "writer" as an occupation. The universal library of all human verbiage shows 1.4 million genres, with 230,000 subcategories labeled "For Dummies."

[You search for a book to read online] and subliminal ads pop up and whisper breathy directives while massaging your neck and temples, all from the sole remaining New York-based, foreign-owned publishing conglomerate in America, which paid the author an advance equal to the national debt. The book, which the author claims is nonfiction, is about an ogre who writes a book. The author's already sold the rights for his next book, "What I Would Have Written Had I Written a Book," which he claims is fiction. You don't care; your neck feels good. You're sure you're going to love it. [Complete premonition in Creative Nonfiction, Issue 31]

While this vision portends interesting briefs for digital agencies in the future, it's sad to contemplate a world without books, which would also be a world without bookstores and libraries, one where stalwart lions on Fifth Avenue might preside over a marble Pinkberry instead.

why writers need copywriters

twitter tip from ariel who is often at the other end of the phone

how does a nice kid like you end up in advertising?

If you're a young creative still on your first job, here's a question from a friend who's updating a book about breaking into the business: in what form did you show your prospective boss your portfolio? Hard copy? DVD? Website? Hologram? No correct answers, no cash prizes, just undying appreciation.