The author of the popular "Left Behind" book series, Tim Lahaye, has written on his website that he does not subscribe to the growing belief that May 21, 2011 will mark the end of the world.
The "Left Behind" series lays out a fictionalized image of the Christian prediction for the end of the world and suggests that the Rapture may be imminent. In addition to his career as an author and evangelical minister, Lahaye has recently drawn attention for identifying the earthquakes and tsunami that hit Japan in March and President Obama's administrative agenda as signs of the coming apocalypse.
With this seemingly eager attitude, it is somewhat surprising that Lahaye has come out in opposition to Harold Camping's judgment day bandwagon. Instead, Lahaye sticks to the oft-cited passage from the Gospel of Matthew that is interpreted to mean the apocalypse will not be predicted:
But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father (Matthew 24:36).
Lahaye points out that Camping has been wrong about the date of the end times before, and he goes on to explain:
You can be sure the rapture will not occur when anyone sets a date because God wants us all to live every day as though Christ could come today. A great motto for daily living is PERHAPS TODAY. For one day it will happen and we don't know when, but we don't want you to be left behind!
What do you think? Does the rejection of conservative Christians like Tim Lahaye affect the credibility of the May 21 movement?
The author of the popular "Left Behind" book series, Tim Lahaye, has written on his website that he does not subscribe to the growing belief that May 21, 2011 will mark the end of the world.
The "Left Behind" series lays out a theoretical image of the Christian prediction for the end of the world and suggests that the rapture may be imminent. Lahaye himself has drawn attention for identifying the earthquakes and tsunami that hit Japan in March and President Obama's administrative agenda as signs of the coming apocalypse.
With this seemingly eager attitude, it is somewhat surprising that Lahaye has come out in opposition to Harold Camping's judgement day bandwagon. Instead, Lahaye sticks to the oft-cited passage from the Book of Matthew that is interpreted to mean the apocalypse will not be predicted:
But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father (Matthew 24:36).
Lahaye points out that Camping has been wrong about the date of the end times before, and he goes on to explain:
You can be sure the rapture will not occur when anyone sets a date because God wants us all to live every day as though Christ could come today. A great motto for daily living is PERHAPS TODAY. For one day it will happen and we don't know when, but we don't want you to be left behind!
What do you think? Does the rejection of conservative Christians like Tim Lahaye take away from the credibility of the May 21 movement?
NEW YORK -- Dick Cheney has finished his memoir, according to his daughter, and the book is scheduled to come out on Aug. 30.
Liz Cheney said that the former vice president's manuscript was turned in at the beginning of the month. She said the book, currently being edited, will be "very straightforward," with "a lot of in-depth analysis of really critically important issues." Cheney's memoir, "In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir," is being published by Threshold Editions, a conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster run by Republican strategist and former Cheney aide Mary Matalin.
On Wednesday, the publisher issued the cover art for the book, showing a characteristic Cheney look during his vice presidential years (and a pose not unlike the cover photo of President Bush's "Decision Points"): hands in pockets, staring slightly away as he stands alone in the White House Cross Hall.
A favorite of the right, Cheney is widely regarded as among the most powerful and controversial of vice presidents and his book is the most anticipated vice presidential memoir in recent history. His daughter, who collaborated on the memoir, said in a recent interview with The Associated Press that "In My Time" will show his "sense of storytelling and sense of humor," but also that he has "very strong views and a very clear perspective."
"I don't think there will be much question on where he stands on the important issues," she says. Many friends and former colleagues have observed that Cheney became much more aggressive on foreign policy while vice president. His daughter agrees and said the reason was simple: The Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
"That certainly will be a topic of the book," she said.
Liz Cheney would not comment specifically on the book's contents, but did say it will move "very quickly" from his childhood into his years in Washington, where his many roles included White House chief of staff under President Ford, secretary of defense under the first President Bush and vice president under the second President Bush.
Asked if he will cover some of the events mentioned in "Decision Points" – Cheney's alleged unhappiness with the president over not pardoning former vice president aide I. Lewis Libby, Cheney's alleged offer to remove himself from the 2004 GOP ticket – Liz Cheney said "that's just scratching the surface."
"There's a whole range of interesting stories that haven't been talked about," she said.
Dick Cheney, 70, has been diagnosed with end-stage heart failure and had an operation last summer to fit his body with a battery-powered device that helps his heart pump blood. He told Fox News recently that he was undecided over whether to seek a heart transplant.
His daughter said that working on the book was "a far more enjoyable project than he probably anticipated when he began it." He wrote out the first draft in longhand and would sometimes dictate passages to Liz Cheney. She said that he will do promotion for the book.
Meanwhile, "He's feeling good and he's getting ready for the first fishing trip of the season."
There are few movie roles that offer instantly as massive a fan base as do the lead heroines in big screen adaptations of Young Adult novels. To wit: Emma Watson, "Harry Potter's" Hermoine, is an icon of screen and style, while Kristen Stewart, the embodiment of Bella in "The Twilight Saga," has her every moody move tracked by jealous fans as she makes her way through new big screen epics and dating co-star Robert Pattinson.
In an exclusive interview with Entertainment Weekly, Lawrence discussed her sudden rise to fame -- on the back of an entirely different type of film, the indie "Winter's Bone," for which she earned an Oscar nomination -- and her mental preparation to play such a highly sought role (she won the part over fellow Oscar nominee Hailee Steinfeld).
"I knew that as soon as I said yes, my life would change," she told the magazine. "And I walked around an entire day thinking 'It's not too late, I could still go back and do indies, I haven't said yes yet, it's not too late.'"
But in the end, she preserved, showing the strength to match her character's. "I love this story," she said, "and if I had said no, I would regret it every day."
Tina Fey studied drama at the University of Virginia. But that genteel Southern collegiate pedigree would hardly suit Liz Lemon, her “30 Rock†alter ego. Instead, we are told that Lemon â€" Northern and cerebral, but also middle-class and hopelessly dorky â€" attended Bryn Mawr College and the University of Maryland, “on a partial competitive jazz dance scholarship.â€
Sometime in the 1980s, my cousin Marc gave me a book called It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand, by Jerome Tuccille. At the time in spoke to me: an adolescent enamored by Rand's fiction and philosophy, yet ready for something more. For the author and for my cousin, the adult version of Rand's ideas could be found in the Libertarian Party.
I write "adult version," because in some sense I understood myself as having outgrown what I came to see as Rand's simplistic philosophy. In college in the late 1980s, I first turned to Libertarianism and then became a Progressive. And thus I am amazed at her continued and even revitalized place in our culture. Did we not all outgrow her? Apparently not.
Though Rand, who passed away in 1982, never quite fell from popularity, her name has been invoked with increasing frequency over the last two or three years -- both by anti-Obama protestors and cable television talking heads. About a year and a half ago, two new biographies of her came out, one of which was featured on the cover of the Book Review section of The New York Times. And now we have the recently released first part of a projected three-part film adaptation of Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged. And events such as Ron Paul's declaration of his Presidential candidacy recall to me my years as a fan of Rand's.
Does Ayn Rand really have much to say to us today? As a former admirer, I can share my reflections.
Like a fair number of adolescents, I discovered The Fountainhead, a novel that swept me away, and then the massive Atlas Shrugged. Rand created powerful, strong, proud characters. No doubt her stories -- of bold and smart individualists, persevering against weaker people trying to sap their creativity -- gave hope to many young boys (and some girls) trying to assert themselves and to find certainty in an often alienating world.
And I fell for it: a simplistic, black and white view of the world, an unambiguous morality rooted in individualism. I arrived in Boston for college and looking for that next step, I reached out to actual Libertarians, members of a political group seeking a third party presence in government, in order to minimize that very government.
Within months, however, my world was thrown into chaos. This was in large part due to a seminar in Anthropology and Comparative Religion. I learned about other cultures and other ways of thinking, about language and meaning. I was thrust outside of my own narrow perspective, and suddenly I found I could no longer articulate a compelling defense of Libertarianism or Randian Objectivism. I had entered university as an Objectivist and become transformed into a Cultural Relativist.
It took a few years, but in time I abandoned that Cultural Relativism, though by no means the broad perspective it gave me. Nor did I abandon the Progressive politics, for that matter.
As for Libertarianism, I want to make clear that although I no longer espouse it, I do think it has its merits and can make an important contribution to our political culture. Libertarianism raises challenging questions about the proper role of government. I do not equate it with what I take to be the worldview of Ayn Rand.
Ayn Rand's world is one without community, a place where rugged individuals achieve success all on their own. Rand is therefore blind to the societal infrastructure that makes the accumulation of wealth possible and makes a polity stable enough for an economy to function. I would suggest that the logical outcome of Rand's philosophy is a fractured world, where the wealthy pay paramilitary forces to protect them in their gated communities. It is a world not of some ideal, free market competition, but one in which the absence of regulations leads to monopolization, the further concentration of wealth, and the breakdown of consumer protections. And in that sort of world, the production of wealth becomes more difficult, even for the wealthy. As trite as the phrase has become, it does take a village. Individual success and triumph often requires individual initiative and perseverance, but it also depends upon so much else and so many other people to create and maintain the foundations of a stable society.
Rand's lone individual is an illusion that must be challenged, not only because it is a lie, but because it will never work, at least not in the long run. If Ron and Rand Paul and the like achieve their goals, we will not see renewed prosperity, but rather the fraying of our society and economy, as healthcare and then education and then even fire and police protection become privatized. The inequalities of opportunity will only grow, and the dream of American mobility, already not as realistic a dream as many people imagine, will become a genuine fantasy.
At that moment when my world shattered, it was no longer self-evident why Rand's principle of individualism was absolute, no idea in her atheistic world should compel anyone else, let alone society, to be bound by it. I think the balance is tricky and difficult -- I am by no means opposed to individual rights -- but I would argue, I have argued, that communal values also have a claim upon us, and we may indeed be responsible for one another, ideally or practically, if we wish to maintain a vibrant and prosperous society.
(Note: An earlier version of this essay previously appeared in the Rhode Island Jewish Voice & Herald.)
Below the surface of the University of Chicago lies a facility -- concealed under an impressive piece of modern architecture -- that houses the wisdom of the ancients. At the push of a button, a visitor can utilize state-of-the-art technology to bring forth this knowledge for his or her own scholarly pursuits.
WASHINGTON -- As President Barack Obama readies a speech aimed at resetting America's relationships in the Middle East, at least one social scientist would urge him to consider the deep-seated anger and sense of betrayal he says Muslims feel toward U.S. foreign policy.
Steven Kull, director of the Program on International Policy Attitudes and author of "Feeling Betrayed: The Roots of Muslim Anger at America," says from Morocco to Indonesia, Muslims "are singing from the same song sheet" of feeling oppressed by an America that cares more about oil and siding with Israel than truly supporting the democratic aspirations that have flowered during the recent Arab Spring.
Kull presented his key findings Wednesday at a briefing at the Brookings Institution, which published the book that draws upon five years of polling, focus groups and visits to Muslim majority countries. Although Kull conducted the research from 2006 to 2010, before the current pro-democracy uprisings, his findings track with a newly released Pew Research Center report. The report found that Obama's efforts to rehabilitate America's image among Muslims after they frayed during the Bush administration's military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have paid few dividends.
Kull's offered four key takeaways from his research that should prove challenging for U.S. policymakers. According to him, a majority of Muslims:
Feel threatened by U.S. military force and share a belief that "the United States pushes people around [and] abuses its power." The presence of American troops across the region is interpreted as "a scheme to steal oil" that smacks of colonialism. While most Muslims do not approve of al Qaeda's violent tactics, a large majority agree with its goal to rid Islamic countries of U.S. forces.
Believe the United States is hostile to Islam and wants to impose its own secular culture or Christian religion on Muslim countries. Many took George W. Bush's post-9/11 vow to launch a "crusade" against terrorism literally, interpreting it in the millennial-old historic context of a religious war.
Resent U.S. support for Israel and believe America's goal is to expand the geographic borders of the Jewish state. Many see Israel as a proxy for U.S. hegemony in the region, and most don't believe the establishment of a Palestinian state is a U.S. goal. The exception: six in 10 Palestinians say the United States does want to see them with their own state.
Are convinced the United States has undermined democratic movements in the Middle East in favor of propping up authoritarian regimes. While recent events may supersede that finding, Kull also found solid majorities say Islamist groups like Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood should be encouraged to organize political parties and take part in democratically elected governments.
Shibley Telhami, a Middle East expert who moderated the discussion of Kull's findings, noted that they belied the conservative trope that Muslims in the guise of extremist groups "hate us for our values." Instead, the research indicates "exactly the opposite" -- that many Muslims are attracted to the democratic values espoused by the United States, but feel betrayed because Americans have so often not lived up to their own standards.
n 1941, as Panzer divisions closed in on Moscow, as Virginia Woolf slipped stones into her pockets and disappeared into the Ouse, Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin huddled in his room at the Gorky Institute of World Literature and wrote:
Following the release of Jerome Corsi's birther book, "Where's the Birth Certificate? The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President," Esquire posted on their website a satirical piece, "BREAKING: Jerome Corsi's Birther Book Pulled from Shelves!" The problem? The satire was so believable that within hours, Esquire had to add an update clarifying that the piece was not, in fact, true and now Esquire may face legal actions.
In light of President Obama revealing his long-form birth certificate, many consider Corsi's book a rather moot point with an outdated argument. But, as HuffPost's Jason Linkins argues about birthers, "They are only limited by their imagination, and they've so far managed to create an entire alternate reality, so why stop now?"
Yet, Esquire managed to convince a major audience that World Net Daily Editor and Chief Executive Officer Joseph Farah had pulled the book from shelves after telling Esquire, "I cannot in good conscience publish it and expect anyone to believe it." To be clear, Farah never actually spoke to Esquire. Farah also never actually offered a refund to anyone who had already bought the book. It was a joke. Except that instead of laughing, Farah is reportedly considering “legal options†against the magazine, according to The Daily Caller:
“I have never spoken to anyone from Esquire. Never uttered these words or anything remotely resembling them to anyone. It is a complete fabrication,†Farah told The Daily Caller. “The book is selling briskly. I am 100 percent behind it.â€
Esquire has posted an update to their piece, a segment of which stated:
We committed satire this morning to point out the problems with selling and marketing a book that has had its core premise and reason to exist gutted by the news cycle, several weeks in advance of publication. Are its author and publisher chastened? Well, no. They double down, and accuse the President of the United States of perpetrating a fraud on the world by having released a forged birth certificate. Not because this claim is in any way based on reality, but to hold their terribly gullible audience captive to their lies, and to sell books. This is despicable, and deserves only ridicule.
It was a joke, but who's going to have the last laugh?
Jezebel-writer Anna North’s debut novel, America Pacifica, is out today. The story centers around an impoverished teenage girl who is struggling to survive on an increasingly toxic island in the Pacific Ocean after a future Ice Age sets in and freezes the mainland.
Ever wonder what goes on at America's most secretive military base, Area 51?
Investigative reporter/contributing editor at Los Angeles Times magazine Annie Jacobsen did. She talked about her new book, "Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base" last night with Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show."
For her book, she interviewed 71 men with direct access to the base, 32 of whom lived and worked there. Though she debunks the alien myths that have been associated with Area 51, Stewart noted, "What is in the book is almost more disturbing than the idea that there was an alien visitation."
Jacobsen relayed some particularly shocking facts in the interview, but the book itself contains even more. Stewart ended the interview encouraging people to buy the book: "Read it from page 1. It will blow your mind." And read the author's own words in an exclusive HuffPostBooks slideshow here.
The following is an excerpt from Chapter 4 -- "The-God-Of-The-Bible's Unauthorized Biography" -- of Frank Schaeffer's new book, Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics -- and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway (Da Capo Press, 2011). Raised in Switzerland in L'Abri, a utopian evangelical mission and community founded by his parents (Francis and Edith Schaeffer), Frank Schaeffer was reared to follow in his parent's footsteps. Sex, Mom and God is the story of why and how Schaeffer "escaped" (as he puts it) from the evangelical religious right, where, in the 1970s and 80s both he and his father had become leaders. Today Frank is a well known novelist (his novels include the internationally acclaimed best seller Portofino) and a critic of the religious right.
My mother Edith Schaeffer herself was the greatest illustration of the divine beauty of paradox I've encountered. She was a fundamentalist living a double life as a lover of beauty who broke all her own judgmental rules in favor of creativity: She read us real books, swearwords and all; she bought me a Salvador Dali art book that included his hypersexuality and "blasphemy" (as other Evangelicals would have described Dali's work). Mom also lived by a lovely double standard when it came to "those lost Roman Catholics" (as she described them back in her more fundamentalist days) by taking us to see their art and rhapsodizing about it as if the art happened to be somewhere other than in a Roman Catholic church.
Mom was just so un-Edith-Schaeffer-like in person! And Mom's embrace of the contradiction within herself, not to mention her mitigating her faith to accommodate her humanity, was quite an accomplishment for One Lone Brave Woman. It was as if my mother were struggling to humanize the 5,000-year-old tradition that had consumed whole races in endless war and had inspired collective intellectual suicide by countless Jews and Christians who denied their brains so that they wouldn't put The-God-Of-The-Bible in a bad light by questioning the book that "described" Him.
All the actors in Mom (and her God's) drama were part of the heavenly battle between Satan and God, in which it was Mom's good fortune and tragic misfortune to play the leading role. And yet the supreme irony is that her manner of life--generous and caring, sacrificial, intelligent and well read--contrasted so sharply with what she said she believed.
Mom spent hours collecting moss, wildflowers, bark, branches, twigs, grasses, rocks, shells, and reeds. She then would lay them all out on the table behind the kitchen and arrange flowers in ceramic bowls, vases, and platters of the kind used to grow Bonsai trees in. Mom's arrangements were of a piece with all the Japanese and Chinese prints she collected, mostly reproductions from calendars, along with a few treasured originals her parents had brought with them when they left China.
Mom's Chinese artworks were by masters who had painted on silk and handmade paper. Their art was filled with literary allusion and calligraphy, but the primary image was typically a contemplative landscape. Having been born in China, Mom had a lifelong nostalgic attachment to all things Oriental that showed itself in her affinity for art and people even vaguely connected to China, Japan, or, for that matter, Korea. Never mind that these cultures hated one another and made constant war on one another. To Mom they were all wonderful. If Mom were in a cab with a Chinese driver, she'd launch into childhood reminiscences of China. If a Korean showed up at L'Abri, she'd give that visitor special attention.
My mother's objects of abstract beauty were superb. Mom's poetry wasn't only in her writing [Edith Schaeffer wrote many evangelical best sellers and had a worldwide following], which sometimes took the form of earnest biblical propaganda, but also in her choice of those watercolors and prints serenely depicting fogbound hills and solitary cranes standing in water and in her exquisite arrangements where a piece of driftwood, a handful of luxuriant moss, and a single flower or fern proclaimed a whole inner aesthetic and longing for transcendent meaning. Mom loved plants, their stems, the shapes of their leaves; she cherished the forms nature carved by wind, rain, or carpenter ants out of a piece of wood or stone. Mom offered her spirit to each arrangement; natural textures, graceful lines, and a sensual connection to her inner life spoke clearly about who my mother would have been if she'd been raised by anyone but pietistic missionaries who drastically narrowed her life choices by placing The-God-Of-The-Bible's heavy "call" on her shoulders.
Who was Mom as she might have been if part of her brain had not been crippled by her missionary parents' indoctrination of her, just as the bones in the feet of little girls in China were once deformed by foot-binding? My mother unbound was a minimalist making poems with what she found on the ground. When could I see my mother most clearly? When Mom came back from the woods or garden carrying handfuls of what looked like random odds and ends that other people would have discarded. An hour later Mom would have transformed these scraps into a centerpiece for the dining table that looked as if it had come from some other, more perfect universe.
My mother deserved better. A lifetime of reaching out to the "lost" and sacrificing on their behalf imbued her with a kindly spirit that even in addled old age shone through. Her example was not lost on me. I simply chose to follow the "other" Edith Schaeffer, the one whose heart was elsewhere than in the lifeless evangelical theories she paid lip-service to.
Mom introduced me to a powerful conduit of Love. So I tell God I love Him and am comforted, though I have no idea who God is. I know only that Love and beauty come from beyond the stardust we're all made of. Love outshines the fact of pain in the same way that Bach's Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin, which Mom loved so passionately, outshine all the bad music in the world, though on any given day Bach is outnumbered.
When I was eleven, Mom held my hand tightly as Yehudi Menuhin played the Bach Sonatas at a concert in Montreux where my mother had bought her family front-row seats. When the applause died away, Mom turned to me with tears on her cheeks and said, "That music is bigger than death, my Dear."
When I was writing this book and sat with my mother during our lovely weeklong (pre Christmas 2010) visit (when I also told her about what was in the book), we listened to those same pieces of music again. I reminded Mom - now 96 years old -- of what she'd said all those years ago.
"Mother?" I said.
"Yes, Dear?"
"Do you still believe that music is bigger than death?"
Karen White's latest novel is The Beach Trees, a story about love and death in the South. There are several mysterious deaths and disappearances in the story, but the true enjoyment of the book comes from its clearly defined characters and the relationships they have with one another. The mysteries are relegated to second place.
Also in the forefront is the locale of the story. Most of it takes place in either New Orleans or Biloxi, two places which have taken a licking from Mother Nature, but slowly have resurrected themselves. White's description of the damages done to these two cities is impressive and heartwrenching. We see a return to life in progress, but also one that was trying to recover from Hurricane Katrina and was socked with the oil spill.
To these places comes Julie Holt. She is a young woman who was living in New York when she met Monica, a runaway of sorts from the South. Monica was a single mother with a heart condition. Eventually, it killed her, and she left Julie to be the guardian of her son, Beau, and also of her share in a house in Biloxi, Mississippi.
Julie heads South and meets with Monica's grandmother, Aimee, who lives in New Orleans. The older woman welcomes the younger one with open arms. She also tells Julie some of the secrets of Monica's life. Aimee's mother was murdered, and the killer was never found. Monica's grandmother disappeared on the night of this killing. She was never found, and there were rumors on top of rumors about what happened to her.
Eventually, Monica's obsession with her missing grandmother caused her to turn her back on her family and flee to New York. She never contacted them again. Now, Aimee hopes that by sharing stories with Julie they can learn what caused Monica to turn on her family.
This is certainly enough plot to fill any book, but in The Beach Trees it is not what dominates the reader's attention. They want to know more about Julie and her obsession with her missing sister. They also want to know more about her relationship with Beau and her blossoming romance with Trey, Monica's brother.
White is expert in weaving these stories in and out of the present and the past. In the past, the story is told in Aimee's voice, but in the present it is in Julie's. That is a little tricky to pull off, but White does it with ease.
She also describes the land and location of the story in marvelous detail. You can see the destroyed landscape through Julie's eyes and you can withstand a hurricane with Aimee in the past. This is what makes the book come to life, and it is what makes White one of the best new writers on the scene today.
If you have an affinity for New Orleans and the Louisiana/Mississippi coast, then you will want to read The Beach Trees. It will take you there, and keep you there for the length of the story.
The Beach Trees is published by NAL. It contains 432 pages and sells for $15.00.
Last month, I finished Richard McGregor's excellent book The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers. One of his best chapters focuses on the Central Organization Department of the Communist Party, the "human resource" arm of the Chinese state. This department controls hiring and firing as well as promotions and demotions within the government. Since the government in China is involved to some extent in every aspect of life, this is no small task. McGregor writes the following eye-opening comparison:
The best way to get a sense of the dimensions of the department's job is to conjure up an imaginary parallel body in Washington. A similar department in the US would oversee the appointment of the entire US cabinet, state governors and their deputies, the mayors of major cities, the heads of all federal regulatory agencies, the chief executives of GE, Exxon-Mobile, Wal-Mart and about fifty of the remaining largest US companies, the justices on the Supreme Court, the editors of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, the bosses of the TV networks and cable stations, the presidents of Yale and Harvard and other big universities, and the heads of the think-tanks like the Brookings Institution and the Heritage Foundation. Not only that, the vetting process would take place behind closed doors, and the appointments announced without any accompanying explanation why they had been made.
I thought of this passage as I listened to Republicans and Democrats try to out-flank each other in anti-Chinese rhetoric in their never-too-early gear up for the 2012 Presidential election. John Huntsman got things kicked off as he condemned China's human rights record in his farewell address as Ambassador of China. His words -- part goodbye, part stump speech for the Republican nomination -- included the following:
[Americans] will continue to speak up in defense of social activists like Liu Xiaobo, Chen Guangcheng, and now Ai Weiwei, who challenge the Chinese government to serve the public in all cases at all times. The United States will never stop supporting human rights, because we believe in the fundamental struggle for human dignity wherever it may occur.
Hillary Clinton quickly one-upped Huntsman, sounding positively Reaganesque as she called the Communist Party's response to the Jasmine Revolution "deplorable" while predicting that history will sweep China's government into the dust bin.
Do these words matter to China's leaders? Not at all. (Or at least no more than China's response matters to American leaders. China's state council shot back that the U.S. is the "world's worst country for violent crimes," and that "racial discrimination is deeply rooted in the United States, permeating every aspect of social life." They issued a report that detailed U.S. "violence, racism, and torture." I doubt these words are keeping President Obama up at night.)
Instead, what matters to Beijing is ... China. As shocking as it may seem to Americans, Chinese President Hu Jintao isn't worried about Washington; he's worried about Chengdu, Guiyang, Hangzhou, Wuhan, and other places most Americans have never heard of.
If we want to understand where China is headed (indeed, where the world is headed), we need to stop listening to our diplomats and politicians; in fact, it's likely that the more we listen to Hillary Clinton or John Huntsman, the less we will understand what matters in China. To get beyond our headlines and into the life of the billion people that control China's future, it's best to avoid America's talking heads entirely.
Thus, my advice for those who want to "understand China": skip Henry Kissinger's new tome and pick up books by writers (whether journalists or novelists) who are in touch with the average Zhou. Want to know what it's like to have your fate determined by the Central Organization Department? Want to know what Chinese are talking about over dinner (and it aint Ai Weiwei or the Jasmine Revolution)? Put Country Driving and Twenty Fragments of a Ravenous Youth on your summer reading lists.
Today's indie author revolution can trace its roots back to the Free Speech Movement that began at U.C. Berkeley forty-seven years ago.
I gave a presentation in Berkeley this past Sunday before the Northern California chapter of ASJA where I argued that book publishing is a matter of free speech.
My visit to Berkeley represented a homecoming of sorts for me. My parents were U.C. Berkeley students in the '60s, I was born there in '65, and my mom, who was active in the Free Speech Movement, brought me me along to many of the demonstrations (first in utero and later in a stroller). I returned in '83-'88 for my business degree.
Mario Savio Channels Author Angst
On December 2, 1964, Mario Savio delivered his now-famous "Bodies Upon the Gears" speech on the steps of Sproul Hall. I embedded it below.
I listened to this speech for the first time this weekend as I prepared my ASJA presentation. I was struck by how Savio's feelings of injustice (he was upset at the university administration for limiting free speech on campus) map so closely to the angst so many authors feel today.
Although I've always felt authors should have the right to publish, it wasn't until I watched the video and reviewed the origins of the Free Speech Movement that I fully grokked the connection between book publishing and free speech.
A tweet or a blog post is free speech, but a book -- especially the long form variety -- is about the weightiest form of deep-thinking, deep-expressing free speech possible.
Big publishing is in the business of selling books, not publishing authors. It wasn't always this way, and there remain welcome exceptions among progressive independent publishers and university presses.
Publishers acquire books they think they can sell. They say no to most authors, thereby preventing those authors from expressing themselves through the communications vehicle that is their book.
I don't fault publishers for saying no. After all, it's not their responsibility to enable your free speech rights when they think Donald Trump, Snookie or Justin Bieber have more important things to say.
Until recently, if a publisher refused to publish an author's book, it limited an author's ability to reach readers. Sure, you could self-publish in print, as the great Dan Poynter has advocated for the last 30 years. However, without distribution access to brick and mortar bookstores -- something the big publishers controlled -- it remains nearly impossible for self-published print authors to reach readers.
Now, the e-book printing press is free and available to all. Indies enjoy the same (or better) distribution opportunities as traditional publishers. Major e-book retailers such at the Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Sony and Kobo are all hungry to carry self-published ebooks. Indies can out-compete the big boys with faster time-to-market and lower prices.
The big publisher gatekeeper-as-curator is being replaced by readers, as it should be.
Say No to No
My challenge to you, the author, is to throw yourself upon the gears of big publishing. Take a stand and say no to those who tell you no.
If your book is finished and ready to stand before the judgment of readers, you have the freedom to get it out there today as a self-published e-book.
The tools for ebook publishing and distribution are fully democratized. Any author, anywhere in the world, can publish instantly and at no cost. All you need is a finished well-written and well-edited manuscript, a word processor, an e-book cover image, an Internet connection, and the desire to have your words heard.
Publishing is saddled with this terrible reputation for being reactionary and Luddite, our denizens known largely for caviling against technology and the new-fangled. It is perverse, truly perverse since publishing is in fact at the center of two major social revolutions that dramatically disrupted the status quo ante.
The first, printing, we all know and understand to a degree, but let me remind all concerned, pace Clay Shirky, that printing upended the established religious and political orders in ways that radio, television entirely failed to do -- these latter media being readily co-opted for propagandistic purposes by the existing political and economic powers-that-were-and-are.
The second, retail, is rarely discussed but booksellers were the first retailers to take their product from the back room and place it on shelves on the other side of the counter, for the public to see, touch, peruse. The consumer-centric approach to retail starts in the book business too.
So to be radical is not at all contrary to the historical spirit of publishing but consonant with it. Being opposed to technology is profoundly at odds with the book business because what is the book but technology, technology that has been smoothed and sanded by repeated contact with human society into the most comfortable technology we have, as taken for granted as our clothes, product of the looms.
I pick looms for this reason because it was the Industrial Revolution that produced the great rupture that bedevils publishing today, the abandonment of an artisanal mode of production/consumption for an industrial one, which took the highly social acts of writing and reading, almost equally performable by anyone provided they were literate (a significant proviso of course), and rent it asunder. Writer alienated from reader, writer from writer, reader from reader. Atomized. And in so doing created a system that was at its most profitable, because of the relentless logic of economics of scale, when there were the fewest number of writers, at its most profitable when the various phases of production and distribution could be handled by highly specialized entities and individuals, none of whom understood what the other was up to, a Fordist model of production combined with a Sloanist management model.
We have tended to speak of the model of publishing for the last hundred years as if it were a perfect one, but look at all the indie presses that arose in the last 20 years, publishing National Book Award winners, Pulitzer winners, Nobel winners. What happened to those books before? They weren't published! They. Were. Not. Published. Sure, some were, but most? Nope. We cannot know how much magnificent culture went unpublished by the white men in tweed jackets who ran publishing for the past century but just because they did publish some great books doesn't mean they didn't ignore a great many more.
I wish to restore what I believe to be the natural balance of things, an ecosystem of writing and reading. Not out of nostalgia, though I have appealed to history to buttress my case, but fundamentally because every time culture becomes more democratic, it becomes better. Not every cultural artifact gets better, but the total amount of useful culture gets better. Allowing people other than priests and philosophers to read and write made books better, allowing women to read and write made culture better, allowing racial and cultural minorities to read and write made things better, the technology that allowed this to happen made things better and typically predated in not in fact produced the social changes that reinforced the extension of the cultural franchise. Yes, the same arguments about too many books have been used to object to too many voters. So it is to a future I appeal, as well as to history.
This, however, is not just a manifesto. I'm putting my money, my livelihood where my mouth is by creating a web-based platform to enable this ecosystem in which the writers read and the readers write: Cursor. And I'm creating a publisher that is now using this system: Red Lemonade. It borrows from the past: we pick and publish print books. It borrows from the future: we allow everyone to add their own works-in-progress to the website, we allow everyone to comment on it. And the platform itself, Cursor, will eventually be available to any publisher, or publisher-to-be. We aim to be transparent about who and why we exist, and how we go about our business, though the books speak for themselves, as they always have.
We don't pretend to have all the answers but we're going to organize and contend with the important questions: How do we use the wisdom of the crowd to read and help evaluate what books should be published? How can a writer find friends and support and feedback, without it devolving into mutual backscratching, or ad hominem barbs? Readers here on the Huffington Post, indeed on any website of opinion, narrative and analysis, encounter these challenges all the time! Can we be mentors without descending into nepotism or cronyism? How do we harness the power of the gifted editor -- we need them to make our writing better, we sometimes need to blindly trust them but how far? These are all questions we're starting to contend with on the web, and we're starting to learn to apply these to books. How do we unlock more of the great value books create in our society, so that we can all afford to write and read better? For, in the end, you have the answers, not me.
Philip Roth was awarded The Man Booker Prize , it was announced this morning on the prize's website. The prize is worth close to $100,000. The Guardian reports:
But that was just the beginning of the controversy. While some are celebrating Roth's win with a collection of his most miserable quotes about life, others are up in arms over his win. Judge Carmen Callil quit in protest over the decision and is quoted in The Guardian:
I don't rate him as a writer at all. I made it clear that I wouldn't have put him on the longlist, so I was amazed when he stayed there. He was the only one I didn't admire â€" all the others were fine," said Callil, who will explain why she believes Roth is not a worthy winner in an outspoken column in the Guardian Review on Saturday 21 May. "Roth goes to the core of their [Cartwright and Gekoski's] beings. But he certainly doesn't go to the core of mine ... Emperor's clothes: in 20 years' time will anyone read him?
What do you think? Was she right or is Roth a literary giant worthy of the prize?
Good writers don't just write well, they carry with them skills crucial to success in college and career. What college or employer wouldn't want someone who excelled in critical thinking, communications, creativity, research, persistence, attention to detail, logic, and follow through? All these skills you learn to master when you learn to write.
The writing process is remarkably similar to filmmaking: both writers and filmmakers need to plan their work, commit their project to film or paper and edit and polish their work until it measures up as both enlightenment and entertainment. Which means you can learn much of the art and craft of writing at the local multiplex.
"Everything You Need to Write Great Essays You Can Learn from Watching Movies" teaches the process of writing by relating it to a topic that is trendy, fun and and never more than a DVD or multiplex away. Although an essay will never be mistaken for a feature film, it can tell its story in pictures, only those pictures were developed by words. Both viewers of movies and readers of essays want to be grabbed from the beginning and transported through a story, whether that's Toy Story 3 or a logical journey from thesis to conclusion. Writing must grab readers' attention and send them on a journey of images. Just like in the movies.
Forty years after finding their golden tickets, the lucky kids who first met in Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory have reunited.
No word on whether the snozzberries still taste like snozzberries, but there's good news: no giant purple floating girls this time.
Nearly all of the surviving cast of the 1971 film, based on Roald Dahl's beloved novel, was brought back together by the "Today Show" on Tuesday, all grown adults but no less fond of their magical adventure.
"I have very fond memories of making the film, working with Jack Albertson and Gene Wilder, they were both super people to work with," said Peter Ostrum, who played lucky winner Charlie. He's now a veterinarian in Maine.
There was even a confession of guilt: Julie Dawn Cole, who played Veruca Salt, admitted that she snuck down early to see the magical set, which was supposed to be off limits to the children until filming began. Sounds just like her character, but luckily for her, no garbage chute punishment was levied this time around. Cole is now a voiceover artist and fitness and instructor.
As for the rest of the cast, many of them, perhaps inspired by Wonka's empire, went into the financial sector. Denise Nickerson, who played Violet Beauregarde, is now an accountant; Paris Themmen, who played Mike Teevee, is a financial consultant; Michael Bollner, aka Augustus Gloop, is a tax accountant.
Yesterday, Random House (@randomhouse) tweeted, "The #NY rain is making us feel slightly evil, which brings us to ask. Who is your favorite villain in literature?" Random House themselves stated that their current favorite was the Harry Potter series' Lord Voldemort.
They ended up getting a bit of flak for this from other Twitter users who wondered if that was the best they could come up with. A favorite is a favorite, though.
Here is a roundup of the tweets.
Don't see your favorite book villain? Let us know who he/she is in the comments!
In a new film version of what is arguably the Great American Novel, a rising Australian has just replaced an American superstar. Then again, it is being shot on his home turf.
Deadline reports that "Animal Kingdom" star Joel Edgerton has beat out Luke Evans for the role of Tom Buchanan in Baz Luhrmann's epic, potentially 3D retelling of "The Great Gatsby," winning the right to replace Ben Affleck, who had to drop out due to scheduling conflicts.
"In casting Tom one had to find an actor who could credibly be (as Fitzgerald describes him) 'one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven,' had five-star acting chops and in the big dramatic showdown scenes between Gatsby and Tom, hold the screen against Leonardo DiCaprio, in the appropriate age group," Luhrmann told Deadline.
A longtime star in Australia, "Animal Kingdom" has launched Edgerton's career into overdrive; he's releasing four films in 2011, including the upcoming "Warrior" with Tom Hardy. He's wrapping up on "The Odd Life of Timothy Green," with Jennifer Garner and Common; "Say Nothing" with Teresa Palmer; and "The Thing" with Mary Elizabeth Winstead.
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) -- GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich and his wife Callista were hit with glittery confetti by a protester Tuesday during the couple's appearance at a book-signing.
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The man approached the Gingriches during the signing at a downtown Minneapolis hotel, dumped a cracker box full of colorful confetti on the pair and said, "Feel the rainbow, Newt! Stop the hate! Stop anti-gay politics!"
Two Associated Press reporters witnessed the event. The man was quickly pushed out of the room by an event organizer as the Gingriches brushed confetti out of their hair and laps.
Newt Gingrich smiled as he brushed confetti off the table, and said, "Nice to live in a free country."
Although authorities couldn't immediately confirm the man's identity, he appeared to be Nick Espinosa, a prankster who has disrupted at least two other political events in Minnesota, including one in which he dumped a bagful of pennies in the lap of a Republican candidate for governor last year. In that prank, Espinosa - who has also used the name Robert Erickson - told reporters he was trying to highlight immigration issues.
Espinosa emailed reporters later Tuesday and attached pictures of the confetti attack. He said it was a protest against a proposal to amend Minnesota's Constitution to ban gay marriage.
Newt Gingrich was due to give a speech at the event sponsored by the Minnesota Family Council later in the evening.
MINNEAPOLIS -- GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich and his wife Callista were hit with glittery confetti by a protester Tuesday during the couple's appearance at a book-signing.
The man approached the Gingriches during the signing at a downtown Minneapolis hotel, dumped a cracker box full of colorful confetti on the pair and said, "Feel the rainbow, Newt! Stop the hate! Stop anti-gay politics!"
Two Associated Press reporters witnessed the event. The man was quickly pushed out of the room by an event organizer as the Gingriches brushed confetti out of their hair and laps.
Newt Gingrich smiled as he brushed confetti off the table, and said, "Nice to live in a free country."
Although authorities couldn't immediately confirm the man's identity, he appeared to be Nick Espinosa, a prankster who has disrupted at least two other political events in Minnesota, including one in which he dumped a bagful of pennies in the lap of a Republican candidate for governor last year. In that prank, Espinosa – who has also used the name Robert Erickson – told reporters he was trying to highlight immigration issues.
Espinosa emailed reporters later Tuesday and attached pictures of the confetti attack. He said it was a protest against a proposal to amend Minnesota's Constitution to ban gay marriage.
Newt Gingrich was due to give a speech at the event sponsored by the Minnesota Family Council later in the evening.
If you're curious about this kind of thing -- what goes on inside the submission process of publishing -- there follow, a few paragraphs down, eight edited examples of the rejection notes I got, through my agent, for 25,000 words of a memoir. The book is about my childhood, work at the New Yorker, and twelve years in the book business and is tentatively titled My Mistake. (The title seemed apter and apter as these "nos" piled up-if aptness admits of degree.) Those who know the business may enjoy a guessing game here. Those who don't may enjoy a glimpse of book-business manners and lack of them. I post them here because in a way they are all part of a coded conversation. You can read between the lines, assaying the praise for sincerity -- I believe half of it, maybe, but am pathetically grateful for all of it, and was of course inclined to accept all of it prima facie, especially "sublime." And finally, these notes give a taste of how disappointing and frustrating the writing game can be, especially these days. In case you think it's vanity at work here, remember this: a rejection is a rejection.
That said, there exist in my mind at least two perfect examples of ego-sparing ways in which a book can be turned down. One is in Ian MacEwan's Atonement -- a fictional rejection sent to the novel's protagonist from a real and very famous editor, Cyril Connolly, which includes such specific and helpful questions as "If this girl has so fully misunderstood or been so wholly baffled by the strange little scene that has unfolded before her, how might it affect the lives of the two adults? Might she come between them in some disastrous fashion?" The other letter was perhaps an urban legend I once heard about a titanically self-effacing Japanese publisher who said, more or less, "Your book is so wonderful that if we were to publish it, we would have to go out of business completely, since we would never again be able to match its excellence."
I've edited out only identifying information. And a deal has now been made, I'm glad to say-with a great publisher and editor. If they had all declined, it would have been on to Mushroom Spore Press, in Weehawken, New Jersey, and Raccoon Scat Books, P.O. Box 43,227, Winnipeg, Manitoba. Or, seriously, self-publishing -- an option that in fact gave me great comfort throughout this process, as the tide inexorably turns against the traditional models of offering books to the public.
REJECTION 1
Dear _____:
I regret I'm going to have to pass on Dan's memoir. I'm sure you and Dan will understand why this book would be tricky for us to do. I remember Dan once telling me that he loved my "sense of mischief," so I appreciate the spirit in which this came my way. I'm sorry not to get the chance to work with him on this....
I particularly enjoyed the reminiscences of Pauline Kael and of the school days in Nyack, and Dan's wry and bemused portrait of all the infighting and incestuousness at William Shawn's New Yorker.
REJECTION 2
Dear _____,
Thank you very much indeed for sending me Dan Menaker's My Mistake. I truly love the narrative energy of these pages, the sharpness of the humor -- which spares no one, including Dan himself...
That being said, I must add something far harder to say, and that is that I'm afraid that there is some concern here about the size of the audience for this book...Therefore, I feel I must decline, though I do so with regret, and wishing you and he every success with the book: I am certain that you will soon find another editor who feels differently, and the right house for Dan and My Mistake. REJECTION 3
Dear _____,
After much thought, I've decided not to offer on Dan Menaker's memoir. I loved the parts on the New Yorker -- as did everyone who read it here. But the family history sections, with the exception of the devastating pages on his brother, were not as striking -- to me in any case...
Thank you and Dan for including me.
Best, ______
REJECTION 4
Dear ______,
I love the humor and playfulness and intelligence of Dan's writing. I have too much trepidation about the marketplace for a memoir to move forward. I had previously suggested to Dan that he put his personal stories in the service of a larger idea, beyond memoir, as he did so well with conversation, but that's just my bias. I understand and appreciate Dan's desire to tell his story in the most direct and personal way. I'm sure he'll do it brilliantly, and I wish both of you great success with it. Thanks, as always, for the opportunity.
REJECTION 5
Hi, ____
The easy pass here is to say, truthfully, that _______ is largely in business to feed paperbacks to _______. And I don't think there is going to be much paperback action for a publishing memoir. So it's really not right for the list....
This book will get reviewed everywhere, but I don't think we are going to be able to get readers to come to it based on the name dropping, and I can't figure out how to position it in a bigger way.
Best, ______
REJECTION 6
Dear ____,
Thanks for the chance to consider Dan's memoir but I don't see this as working for me.
Sincerely, ______
REJECTION 7
Dear _____,
Thanks for this. Dan is a sublime writer and I enjoyed reading about his childhood... But I'm sorry to say that I don't think the draw of these subjects is strong enough to drive sufficient sales for us....
Thank you for letting me read this, and please give my thanks and best wishes to Dan.
Yours, ______
REJECTION 8
Sorry for the slow response regarding Dan's manuscript; I had spoken to _______ about it and I've been meaning to get in touch.
I enjoyed the pages. The two narratives bounce off each other in intriguing and suggestive ways, and both are infused with great energy and charm; a tantalizing kind of tension is developed. The shifts between the two stories are sometimes rather abrupt, the pacing sometimes off, but I'm sure this will get worked out in the writing.
Ultimately, though, ______ and I felt we should step aside....
Thanks for the chance to look at the chapters; please give my regards to Dan. I hope we'll connect on something else before too long,
Have a good weekend.
Best, ______
The last letter, from one of the smartest and most likable editors I know, gave me a bit of a laugh, to go along with the tears. I mentally filled in the blank inadvertently left by "I've been meaning to get in touch" with "but there was a tiger sitting on my keyboard who would have killed me" or "but Obama called me in for some help with bin Laden" or "but there was this one word in the crossword puzzle I just couldn't get."
I was two months into my book contract for my first memoir when the Frey controversy broke. I was riveted to the TV much as I had been on 9.11.2001. I know it's heresy to compare a memoir scandal to the events of 9/11, but I'm just being honest here. That's what us memoir types do, right? And for me and for all writers of memoir and maybe even writers of fiction as well, that day and the dark Oprah days that followed were days of history making. A line was drawn in the sand between fiction and memoir. From now on there would be rules and we knew it. A few weeks later my mother sent me a magazine article about the Frey debacle with a note clipped to it issuing the cheery encouragement: "Don't let this happen to you!"
Monday, Oprah did the first of her two interviews with Frey, five years after the A Million Little Pieces debacle. And, once again I'm at the TV. But, my heart is nowhere near my throat this time. I'm curious, yes, but like most memoir writers I do know now what we roughly understand to be "the rules," the unspoken contract between memoirist and reader that what you're about to read lies somewhere in veracity between a lyrical poem and a court reporter's notes, and when it veers toward the former, you will be warned in the author's note. The author's note is just one of the ways that our literary landscape has changed since Frey's legendary Oprah visit in the Winter of 2006. Now it is commonplace for memoirs to begin with an author's note, a disclaimer of sorts that gives a road map of where journalism ends and poetry begins.
But to understand why the Frey fall from grace was history making, we need to back up a bit. Frey's A Million Little Pieces first hit bookstores in 2003, which means he probably sold the book -- I'm guessing -- in 2001 or 2002 at the latest. At that point in history, the memoir was in approximately its sixth year of its incarnation as an exploding literary genre, the literary equivalent of a first grader. While there had always been lone wolf memoirs here and there to confuse the shelvers at Barnes and Noble -- Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Baldwin's Notes from a Native Son, Baker's Growing Up, to name a few -- memoir did not exist as a popular genre until the mid 90′s. Before the mid-90′s writers who wanted to use their own lives as material -- notably, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Nora Ephron, Silvia Plath -- were likely to write an autobiographical novel, a genre that would allow the writer to tell her own story and make stuff up as she pleased. No questions asked. Or relatively few. But in 1995, Mary Karr's The Liars' Club flew up the bestseller list as a memoir and the next year, 1996 , Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes followed the same upward trajectory.
The next year,1997, is a significant year for me as it's the year I started in a MFA program in Fiction. There were very few programs at that time in Creative Nonfiction, the genre that would have allowed me to write memoir, but I hadn't heard of them until after I was already in the Fiction program. I don't know for sure that I'd even heard of memoir. In my first year of the fiction program, two things became clear: I had a very limited imagination for plot, and I was very interested in writing about my own experience. I wrote these weird essay-ish short stories, and with the encouragement of my teacher, David Shields (if you want to read the most mind-exploding expose of life in the borderlands between fiction and memoir, read his book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto), I continued to blunder through-not assigning the word "memoir" to my work until 2001 when Brain, Child magazine published a long piece of mine about my family called "Women Like That, Like Us."
It was around that time that I figure that Frey was running around New York, first shopping around his A Million Little Pieces as a novel and then finding no buyers, selling the manuscript as this new thing called memoir. He said Monday in his return to the Oprah show that he'd been influenced by Henry Miller and in particular by the book The Tropic of Cancer (an autobiographical novel that would doubtless be sold as a memoir today) and that he hadn't been thinking about what his book was while he was writing it. He just wanted to write a book that affected young readers as The Tropic of Cancer had once moved him. He'd thought of his book-in-progress not as memoir or a novel, but as "a statement of defiance." A self-taught writer, Frey had no professors or fellow students to debate what the writer's obligation to the reader is or where the line before memoir and fiction lies. But even if he had been in school as I had been at the time, I don't know for sure that he would have had the opportunity to discuss the ethics of memoir writing that would be commonplace in such programs today, in part because of Frey.
I don't think Frey did the right thing. Ideally, he would have either published the book as fiction or as memoir with a hefty author's note. He admits himself that he knew he was crossing the line, but I have to say, I understand it. He says he saw himself as more of an artist than a writer. He says, "I was trying to write literature. I wasn't trying to write a self-help book." He says he was influenced by Picasso's cubist self-portraits. It was 2001, and then 2003 and then 2006. It was the times, I'm telling you. It was the times.
Everyone is writing about how great and glorious the new publishing paradigm is. About the pot of gold at the end of the self-publishing rainbow. About authors getting 70% royalties and having control.
The scent of revolution is in the air.
A writer who writes all the time might still be a romantic ideal but it's not a practical reality. No writer can entirely devote him or herself to the muse. Not one who is traditionally published. And not one going the self-publishing route.
So how much work are you are you going to have to do?
If you have an agent and a publishing house you won't have to make all the decisions or do all the work yourself. You'll have partners along the way -- from editors to publicists. They will do the lion's share of the work and pay the lion's share of the bills. Yes, you might want to -- even need to add to some of those efforts -- adding more marketing or more PR -- but much of the work of publishing will be done for you.
When you self-publish, you are on your own.
Okay. So what's so tough about that?
Part One 1. Writing a great book
Self or traditionally published, you need to produce the very best book that you can.
That means being committed enough to rewrite your book three, four or twenty-five times. Even pros who have been at it for years and have dozens of books under their belts don't have their first drafts published.
So far it's the same for self-published or traditionally published authors. But then the traditionally pubbed author turns his or her book over to professional editors.
If Lee Child, Sara Gruen, Laura Lippman and Jennifer Weiner all get edited, can self-published authors afford not to do the same thing?
Yes, an editor costs money. And yes, an editor might require you to do more rewrites. Yes, you might be tired of writing the book and not even want to work on it anymore.
But if your goal is to sell books, get readers, and build word of mouth -- you absolutely need professional help.
What if you don't have the funds? Barter. We're in a recession... maybe you can find someone who will agree to get paid in installments. Do whatever you can but whatever you do -- don't spend a dime until you see examples of their work and get references. You have probably put a lot of time and work into this project. Your name will be on the cover. Do yourself proud.
The average reader buys one or two books a month. The competition is fierce. Your job is to convince Jane S. not to buy Kristin Hannah's newest but to take a chance on yours. To persuade Alan K. to buy your thriller instead of Steve Berry's.
2. Self-Publish for the Right Reasons
Even though Mark Twain and Virginia Woolf self-published, the stigma didn't really lift until very recently.
Suddenly self-publishing is no longer just a fall-back position. It can be a first choice. Just be sure you choose to do it for the right reasons.
Don't self-publish because you think it will be easier than trying to find an agent and a publisher. It won't. Self-publishing is a tremendous amount of work. You have to be prepared, not only to be an author, but a business person, too.
Doing anything right takes time. So don't self-publish because you are impatient (unless, of course, you have a timely subject that you want to get out there fast, in which case you still need to pay attention to quality, but self-publishing will definitely provide you with a faster turnaround time).
Don't self-publish because an agent rejected your book a few times -- or twenty times. There are lots of hugely successful books that have been rejected many times by agents. Harry Potter comes to mind. But if every agent rejects your work, perhaps instead of self-publishing it you should take a look at it again. We can't be totally objective about our own work. Neither are our friends or family.
In fact we'd go so far as to say if you can't get a single agent interested the last thing you should do is self-publishing. There is a difference in believing in yourself and being unrealistic.
Do self-publish because you are an entrepreneur. Do it because you have a vision. Self-publish because you want control of that vision.
M.J. Rose is the internationally bestselling author of 11 traditionally published novels, one self-published novel and one self-published nonfiction book -- Buzz your Book. In 1999, Rose's novel, Lip Service, was the first self-published book (e and print) to be discovered online and bought by a traditional publishing house. Rose is also the founder of the first marketing company for authors -- AuthorBuzz.com -- and one of the founding board members of ITW. She can be reached at AuthorBuzzco@gmail.com.
Amy Edelman is the author of two traditionally published books and one indie that she sold to a traditional publisher. She has been a publicist for two decades and is the founder of IndieReader.com. She can be reached at Amy@indiereader.com
Not surprisingly, a dispute over film rights to the late George V. Higgins’s novel “The Rat on Fire’’ has ended up in court. Loretta Cubberley, Higgins’s widow and executor, has filed a copyright infringement claim against Boston University film professor Jan Egleson and independent filmmaker Robert Patton-Spruill, asserting they have no right to start filming “Rat.’’
Apple (NSDQ: AAPL), which almost never appears at industry conferences unless it is doing the hosting, will exhibit this year at BookExpo America, the largest trade book fair in the United States. The company has a large booth in a prime location, next door to Scholastic and in the same area as major publishers including Random House, Disney (NYSE: DIS) Book Group and Macmillan. BEA’s website notes that Apple will be represented by Scott Simpson from Apple’s iBookstore.
A few years ago it was announced that Justin Cronin's next project would be a vampire novel. In some literary circles this revelation was tantamount to that of Bob Dylan going electric in '65. Having achieved considerable distinction amongst the literati with his Pen/Hemingway award-winning novel Mary and O'Neil in 2002, and subsequently The Summer Guest in 2004, many readers found it difficult to believe the author would divert his attentions to matters of the undead. Yet, last year's publishing of The Passage affirmed that Cronin's tender, measured prose could surmount even the most dramatic shift in subject. In honor of The Passage's paperback release on May 17, 2011 (it can be purchased here) I spoke with Justin last week:
Ben Evans: This book seems to stand out from others in the genre in that it both immerses the reader in a sprawling story, while also prompting them to pause in admiration of the prose. That being said, what is Justin Cronin's most pronounced characteristic as a writer, stylistically or otherwise? What do think it is that distinguishes your work from other authors?
Justin Cronin: Hmmm... that's a good question and it's hard to answer without sounding self-adoring.
BE: Do your best to be objective.
JC: Okay, I think probably my most distinguishing feature, and it's not original to me, it's one that I learned from other writers, is a desire to be absolutely clear. Which means when I write a scene I work extremely hard to know its physical and temporal reality with totality, and secondarily, its emotional and psychological reality in some totality; and then find, and this is always my ambition, not always achieved, the crispest, most compact way of naming that reality. The person I learned this from is Frank Conroy, who was my teacher, who was a great teacher by example on the page and through his writing. He didn't do very much of it, and I think that's probably good, I think he wrote exactly what he wanted to write and nothing else. His sentences have an unbelievable sturdiness to them, they have no encumbrances, every word feels like exactly the right word. That's what I always hope to try to do. Is that a style, is that a theology? I'm not sure which; I think it's probably both.
BE: Throughout all your books, to me, the most marked characteristic is the sincere compassion you exhibit for your characters. What experiences can you point to in your own life, outside of the classroom, that you feel helped to shape your sensitivity as a writer? JC: That's a good question. I'd say some of the obvious ones and some maybe not so obvious. The most obvious is watching babies be born (laughs); and I've been in the room for two of those. I really like to write from the point of view of women, and I think that's part of our job as writers: to write with psychological clarity and insight about people who are not like us. The experience of watching a baby being born is a putting aside of your own ego. As the man in the room, I mean they give you these phony jobs to perform, you know they are kind of just keeping you busy. And at the center is another person, it is in effect one and a half people becoming two people and it is a situation where tremendous strength is called upon, and of course you're emotionally involved in this, these are not total strangers, its your wife, it's your son or daughter about to step on stage. And there is something very transformative about that that enlarges your sense of your self, and maybe even by doing that actually sort of eradicates your self temporarily and you come away fattened by it.
So that's one, the other one I'll say, and I wrote an essay about this long ago and I'm still not quite sure what it did to me, but I think something started there -- I was a young man, I don't remember how old, I think maybe 10, 10 years old, and for whatever reason I was driving on a dirt road near a reservoir with my father. I think we were going to the hardware store, and we came upon a car, a battered old Mercedes parked on the side of the road, it was March, it was raining a little bit, it was very muddy, and there was something about the car that seemed odd and as we drove past it I said to my father "I think we should stop, I think there is something wrong," and we stopped the car, we backed up, and to kind of make a long story short, indeed something wrong, there was a man in the car who was nine tenths of the way to successfully committing suicide with a bottle of pills and a fifth of whiskey. There is more detail to this story that captured my attention, but it was the first time I had ever been in a situation even remotely like this, and where essentially it was my job, and my father's job, to save somebody's life who didn't want it at that moment. The only thing to do was, my father tried to keep away, while I ran about a mile up the road to the next house, it was actually the house of a friend of mine, to call the ambulance. And this memory has stuck with me a million years, and in fact it's the basis of something, I wrote an essay about it many years ago, it actually is sort of replayed in a way, in the second volume of The Passage. But it was on my mind very recently, and as I said, I think it's a place where something started.
BE: Prior to embarking on this project, did you have disdain somewhere in you for genre fiction?
JC: Well, I think there is great genre fiction, and there is stuff that is kind of junk...
BE: Don't say anything about Sweet Valley High (laughs).
JC: (Laughs) I will not talk trash about Sweet Valley High.
You know, there's a lot of stuff out there that's written for entertainment. In general it doesn't entertain me because I'm a college English major and I'm in the business, you know? What I really like is something different, the experience of language itself is part of why I read.
BE: Yeah, a pro baseball player is not going to go see a Little League game.
JC: Exactly; unless his kid is in it. So my point of view on this is a little bit different. I think disdain is probably just a bad feeling to have for anything. I mean you know, each to his own, God bless. That's how I take it. The one thing that I do take exception to is sometimes there is sort of resentment going back and forth between the two camps. I've heard commercial writers say that literary writers would do what we do if only they could, and I've heard literary writers say commercial writers are always upset about not getting review attention but they don't write well enough to deserve it. That's kind of...
BE: I'd say the latter is far more accurate.
JC: Yeah, I mean you can pick a side, and I won't do it here, but of course I have mine. It's not a pleasant discussion and its kind of mean-spirited and it mostly comes down to business. There's a perceived dichotomy between critical respect and what you get paid, and I'll be perfectly honest, when I wrote The Passage I wanted both. I didn't believe that they were mutually exclusive.
BE: No, there comes a time when you get paid for your craft and you go out and you do it, and that's what you did.
JC: Yeah, there was no reason not to try, because if it didn't work, it didn't work. It wasn't going to cost me anything.
BE: You know just reading your writing, at least the first two books, and knowing that you grew up on the east coast, I kind of envision you as a younger (John) Cheever, minus the harrowing psychological journey.
JC: Without the alcoholism, yeah.
BE: It seems to me that you grew up in kind of, dare I say, WASPish environs. Is that accurate?
JC: Yeah, I always say I grew up inside of a John Cheever short story, although I didn't understand most of what was going on. I did, I grew up in suburban New York not far from where he lived, which was Ossining. His short fiction was enormously important to me, still is.
BE: It's the best.
JC: No dispute. I encountered the first story of his when I was a senior in high school. I was taking a creative writing class and a friend of mine who was a very intelligent reader and a really gifted writer handed me one of his stories. It might have been "Farewell My Brother" or "The Worm in the Apple," I'm not sure, it could have been a number of them. And it was my first real encounter with sort of ecstatic language applied to a diurnal reality that I recognized. I was just an unrepentant lover of his work, to the extent that in the summer that he died I was working in a deli, I was painting houses during the week and working at a deli on the weekends, you know, making sandwiches and making coffee and working the counter, and I wore a black armband (when he died). And this is sort of in a working class neighborhood in Stamford, Connecticut. The major patrons of this deli... There was a post office near by with a big depot so all the postal workers came in, and I was wearing this black armband and they were like "Whose that for?" "Why are you wearing that?" And I'd say, "John Cheever died." And my favorite response to this was a woman who said, this woman who is wearing a postal delivery uniform looks at me and a great sadness comes over her face and she touches my hand and says "I'm very sorry for your loss." (Laughs) I think she thought we were related.
*A full audio recording of the discussion from which these excerpts appear can be found on Fogged Clarity.
AREA 51 sits inside of the largest government-controlled land parcel in the United States, the Nevada Test and Training Range. It's a little smaller than Connecticut, three times the size of Rhode Island, and more than twice the size of Delaware. It is the most famous military installation in the world and the most secret. Everything that goes on at Area 51 is a black operation, and most of what goes on at the Nevada Test and Training Range is classified. These operations take place in the name of national security and they all involve cutting-edge science. "AREA 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base" is the first book based on recently declassified documents and interviews with firsthand eyewitnesses to base history--seventy-four individuals linked to the secret base, thirty-two of whom lived and served the base proudly and secretly for extended periods of time.
Even an expert doesn't always know when he's confronted by a psychopath, as Jon Ronson, author of "The Psychopath Test" said last during his interview with Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show."
Ronson said it took him three hours to realize that a prisoner he went to visit was actually a psychopath. The tell tale sign came when the prisoner said, "If you can get people to like you, you can manipulate them to do whatever you want them to do."
Ronson also provided some very startling statistics. Stewart said that most of us assume that the psychopath is solely "the guy who as bodies buried in his backyard," but the truth is, you might even work with a psychopath. Ronson stated, "One out of every 100 people walking around are psychopaths." Twenty-five percent of the prison population is psychopaths, as well as four percent of corporate chiefs.
If you're interested in finding out whether or not you're a psychopath, you can buy Ronson's book and take the test. Stewart himself took the test and was "happy to report [he is] just neurotic."
Here an app, there an app, everywhere an apt app. Now, the New York Public Library has created a new iPad app that bring the library’s research collections into “the palms of the public’s hand,†as library officials put it in a statement released Tuesday
I am not sure when the history bug bit. I was not a youngster -- I think I was in college. But once bitten I was hooked. I loved it all. I loved the well written and thoroughly documented history books that had pages of glossaries and even more pages with helpful "further reading" suggestions. I became an avid fan of any well done historical fiction -- book or film. And I especially loved the whole "Yo ho ho" 17th century pirate/rogues genre. I read the popular Return to Treasure Island, by John Woods, a sequel to Robert Louis Stevenson's all time classic Treasure Island.
And of course, I was a big fan of the first, wildly successful Pirates of the Caribbean movie, Curse of the Black Pearl back in 2003.
As I wait for the fourth installment, On Stranger Tides, I am excited but anxious as well. No subsequent movie within this franchise captured my imagination as effectively as the first one. In fact, every subsequent release finds me less and less satisfied.
I remember the first movie, Curse of the Black Pearl, well. I was completely captivated by the movie from the start: pirates, wenches, pirate ships, treasure, intrigue... and a love story. The adventure was fresh, inspired, well written and flawlessly directed by Gore Verbinski.
But the next two films let me down. I wondered why. Then, fortunately, I had the chance to discuss my feelings with a fellow pirates fan -- and author John Woods. We both love the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and we pondered together about what to expect with this fourth installment.
Judy Shapiro: The first installment in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise we both loved because it had a funny, sweet whimsy that seemed missing from the next two movies. What was your experience of the second and third Pirate films? John Woods: When the second movie in the franchise, Dead Man's Chest, was released, I was full of unbridled excitement and anticipation. However, this time I had a different sense of the movie. Although impressed with the special effects (who can forget Davy Jones' octopus' face created by Industrial Light and Magic?) and the Kraken monster, the film seemed like it was heading into parody territory. I felt satiated at the end. Yet, much like a Chinese meal, felt less and less satisfied later and found myself hungry for the relationships, quick humor, fresh lines.
Then in 2007 I again waited in line for the third installment, At Worlds End, and I think the title was more a premonition of the depth of creative story writing and development than Disney anticipated (it could easily have been called At Story's End). It was cartoonish, irrelevant, and worse than unsatisfying. I mean, come on, flipping a boat upside down so as to be back on top of the Earth? Couldn't suspend my disbelief on that one.
Judy Shapiro: So where do you think the later films went wrong? John Woods: Truth is, I longed for the simpler story and character interactions of the first one and a half movies. Pirates. Their codes. How they interacted. Finding treasure. In fact, I have rented the first two movies many times. I have never rented the third one.
Judy Shapiro: So do you have expectations for this latest release coming out? John Woods: That's where my anxiety lays. Will this next Pirates of the Caribbean movie, On Stranger Tides, be closer to the first or third movie? I am not sure. Maybe they will regain the sense of wonderment, charm and story of the original, which I think Walt Disney himself would have loved. Then again, you never know with Hollywood.
Judy Shapiro: I am curious -- what do you mean when you say "Content is not king -- story is king"? John Woods: And as I prepare to finish my newest book, The Seekers, I am guided by the lessons learned from the Pirates franchise. Their story is what got me hooked -- the wit, humor and banter between the characters; the characters' camaraderie and fellowship despite differences in background. Mostly, though, the franchise reminded me that a great story is a delicate, creative blend of implausibility with just enough plausibility to make the story come to life.
As a writer, I have learned to remain focused on the story and to stay true to the characters. It's what keep me coming back for more to any franchise -- every time!
Judy Shapiro: Do you intend to go see this latest release? John Woods: Will I stand in line for the opening weekend to see it? Nothing could stop me. As a pirate aficionado and eternal optimist, I am in hopes that Disney will be able to recapture the magic of the original movie. __________________________________________________________________ John O'Melveny Woods is a writer living in California. His novel, Return to Treasure Island, has won numerous awards and praise including a Silver Medal for Book of the Year from the IBPA. It is forwarded by LeVar Burton. He is currently working on his new book series, The Seekers, which is due out in the fall.
-- William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act V, Scene II
Every day published, self-published and unpublished authors breathlessly ask us, "Do I really have to have a Facebook page, and if so, what the heck do I do with it?" We will endeavor to answer these questions. But there are also a lot of questions we are not asked, but we think authors should be asking. Our goal is to present a roadmap that will help any writer navigate this increasingly complicated -- and crucial -- cyber-landscape.
While we get our Facebook on every day, we turned to two experts, Annik LaFarge and Antonella Iannarino, to give us the skinny on the latest and greatest ways to use this monster of a tool.
Annik spent 25 years in the publishing business in senior marketing, editorial, and publishing positions. Today she runs her own company that specializes in online project management, editorial work, and consulting on digital strategy. She recently wrote The Author Online: A Short Guide to Building Your Website, Whether You Do it Yourself (and you can!) or Work With Pros. Antonella, an agent and digital media maven at the David Black Agency, has helped authors like Mitch Albom get their websites and Facebook pages up and running. Here Annik and Antonella offer us both the Big Think about how to use Facebook and also some more granular how-to information (just follow the links...) that will help you get started today.
First, Annik addresses the most popular questions The Book Doctors hear from authors about Facebook:
1) How many Facebook fans is enough to impress a publisher?
What seems like a lot of fans to one publisher might seem paltry to another, so rather than think in terms of actual numbers I urge you instead to think about growth. Facebook's analytic tool called Insights allows you to easily track the number of monthly active users, Likes, wall posts, comments and visits that your page receives, along with the increase or decrease on a week-to-week basis. So pay attention to that data and aim to present your publisher with a percentage of growth rather than a fixed, context-less number. More impressive will be the fact that with active use and engagement you grew your key metrics by ten or twenty percent over a period of several months or a year. That shows dedication on your part, and demonstrates that you understand how to provide high value content to your readers. Even more impressive will be the number of Likes your page has garnered from fans. Read on and you'll understand why.
2) Should I set up a fan page for my book or just use my personal page?
You should set up a fan page because these are accessible to anyone on the web, whether or not they're Facebook members. And they don't have to be your friends to access it; the page is open to anyone. This way you can post special content or links on your Facebook page and mention it in media interviews. For all of you Luddites out there, Antonella wrote a great primer about how to do this: The 7 Essential Elements for an Author's Fan Page. Everything you need to know is there, along with screenshots plus a link to a piece that outlines all the important settings for your Facebook page. At the end of this article we've offered a few examples of author fan pages that you can use to generate ideas of your own.
3. When should I set up my Facebook page -- when I start writing/once I have a book deal/once my book comes out?
It takes time to build an audience. The sooner you begin the more time you'll have to grow your fan base and start learning -- by studying your Insight analytics -- what sort of content resonates with them. Start as soon as possible. How about tomorrow afternoon?
4) How often should I communicate via Facebook? What is too much?
You'll know when it's too much because the postings will feel forced. Communicate as often as you have something worthwhile to say. Being consistent is good, but not essential. Some people insist that you should post to a blog or Facebook page at least once a week. I think the better rule of thumb is: always default to quality, not quantity. Your friends and fans have other things to read; just make sure that whatever they find on your page is worth their time.
5) I'm worried about privacy issues. What should I do?
You don't need to include personal information on your page. You do need to provide some details when first signing up for a personal account with Facebook, but that's for registration and you can keep that information private through your privacy settings. But for your Page, the only details you can elect to include on your "Info" tab that might be of concern are your birthday and contact information. Think carefully about posting your birthday online. The upside is that your friends can send you nice messages, wishing you a happy birthday. The downside is that your date of birth is used by banks and other institutions as a legal identifier, and so there are reasons to keep it private. Antonella points out that some people include their zodiac sign and list their publisher's address or a P.O. box for fan mail. As for managing information on your personal profile, our best advice is to closely monitor your settings and stay up-to-date on changes that Facebook makes. They happen often, and are widely discussed online. Often, Facebook's default options are not pro-privacy. So pay attention, and ask your friends what they do if you're unsure. And of course, use common sense about what information you share. Anywhere. 6) Should I put up pictures? Video? What kind of picture should I put up for my profile?
If your pictures and videos enhance what you're sharing on Facebook then sure, use them. But don't post any visual media just because you have it. Post it because the stuff is worthy of being posted -- because it helps you amuse, entertain, educate, engage. And use something dignified. A goofy picture of you and your dog is okay for your personal page but not, perhaps, the image you want to leave potential book buyers with. Many authors (myself included) use their book cover instead of a photograph. That's fine too, just try to keep the image relevant to you and your work.
Now that Annik and Antonella have covered the questions The Book Doctors get on a daily basis, we want to introduce the questions you should be asking, but aren't. Take notes! 1) So now I know I need to get people to "Like" my page. What's the best way to do this so I can build my list of friends/fans?
Two ways. First, post relevant, engaging content: questions, insights, books you've read, etc. Give people a reason to visit your page, make it interesting, interactive, and a true reflection of you and your work. Then tell people about it in all the ways available to you: link to it from your website or blog; place a link in your email signature; mention it on the flap or back cover of your books; send a message with a link to all your personal Facebook friends asking them to join your book page by clicking the Like button; etc. 2) What's the deal with the "Like" button and why is it so ubiquitous?
As you may have noticed, the "Like" button that appears at the top of a fan page, is now showing up in lots of other places: on people's blogs, next to products on online stores, and in nooks and crannies all over the World Wide Web.
I recently had a conversation with Greg Lieber who runs business operations for GraphEffect, one of the fast growing social advertising platforms that Facebook works with closely. They develop and manage Facebook campaigns for large brands that go way beyond the spookily targeted ads you see in the right column of your Facebook page.
He helped me understand the basics of how Facebook works by explaining that its algorithm, EdgeRank, gives a value to all of the items that appear in your News Feed and that a huge component of this is the number of Likes and comments that are associated with it.
So let's say you have a blog and you've installed a Facebook plug-in that places a Like button alongside each post you write. When someone clicks the Like button your post appears in that person's Facebook News Feed and becomes visible to all of their friends, plus it includes a link back to your blog.
This allows people to discover your work and enables them to either like the post directly in the feed or to click on the post and like it directly from the post itself. As the likes increase via Facebook's viral channels the value of the post increases in EdgeRank and makes the post more likely to appear in your friend's News Feed. However there are other factors at play: for example, if there's a friend or page you interact with frequently on Facebook, then this person or page's post will likely appear towards the top of your News Feed. Another factor is timing: the older your post, the less likely it is to appear in the News Feed of your friends. Finally, the "weight" of the post's feedback plays a role, meaning that comments on a specific post are going to have a greater impact than 'Likes' of that same post.
[Side note: you may have recently seen that new "Send" button on Facebook. It's similar to the Like button, but allows you to share a link privately with a friend or Facebook group using Facebook email. Whenever someone clicks it, it does increase your total like count, but it will not show up in the newsfeed.]
3) What sort of landing page should I have?
Creating a special "landing page" that people will see when they first come to your page is an effective way to use Facebook almost as you would the home page of a website. You can convey the "voice" of your site (in words and images) and tell folks what sort of regular content you'll be providing there. A good example of this is a company called Global Basecamps, a popular eco-tourism business. See how their landing page expresses what the business is all about, tells you a bit about what they offer (weekly travel quizzes!) and, most important, encourages you to hit the Like button. Once you've Liked their page you'll start landing, in future visits, on the wall page where they post all kinds of useful, interesting, amusing, content. The more good stuff they post, the more their visitors hit the Like button. And the more they hit the Like button... well, you know about that now.
But be warned: Facebook recently changed -- and made more complex -- the programming language that members use to customize their pages. Today creating a landing page requires some knowledge of basic programming. Antonella's 7 Essential Elements for an Author's Facebook Page article has some very helpful background information and tips for how to get started (see #7), and she also includes links to third party apps that you (or your developer) can use.
4) Should I connect my Twitter feed or my website to Facebook?
Probably, but if all you feed to Twitter is your Facebook status updates you're not making your Twitter account unique. Best of all: create unique content for each platform and give people a reason to follow you in both places.
Now that we've laid down the basics, look around at some author pages on Facebook and see what you like (lower case...) and admire. Some people share a lot, others very little. But it bears repeating: follow the quality over quantity rule and post your updates and links with care. Offer value to the people who come to your page, and remember that because you've made it public anyone can come there -- it's not just your friends and family. Think about all the many different kinds of people who might end up there -- young or old, familiar with your work or not, interested in just one aspect of a subject you cover, etc. Visit your page periodically like you're a perfect stranger, and consider how the content, style and look may strike those different audiences. Then review, update, revise. And for goodness sake, whatever you do, have fun!
Five Author Pages Worth Looking at on Facebook:
Keith Thompson Gretchen Rubin Mitch Albom Neil Gaiman Laurell K. Hamilton
By Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry, The Book Doctors, are the authors of The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published. Yes, you can find them on Facebook.
This is a picture of me -- when I was 20 years old -- with a family I met when I was visiting a homeless shelter. Michael, the boy on the far left, became my "little brother," and I've been his big brother for the last 27 years. Michael and I wrote a book in dual narrative about our lives together and apart, called Unlikely Brothers, and it comes out today via Random House.
In the book I write a lot about why I first took notice of what was happening in Africa. I describe my first few trips to the continent, and how I ended up in war zones as a human rights activist. I touch on the close calls I've had, as well as some of the amazing African success stories that I've been able to witness. And I cover the birth of the Enough Project and what we're trying to do here to build a permanent constituency to battle human rights crimes like genocide, rape as a war weapon, and child soldier recruitment.
Through my long relationship with Michael, which endured my living and working in African war zones while Michael was growing up in a different kind of war zone only minutes away from the White House, I learned anyone can make a difference in another's life if we take a risk and make a commitment. Through the book, we'll be helping Big Brothers Big Sisters recruit new "bigs" as well as mentors and tutors and others willing to take that step.
Through my years of working on war and peace in Africa, I have learned that there are solutions to some of the greatest human rights challenges, and we all can be a part of those solutions. Liberia, Sierra Leone and Angola wouldn't be peaceful today if we didn't raise our voices about blood diamonds. Apartheid would still be the law of the land if we didn't join forces with South Africans to support peaceful change there. Unlikely Brothers talks about the importance of citizen action, and shows why and how we can make a difference.
I wrote my share of this book to chronicle my life, warts and all, in the hopes that I might be able to inspire others to get involved and act both locally and globally. As you'll find out if you read the book, if I can make a contribution, trust me, ANYONE can.
I look back at my father's rage when I was too young to understand it, our constant relocation throughout my childhood, Michael's living out of Hefty bags in the shelters when he was a kid, the near misses we both endured, and the extraordinary paths to redemption we both traveled, and I realize the only way we had a chance to experience all the things we did and have any success is that we dove in head first and tried our best. Michael and I put our hearts and souls into Unlikely Brothers. We hope you'll read our book, and that it inspires you to make a commitment locally to being a mentor and/or globally to helping to end Africa's deadliest wars.
It's a wild and varied staff at Huffington Post and the reporters are avid readers. They've got favorites they're in the middle of reading and we thought you'd want to know what's getting the attention of our writers. There's a great mix of fiction and non-fiction, award winners and books you might have missed. And you'll see we're not light on history or great literature. Let us know how you feel about these--we'd love to hear your thoughts and about the books you're in the middle of reading that you love.
NEW YORK — After a career of telling all, Ricki Lake is ready to write her story down.
The actress and talk show host has signed with Atria Books for a memoir scheduled to come out in spring 2012. Her new talk show is expected to launch later in the fall of 2012.
Atria, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, says the book will be "a raw and emotional ride through the glum and the glamour."
The book does not yet have a title.
The 42-year-old Lake has starred in such films as "Cry-Baby" with Johnny Depp and the original "Hairspray." She also hosted her own talk show from 1993-2004.
She has spoken often about personal issues, including her weight problems and past sexual abuse.
By the time I wrote my first short story, at the age of 23, I had written five unpublished novels. What I couldn't figure out until then was how to complete a story in fewer than several hundred pages, for once I began making things up, one thing led to another -- one set of events, or characters, led to more events, more characters -- up one path and down another: to detours and dead ends and turnabouts, and to characters and incidents that, when I started out, had not, as far as I (consciously) knew, existed. A novel gave me the sheer space I needed to be able to tell a story.
Now, a half-century later, when a fourth collection of my stories, You Are My Heart, is being published, I notice that the stories I've written generally take up more space in time -- often a half dozen decades of its characters' lives -- than my novels, which usually occupy only a few days or weeks.
During the years I taught writing to undergraduate and graduate students, most writers, I found, worked in an opposite direction: they began by writing stories, and worked their way toward novels; it was as if they believed that in order to write novels they had first to serve apprenticeships in shorter fictional forms. Not at all, I'd suggest, for the short story is as different from the novel as, say, an oil painting is from a marble sculpture.
Just as some artists excel and/or are more at home in one form of visual art than another, so too with writers: some notions simply arrive as stories, and some as novels. Many wonderful writers --Isaac Babel, Anton Chekhov, Alice Munro, Flannery O'Connor, Grace Paley, among others -- never wrote a novel, and the most exceptional work by writers who have worked in both forms (e.g., John Cheever, Henry James, Jim Shepard, William Trevor), has often been the short story.
When I started out writing stories, in addition to literary quarterlies and the annual Best American and O. Henry anthologies, there were many large-circulation magazines that regularly published fiction: The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, Redbook, Playboy, Esquire, Harper's, Harper's Bazaar, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Collier's, McCall's,Vanity Fair, Yankee, Mademoiselle, etc. Now, of our large-circulation magazines, only The New Yorker publishes a story in every issue. Most Americans are still brought up, through elementary school, high school, and college, on short stories, however, so that one wonders where, once they are done with formal schooling, unless they subscribe to literary quarterlies or to The New Yorker, they will ever again, in any regular way, come across short fiction.
Some promising answers: new online sources of short stories (Narrative, Guernica), magazines that are publishing stories for the first time (Commonweal, Columbia University Alumni Magazine), new and adventurous venues for stories (One Story, Tin House, Black Clock), and an abundance of new, often annual short story anthologies (New Stories from the South, The Year's Best Science Fiction , The New Granta Book of the American Short Story). My own sense -- faith? -- is that though literary forms change -- some fade, others thrive -- the love of story remains.
(For more about Jay Neugeboren's new collection of stories, You Are My Heart, see: www.jayneugeboren.com)
NEW YORK — Playing dress up or running around the park, kids can be so darn cute. Until it's 3 a.m. and they won't go the (bleep) to sleep.
The F-bomb plea on the minds of every parent at one point or another is the title of a buzz magnet of a book parody written in kid-friendly rhyme. Beware, parents, it's decidedly unworthy of a bedtime readaloud.
Not yet out, the 32-pager from a tiny Brooklyn publisher has hit No. 1 on Amazon.com and has sold more than 100,000 copies in pre-orders since it surfaced less than a month ago. After bootleg copies leaked, Akashic Books moved up publication from October to June 14, for Father's Day.
Film rights have already been sold, though adaptation should be intriguing. A British publisher, Canongate, is putting out the book simultaneously with U.S. release, including the former commonwealth countries of Australia, India and South Africa. Publishers in China are interested. How does the F-bomb translate, anyway?
All this for what amounts to a lament put to picture book illustrations (by Ricardo Cortes) at a suggested retail price of $14.95. Here's a sample: "All the kids in day care are in dreamland. The froggie has made its last leap. Hell no, you can't go to the bathroom. You know where you can go? The (bleep) to sleep."
Only the book uses the real word in full. A lot. On just about every page, in fact, with other bad words thrown in for good measure.
The spoof was written by novelist and poet Adam Mansbach, whose 3-year-old, Vivien, used to be a night owl but has turned the corner on the sleep thing.
Mansbach, who just completed two years as a visiting professor at Rutgers, is as stunned as anyone at the raw nerve he has touched with humor among parents and people who buy gifts for parents – and for petrified parents-in-waiting.
"Initially the audience was me and my wife," he said. "It captures the frustration of being in a room with a kid and feeling like you may actually never leave that room again, that you may spend the rest of your life in that dark room, trying to get your kid to go to sleep."
Mansbach had John Murphy at hello. The computer engineer in Lebanon, N.H., plans to give the book to a friend who's about to become a dad.
"Yup, the buzz got me," Murphy said. "I actually don't have any kids myself, so maybe it's cruel of me, but I hear him getting some rather gleeful warnings from people who already have kids about how he can kiss goodbye his sleep and free time. I thought a little levity might be appreciated."
Mansbach admits that when it comes to bedtime, he's not exactly on par with his partner, Victoria. "I probably only put my daughter to sleep 25 percent of the time. I should come clean about that," he said.
But he still knows of what he writes. Like so many kids, Vivien's brain "couldn't spin down, so she would lie there and all this stuff she heard during the day or the week, or in the last six months, would sort of bubble up," he said.
"There were those moments, when she's not rolling around, sitting up," Mansbach continued. "Her breathing got slow and I'd convince myself, this is it. Then I'd make that fatal mistake, trying to sneak out early. You know you shouldn't, but you really want to get out of there. And she'd wake up."
Is he a parenting manual person? What about sleep training? Crying it out? Modified crying it out?
Not for Vivien, Mansbach said. "We were certainly aware of that but we could never really bring ourselves to do it." Turns out the sleep thing cleared when his toddler dropped her nap.
Brad Wilkening in Chicago is about to become a dad for the first time. Surrounded by people delivering horror stories, he ordered the book for a laugh. "It almost seems like there's some gang initiation phase to parenthood," he said. "I like things that are over-the-top funny."
Vivien may be sleeping just fine, but Mansbach said he's still not getting enough shut-eye. "At this point it's this crazy book keeping me awake."
Twisted kid-book parodies aren't new. In 1969, there was a Harvard Lampoon send-up of "Lord of the Rings" called "Bored of the Rings."
Since 2008, the Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd picture book classic "Goodnight Moon" has been treated to "Goodnight Bush," as in George W., and "Goodnight Goon," featuring a little werewolf "in the cold gray tomb with a black lagoon."
On pre-order right now with Mansbach's book is the July 1 release "Goodnight Keith Moon." He was an F-bomb lovin' drummer, kids. In a rock band called The Who.
I used to be the kind of reader who gives short shrift to long novels. I used to take a wan pleasure in telling friends who had returned from a tour of duty with War and Peace or The Man Without Qualities with that I've-seen-some-things look in their eyes--the thousand-page stare--that they had been wasting their time. In the months it had taken them to plough through one book by some logorrheic modernist or world-encircling Russian, I had read a good eight to ten volumes of svelter dimensions.
Are memoirs fact, fiction or a combination of both? It depends on how seriously you want to take them. Considering I can't always remember my exact words in a conversation I had yesterday, I find memoirs written with extensive dialogue that supposedly happened a decade ago a work of faux-fact, but it doesn't stop me from enjoying the tale.
Some might say my taste in memoirs and autobiographies range from the intense and demented (serial killers) to the cosmically abstract (reincarnation/spirit bodies). Regardless of what element I am experiencing in this voyeuristic way, I love memoirs. Why? Because they offer a rare opportunity to have an intimate look into the lives of interesting people and their experiences.
As documented in Ben Yagoda's book,Memoir: A History, published memoirs have increased 400 percent over the last four years and this statistic is what motivated Yagoda to trace autobiographies and memoirs back to the fifteenth century. What he found was fabulous facts intertwined with exaggerated selective memories. What makes them walk such a fine line depends on their purpose.
Why we love our memoirs:
They read like fiction which holds our creative attention
It focuses on a brief period of time or a series of events rather than a lifetime
We see the irony and meaning of the events as they unfold
The narrator does well to walk us through conflicts and flashbacks
We learn the impact of an interesting turn of events
We engage on a higher emotional level than if the story was being told about the author
We know the author survives the crisis and we want to learn how
Often includes the viewpoints of family members and friends to create a multi-dimensional account of the events
One of my favorite memoir is Laura Munson's New York Times best-seller, This Is Not The Story You Think It is...A Season of Unlikely Happiness. This book is quite simply fabulous. Laura's noble quest to become the source of her own happiness takes you by the hand and heart as it guides you through the steps to living a life without suffering. Her story pulls back the curtain on the only magic we ever need to know: how to make the shift from fear to love.
Other favorites include: Shirley Maclaine's I'm Over All That and Other Confessions which shares her current point of view on everything from money, love and fame to what's going to happen on December 21, 2012. For me, reading it was like having an intimate dinner with a longtime friend.
Nancy Cooke DeHerrera's All You Need Is Love: An Eyewitness Account of When Spirituality Spread from the East to the West in which she tells the intimate details of her life, which include her friendship with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founding father of Transcendental Meditation, and their time together in the Valley of the Saints with the Beatles, Mia Farrow, Mike Love, Donovan, and Paul Horn.
Rampuri's Autobiography of a Sadhu: A Journey into Mystic India, is Rampuri's true story of moving to India at age 18, meeting his Guru and having many spiritual adventures. Today he is a highly esteemed holy man who is head of the Naga Baba sadhu's. This autobiography is filled with true accounts of magic, miracles, ghosts, and lessons on Hindu gods, a real E-ticket ride through the holy land of India.
What have been your favorite memoirs? What autobiographies have you related to or learned the most from? I'd love to add yours to my reading list!
One of London's most beautiful shops of any kind, Daunt Books would be worth a visit just to soak up the streaming natural light emanating from the skylights and the illuminated Edwardian elegance.
On Friday, May 13, the Women’s National Book Association (WNBA) announced the winners of the 2011 WNBA Pannell Award, presented annually since 1983 to two bookstores that excel in contributing to their communities in ways that bring books and young people together.
In response to Russ Marshalek’s excellent post on devastatingly sad books last week, we’ve decided to try and lift your spirits a little during this rainy week by suggesting books that are great escapes from the incessant grind of daily existence.
Everyone is writing about how great and glorious the new publishing paradigm is. About the pot of gold at the end of the self-publishing rainbow. About authors getting 70% royalties and having control. 
author would divert his attentions to matters of the undead. Yet, last year's publishing of The Passage affirmed that Cronin's tender, measured prose could surmount even the most dramatic shift in subject. In honor of The Passage's paperback release on May 17, 2011 (it can be purchased 
