Tell Me A Story - James Goertel

Welcome to another addition of TNBBC's Tell Me A Story. 

Tell Me a Story is a monthly series that features previously unpublished short stories from debut and Indie authors. The request was simple: Stories can be any format, any genre, and any length. And many amazing writers signed up for the challenge.


This month's story comes to you a little late.. but better late than never. If it wasn't for James Goertel coming to our rescue, we may not have had a December installment of Tell Me a Story at all, so we are extremely grateful to him!


Born in North Dakota, James Goertel spent twenty years working in television for ABC, NBC, and ESPN, among others.  He currently teaches writing at Penn State Erie and lives on Lake Erie in Western New York, south of Buffalo proper. 'Carry Each His Burden' is his debut fiction collection and was published in September of 2011.

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She Just Wants to Be

            

SHE was becoming something else: like the mutable sky, she a cloud; like the chameleon water, she the diamond light dancing. He had become something quite other than the man from a score ago, long ago: once white teeth, yellowed by the nicotine from fifty-thousand snuck cigarettes beyond their vows and his to quit; thick brown coif turned a scatter of grey strand inconvenience; soft fumbling hands now a palsy of fists of put-upon threatening to pummel the little left of his once good nature and unclenching only for unannounced, uninvited trespasses upon her flesh.  Her own beauty once apparent, now nearly transparent, his face merely a nervous tick she could not seem to shake. 

            No more mirrors in this un-funhouse. She’d gotten rid of them all in the space of this last year. One by one – a compact into the bathroom trash, a full-length from the bedroom relegated to the attic and quietly reflecting for these past six months a two decade accumulation of who they were, had been, were not now – the slow capitulation of their personalities in the reverse images of unmarked cardboard boxes standing vigil over a discard of memories and mementos alike.

            She read somewhere in the insomnia of the literature that filled her waking hours, that sleep comes when one imagines herself as the river, the stars, the eagle gliding thermals with no need for the uncertainty of the ground. Night was a refuge for her, from the predators of day, its unflinching white light, its landscape of faces she painted over with the waves she imagined herself as, until sleep finally breached her earthbound senses, erasing sands even time could not seem to touch. She read almost anything, the pile of year old magazines in any doctor’s office as worthy and welcome as the entire contents of the Vatican Library; the words within the pages of People Magazine, of prophets, poets, and priests, anything to drown out the sound of his voice, a dissonance of claws tearing skin, its screech scratching bones, gouging marrow, leaving scar tissue for tears she kept to herself.

            She just wants to be. This recurring third person thought becoming a redundant dialogue between whom she was and whom she had not yet become. He was the rattle of a train against the wind and rails. She was the mute lightning across the panorama of a fog horizon. But something was giving way, a shift in long-held beliefs, a manifesto taking form behind her kidnapped smile, within her nocturnal spirit and magnifying the dim light left inside her, brightening the corners of her opaque and odalisque soul. Her days had slowed to a trickle in this year she refused to name, no longer willing to even recognize a calendar that was unable to count accurately the inert hours between a lifetime abandoned and the one not yet embraced.

            And so she painted the blank canvas of days away with unwarranted reverie for a life beyond her grasp, one that might have been filled with a profession she’d attained both undergraduate and graduate diplomas for, if he had allowed her to work. So much though for her degrees in psychology and what good were they anyway considering she could not even understand, much less budge toward resolution, her own ambivalent thoughts. She awoke dutifully each morning during the week, dressed and brought him his coffee and toast to their once table for two as he pawed at the newspaper like a feral cat in a litter box. Even the most mundane, perfunctory actions by him now reviled her. He had become an animal to her. But she too had become an animal, a primal thing wanting only to howl at the moon with a call of the wild to keep her remaining sanity, to keep her safe from his stalking and the heat of desire still burning beneath his hairy limbs, within his canis lupus heart.

            Five days a week he left by 7A.M. and by 7:05A.M. she had stripped herself naked and had gone back to bed where she dreamed of herself as the bird no longer willing to alight, the stream beyond its banks, the wind moving deftly around the immovable. She was beyond the sexual being of her college days, their early years of marriage. Her breasts were excess baggage, her lips held their reservoir of kisses in a safe house beyond the lipstick she used as a shaded shadow play in place of an exiled smile, and her eyes no longer held the fire that had once made effigies of suitors, lovers, and a line of men who still stood waiting for a wink, a batting lash, a laughing brow in the decades she’d left behind and which it seemed to her had passed in a dry blink, for she found that she could no longer even cry.

            As she slipped further away from herself she turned to photographic evidence she found while looking for black and white clues, Kodachrome reminders and scrapbook testimonials of who she had been before him. Within drawers, the folds of paperback books, and turn of yellow paged binders, she tried to divine the before in search of the after. Across the hundreds of photos she ran fingers hoping to find something more than the flat, one dimensional, but factual image of a single captured moment that in their totality would not have given a complete picture, even if animated across the white expanse of a wasted lifetime and with the benefit of her own memory to make the jump cuts somewhat less jarring. If somehow this picture parade, this pageant of nostalgia could miraculously fill in the missing pieces it would be but a foothold and so much less than the solid foundation she felt she needed to stand upon going forward. Her waking life precluded any connection to the past and her dream life connected her only to the now – she the sea upon the palisades, she the soil beneath the permafrost, she the tree no longer shooting roots but in pursuit of only sky.

            She could remember when one hunger ceased and the other began. He was there, she was happy; he was there, she was unhappy. Happy, sad, angry, frustrated, and elated had all congealed into a lump as continually mutable as cancer cells that leap from skin to lymph to lung to breast showing no particular preference, the perfect opportunist. But her condition was far from terminal, so she had instead become her own best anesthetist, her imagination the chloroform against both reality and denial; an anodyne far more predictable than chemotherapy.

            At least there was no longer any reason for either one of them to talk. He grunted, she sighed. His coughing and gagging often broke her attention from her own heart’s beating recital or from the rhythm of her breath barely audible through nasal passages, for to separate her lips even minutely might intimate the impending resumption of a conversation long since abandoned by both, but to her dismay recently replaced by something far worse than banal, mutual discourse.

            He started with outbursts and vomiting diatribes here and there, their bile sculpted innuendos and castigations left in uneven puddles around her feet which just this past week had begun to lift, float, elevate just ever so slightly as to be unnoticeable to him, unmentionable by her. Who could she speak to? The fox, the flower, the grass she imagined herself waiting on the wind to whisper the dew away? Friends had been few over the years and now were none at all – a small number of fortunate souls who had slipped away from the suffocation of her anaerobic marital condition to join a material world she had always found elusive, a world of superficially put-together, confident people walking malls, driving cars, and going to dinner, blissfully unaware of the beauty of their transfigurations not through self-actualization, but through solipsism so perfectly shimmering it was blinding to someone as self-aware and sensitive as she.

            The sanctuary of sleep was her only refuge, but he had begun unwittingly to invade that as well in a series of dreams that left the bedroom smelling of accelerant, her face flushed, a sense of aerial topography where the floor had once been, a shroud of smoke where the bedroom ceiling she knew intimately had once hovered. The river she gave herself to so long ago now flooded beyond its collapsing banks, the broken-wing crow she imagined herself before sleep now spread both wide in anticipation of flight, and the sound of wind through the trees beyond the house now replaced the communion of letters pronouncing her own name.

            She counted down the hours of her last day by spending it idly identifying songbirds that came and went outside the kitchen window. The last thing she may have remembered before she saw him approaching the house, if things such as this mattered in the aftermath of things that no longer mattered at all, was the sudden large shadow of an unseen flock of birds darting this way, then that way across the lawn, beneath the fading strength of an autumn noon’s sun. And in that near illusion’s wake only pure instinct remained replacing the whole of her biology, an ethereal adrenaline where bone, breath, blood, and skin had been just a moment before.

            Leaves rattled upon the wind that rushed in on a barometer heading down. The sad, long strands of what was left of his hair moved back and forth like delirious tentacles as he made his way up the sidewalk, hand gripping gun-metal within a pocket of his soiled tan and torn trench coat, his knowing smile residing firmly in his mind, not bothering to make its way to his lips. He stopped at the front door, peered in through one of the panes of glass adorning either side and into the mudroom leading into the small kitchen. Empty. And so too now was he, completely, at last, the animal within void of all human emotion; for him as for her, only instinct remained.

            But her instinct, honed over time through both attention and inattention to his rut worn habits, anticipated his dark intentions today and so found her walking out the back porch door as he entered the front. She walked with singular purpose to the north corner of the house. She uncapped the red, plastic, five gallon gas container sitting there, tilted it ninety degrees and followed the outline of the structure back toward the front door, pouring a steady stream as she went. Her nostrils winced, flared in the vapor trail of its fumes. Her eyes began to water, but these were not tears, merely residual biology. At the front door she looked in through the house sensing his shadow going from room to room in search of her, though she could not spy his figure. Gas now lapping at the lip of the container and splashing up onto her hand, she continued on and made her way from the southwest corner up and around until she stood at the north corner again.

            The old, shingled house caught fire quickly, so quickly in fact that she immediately made her way across the property, moving briskly in between the tall dead birch trees and a variety of robust maples that covered the lawn until she reached the edge of a large stand of old growth oaks. The front of the house was on its way to being engulfed and flames throwing white-hot debris began to lap at the dry dead leaves of autumn still hanging from many of the trees. The windy day carried burning leaves, ash, smoke, and heat toward her.  It was from this new perspective, at a distance from the house now, that she noted one of the windows opening and before his frame was fully through it, she turned on a heel and headed into the waiting arms of the woods, life and limb hanging in the balance between him, the hunter, and her, the hunted.

            Flight, after running only a short distance, gave way to fascination, an inexplicable fascination with a sudden sense of something beyond mortal fear. She stood behind an oak among many, her back leaned in against it, head tilted toward the remaining and reluctant canopy of broad, brittle leaves and up into the sky and its shift of grey smoke, its dance of black ash. She closed her eyes. She could feel the waves of heat here and there across her face as she breathed in deeply the last dream awaiting only sleep. She could hear his distant voice calling her name; hear his wolf heart beating as he stalked the large stand for her, his voice a blood-stained razor cutting across sharp teeth. She turned toward the towering oak and put her arms as far around it as she could in a warm, surrendering embrace.

            She felt her feet take root, running the soil, encountering moisture. Her arms seemed to rise along the bark and then were inside it and she could feel the damp cool of the oak’s true flesh. Her hair stood on end and smelled of burning leaves, smoke, and scorching wood pulp. She felt her feet, now roots, begin to pull away from the very dirt they were mining and her head became woozy as she began lifting, slightly at first, upward.

            She, now the tree, growing, adding to the last ring an epitaph while reaching with branches for the open sky, propelled by what seemed a hundred years worth of spontaneous growth; her roots pulling free from the ground, her limbs of leaves now feathers and taking wing, leaving behind the oak to be consumed in the conflagration below, feathers finding thermals and catching the drafts that plucked away at them until she found herself loosed from gravity itself.

            And she is at last the wind she just wants to be, moving freely, deftly around all that is immovable.

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I want to thank James for participating in TNBBC's Tell Me a Story. If you like what you've read, please support James by checking out his book and website. Help spread the word by sharing this post through your blog, tumblr page, twitter and facebook accounts. Every link counts! And be sure to check back with us next month for the next installment....

If you are interested in submitting your short story for consideration for this series, please contact me mescorn@ptd.net.

The Blue Square Press/Mud Luscious Press Mini-ini (Part II)

Yesterday, I posted Part I of the Blue Square Press / Mud Luscious Press Merge mini-ini. In it, you got to hear BSP co-founder Ben Spivey dish on what fans of the press can expect from the partnership.

I have to admit, when I first learned of the merge, I googled the heck out of Mud Luscious. I was not familiar with them or their founding editor J.A. Tyler and was dying to see what they were all about. Of course, while I was peeking around on the internet, the little light bulb over my head went on and I figured why not interview them and get their take on the new partnership! Thus, the mini-ini was born....

And J.A. Tyler, who I can already tell is one helluva cool dude, had this to say on things:


Why the merge with Blue Square Press?

Blue Square Press is a publisher we've always admired - they take calculated risks, they love stretched language, and their production quality is tremendous - so when Ben and David got in touch with us about the potential to combine forces, we were so game. We knew that we could bring a wider audience to BSP as well as some extra resources and staff, and we knew that they would allow us to publish even more books and create an even broader brand for MLP.

What does the merge mean for Mud Luscious?

This merger means that Mud Luscious Press can help in the publishing of
2-3 more titles per year, books that we wished we could publish ourselves but could not due to budgetary and calendar obligations - but now, with Blue Square Press in our family, they can bring those books about under our umbrella - a true win / win. The merger also means that we get to work with Ben Spivey and David Peak, both writers and editors that we greatly respect and can undoubtedly learn new tricks from.

What can Mud Luscious readers expect from you in the future?

2012 is going to be absolutely brilliant for Mud Luscious Press.

First, we are releasing four new novel(la) titles: Gregory Sherl's second book, The Oregon Trail is the Oregon Trail, a connected series of beautifully vicious and lustful poetry, Matt Bell's second book and first novella, Cataclysm Baby, an apocalypse like none other. Then mid-year we'll be re-releasing Ken Sparling's wonderful Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall, originally published with Knopf in 1996 and wrongfully out of print for more than a decade. And we'll finish our novel(la) series year with the first full-length book from Robert Kloss, The Alligators of Abraham, one of the most brutal books I've ever encountered and delicately laced with cover and interior illustrations by the astounding Matt Kish of Tin House's Moby-Dick in Pictures.

And beside those, we will be releasing a smattering of new Nephew series titles, including XXXX XXXX-XXXXXXX XXXXXXXX by XXXXXXX XXXX XXXXXXXX, XX XXX XXXXX XX XXXXX by XXXXXX XXXXX, XXXXXXXXXXX by XXXXXX XXXXX, and XXXXXX XXX XXXX by XXX.

We'll also be very shortly announcing a new venture - the Transduction series - which will open its doors with Alban Fisher at the cover design helm and Kristi Maxwell's P/LANK as its first title - an endeavor that we are so exciting to start getting our grubby hands on.

All in all, a year we know will be the biggest and best yet for a lovely growing Mud Luscious Press

The Blue Square Press/Mud Luscious Press Mini-ini (Part I)

Blue Square Press and Mud Luscious join forces!

Last month, I heard that Blue Square Press had signed on as an imprint of Mud Luscious Press. I was all over that in a matter of minutes.  Having worked with Blue Square Press (BSP) in the past, I was familiar with their work and their history. Earlier in the year I had reviewed Ben's novel , and Blue Square Press's first release, Flowing in the Gossamer Fold. And a few weeks back I read their second novel, Jack Boettcher's Theater State (I owe them a review on this!!). Ben is a peach, and has been extremely supportive of TNBBC, even agreeing to write an article for my On "Being Indie" series.  So, naturally I was curious to know why Ben Spivey (author and co-founder of BSP) made the decision to merge. 

When interviewed for this mini-ini, here is what he had to say on the matter:

Why the merge with Mud Luscious Press?

I think of when Square Co. Merged with Enix in the early two-thousands. Square and Enix were independently publishing some of the best rpgs around. I was a fan of both companies growing up. I loved Square for games like Final Fantasy 4, 6, Tactics, 7 and 9, Xenogears and Chrono Trigger. I similarly loved Enix for Ogre Battle (SNES), Dragon Warrior 7 and Star Ocean the second story. I'm not exactly sure why they merged but I assume it was because they were reaching a similar audience and could accomplish more working together. We merged because we felt like that. We're on a similar path. We have different aesthetics but we compliment each other. Essentially we were running different paths to the same goal, but now we have a partnership with a direct red-phone-line to close friends who we'll oar through the seas and the years with.

What does the merge mean for Blue Square Press?

MLP has a large readership base and we benefit from the new eyes in our direction. We're working on a lot of new things with the support of J.A. Tyler and Andrew Borgstrom such as ebooks, different distribution methods, and new ways of acquiring interviews and reviews for our authors and their books. It's sort of like when Richter Belmont finally meets Maria Renard in Castlevania: Rondo of Blood. Things get a little easier, you can take a step back and focus on moving forward in bigger ways.  

What can Blue Square Press readers expect from you in the future?

We're ecstatic about our upcoming titles. Sean Kilpatrick's fuckscapes will be out this December. Its been an amazing experience working on that book. It's a beautiful and brutal collection of poetry. And so far for next year we have two books lined up: M. Kitchell's Slow Slidings, which I view as a innovative horror text and Darby Larson's Irritant which is a 700 page tome unlike anything I've seen before. We're working on and looking into things like publishing games that also function as literature. Things are only going to get more interesting as we go. We'll continue down this path.    

**Check back tomorrow to see the mini-ini I conducted with their new partners-in-literature, Mud Luscious Press!**

Review: Whiskey Heart

Read 11/23/11 - 11/30/11
4.5 Stars - Highly Recommended
Pgs: 208
Publisher: New Rivers Press

Everyone likes to have a good, stiff drink now and again. Something to help take the edge off. Something to help you forget. Right?

But how long till that one glass turns into two? And two turns into three? And three becomes... wha.. where am I.. Is that the floor my cheek is stuck to.. Am I under the table.. How the fuck did I end up under the table.. How many drinks have I had?! Bartender, hit me with another... I'm starting to remember!

C'mon.. admit it. You've been there, or somewhere like there, once or twice before. There's no use lying about it. I know.. oh god, do I know! It's a horrible feeling when you find yourself there, but man did it feel good getting there, right? Am I right?!

We love to love the drink, don't we? We love the way it gives us wings, makes us feel empowered, blurs the edges enough to make letting go a little easier... But no one (or, at least, no one I've ever met), loves the way it tears their family apart. No one loves the way it changes their father into a shadow-man, or turns their sister into a forgetful mess, or their brother into a violent man, or accelerates their closest cousin into a depressed, ticking time bomb. Perhaps worse than all of that is the belief that the drink won't do any of that to them. No way. Yet, it's got to start somewhere. And so it always begins with just... one... drink...

In Whiskey Heart, Rachel Coyne cleverly demonstrates just how deep the drink can cut you.

We meet Kat, who left her family behind many years ago, as she suddenly becomes aware of the fact that she is in her car, driving back home for some unknown reason. She managed to stay away for her father's funeral - a drunk who stashed so many bottles of booze in and around the house that she is still uncovering them many years after his death - and her beloved cousin Tea's funeral - who used booze as a way to hide from her inability to love and died a fittingly mysterious death that reeked of alcohol abuse.

Upon her return, still numb from the loss of her cousin, she discovers a shell of the family she had left behind. Her mother is cold and distant, her older sister Abra has found Jesus, her younger sister Pearl is a sloppy drunk who seems to forget she is the mother of young Blue (an extremely odd yet forgiving little boy), and her two brothers - who come with tons of baggage of their own - all appear hesitant to welcome her back yet seem to need her to hold them all together.

 As she attempts to deal with their issues and her own overwhelming feelings of abandonment, anger, and grief over Tea's death, Kat retreats to the attic where Tea lived out the last few months of her life, in an effort to pack up and distribute all of her old belongings. Doing so brings back a wave of memories and stories that she is not prepared to deal with, and soon... Kat - already on the brink of depression - slowly finds herself slipping into alcohol's familiar, warm embrace.

Coyne spares us all the flowery details, driving right into the heart of things. She torments her characters, suffers them real emotions and pays them out real consequences. The writing is honest and ugly and forces you to accept these people - Kat, Momma, Pearl, etc... - for who they really are. She makes no apologies for them, which was a breath of fresh air for me. And when all is said and done, Coyne refuses to tie a nice, neat little bow on things. She lets everything hang... unfinished... yet leaves the reader feeling satisfied nonetheless.

Many of the events in the book are foreshadowed, which builds up this wonderfully tense anticipation. Coyne also creates a heavy air of inevitability and acceptance, and sometimes even resignation, in both her characters and in me, the reader.

The only thing that stopped me from giving it the full 5 Star "Next Best Book" treatment were the editing errors. A small, but obvious, thing that distracted from the story from time to time. That might sound funny coming from me -since I am constantly making grammatical faux pas - but there you have it.

A 2009 release from New Rivers Press, I am sure this little gem slipped under many of your radars. Go. Buy. Now. And come back to thank me later.

Book Giveaway: The Moment

TNBBC has got a hot new giveaway for you!

 Douglas Kennedy's  The Moment
is out in paperback

and we are giving away 3 domestic copies to US residents.

(sorry, no international this time!)

Here's the Goodreads description (where you can read an excerpt as well):

Berlin, during the period of perestroika in the 1980s. The male protagonist is a travel writer who falls desperately in love with a beautiful East Berlin woman, Petra. Their passionate relationship is destroyed when he finds out that Petra is a Stasi agent and, worse, that she has been using their relationship to gain information from him. He is devastated at such betrayal, believing that every element of their relationship had been false.

It is only years later, once Petra is dead, that the narrator discovers the truth. Petra was being forced to give information to the Stasi, who were holding her son captive under threats of death. Too late he learns that the relationship was a sincere one -- the feelings were real -- and it was only Petra's fear for her son's life that led to her betrayal of her lover. But the crucial moment, when he had the choice to commit fully to her and find the truth or to walk away, has gone for ever.

Like Kennedy's previous highly acclaimed novels, The Moment brilliantly illustrates the irrationality of love and the crucial moments which define whole lives.

Sound like something you might like?

I sure hope so!!

The contest will run through December 9th. 

Winners will be announced here and via email on December 10th.

 Here's how to enter:

 1 - Comment here stating that you would like to receive a copy of the book and share with us your favorite, most disturbing, or heart-breaking moment.

 2 - You must leave me a way to contact you (email is preferred). 

 That's it! Easy right?! 

Of course, should you win, we'd love to know what you thought of it.

Good luck!

A New Kind of Literary Agency

Lucinda and I met during the first annual Book Bloggers Convention during BEA in New York City in 2010.  At the time, she was working for a literary agency and I was still fairly new to blogging (though I had already established TNBBC on Goodreads a good three years prior). She was incredibly energetic and interested in what I wanted to accomplish with my blog and I was completely captivated by her. 

Over the past year and a half, we have worked together numerous times - scheduling in books for giveaways on the blog and hosting month long discussions with her authors in the Goodreads group. She has also been a tremendous mentor and coach to me.

Today, I'm thrilled to congratulate her on her newest venture - Lucinda Blumenfeld Literary Consulting! As a way of introduction, Lucinda has shared the following information with us. It helps bring to light the ever-evolving role of a lit agent and explains how digital publishing has changed the marketplace. (Please be aware that as of right now, the Lucinda Literary website is not officially launched, so the hyperlinks won't work... Try 'em again later this week though, as it's anticipated to hit the internet soon!)

A new eLiterary Agency: Interview with Lucinda Blumenfeld

President and Founder of Lucinda Literary LLC
Coming this week…http://www.lucindaliterary.com

Is readership diminishing in the advent of digital publishing?

There will always be readers so long as there is human curiosity. I see digital publishing as a major advantage, not merely in terms of the infinite marketing avenues it allows, but also in terms of hard data that, historically, has not been accessible for authors or their publishers. We never knew who readers were before; what books they liked to read. My personal thought is that what I call “app-sized publishing” is not a bad thing at all, but conversely offers authors and publishers a greater chance to stand out in a high-volume marketplace. This means more books, ultimately with lower production costs, more appeal for multimedia, and more readers—albeit with smaller attention spans. 

Consider my friend Ted, an avid reader who is also an MD/PHD. Ted has an IPad, an Android; he loves obscure social networks and blogs, and he likes to read on diverse subjects in the little time his schedule permits between classes and residency. In other words, on the subway.

Ted is the reader of the future: the kind writers need to write for, and publishers need to market to. (The dangling preposition sounded more affirmative, no?)

Read more about Ted and his wacky ideas at http://www.lucindaliterary.com/blog.

What does this mean for publishers and authors?

Book purchases at lower costs and higher volume. Greater reader engagement through interactive/social media integrated into enhanced eBooks or mobile apps. More visibility, creative power, and possibly financial benefit for authors.

Those of us who enjoy looking at visual media and reading books but are conservative in our spending—those who  wait for movies to release on-demand, and for cheaper iterations of the IPhone and IPad—likely do not buy a hardcover book at $25.99, unless you just can’t wait another minute for Elizabeth Gilbert’s, Tom Connelly’s, Stephanie Meyer’s, JK Rowling’s latest book. We’ll splurge to that.

But a debut author with no prior bestselling credentials and zero recognition, save that great book review in the Times that your mother mentioned? Limited.

I’m not saying don’t try to be a bestseller, get an agent, get a book deal with Random House! But if you come up dry, you have options. There are plenty of successful self-published authors out there, and with the dawn of “micropublishing”—not yet an industry term, FYI, just a term I’ve coined—readers can find and impulsively buy your books on mobile devices; we can follow you using social media. You could be the next Kindle Mover & Shaker. And then you can pursue that book deal you’ve been wanting, with your audience already established (which means, a bigger book deal.) Writers need patience above all…any agent or editor will tell you the marketplace is all about timing.

P.S. Don’t expect your mother to know what a Kindle Mover & Shaker is. But at least she won’t be your only reader.

(Do you still even read The Book Review, or do you scan Goodreads for recommendations? Vote here.)

Where do literary agents stand? What's their take on all of it?

It’s a conflict for agents. They’re mainly a smart and forward-thinking bunch, so we see the power of digital media, while we cling a hardcover past, because our livelihood historically has depended on it. Older agents, however, remember similar fears when paperbacks came along, which later proved a sales advantage—a larger print run of books sold at half the price of a hardcover made sense in terms of the numbers. Many of these agents therefore don’t tremble in the wake of eBooks and apps…but they’re not exactly on Twitter. And that may be the largest issue.

I’ll be very transparent with authors that I’m a learner at Twitter, too, and that my primary work is helping authors to leverage social networks, which often means I do less self-promoting than I should as a new company. But getting versed and being knowledgeable in whatever’s coming next in terms of new media could be seen as a big advantage to working with me. I’m an outsider looking in, but at least I’m looking: I’m as clear as I can be on how it all works.

And yet, aspiring authors still see big deals happening for hardcover books….

I love the way the legendary editor Jonathan Karp puts it in a recent New York Magazine article, “‘As for the big advances,’ he says, “when publishers swing for the fences, I think that’s admirable. Does anyone want publishers to bunt?”  Publishers today bank on a book’s possibility to go out of the gate like gangbusters. But everyone knows this kind of success to be negligible, just like publishing’s precedents in music and film.  It’s a very difficult business to represent authors today, however talented, however devoted we are to their books. And so, while I love Karp’s wording above, I find it completely contradictory to his preceding sentence in the very same interview: “Why anyone would write a novel and not want everyone to read it is a mystery to me.”

Wouldn’t that just prove that the app-sized or micropublishing model of lower advances, lower production costs, and lower prices is the preferable option if it offers the most expansive visibility bar none?

Can you tell us some frequent author misconceptions about what having an agent means?

Myth 1: Because I have an agent, I have a book deal in the horizon. (It’s just that the horizon is presently cloudy, indiscernible to me.)

Myth 2: An agent is like a real estate broker. His job is to sell my book.

No savvy agent is going to take you on if he/she doesn’t believe your book will sell! But you won’t see in your author agreement with an agency that your book might very well not sell. Myth unraveled: all agents have not sold books (in the plural). And anyone in the industry will tell you the marketplace is more restrictive than ever, though better than it was a few years ago, before eBooks brought a whole new revenue stream and substantially added value. 

Thus a natural, human confusion arises in the minds of authors—I certainly don’t blame them—my agent is responsible for selling my book (not manage all the crises that arrive once the book deal happens, not offer career strategy, not market and network on your behalf, not relentlessly pursue any ancillary deals, like television, long after your book has published. We are there to legally and emotionally and financially protect you—all of which make an agent more landlord than real estate broker. All that’s in parentheses are as much an agent’s work as the effort, not guarantee, to sell your book. 



Myth 3: An agent is a publisher. 


Myth 4: An agent is not an editor. (There’s a trick here)


Myth 5: I do not need an agent.

I kid you not: there are many people, including writers, who actually think agents publish books. (OK, well arguably, some agencies do now.)  But agents neither physically produce nor distribute books. Both our product and capital is client service, interpersonal relations, and above all, advocacy.

You’re right: an agent isn’t an editor. But agents play editors all the time. We need to share their eye, and we need to share the workings of their brain. If you’re refused on the basis of “platform,” that horrible platitude all of us have come to despise, that doesn’t mean an agent doesn’t believe in your talents as a writer. (Yes, a double negative, because it sounded more affirmative. Just want to be clear that I do have some sense of proper sentence construction…)

I do not need an agent—au contraire! I personally know one author who chose to publish her first novel with a small, independent press and seen real success, but that’s because she’s an exceptional networker, has zero trepidation in self-promoting, confidence in the quality of her work, has published traditionally with an agent and major publisher before, so she knows the game, and had marketing help from my company. Jointly, Sonia and I worked as partners to tirelessly promote her book…and magical things happened.

Other authors need to be walked through the process. They need someone to verse them and possibly handle rights; they need editing help, which good agents provide; they need marketing insights, which many agents can inform; they still need legal, emotional, and financial protection. Who wants to go through this alone?

Plus, in the future, authors may see more negotiating power in terms of agent commissions in eBooks-only representation. (Not to worry agents, because this will be a fun challenge, less bureaucratic, and consequently, our days won’t be swallowed in mediation. We’ll be dealing author-agent only, possibly with a third marketer’s involvement. Didn’t we get in this because we wanted that primary agent/author relationship?)

How do you consider your agency different?

I represent book proposals and writers just like any typical literary agency. But I’m not an elitist: I enjoy diverse categories of books because I’m an insatiable “curiouist”—again, a word of my own design. I’ll review any project I solicit or any project referred to me with the exception of fantasy, sci-fi, diet, children’s, just because I can’t fall for those categories of books to which I’m not a devoted reader or expert. I can’t fake enthusiasm even at the prospect of a big advance.

My particular company and role in the new, digital era of publishing is to work with aspiring and established authors looking to grow their audiences, and coach them through best practices for social networking, offline networking, and messaging from both a marketing and book standpoint (these are usually different). I lend, along the way, a love for and thoroughness in editorial development and presentation, my marketing experience and publicity connections for the strongest platform possible. You can learn more about my “B2B,” or “Blog to Book” model servicing bloggers and business practitioners, doctors, filmmakers, psychologists, celebrities, professors—those who already have the book idea, and even those who don’t, but should be writing one.

Some call this ADD, but I call it all-accessibility—it’s what’s needed in a new, evolving marketplace—and I have the capacity to be all-accessible as a new company, hungry, and 5 years away from having children. Unlike those more seasoned, I’m not cornered as a specialist.

As previously discussed, I see the value of working with an agent far beyond a sales capacity, and the value of working with a marketer far beyond publicity, or blog tours, or Amazon promotions. I’m the person who is both, and I’m training my employees to think and grow in these complimentary directions, too.

I’m trying to re-invent publishing. I know that’s ambitious.

Lucinda has worn many hats in publishing as a literary agent at Fletcher & Company, an online marketing manager at Scholastic, and as a publicist at HarperCollins. Recent projects include women’s nonfiction debut My Formerly Hot Life: Dispatches from Just the Other Side of Young, by Stephanie Dolgoff, leadership debut Too Many Bosses, Too Few Leaders, by Rajeev Peshawaria, and historical novel The Moment, by Douglas Kennedy. Learn more about LBLC at www.lucindaliterary.com or follow her on Twitter@lucindaliterary.

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Indie Spotlight: David Simpson

As a reader whose tastes typically fall "left of center", I've always been a supporter of independent/small presses and self-published authors. It's no secret that some of my favorite books have come from these underdogs of the publishing world. 

Sure, the choice to self-publish has never been an easy one. It carries with it a stigma that is sometimes difficult to shake - one of poor grammar and editing; a book that traditional publishers were not willing to represent; a writer with work that was un-agentable. However, as more and more people embrace e-Reading and writers become more business-savvy, for many the new advantages that come with the decision to self-publish appear to far outweigh the negatives. 

David Simpson, author of the 2009 release Post-Human and more recently released titles Trans-Human and The God Killers, decided to take control of his novels' destinies by publishing them himself. In the following guest post, David explains the many reasons he believes self-publishing is the right move for him:

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Times, they are a changing. 

Last week, the trajectory of my writing career, at least for the foreseeable future, finally changed with the times. Late Saturday night, I was about to hit the sack and get some much needed sleep when I made the fateful decision to click on yahoo news (an almost zombie-like habit I have formed) to see what was happening in the world. On the front page was a story about Amanda Hocking, a “paranormal romance” author who, despite being rejected over fifty times by traditional publishers, was talented, hardworking, and self-published on Kindle. 

And she had just sold one million books.

One million. All with no publisher or agent. My heart was pounding as I read the article. I researched her, read her blog, watched news reports about her on Youtube, and knew immediately that the path she took was the one for me too. 

In her first month as a self-published author on Kindle, Amanda sold a few hundred stories for only 99 cents a piece; Kindle only lets the author keep 35 cents on every sale at that price point, so Amanda didn’t make much money, but she was proud that she had sold so many copies (and so she should have been) and was encouraged to pass her book along to book blogs not unlike this one. In only her second month, her sales had climbed to over six thousand. The following month (July) she crossed ten thousand. In November, twenty thousand. And in December, she reports that she sold 169 000 copies! In less than a year, she had transformed herself from a woman living paycheck to paycheck, into a millionaire.

I should have seen this coming. I still teach, and one of my favorite subjects to teach my students about is future trends, especially in technology. I’d been expecting e-readers to revolutionize the book industry for a couple of years now. In 2009, when I published my first novel, Post-Human, my publisher (who is owned by Barnes and Noble) didn’t care about e-books, because they only made up 3% of total sales. By the end of 2010, however, the number had climbed to 9%. I remember reading industry “experts” who looked at that 6% jump and assumed 2011 would be the year e-sales might reach 15%. I predicted that the trend would be exponential rather than linear, and that sales should hover close to 30% for 2011. Depending on which source you’re relying on, in 2011 e-book sales make up between 30% and 55% of total book sales in the U.S.. Holy...

Despite all of this foreknowledge, I still clung to the “old” way of doing things, hanging onto tradition during this phenomenal and revolutionary transitionary time period in the profession of novel-writing. I still can’t really understand what I was thinking. Maybe I was just being a defeatist. I had published 3 books by that point and though I had a fiercely (and I do mean fierce... try writing a bad review for me online and see how many people jump out of the woodwork to defend my books) loyal readership, it was a readership that was small, and after a month or so, all of my books wandered off into the publishing abyss and pretty much died. I figured that was just the way it was. Best-selling authors are like lottery winners. You just need a lucky break, and most of us were going to have to wait a really long time to get it.

That was until I read Amanda’s story. Suddenly, I realized that I was living in the first ever era in which a writer had the power to take his or her destiny into their own hands, out of the hands of the number-crunching publishers, and take their work directly to the reader for a price that readers would think was fair. I still owned the copyright to my novels, and I was going to resurrect them, dust them off, and put them back in the game, but at my price point, not my publisher’s.

I went to work making my own Kindle versions of my books (with a lot of help from my tech-savy wife) and, after struggling for most of the week to get the books formatted and ready for prime time, I put them up on Amazon, all for 99 cents. Post-Human, my first novel, is actually free on my website, and will be from now on.

You see, my books were never going to be big sellers traditionally, because the price point was too damn high! I still can’t do anything to control the prices of my paperback editions, but that doesn’t matter, because the book world is going digital in a hurry. At 99 cents, people who liked Post-Human can snap up a copy of Trans-Human and The God Killers without having to think about it twice. My publisher’s e-copy was going for $9.99. Needless to say, few sold. 

Publishers and traditional big box book retailers are finished. There. I said it. In Canada, Chapters Indigo, the country’s biggest big box book retailer started the year reacting to the closing of Borders in the U.S. by saying that Borders was a badly run company and that Chapters Indigo was poised for a big year and would be sticking around. Their e-reader, the Kobo, was flying off the shelf, but a peaceful coexistence between paper books and traditional publishing and e-books could be struck. 2 weeks ago, after announcing 3rd quarter losses of 40 million dollars, Chapters Indigo sold the Kobo to a Japanese company and announced plans to become a “cultural department store.” Good luck with that. 

Barnes and Noble is putting up a great fight, and their sheer size might help them battle it out with Amazon and transition into a terrific online competitor, but there is no way that they’re going to be able to remain in their physical form all the way through to 2013, especially with their new Nook tablet and the Kindle Fire sure to send e-book sales soaring to the 80% marketshare threshold early in 2012. 

And so where will the publishers be? There is a gap from the old way to the new way that I do not think they will be able to cross. I know I am probably ruffling a lot of feathers by saying that, and I take no joy in the idea that small publishing firms that truly love helping authors will probably suffer. I am, however, pretty happy that the monolithic middlemen are being squeezed out. 

If you are a writer, then you are a publisher from now on. Thanks to Amazon (and hopefully Barnes and Noble soon once they open up to Canadian authors) I am now in control of my own destiny. My books are dirt cheap, and whether they fly or not won’t have as much do with luck or someone believing in me and giving me a chance, as much as it will have to do with whether they are any good. It’s just me, the retailer, and the reader, and that’s the way I like it.

As I write this, my new Kindle versions have only been online for about 36 hours, but I’ve sold over a dozen and my free Post-Human edition has been downloaded hundreds of times. Even the 99 cent Post-Human is selling on Amazon for some reason... maybe people recognize what I’m doing and just want to lay down their buck in support? I also scored a major interview with a technology blog that gets 100 000 hits a month that I did earlier today via Skype. And then there is Lori, encouraging and supporting authors as usual by suggesting that I write this guest post. Thank you, Lori. All in all, not a bad start. Modest, but not bad, and a hell of a lot better than sticking with the traditional way! 

If you’re an unpublished writer reading this, or you’re published but your book is dead in the water (but you still own the copyright) I highly recommend reclaiming control over your own destiny and taking your book right to the readers! Amazon gives you the platform, and your readers will be your judge from now on... not the middlemen.  

DAVID SIMPSON is the author of Post-Human, his 2009 debut novel, as well as Trans-Human and The God Killers. He has a master's degree in English literature from the University of British Columbia. He currently lives in West Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife Jennifer.

He's currently working on a fourth book while teaching English Literature and developing numerous writing projects. If he has any spare time, he watches the Vancouver Canucks not winning the Stanley Cup and breaking his heart or goes to a movie... IF he has any spare time.

Visit David's website to learn more about him and to download a free copy of his first novel Post-Human. 

Purchase its follow-up Trans-Human here. 

Purchase The God Killers here. 

You can also find him on Goodreads and Twitter.