Not THAT kind of flap, you idiot!

Daniel Menaker, Editor of Grin and Tonic, has codified the rules for writing foolproof flap copy.  Writing in the Barnes & Noble Review, he offers such recommendations as:

# Always use “stunning,” except when the book is about the history of the stun gun.
#Always use “deeply.”
#Use items in a series as often as possible. “In this stunning, deeply passionate, and thrilling tale of guns, gangs, and gambling…”
# In addition to “stunning,” use at least three of the following adjectives for every flap: “Enthralling,” “gritty,” “original,” “remarkable,” “magical,” “ground-breaking,” “arresting,” “dazzling,” “heartbreaking,” “compelling,” “devastating,” “captivating.”
#Find a way to work in “best-selling,” even if it has to take the form of something like “Often compared to the stunning best-selling novelist _________…”
#Try to end the flap with the word “resolve” or “resolution.” (“Stunning” should always be placed near the beginning.)
#Forget “subtly.”

Flap Rules by Daniel Menaker

Thanks to Andy Borowitz we have this dire assessment of consequences facing Internet users as Hurricane Irene bears down on the United States East Coast.

“WASHINGTON – As Hurricane Irene prepared to batter the East Coast of the United States, federal disaster officials warned that Internet outages caused by the storm could force people to interact with other people for the first time in years. News of the possible interpersonal interactions created panic up and down the coast as residents braced themselves for the horror of awkward silences and unwanted eye contact. And as officials warned people in the hurricane zone to stay indoors, residents feared the worst: conversations with members of their immediate family.”

Read the rest: “Internet Outages from Hurricane Could Force People to Interact with Other People, Officials Warn”

RC

Apropos of our recent posting The Real Kindle Killer…

How far can you thrust your tongue into your cheek without it punching through your flesh? You’ll find out when you read The Future of Books by James Warner on the Mcsweeneys.net website. Warner projects the evolution of books decade by decade until 2080, when we learn what dolphins will be reading.

Here’s a preview from 2030.

RC

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2030: All Books Will Be Crowdsourced and Cloud-Based

Novelists will start out designing their characters in the form of sets of vinyl figurines. If these generate enough buzz, fans will produce the actual novel collaboratively as a wiki. As you read it, thermal cameras will measure your physiological signals, including flickers in eye movement, facial muscle contractions, and heart rate, to determine where you want the story to go next—it will be expected to read itself to you, explain itself, and unobtrusively weave your incoming text messages into the dialogue. You will also be able to fine-tune details of how the characters are digitally rendered, fire at them, and (when imperative) indulge in cybersex with them. If a novelist is posthumously discovered, his or her vinyl figurines may wind up as collector’s items.

RC

Mr. Curtis said he expects to eventually see product placement in digital books that will generate ads for e-books. “If you see a link in a novel to a product being advertised, you’re generating synergy between the content and the advertiser. It will be the same principle as product placement in movies and television,” he said.
(Richard Curtis, New York literary agent and digital book publisher, commenting in the Wall Street Journal on Amazon’s introduction of a Kindle carrying advertising.)

Product placement in novels? Hmm, just how would that work….?

Donna applied one last dab of lipstick and critically appraised her makeup in the magnifying mirror on her vanity table.  She frowned as the  image revealed the merest hint of a wrinkle on her brow. Tonight she had to be perfect: she’d been casually dating Todd for three weeks but she knew that tonight he was going to make his move. For the third time in five minutes she peered out of her bedroom window searching the street for his familiar car with the dented right fender. From the moment she’s set eyes on his face she’d wondered what it would be like to kiss that sensuous mouth…

Richard Curtis

This book that will enable you to watch the final convulsions of civilization from the veranda of your country estate. When the last trumpet sounds and the end of the world is nigh, remember to pick up your dry cleaning, cancel your subscriptions and call your mother. And don’t forget to pack your copy of Richard Curtis’s How to Prosper In the Coming Apocalypse. It’s available in e-book and will be in paperback before long.

From the introduction.

“The most important things for you to concern yourself with in the coming bad years is, Who’s responsible and how can I get even? It is essential that we find someone to blame and really beat the hell out of him. Sure, the tragedy of the past is that we are condemned to repeat it, but does that make you feel any better? No! Your first task is to find a scapegoat.” (You can click here to read the complete introduction, “What is an Apocalypse, and Why Can’t People Just Call It Doomsday?)

And if you enjoy Curtis’s brand of whacked-out humor, read his satires on authors, agents and publishers in The Client From Hell.

For seven or eight years in the mid 1980s and early ’90s Publisher’s Weekly ran literary agent Richard Curtis’s end-of-the-year summary, in tongue-in-cheek verse, of the highlights and lowlights of the year in the publishing industry. The annual rhymes carried such titles as, “Merger, He Wrote,” (1986), “Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Industry of Mine” (1989) and “Stop the Millennium, I Want to Get Off” (1990).

After a hiatus of some fifteen years, the verse-atile agent returned to PW in 2007 with “The Year of the Platform,” which boasted such lines as,

Are our values turning asswards
When opening books requires passwords?

Last year’s effusion, “The Coming of the POD People,” had this memorable doggerel:

Agents now submit their schlock
By means of email as dot-doc.

In 2009′s poem, “The Yr of the Tweet“, Curtis writes,

It’s fine for paradigms to shift
As long as authors don’t get stiffed.

Click here to read it in its entirety, and discover how Curtis actually found a rhyme for “Shatzkin”. Verses for prior years as well as his prose spoofs are collected in The Client From Hell and Other Publishing Satires.

For seven or eight years in the mid 1980s and early ’90s Publisher’s Weekly ran literary agent Richard Curtis’s end-of-the-year summary, in tongue-in-cheek verse, of the highlights of the year in the publishing industry. The annual rhymes carried such titles as, “Merger, He Wrote,” (1986), “Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Industry of Mine” (1989) and “Stop the Millennium, I Want to Get Off” (1990).

After a hiatus of some fifteen years, the verse-atile agent returned to PW in 2007 with “The Year of the Platform,” which boasted such lines as,

But are our values turning asswards
When opening books requires passwords?

PW’s 2008 year-end issue is out and carries Curtis’s latest poetic effusion, “The Coming of the POD People“. Here’s a taste:

Those of us who toil in the publishing trade don’t always have the objectivity to see the comical aspects of what we do. If you seek a dark view of our industry you’ll find lots of confirmation: publishers gobbling each other up, dedicated editors summarily released from long-held jobs, an antique and horrifyingly wasteful distribution system, books orphaned and ruined by corporate indifference — well, I could go on and on. And I did, chronicling these and other harsh realities in a column I wrote for Locus, the science fiction trade magazine, for a dozen years.

As time went by, however, I achieved a bit of perspective and began to see the ridiculous side of publishing. The world is certainly a tragic place, and if you measure tragedy against war, famine, earthquakes and floods, then the horrors of orphaned books, underpromoted authors and bankrupt publishers do seem petty, pathetic and preposterous by comparison.

It’s in that spirit that I offer The Client From Hell and Other Publishing Satires. What if an alien visited Earth seeking intelligent life but, after studying publishers, concluded the planet was not worth a second look? Suppose a visitor from another galaxy engaged a literary agent to handle book and movie offers? Picture a convention of authors so jealous of each other that they rend their agents limb from limb a la Night of the Living Dead? Those are some of the nutty concepts you’ll find in my book. And, if you’re a denizen of the publishing industry, you may get a kick out of my end-of-the-year poetic spoofs that appeared in Publishers Weekly. You can hear more about these in my introduction.

Have your royalties plummeted? Editor left the industry? Publisher gone bankrupt? Smile — it could be worse!

- Richard Curtis