I make those remarks, of course, because I’m jealous. It’s the frustration of a still-emerging writer scared shitless of never making it, for whatever ‘it’ means. The fear of a newb that all the fancy education and writing learning and multiple novels will never get the attention I’ve always thought they deserve.

And of course they don’t. Because nothing really deserves attention. Attention has to be earned.

Which, I think, is where a lot of the frustration with Meyer and Palin and Franco comes in. As a writer, I don’t get the fascination, the quality people find, but maybe I’m approaching it with the wrong idea. Do Meyer’s and Palin’s readers go to those women’s books seeking depth of thought and lucidity of prose?

Doubtful. Nobody read Twilight for Meyer’s style or literary finesse. I think it’s safe to say that Palin gave so many people the hearty dose they needed of “you betcha” and “gotcha” and hockey moms. Which is to say she’s sold an ideology, mostly, as she has come to embody one. Or used to. I don’t know if studies have shown her numbers dipping (one could hope), and she’ll probably manage a successful career in political punditry (which would be happy if only it kept her away from actual politics).

She’ll continue to get attention.

Of course, that leaves Franco. The other week, New York magazine ran a profile on Franco, who is apparently enrolled in master’s degree programs in Columbia and NYU, or something, after taking writing classes at UCLA, and will be attending Yale in the fall for a PhD. Which is, as such things go, interesting, for sure; did anyone watch Freaks and Geeks and think Franco was going to have the most interesting career of the bunch? I didn’t. Maybe because he slouched too well, played stoned too convincingly.

Which is, of course, the mark of a great actor. Maybe he’s such a good actor that nobody, myself included, realized he was acting. Perhaps he’s so good that I didn’t realize how good he was.

I don’t think the same is true of his writing. Like his story that appeared in Esquire. I can’t imagine what Esquire‘s fiction editor was thinking of Franco’s story besides that it was a story by James Franco. It’s a pretty terrible story. I mean, the phrase comparing blood to “ketchup randomness” alone should have warranted rejection.

On the other hand, it is, in fact, a story that could have earned its author a place in a writing program. It shows some promise, and even reaches toward telling a story, even if it does so awkwardly and clumsily. I hope Franco learned a lot in his MFA program. I sort of wish he’d been in mine, and we’d been in the same workshop, if only so that I could have said: “Dude, ‘ketchup randomness’? Either you’ve never actually seen blood or something is really wrong with your fridge.”

I hope he sorted out his fridge, too.

***

It’s just it’s daunting, and frustrating for writers who have gone to programs and dedicated themselves to craft, which I suppose is what Franco did, which is at least more than we can say about Tila Tequila and the Jersey Shore cast. Is it really just jealousy to resent Shit My Dad Says? I’m not sure. I don’t think it’s solely about jealous. I think I’ve always wanted writing and books and stories to get better, to be better, to keep improving, and I don’t see, any more, how publishing helps the quality of . . . well, I wish I could think of a better–perhaps less pretentious–word than discourse, but it eludes me.

I will note I appreciate that Franco is challenging himself. He seems to have tossed himself into degrees and programs and institutions of higher learning with wild abandon.

I’m just really not so sure we all need to read about it. Esquire notes his recent “film”-slash-”art”-slash-”installation” includes (and I’ll quote so you know I’m not making this up):

One film, a herky-jerk seminarrative in which Franco dashes through the Louvre wearing a penis on his nose, will briefly feature the always thrilling documentation of human defecation.

I mean, sure, sounds like “art,” but I know a good movie when I see one, and that sure doesn’t sound like one. Just like I know good stories when I read them, and I can tell from what I read of the Esquire fiction that his work isn’t yet ready for publication.

Then again, it was published.

Does that say more about the story or publishing?

I fear my solutions to the problem seemed vague. I thought I’d fix that.

I think we need to remember that books are not stories, and vice versa. That reading is as much about the experience as the object being sold, and as such, retail publishing must change to meet new needs of the market.

The market needs a few things, based on what is changing. The biggest change is the proliferation of digital in an almost completely analog environment, but that provides both challenges and opportunities.

As I see it, what the market really needs is simple:

We need a digital media player well-suited to reading.

We need content to read on said digital media player.

We need the opportunity to purchase analog when we seek that product.

With those three needs, I think what we’re going to see is a further divide in retail publishing. Because it would make sense if big-box retail outlets, like Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Target chose to focus almost exclusively on the media players/content, while indie bookstores chose to fulfill the needs of the analog niche.

It makes sense, in a way. Why do we go to indie bookstores? Because they’re small and privately owned and awesome, maintained by proprietors we probably know by name and staffed by people we’ve seen smile. You’ve got to love books to actually own a bookshop, just like you have to love books to go to one nowadays. Like I said, I go to B&N for the author events, free wi-fi, and coffee, not for the books. For books, I go to the Strand or Amazon.

Perhaps the solution is simple: places like chains replace their “book sections” (which are usually all Twilight, James Patterson, Maeve Binchy, and Glenn Beck anyway) with book kiosks, or at least with limited shelving and POD machines. Books aren’t like other media: retailers usually sell CDs and DVDs as so-called “loss leaders” to get customers to buy more expensive fare like the players those media require.

Which is why it makes sense to consider the retail industry as two separate components. Indie bookstores are more like the hip record shops where DJs and enthusiasts shop the vinyl.

Thing is, it seems like every day another bigtime retailer is announcing its woes. (With Barnes & Noble considering selling itself, why would anyone buy a nook? I’d be scared it’ll go obsolete in a year. But then again, what electronics don’t?). What’s a big retailer to do?

Which got me to thinking: if I were Borders (which is the other big book retailer, and whom I’ve read as having woes, just not this week), what would I do? How would I save myself?

First, I’d partner with a hardware manufacturer. I’d call Sony or Acer, probably. Or Samsung, perhaps. And I’d say, look, I need the best e-ink display you’ve got. I want people to look at it and think it’s a page. I want a well-designed device people will want to use. Capacitive controls? I’m not sure. But I want a device with a cross between the functionalities of the iPad and the Kindle. A device equally adept at just about anything. I want my customers to be able to do two three major things on it: read books, browse the Internet, and listen to music.

Second, I’d go to Google and say, okay, I want Android. Stock Android I can update the moment you do. In addition, I want an Android reading app as good as Kindle and the iBookstore. We’ll put Google on our devices if you back our e-reading app.

I’d call it the Borders Portal. It’d be roughly Kindle/iPad-ish. It would have a nicer, more versatile screen than the Kindle, but you’d be able to view it outside easily.

And the Borders Portal would come with two stores: Borders Within and Borders Without.

Borders Within would let the Portal access a local-area network in all retail locations, giving the device instant streaming access to every book and all music available for download/purchase. When in a Borders store, basically, the Portal can play/display anything.

For free.

Borders Without is the store outside. Borders in your pocket.

Finally, I’d partner with T-Mobile to, in effect, make the Portal a 3G HSPA+ mobile hotspot.

With tethering. And unlimited data at $30 per month.

I don’t think I’d be able to keep the thing in stock, personally. I’d want one, I know that.

The only other experience it offers, unfortunately, is coffee, really.

No, seriously, consider a Barnes & Noble. Or a Borders, for that matter. With so many new books published at such an incredible rate, do you really think that’s where they make their coin?

I live in Manhattan, basically. There are a bunch of Barnes & Noble stores. Why do I go to them?

For the bargain-priced hardcovers (which are mostly remainders, and which I’m pretty sure B&N makes no money on), for the free wifi, and for the author events.

Other than that, I’ll find someplace else. If I want to buy a book, I either go to Amazon’s Marketplace or the Strand.

The reason Barnes & Noble is floundering is because the business model of selling books is starting to make less sense as more retailers find new ways of doing it. iTunes is now the nation’s leading retailer for music, purchases from which, by extension, must be digital.

One wonders if we’re on our way there now.

What’s missing–and what’s been missing for a while–are retailers and publishers who grok that we need new ways of doing things because we’ve been discovering so many new things to do lately. Books are an interesting medium, in that they are the one that neither requires anything for function nor have an ephemeral aspect. When you buy a DVD, you’re buying a disc to play in a player. Same with a CD. What you’re actually purchasing has nothing to do with either of the things you’re purchasing to experience. Somewhere between CD and player, there’s music. Somewhere between DVD and TV you get a movie.

Written stories are different. Books are different. You go out to the bookstore, and you buy a bound bunch of dead leaves, and you don’t need anything to read it. You don’t have anything to plug in. You only need enough light to see by.

I think that difference is part of what held the publishing model together for so long. It’s only been very recently that quality digital reading devices have been possible, much less manufactured. Now that they’re getting so much better, we’re seeing a lot more people use them. I don’t think I see as many iPads, Kindles, and nooks on the subway as I see paperbacks and magazines, but I see both pretty much every day, which is crazy different from the situation just a few years ago.

Here’s what I think is going to happen: prices for Kindle are going to sink below $100, and eventually probably below $50. Prices for iPads will fall, as well. In that not-too-distant future, we’ll all have tablet-esque devices–whether Kindles or iPads or slate computers running Windows–like we’ve all begun to have cell phones and iPods. And just like with iPods, there will be companies that sell cheaper alternatives than their competition.

What we’re going to need is the book equivalent of an mp3. You can play an mp3 on any device, any computer, etc. My television can play mp3s. My phone plays them.

Amazon is close with this idea. I had Kindle on my iPhone. I have Kindle on my new phone and my computer. My purchases sync across the devices.

And so, ultimately, we need two things, one of which gives Apple an advantage: a killer media app for purchase. iBookstore is part of the iPad. You tell me why it took Apple to create one. You tell me why so many publishers have watched iPhones and iPod Touches gain unprecedented popularity with immediate access to hundreds of thousands of apps and not one of them thought, “Hey, let’s get our books on there.” You tell me why Random House never made an app that would have made their books easily readable on pretty much the most popular electronic device of all time, with a screen fine enough suited for reading.

People claimed for so long nobody likes reading on screens. People like physical books. Blahblahblah.

Bullshit. With the Internet, all we do is read on screens anymore.

Which is the other thing we’re going to need. We all read on screens, and we’ll be reading books on them, but pretty soon I think we’re going to realize books are the dead-tree luxury they’ve always been (how many trees do we kill to make a book? How badly has reading hurt the environment?). People will still want books. Maybe they’ll read something they love on their Kindle and think, “I would really like to have that book on my shelf.”

Because there’s always going to be something about bookshelves.

And so what they’ll do is go to a bookstore and purchase their deadtree copy.

Will bookstores need to carry them?

Of that I’m not sure. I kept hearing things about the Espresso Print-on-Demand machine for a while, but haven’t heard anything for ages.

But imagine that Barnes & Noble? Imagine you walked in and rather than all that barely used shelf space (which can hold only some of the books published within the previous six months or year, besides all the classics one must always carry), you could walk up to that machine that vaguely resembled an ATM. On which there would be digital copy of every book in publication, and which could print you a bound copy of any one you wanted for ten dollars within five minutes?

I’ve been a writer since I was in my teens, and even I know we don’t need books. We’ve never needed books. We need information, stories, written chronicles of ourselves, and books have merely always been the most viable repository of those things.

That’s changing. One of the reasons publishers are struggling is because they spent so long trying to convince everyone the world wasn’t changing and haven’t been able to keep up when they finally acknowledged things already had.

Second, if you haven’t by now watched the teaser video for Meets Girl in the previous post, go ahead and do so now.

I tweeted a picture of the cover, and then posted this video. A lot of questions came up, most of which boiled down to “All right, it’s pretty, and I’m excited, now how do I get the damned thing, Will? You’re killin’ me, Smalls!”

The answer is simple:

As the teaser indicates, Meets Girl should be available, barring outright catastrophe, over the holidays 2010. Now, my friend Ravvy noted he hoped that, by “holidays,” I meant Labor Day, which I think is pretty awesome people want the damned thing yesterday, but I’m going to tell you know: it’s not ready yet. I could push hard for an earlier, autumn release, but I want to do this right.

Because I’m doing it different.

Those of you who have followed my writing escapades know I’ve spent a good part of this year querying The Prodigal Hour. And yes, it’s been pretty universally rejected. I’ve had a couple of requests for fulls and several more besides for partials, and there are still a number of queries outstanding, with agents whom I had thought didn’t take a “If you don’t hear from me, it means ‘no’” position (a position I loathe, and which cuts an agent of my query list altogether).

You may be wondering to yourself, okay, well why aren’t you doing this with The Prodigal Hour?

There are a number of reasons, the most important of which is simple: they are very different stories with very different executions, and Meets Girl lends itself, as an experience, better to what I plan to do with it. A few agents have seen Meets Girl partials, but for the most part, my focus has been on The Prodigal Hour, at least in terms of seeking representation.

If The Prodigal Hour is a blockbuster time-travel techno-thriller, Meets Girl is a smaller, probably quirkier, sort of indie movie. If The Prodigal Hour is to Avatar or The Dark Knight, in that as a big-screen experience it would be huge and loud and blow everything, including your eardrums, up, Meets Girl is more to Adaptation or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Those differences make Meets Girl more appropriate for what I want to do.

What do I want to do?

Well, that’s a little more complicated. Suffice to say, I’m announcing it now, for the holidays, because there are a number of things. I opened up a Kickstarter account not long ago and plan to use it.

What it comes down to, for you, as readers, though, is simple: availability and accessibility. Basically, I’m planning to post the great majority of the novel (and most likely all of it) here, serially, over a few months (Meets Girl Mondays, probably). At the same time, and rather early on, I’m going to make it available in digital form, for the low price of a few bucks; I figure the fact of having the whole file, for yourself, is the premium. I’m planning to make it available in pretty much all formats.

And, of course, for the digital reader of your choice. It’s definitely going on the Kindle. I thought about making it a Kindle exclusive, and I’ll tell you why: there’s no such thing. The Kindle works across enough platforms (PC, Android, iOS, Blackberry, etc.) that making it a Kindle book would make it available to you on pretty much any device you wanted (except the nook, I think). It would even be on the iPad, even if not in the iBookstore.

Finally, I’ll have paperbacks. Maybe hardcovers if interest seems great enough. I think the paper books, however, will be available solely through me, inscribed to readers. We’ll see how that works out. Obviously if there’s a huge demand that’ll be harder to fulfill, and I’m not saying I’m not expecting a huge demand, but Entrekin has sold a few hundred physical copies while being downloaded several thousand times, and the paperback I’ve been reading and editing and making sure it’s perfect looks flipping fantastic.

Why am I doing all this?

Because, to a guy with master’s degrees in writing and business, it fucking makes sense, in a way that publishing stopped making a while ago. Because I thought, well, maybe it’s time to start querying Meets Girl, and then I looked at the story and thought, wait a minute, maybe I can do something better with this. Maybe, if I stop worrying about advances and making the bestseller’s list and selling a go-jillion copies, I can create something even more exciting for readers.

So that’s what I’m trying to do. And I’m telling you now for the same reason I asked for help with those surveys: not just as homework, but to figure out what you want. Meets Girl is a story I like a lot, and now it’s time to figure out how best to tell it to you.

Cheers to that.

So here’s the deal: I need your responses. I’m going to paste the interview after the jump. Think of it as one of those surveys everyone always used to love to do.

I think I’d most like to work this as an e-mail thing. Unless you want to post your response after the comments.

To sweeten the pot: anyone who responds will receive a copy of the first chapter of “Meets Girl,” by e-mail. If you comment, I’ll send it to the e-mail used in the form. If you email it to me (at willentrekin at gmail dot com), I’ll respond to the survey with the chapter.

I’ll appreciate every response I get. I’d love to deluge the course’s submission box with reader responses.

Thanks in advance. Survey after the jump:

Age:

Location (City, State, Country):

How did you find out about Entrekin?
A. Myspace
B. Facebook
C. Twitter
D. Main site (Will in the World)
E. The Nervous Breakdown
F. Link to Will in the World/The Nervous Breakdown
If through a link, what site were you reading that linked to Entrekin?

Do you follow/read Will Entrekin’s writing often?

If so, through what means?
A. Mainly through Facebook.
B. Twitter updates.
C. Main site (Will in the World)
D. The Nervous Breakdown
E. Self-titled collection

Did you purchase/download Entrekin (the collection)?

If so, how did you find it?
A. Myspace
B. Facebook
C. Twitter
D. Main site (Will in the World)
E. The Nervous Breakdown
F. Other

If “Other,” please explain in a few words.

If so, what is your favorite work within it?

If you have a preference for Entrekin’s work, which is it?
A. Essays
B. Fiction
C. Poetry
D. Twitter feed

Which subjects do you like to read Entrekin discuss?
A. Writing
B. Graduate school
C. Teaching
D. Travel
E. Life
F. Politics
G. Lifestyle

Do you follow Entrekin on Twitter?

Are you Entrekin’s friend on Facebook?

Do you subscribe to Entrekin’s main site (Will in the World)?

If so, how do you receive it (RSS, email, regular site visits, other)?

On a scale of one to ten, with one being not at all and ten being “Can’t wait,” how much are you looking forward to reading Entrekin’s novels?

If Entrekin published a novel, how would you prefer to read it?
A. In book form.
B. On the main site.
C. On a Kindle/iPad.
D. As a .pdf.

If Entrekin published a novel, how much would you be willing to pay for it in digital form?
A. Nothing; I’d rather read it free and then donate.
B. Less than $5.
C. Between $5 and $7.
D. Between $7 and $10.
E. Between $10 and $15.

If you answered “Nothing” to the previous question, how likely do you think you would be to donate, and how much do you think you would donate?

Name three other sites with editorial content (blogs, news sites, etc.) you read consistently.

Name three other authors you read consistently.

Briefly, please describe what most attracts you to Entrekin’s work.

It helps explain why I went quiet for so many months, and stopped posting here altogether.

The ad I saw looked interesting and sought a writer interested in a monthly column. So I dropped a note to the supplied e-mail and, when I got a positive response, checked out the site, which was actually pretty awesome. I looked over some of the articles and pitched to the editor an idea I’d been kicking around for a few months (and still am).

The editor was encouraging and liked my style but thought the topic to specific and narrow, too relevant to writers and not relevant enough to their readers.

Ah, the dichotomy.

Look around online, visit Facebook or Twitter, and you’ll see lots of “articles.” Basically blog posts, except back in the old days blogs used to be web logs, and they used to be personal and on Live Journal and . . . was it Zingo? No, Xanga!

And then, of course, there was MySpace. I missed Live Journal and Xanga, but boy did I find MySpace. I started posting blogs there in August 2005, just when I was starting to consider graduate school, and the people I met through MySpace became very much a part of my experience of Los Angeles and USC.

Back then, the blogs and the posts . . . well, no one word applied to them. Lots of writers were posting poetry or microsays or short fiction. Some serialized novels and such. Some just wrote about life and pop culture.

I bring all this up because while I know that still exists, it seems there’s been an interesting transition over the past few years. We used to be a culture of consumption but are quickly becoming, instead, a culture of creation. Many of the people who read blogs decided to start blogs of their own (myself included) to write about whatever was important to them.

Readers became writers.

Do readers even exist any more?

***

Maybe my uncertainty is because I’m arguably closer to the publishing side of writing than many people are. I don’t know if readers, in general, can name the big 6 corporate publishers off the top of their heads, but I know many of the people I follow and who follow me on Twitter probably can. So I fear some of my view is too insular.

As in chemistry, where like dissolves like, when you get to a social networking medium, like tends to attract like. Writers attract other writers; it’s a support system, in a lot of ways. Collectors attract other collectors. Fans attract other fans.

Readers, one would think, would attract other readers, but perhaps by nature of the medium, something strange starts to happen; readers start becoming writers themselves. Readers sit down at their keyboards and review books online and become book bloggers, who become so great in number they actually have a convention to complement Book Expo America, basically the largest literary gathering on the East coast.

Communities gather. It’s what we do. We gather around the things we know and care about, the things that drive us and motivate us.

So, when readers who have begun blogging about books they love come together, they start talking about things like ethics and journalism and professionalism.

Often, when writers begin to build a so-called platform, they begin to talk about the sorts of things they care about and are interested in. The sorts of things that new writers are so concerned about. They produce the sorts of articles I put in quotes just up above: they talk about the best ways to build a platform. They talk about great ways to market cheaply.

Now don’t take me wrong: I’m not claiming there’s anything wrong with this.

It makes a lot of sense. In fact, a lot of what I’ve posted to this site has concerned the publishing industry, and problems with it.

Maybe what I’m driving at is that Jesus Christ, sometimes I bore even myself. And given that I’m a firm believer in the idea that if you want to make readers cry you have to make yourself cry first, if I’m starting to bore myself, you’re either well on your way to bored or relatively far beyond it already.

***

When I pitched to that editor, I received similar feedback; it was a neat idea, but the site wanted something more reader-centric, rather than writer-centric. Reading over more of the site to see the sorts of articles they were posting on a regular basis, I realized I had no idea either what that meant or how to pursue the relationship further. It may not have been professional that I simply gave up; I probably should have engaged the editor in a dialogue about what would have worked and what wouldn’t.

The thing is, though, that I sometimes think engaging editors is precisely–and especially lately–the wrong way to go about it.

Over the past year, I’ve begun to use Twitter more. It’s fun and fast, and can be as informative as it can be a complete waste of time otherwise better used elsewhere. It’s another like-attracts-like venue, but it’s also one where friends of friends of friends can jump easily into ongoing conversations. One useful catalyst for that bit is the hashtag, of which there are many. Among the hashtags I keep in a saved search list are #1b1t, #supernatural, and #pubtip. I’ve seen lots of others; one agent founded an #askagent hash by which aspiring authors can ask agents pretty much anything about the querying process.

One regular one is #followreader, wherein it seems like publishing professionals discuss amongst themselves . . . er. To be honest, I don’t quite understand what the #followreader discussion aims at. I know a lot of people I respect take part, and they talk about interesting things.

The thing about #followreader, though, is that it doesn’t, actually. You’d think that one would follow the reader like one would follow the leader, and it seems it even has its own site here. At the time of this writing, the most recent post is “What’s the RIGHT way to e-Read?” (Which I think prompts the question: er. Is there a wrong way to e-Read? Surely, if I’m reading, however I’m doing so has to be right. I’m the reader, after all, which makes me the customer, who is always right.) Others include “What’s Good About Traditional Publishing?” and “Networked Bloggers Sell More Books.”

And don’t get me wrong: I see the value in that sort of discussion. Although asking people who’ve been involved with the traditional publishing industry since manuscripts were sent hard-copy by Fed Ex what’s good about said industry strikes me as somewhat analogous to asking Paul McCartney what was great about the Beatles. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because Hell, he’s Paul McCartney, after all. I don’t even much like the Beatles but I’d still ask Paul McCartney what was great about them, and maybe ask him to play “Let It Be” for me, because Fuck, how awesome would that be?

But there’s a giant disconnect:

There’s a lot of talk the publishing industry needs saving. Everyone wonders what will save it. Publishers and editors and agents continually go to book fairs and conferences and every available media opportunity they get to note how things are uncertain but books remain strong and all this stuff, but there’s one major person nobody seems to ever think to talk to:

You.

Follow the reader? Are you burning to know what’s good about traditional publishing?

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe readers aren’t the point of #followreader. Maybe it’s publishing professionals talking amongst themselves to better figure out how to sell more books and survive and thrive in a new economy and acknowledging they have to do so by serving readers.

Maybe. But in that case I think of those damned writing manuals you see in any bookshop you go to. Not the Writer’s Market but the other ones like those mentioned in this Atlantic essay. I’m obviously not against workshops, studying craft, and reading about how to write better. I think writing better has perhaps become my main driving goal. I can’t exactly disparage How to Write a Better Plot when Robert McKee’s Story is half the reason I took a class with Syd Field, who literally wrote the text book on screenwriting and plot, both of which helped me become a better writer and storyteller. Ditto Sid Stebel’s Double Your Creative Power!. Sid was my adviser at USC, the guy who read, gave feedback on, and then signed my thesis.

Obviously, I think instruction is valuable. I think discussion is terrific.

But I think, ultimately, both neglect the most important aspect of writing and publishing in general, and that’s you.

I can’t speak for every writer, but I wouldn’t do it if not for you. To communicate with you. To say something to you. Writing is, first, communication from one person to another (or, hopefully many others). But always communication.

I see a lot of those hashtags. #askagent. #pubtip. #scribechat. All these writers and editors and agents and publishing pros talking amongst themselves.

Where’s the #askreader?

I see a lot of aspiring authors using the #askagent tag to ask questions like “What’s the hot trend now?” or “Do vampires still sell?” or other such questions.

Why aren’t more people asking readers what readers want to read?

More importantly, why aren’t I?

Why aren’t more people asking you how you want to read a book? Why aren’t publishers asking you what books you’ve been enjoying? Why aren’t agents asking you what sorts of books you’re dying to read so they know what to pluck from the 1000s of slush manuscripts they’re always complaining they receive but don’t have time to actually reject or even respond to.

Is it just me, or does it seem like #followreader is really all about trying to lead readers somewhere, rather than following where readers might like to go?

***

Which is not to say I’m not guilty of narrow focus. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I’ve posted so sporadically. Maybe I got so wrapped up in trying to be an author I forgot why I was writing in the first place.

I’m starting a new hashtag: #askreader. So far as I can see, it’s not been used before, and I think that’s a shame.

Because I want to know: what do you want to read? What makes you visit a site? What made you visit mine? If you bought my book, what made you do so?

Once upon a time, I was writing about pop culture but doing so inconsequentially. I burned out on MySpace because I didn’t feel what I was writing was really any good. I think I burned out on posting elsewhere, at least for a while, because I got so caught up in things like “platform” and “readership” and “online presence” and “marketing” I forgot to be a writer.

So, a promise: if you read this, if you comment, if you tell me what you want to read, I’ll write something and post it. Depending on the response, it might take a while, though I doubt it; since I stopped posting regularly, readership here has dropped rather significantly.

But I think I’m done worrying about readerships in favor of wondering about readers.

Again, simple: what do you want to read today?

Working on 12th and Greenwich puts me in the heart of the Village, and so, with a few hours off, I made my way just a bit north and east, to Barnes & Noble Union Square, which is even larger than the B&N at the Grove in Hollywood.

Going there made me think a lot about books. Not just because I was surrounded by them.

Used to be, if I went to a B&N, I couldn’t leave without an armful of books. Last week, I had no inclination to buy any at all, and not just due to lack of fundage. Lots of books getting some buzz: I know I need to read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo relatively soon, but otherwise? I heard a lot about The Imperfectionists, but I browsed it and didn’t make it past the first half-dozen pages, after which I gave up out of boredom.

This troubles me.

I used to read a copious amount of books, read books the way some people chainsmoke, beginning a new one even before I’d finished the previous one, letting the last few pages of one blur into the first few of the next.

Lately, I haven’t been so interested.

I worry about this a lot, considering books and what’s out there. Seems like the ones that sell the most copies are rarely that good. I’ve come down hard on Stephenie Meyer, whose books I find deeply disturbing on a great lot of levels, but I find lots of other books and trends just as bad.

The mash-up genre for one. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is a great punchline, but adding zombies to Austen’s classic just makes it a gimmick, and none of the other examples I’ve heard of prove exceptions to that. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter? Android Karenina?

Who’s read Tolstoy, anyway? He’s always struck me as one of those writers who gets a great reputation as gratest novilist evar despite that nobody’s actually ever read anything he wrote. I’ve never met someone who managed through War and Peace.

I’m sure these books are making their publishers a lot of money, but I’m less certain they’re doing anything special for reading or writing or literature or culture. They’re basically fan-fiction, except not as original. Not that there’s anything wrong with fan-fiction, but at least it usually has the good grace to be more original than mash-ups.

Of course, with that I have to confess that Meets Girl is a mash-up. It’s a modern-day, meta-fictional retelling of Faust. It kind of does with fiction (and songs, and movies) what Girl Talk does with music (and if you haven’t heard Girl Talk yet, you must).

It strikes me that the current crop of mash-ups is basically 90s-era Puff Daddy records, one dude rapping (not very well) over Sting and Aerosmith.

It could be more, though.

For example, technically, Shakespeare was basically a mash-up writer. Off the top of my head, I know two of his greatest plays–The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark and The Tragedie of Macbeth–were both retellings of then-popular tales. Basically, he took what everyone was already watching performed, added his own genius to it, and went with it. Which I guess goes back to the idea that there aren’t any new stories, only ways to tell them, and maybe I’d be more forgiving of the current mash-up crop if they were any better telling. Shakespeare, when he did it, took something old and made it new by making it something more than it had been; if there were sources for his plays, those sources are never as well known as the new plays themselves.

All the mash-up lit, though? It’s just derivative. Pride and Prejudice will forever stand on its own, with a footnote that some dude once added a few zombies to the original storyline.

***

Am I the only reader who feels like people think I’m stupid? That I can’t handle something new? That the only way to satisfy me is to give me more of the same as before, fill the shelves before me with endless variations on the same basic theme? Do we really need 30 James Patterson novels per year? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I think the man’s a machine and I admire what he’s done, as a writer, but there comes a time when playing to public nerve stops being canny and starts being exploitative, doesn’t there?

I’m not against popular fiction; I think the argument can be made that Shakespeare was the most popular fiction writer of his time. His output is meager compared to Patterson or Dean Koontz or Stephen King, but then again how many times have they achieved what he managed pretty much every time out? I’ve taught King at the university level; some of his stuff–particularly his early novellas, but also some of the longer works–certainly achieved something a great deal more important than just “popular”. Koontz’s Intensity is as good a novel as I’ve ever read.

I miss those sorts of books and experiences. Duma Key was not nearly as good as King several years ago. I haven’t read any Koontz since False Memory. I’ve never made it through a Patterson novel.

I used to love browsing books. I used to relish turning pages and getting lost in a story, my only reminder of the outside world the crick in my neck I’d earned finding the novel.

***

This feels, unfortunately, like one of those “Back in my day, _____ was better.” “Back in my day they made some real music, not like the crap you hear on the radio nowadays.” “Back when I was young we had real movies, not 3D gimmickry they’re charging $30 a pop for.”

I don’t know how to change that.

Does there come an age where what is new no longer holds the same sense of wonder as when we were younger?

I’m not sure. I still hear new music I enjoy all the time. I loved Avatar, and many of my favorite movies have come out in the last decade. Truthfully, in fact, I’ve never been one to think that the best had come before; I never liked Hemingway or Steinbeck. I think the best thing Faulkner ever wrote was The Big Sleep‘s screenplay. I always thought, in fact, that fiction–novel-length fiction, at any rate–was young, new, still in its infancy. That the best was yet to come.

I just didn’t realize people were going to think the way to make novels better was to stick zombies in them.

I thought we’d have more fun than that, and be more interesting.

***

Am I the only one? What’re you reading right now? What’re you loving in books?

I’m not going to pretend I can make that interesting.

It was the first business plan I ever conceived, and I tried hard but had difficulty with the course overall, which translated to difficulty with the final project. I knew how to query; I got requests for partials and polite rejections all the time. I’m reasonably good at pitching when I’m not so nervous my heart flutters. When it came time to name competition, I had trouble; I’m a writer, and don’t tend to think in terms of competition. Are Meyer and Brown competition? Part of me hopes so, because I’m about a thousand times better than either, but sometimes the market seems not to care about quality.

That’s a digression.

Part of what was hard for me was thinking of my writing so specifically as a product. Comparing my books to others. For me, it doesn’t; I write them because nobody else did and I wanted to read them.

That’s not what a business plan wants to hear.

***

What a business plan wants to hear is how viable a model any given venture may be.

My first business plan concerned itself with Exciting Entertainment, which I envision as a sort of new media production company. It is whatever I make it. So far, I’ve made it two great novels, a well-received collection, and a somewhat sporadic Internet presence closely followed by those who do at all. I still envision it that way, to some degree, but my personal and professional goals have changed somewhat, I think. I’m quite certain my publishing goals have.

My second focused on Exciting Consulting, which is one-stop author services to which I bring all the experience I have as an editor, designer, and publisher. It’s been very rewarding helping people make their ideas real and tangible.

I couldn’t write those business plans without thinking more deeply about publishing and models, and thinking about it as a business really began to alter my perceptions of the industry as a whole. And eventually I started to realize it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Maybe it shouldn’t. Some of the rejections I’ve gotten have cited the “subjective” nature of the publishing industry, and I hear time and again agents reject manuscripts they “just didn’t fall in love with” for one reason or another. Oddly, these agents never say those things about stuff like Never Fall in Love at the Jersey Shore, but I guess it’s supposed to remain valid? Somebody had to fall in love with Snooki’s bump-it and The Situation’s abs, I guess, right? Someone had to really believe that the most pressing question publishing could possibly answer was how J-Woww and Ronnie gymmed-laundry-tanned their fist-pumping ways into our collective hearts.

Right?

Thing is, business isn’t for subjectivity. It’s like science; it’s meant to be a place for objectivity, data, facts, measurement, analysis. I suppose one could make the argument that publishing is a business that concerns itself with art, which is all well and good, except here again we run up against the problem of Meyer and The Jersey Shore. Which one might bypass altogether by claiming both as examples of “low art,” which is shit that everyone totally fucking loves and goes batshit over but which is vulgar and probably lewd.

Like, say, Shakespeare. Titus Andronicus and the like.

Business is about bottom lines and revenue. Which is where Meyer and The Jersey Shore actually make sense; the latter is, quite literally, beach reading. And lots of people go to the beach. For better or for worse.

So maybe it all actually does work on that level. But on several others besides, I think it’s less viable.

***

To explain what I mean, let me first address what publishing means. Going by Dictionary.com’s definition of “publish,” it means “to issue (printed or otherwise reproduced textual or graphic material, computer software, etc.) for sale or distribution to the public.” This explains why, a few years ago, agents and editors were all universally recommending authors never post writing on, say, a website; publishers want things like first American rights when they buy manuscripts, and posting something online basically uses those rights up.

Years ago, before the Internet, it wasn’t so possible for just anyone to issue printed or otherwise reproduced textual material, nor to sell or distribute it to the public. First, it was expensive; printing all that paper and making books costs money. Second, they take up room. Third, they’re not easy to distribute, and when you do, they’re not easy to sell. Which was where publishers helped. Corporate, New York publishers. They had editors who proofread and developed manuscripts, relationships with printers to print large quantities of books at a discount over printing fewer numbers, and relationships with bookstores, where the public went to buy books.

That part of it made sense.

Some of the rest, however, didn’t, or at least didn’t to me. The two big areas where it seemed to make less sense were concerning advances and returns. When purchasing a book, editors and their publishing houses offer authors an advance, generally in the $5000 to $10000 range (last time I looked at figures from surveys conducted by guys like John Scalzi and Tobias Buckell). Some are significantly less (down to $0) while some are significantly more; Sarah Palin received an $8 million advance for Going Rogue. Now, that advance is against royalties, which means that when, say, HarperCollins bought Going Rogue from Palin and her ghostwriter (you didn’t really think Palin wrote her own book, did you? She can’t even speak an intelligent sentence, much less write one), they must have believed they would sell a boatload of copies, ultimately more than $8 million dollars worth. After which they would pay Palin royalties (generally between 7% and 15% per book, depending on contract).

I think they were actually right. I think it’s sold something like 2 or 3 million copies. At $30 for a hardcover, that’s, what, between $60 and $90 million dollars?

Most don’t sell that many copies. This page has some stats about sales, and it was written by the president of this company, and some of it is pretty startling. Eye-opening.

***

The other aspect of the model that never made sense to me was returns. It is, apparently, a throwback to the time around the Great Depression. Basically, book publishers had to offer to buy back from booksellers any copies of any books the sellers couldn’t sell; otherwise, the seller couldn’t stock it. Cost too much, or something, I guess.

I don’t know how many books get returned. Nor how it works. I do know, though, that it figures into that whole advance/royalties thing. I know that publishers withhold some portion of royalties at some point based on credit returns, some of which haven’t actually yet been made.

It basically just seems to tie up money on everyone’s end.

Do other industries work like this? I’ve never heard of it. Do DVD distributors let Best Buy return unsold discs? Do music labels allow Target to return CDs? I ask because if they do, I’m not aware of it.

Maybe I’m just ignorant.

Of course, maybe it’s also why Tower and Virgin and all went under.

***

Thing is, if you never knew how corporate publishing worked, if you were a writer, right now, and you wanted to publish your stories, you might not even consider the idea of paper. Not at first, anyway. If publishing is distributing information, you’d have all the necessary tools right here, online. If you were a writer, just starting out, or just trying to, and you’d never heard the idea of someone with no advanced degree in either business or law who wanted to take your story to editors with the hope of selling it to them and then withholding 15%, I’m not sure the idea of getting an agent would seem so attractive.

If you were a writer, just starting out, who disliked everything about Rupert Murdoch and News Corp and Fox, would the thought of attempting to get a book deal from Harper Collins even cross your mind?

I’m not sure.

Sadly, I’m not a writer just starting out, and may not have been when it counted. By 2000, I’d already been writing for five or so years. I’d already found the Well and met Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who maintain Making Light and are editors at TOR. I’d already read a lot about publishing, interviews with King and Koontz and Grisham, and the thing about that, when you consider it, is I’d already been exposed to publishing’s idea of what publishing was.

I am, however, an author just starting out. I have that USC master’s, and nearly another, in business, from Regis.

As a businessman just starting out, it strikes me that all the tools are right here. It strikes me that lots of people still love actual, physical books, but that maybe they’re now more about legacy rather than information; so many people read, right here, right now . . . is paper even necessary? Maybe paper’s necessary when you’ve already read and loved something you just want to put on your bookcase, just want to crack open one night alongside a bottle of wine and a new playlist and have an old-fashioned kind of quiet evening.

Because otherwise information has changed. It’s no longer kept in books on shelves and produced only by academics and professionals; it’s interactive, housed in servers and accessed electronically by everyone in the world, who can create and edit and interact and participate with it as they wish, and that’s exciting.

It makes sense why it scares all those corporate publishers, of course. It makes sense why Viacomm wanted to sue YouTube back in the day.

But for writers? For authors and creators?

And most of all, for readers? How many books are readers missing a chance to decide, for themselves, are great because publishers are focused on Palin and The Jersey Shore? If taste is truly subjective, should we really leave the arbitration of it to people whose track record, especially lately, is dubious at best and outright detrimental at worst? Consider the ways corporatization has changed publishing; who, in corporate publishing houses, is really reading books? Overworked editors who have meetings and pitches and proposals and marketing to do, every day, or their assistants, their interns, the ones who’ve just finished their degrees in literature or are still working on it?

***

I’m a writer. All my life, I’ve only wanted to connect to readers to tell stories. When I was growing up, the only way to do so was to pitch ideas to agents, who might take them to editors, who might buy them for publishing houses, who might work with printers to distribute those stories to bookstores who might stick them on shelves for readers to buy.

That is no longer true.

Lately, with iPads and Kindles and nooks and the Internet and digital revolution, there’s been some talk of the death of publishing. Who will save it? How will we save publishing?

Truth is, we don’t need to. If publishing just means the dissemination of information, well, maybe it was folly to believe anyone was ever able to control it in the first place. People say publishing has changed, but publishing has always changed, and it will continue to, because publishing is change, and information is the most basic mechanism of it, truly one of the only things that ever has exacted change on the world.