Can you produce a vook?  What skills will you require to make one?  And will you be more of a writer when you finish it?

This essay was written in the mid-1990s, but except for a few dated references like CD-ROMs, which I’m going to leave in for the fun of it, it seems to be completely relevant to what is happening in the media this very day.

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How can you possibly call yourself an author if you can’t process digitized full-motion video signals on your computer, accelerate your image-compression manager to thirty frames per second, and enhance your video with full stereo sound?

The day is coming—and much sooner than you may think—when authors will no longer be able to define themselves simply as creators of literary works. As electronic technology hurtles too fast for even futurists to keep up with, a generation of readers is emerging that will not accept text unless it is interactively married to other media. The twenty-first century’s definition of “author” will be as far from today’s definition as you are from the town scribe of yore.

The evolution of authors from unimedium creators to multimedia producers has been gaining momentum since the replacement of manual typewriters with electric ones, a phenomenon that any living soul in his or her mid-thirties or older has witnessed. The addition of computerized memory converted these dumb and passive typing machines into utilities possessing the potential for genuine partnership with writers. Each refinement in memory capacity, miniaturization, automation, and audiovisual display exponentially accelerated the typewriter’s curve away from mere laborsaving device and toward a purely organic extension of the writer’s mind.

At this point in time, we are at a place on the curve where typewriting has been supplanted by word processing, and word processing, in turn, has advanced into desktop publishing. This means that writers are capable of assuming the role of publishers in every function except distribution of their works to the consumer, and even this condition is on the way to being satisfied with the ongoing creation of electronic networks delivering intellectual creations directly to users.

The closer writers come to realizing that potential, the greater will be the pressure on them to expand their skills beyond effectively delivering the written word in print mode. It will be incumbent on them to navigate, and enable computer users to navigate, through a world of sights, sounds, colors, action, information, and special effects. The introduction of the optical disk, with its almost unimaginable memory and versatility, into the writers repertoire, makes their ascent to the next rung of evolution a foregone conclusion. But what is that rung, and how many others loom above it?

Technological growth is seldom achieved without a price, however. The same refinements that liberated writers from some kinds of concerns have saddled them with others. Our relationship with text has become complicated, if not obscured, by our need to master new writing tools. More and more of our creative energy has become dedicated to the selection of hardware, software, peripherals, and options. Each improvement challenges us not to become better writers but to become better engineers.

To read this essay in full click here.

Richard Curtis

The Bulwer-Lytton prize for the worst opening sentence of a novel has been given annually since 1982 by San Jose State University.  This year’s recipient is Molly Ringle, according to The Guardian‘s website.

The first line of her novel The Ghost Downstairs reads:

“For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss – a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.”

The prize is named after the first line of Bulwer-Lytton’s novel Paul Clifford, published in1830. It started “It was a dark and stormy night…”  Though it may have seemed vaguely fresh at the time, it has become the standard for quintessentially cliched story openings.

Recipient Ringle took it with good humor and stands by her gerbil metaphor, which was inspired by her nursing child: “There are definitely worse ways to get 15 minutes of fame,” she commented. Nevertheless, authors who seek immortality may want to skirt this particular honor.

It’s all here, including a doozy of a runner-up: Bulwer-Lytton prize for bad writing goes to ‘inappropriate’ gerbil sentence

Richard Curtis

Asked to free-associate with the name “Bowker” most publishing people think of such publishing services as ISBN book-identification numbers and similar tedious but essential data.  But, in a surprising announcement emailed to publishing professionals, Bowker today announced a service for authors, and one guaranteed to raise some eyebrows.

“I am writing to inform you of the exciting release of Bowker Manuscript Submissions,” writes Natalie Piccotti. “a new online service allowing authors to submit their manuscript ideas to a number of publishing houses from one central location.

“BowkerManuscriptSubmissions.com will be featured at Book Expo America in May 2010, and will officially launch in June 2010.”

The initiative is designed to “streamline the process of sorting through an overwhelming volume of unsolicited manuscripts publishers receive. Built off the success of Christian Manuscript Submissions, Bowker will now provide a similar service to the trade and higher education publishing communities.”

For an annual fee of $295 the program will…

* Sort by subject of choice and submission date
* Search by keywords in title, description and topic
* Identify proposals that have been professionally edited
* Cut down on wasted time – our system remembers your last date of entry so you do not read previously reviewed manuscripts
* Contact the writer directly
* Find proposals by author’s name
* Review an author’s publishing history, book summary, and writing style in one step

Before literary agents’ noses go out of joint, the announcement reassures them that the submission program will enable them to promote their services and match their clients’ ideas to the best possible publisher.

Our nose remains in place (though permanently deviated 5 degrees by a football injury), but we suspect many an agent will wonder if the program can substitute for or even supplement a lifetime of knowledge and wisdom, experience and cultivation of relationships.  Will Bowker Submissions know if the science fiction list of Publisher A is inventoried, or the romance editor of Publisher B just jumped to Publisher C, or if Publisher D just acquired the same idea from another author six months ago?  Will Bowker Submissions buy us lunch? Will it hold an author’s hand when her idea has been shot down at ten houses?

These mean-spirited observations aside, we welcome the program as an interesting attempt to offer vital information for authors and agents.  And here’s the best part – if Bowker makes a match between an author and a publisher, it won’t ask the agent to split a commission.

Richard Curtis

Paper Man, a movie starring Jeff Daniels as a terminally blocked novelist, has opened in general release. Every author should go see it.  By presenting a copy of

your remaindered, out of print literary debacle at the box office plus the full price of a ticket we guarantee you will be admitted.

The film’s fictional author, completely unhinged by the cartons of unsold copies of his flopperoo piled up in his cabin, finds creative ways to sublimate his angst such as fashioning the pages of his novel into origami animals, and building a couch out of copies. You can see the actual piece of furniture in Filmmakers Turn Old Books Into a Couch as reported by Penelope Green of the New York Times. The one upper right is not in the movie but looks like the perfect place to lose yourself in a book.

Further inquiry yielded a home that looks like stacked books, where you will also see that the bedroom activities of the owner, a sculptor, are truly an open book.

RC

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Of Taxes and the Writer
By Richard Curtis

Early in April a few years ago I got a call from a client who was preparing his income tax. This author wrote erotic fiction and wanted to know whether he could legitimately claim as a deduction his pharmacological treatment for a little affliction he had contracted in the course of “researching” one of his novels.

I told him I imagined the treatment would probably fall under medical deductions rather than research expenses, but the story does illustrate that even the most untrammeled literary spirits have to pay their obeisance to Uncle Sam sooner or later. With more and more authors incorporating, purchasing expensive computer equipment, seeking shelters for their taxable income, and in general being more businesslike in their approaches to the art and craft of literature, the accountant is becoming as important as the literary agent in guiding the destinies of writers.

The chances of a writer being audited by the Internal Revenue Service are a little better than those of the average working stiff because most writers are freelancers, and taxes on their income are not usually withheld as they are from persons on company payrolls. Thus, even though the odds that anybody will be audited are going down because of staff cutbacks at the IRS, a free-lancer’s tax return may be more provocative than that of someone who works for Boeing or IBM. Your best defense, should the fickle finger of the IRS single you out, is a well-kept set of records, primarily your canceled checks, your receipts, and a journal or ledger recording details of every transaction for which you are claiming a deduction, particularly those for which receipts are not ordinarily given, such as public transportation, certain tips, and the like.

In general, authors are entitled to “write off,” or deduct from taxable income earned from their writing, certain costs incurred in pursuit of that income. Among those costs are agent’s commissions; rental of office space; editorial and secretarial assistance; purchase or lease of computers and other office equipment; office supplies, such as toner cartridges and paper; travel; the cost of entertaining editors, agents, producers, collaborators, and others related to their professional endeavors; and books and other research material.

Naturally, not all expenses are deductible; other expenses may be deducted over a period of years; others are only partially deductible; and still others are deductible only at your peril.
Because of the feast-or-famine nature of the freelance life, you don’t necessarily have to earn money in any given year in order to write off expenses. You may be working on a long-term project and a whole year or more may go by without income. Yet you may still claim the costs incurred that year and deduct them from whatever other income you received, such as interest or stock dividends, your spouse’s income if you’re married and file jointly, and the like. Even if you’re not a professional writer at all but simply a would-be writer who has yet to realize a dime from his work, you may nevertheless write off your expenses for a period of years before these activities come under the definition of hobby, the costs of which are not deductible.

So much for famine. But there’s also tax relief for those who feast. One form of it is the government-sponsored IRA’s and other tax shelter plans, which are designed for freelancers and other independent breadwinners who do not earn regular wages. By putting some of your income into such a shelter, you in effect lower the amount of income you claim for that year and pay taxes on it only when you draw that income later in your life, at retirement age, when you will presumably be in a lower tax bracket. Meanwhile, your tax shelter account will be appreciating through interest or dividends or (if you invest the money wisely) through capital gains on investments.

When it comes to taxes, the name of the game is deductions. Let’s talk about some.

Capital purchases. Capital purchases are major items such as machinery and furniture. These might include your personal computer and printer, a desk, photocopier, file cabinets, a fax. The government considers such purchases investments, and because investments are subject to depreciation, you are usually not permitted to deduct their purchase price in full the year you purchased them. Rather, you have to spread the cost out over several years for tax accounting purposes. Thus, if you buy a PC and a printer, you may only be able to “depreciate” them over five years; that is, deduct a portion of the price from your income each year for five years. On the other hand, you may be entitled to an “investment credit,” a direct credit against your tax liability. Investment credits are a form of reward the government gives businesses for buying capital equipment. The principle is that such investments pump money back into our economy and keep it healthy, so investment credits encourage you to buy furniture and equipment.

Straight deductions. Most day-to-day necessities of the writing profession come under this category. Assuming you can furnish receipts, these are fully deductible, and deductible wholly in the year in which you pay them. They include paper and other stationery; pens and pencils, paper clips, rubber bands, and other office supplies; postage; messenger bills; photocopy bills; legal, bookkeeping, and accounting fees; dues and professional organization fees; editorial and secretarial assistance; agent’s commissions and expenses; phone bills; interest on loans; and certain state and local taxes, such as unincorporated business taxes, city rent or occupancy taxes, and the like.

Although many of these costs are indisputably business expenses and are seldom questioned by the IRS as long as you furnish solid documentation, some of them do fall into a gray area where eyebrows might be raised or IRS computers, programmed to seek variations from certain norms, might “flag” the questionable item. Writer’s Digest is a pretty safe magazine subscription to deduct, but Vogue? Sports Illustrated? Well, if you can demonstrate that you wish to write for those markets or that the information they provide applies to a writing project you’re developing, those subscriptions will be arguably legitimate. The same might be said of a television set. If you hope to write for television or consider TV a good source of information for your books, stories, or articles, you may be able to get away with writing off all or some of the cost of the television set.

The gray area gets even grayer with such deductions as travel and entertainment. At what point, if any, a dinner stops being social and starts being professional is often impossible to say, as is the point at which a vacation becomes a business trip. In order to legitimize these deductions, solid documentation is desirable in the form of receipts and canceled checks, a diary or journal, or other written evidence demonstrating intent and purpose. The IRS requires receipts for any claimed business meals of more than $25; for meals costing less (is there such a creature?), no receipt is necessary but a detailed journal entry or other memo is desirable. It should stipulate the date, place, persons involved, business purpose, and price. Home entertainment may be harder to document, since food and drink for business entertainment are often purchased with provisions earmarked for personal use, or food and drink already stocked at home may be used to entertain business guests. But here again, a combination of receipts and memoranda may at least convey to potential auditors the sincerity of your attempts to furnish good documentation. The IRS does assume that a certain percentage of a professional writer’s or freelancer’s income is going to be claimed for entertainment, and within that range it may not raise any questions. But because entertainment deductions are usually among the most inflated found in the average return, any inordinate claims will usually trigger intense curiosity.

The same is true of travel. Business travelers are obliged to document the purpose of their trip and expenses, and even though such trips may in fact be 95 percent play and 5 percent work, orderly records will allow the benefit of the doubt to be given to the claimant. Indeed, no connection between the place visited and the place written about need manifest itself, for who is to say that you did not write a story about Acapulco that was rejected and never published, or that after spending a week in London researching a novel you did not decide to set the book in Paris instead? But there are limits to the government’s credulity. The writer who flies with his family to Miami Beach during Christmas week may have a hard time convincing a gimlet-eyed IRS auditor that it was a research trip.

Probably the most common tax headache for a writer is what to deduct for the office in his home. If you have an office outside your home, you may claim the rent, utility, insurance, and related bills in their entirety. But what if your bedroom doubles as an office or you do your writing on the kitchen table? Until a few years ago, the IRS was liberal in its definition of office space in the home, but it has since become stricter, insisting that a room be set aside specifically and exclusively for professional use. If you have an eight-room home and use one room as an office, you may claim one-eighth of all your house expenses as deductible business expenses.

The telephone is another ambiguous item insofar as personal and professional uses are mingled on the same bill. In such cases you can assign a percentage of the bill to business use and note the long-distance charges for business calls. Perhaps the best way around the problem is to maintain a separate phone for business purposes.

A growing number of writers have become so businesslike about their profession that they have incorporated themselves. What benefits do they hope to derive? Is this something that every writer can or should do?

There are many financial, legal, and other good reasons for individuals to form corporations, but these are not always as clear for writers as they might be for manufacturing or service companies. One major benefit, for instance, is limited liability. With the threat of legal claims perpetually hanging over every writer’s head, what author would not breathe easier knowing that the only assets he’s in jeopardy of losing in a lawsuit are the rather meager ones retained by his corporation?

Unfortunately, it’s nowhere near that simple. The law recognizes how easy it is for wrongdoers to hide behind the cloak of corporate immunity, and thus in the “discovery” process of a trial it may be ruled that the personal assets of the head of a closely held corporation (meaning that only you, or perhaps you and your spouse, hold all the stock) may be vulnerable to a claim.

Furthermore, most publishers signing contracts with incorporated authors require them to furnish written “performance guarantees” that they will honor their contractual obligations and be responsible for the warranty and indemnification clauses of their contracts. After all, a corporation can’t write a book – or, what is more pertinent in this case, it can’t write a libelous, defamatory, obscene, scandalous, or privacy-invading book. Only individuals can do that, so authors must sign a document guaranteeing the contractual obligations of the corporations they own, and vice versa. This so vitiates the limited liability aspect of incorporating as to render it virtually impotent.

There are definite financial advantages for an author to incorporate, but these generally come into play only if that author is making a good deal of money, and making it consistently. Medical insurance can be paid out of before-tax income. A pension plan can be established, enabling you to shelter until retirement far more money than the government currently permits under IRA plans it sponsors. These pension plans usually have life insurance options, meaning that life insurance premiums may be paid out of before-tax income, a distinct advantage over the situation of unincorporated individuals.

There are other benefits, too, but there are also disadvantages. The costs of starting and maintaining a corporation are not inconsiderable, and after you have paid legal and accounting costs, or spent so much time filling out and filing federal, state, and local withholding income tax, corporation tax, unemployment, Social Security, disability, pension, and other papers, you may find that you might have done just as well conducting your business as a plain old unincorporated human being. Besides, if the government feels you’ve established a corporation just to dodge taxes, you could get into trouble and end up paying heavy penalties and interest on back taxes. So before you start thinking about vying with Mobil for a place on the Fortune 500 list, consult your accountant.

This article was originally written for Locus, The Newspaper of the Science Fiction Field. It’s reprinted in How to be Your Own Literary Agent, published by Houghton Mifflin, Copyright © 1983, 1984, 1996, 2003 by Richard Curtis. All Rights Reserved.

If you ever worked in the garment business you’ll remember the joke about the dress manufacturer who hears that taffeta is going to be big next season and buys a huge amount of it,  only to learn that everyone will be wearing velvet instead. Ruined, he jumps out the window. As he plummets to the sidewalk he notices in a window that his friend Murray is manufacturing a taffeta skirt. “Murray!” he shouts. “Cut velvet!”

I was reminded of this story when I read a Publishers Weekly report by Diane Roback on the Bologna Book Fair, a major worldwide convocation of children’s book publishers. Roback’s title was YA Hot, Digital Not at Upbeat Bologna, and she quoted a number of editors and agents who proclaimed that the superheated trend in young adult fiction, propelled by such engines as Harry Potter and Twilight, continues unabated. For instance, a Disney subsidiary rights official reported that “People are saying ‘we want to see YA fiction.’ And they’re asking specifically for YA, not just middle-grade and not just series.”

However, before you rush to develop another young adult series – remember that for every bubble there is a pin. Can’t happen? Party’s going to last forever? One agent at the fair told Roback that a number of publishers told him their lists are YA-saturated and “what we really want is good middle-grade.” And Random House’s Beverly Horowitz, one of the children’s book industry’s doyennes, thinks the trend may move to younger readers, boasting that she has an “otherworldly” middle-grade project in the works. Agent Simon Lipskar of Writers House elicited a preemptive offer from Random House for a middle-grade trilogy.

For the moment the only certain trend is that children’s books remain one of the few sectors of the publishing ecology that are making money, and the field is equally divided between books for big kids and for little kids. Indeed, YA books may have the edge because their readership often crosses over into the adult world.

But how many YA’s are so fabulously successful that they will be snapped up by grownups? Do you want to be the first author to arrive after the gates shut, leaving you and your agent standing with a perfectly wonderful and utterly unsalable YA project? It might behoove you to hit the bookstores, pick up and study some middle grade novels, and try your hand at one. That way you won’t be left with a warehouse full of taffeta.

Richard Curtis

Agents and publishers spend a lot of time creating subtitles. In fact, if you were to measure how many man- and woman-hours go into the process you would say they spend an inordinate amount of time in these deliberations. I say “deliberations” but as often as not they are debates, and some of them turn into donnybrooks with noses bent far out of shape and people not talking to each other. Publishing folks take subtitles seriously, and we advise you to do the same.

There is a lot at stake. A confusing or amorphous title desperately needs to be sharpened and focused with the help of a handful of explanatory words. But subtitles are not merely any words. They have to be perfect words.
Subtitles are not composed so much as they are distilled like acid so that every syllable etches an indelible impression in the mind of a customer gazing at a stack of books. A word out of place can well mean a sale lost.

Though subtitles are usually worked out in a dialogue between editor and author, the influence of the publisher’s sales representatives is always in the room. The question What the hell does the title mean? coming from a sales rep is a command to go back and come up with a better one.

These remarks are prompted by a blog by Robert McCrum in London’s Guardian.co.uk urging publishers to drop subtitles altogether. McCrum is incensed that the publisher of John Carey’s biography of William Golding felt compelled to add this subtitle: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies.

McCrum waxes positively bilious over the spineless editorial crew that came up with that one. “Picture the scene at Faber & Faber,” he writes. “Carey’s manuscript has been delivered, and the book is in production. Then, at some routine sales meeting, the worm of doubt starts to creep in. Up pops some bright young spark. Excuse me, says the BYS, I’m not sure that some of our younger readers will actually know who William Golding is. I mean, he’s been, like, dead since 1993, and most of his books are out of print.” The fact that Golding won a Nobel Prize for Literature and his masterpiece is required reading at countless colleges does not seem to have assured the publisher that readers will identify him without having to be hammered on their heads.

That’s why McCrum wants to do away with subtitles entirely. “The truth is, if you have to justify your book with a subtitle, the game is up,” he says. “Buyers pay scant attention to them; librarians and bibliographers often forget to catalogue them. They linger only as fig leaves of authorial shame. Who now remembers, or cares, that George Orwell’s Animal Farm bears the subtitle A Fairy Tale, or that Herman Melville’s Moby Dick was also known as The Whale?”

Author and English professor Ben Yagoda agrees with McCrum. In 2005 he published an article on the subject for the New York Times Book Review section. “Nobody really notices subtitles,” he wrote. “They are a sort of lottery ticket in the economics of nonfiction book marketing. Publishers throw all kinds of elements in them – vogue words and phrases, features of the book the title didn’t get around to mentioning, talismanic locutions like ‘An American Life’ – in the (almost always) vain hope that something will pay off.” In fact he thinks the convention has become a crutch for publishers: “What’s changed recently is that the subtitle has been asked to bear ever more weight. So many books are published nowadays that each one needs to proclaim its own merits; and with advertising budgets shaved away to nothing, the task falls to subtitles. As a result, they have become ubiquitous, hyperbolic and long... Once you’ve read the cover of ‘Shadow Divers: The True Adventures of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II‘, is there really any need to crack open the book?”

After a recent bruising negotiation with an author over trimming his 22 word subtitle, I definitely agree with Yagoda’s conclusion: “I miss the time, not so long ago, when it was possible for a book to go out into the world with only a strong title followed by a few hundred pages of outstanding writing.”

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Back in January we told you about app addiction. Not everybody is hooked on Apple applications, however. Some are addicted to Twitter, others to Facebook, still others to YouTube. Writers are addicted to anything that will divert them from the work at hand. You go on Google to research a fact for your book and, well, one association leads to another and pretty soon you’ve drifted far, blissfully far, away from your book.

Authors have procrastinated from time immemorial, and their excuses have evolved with the available technology. In the 20th century the usual dodge was a trip to the refrigerator or pencil sharpener. Today’s authors still go to the refrigerator, but as for pencils many don’t know which end the writing come out of now that they have spellcheck and other computerized editing tools. So they seek distraction on the Internet. And its seductions are far more addictive than anything ever offered on street corners.

“You get to your PC every morning with hours of productive time ahead of you,” writes Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times. “Next thing you know, it’s 5 p.m. and you’ve frittered the day away on Digg, Hulu, Wikipedia and your fantasy football league. And no wonder — how can anyone expect to get anything done when you’re plying your trade on one of the most distracting machines ever invented? With so much available on your PC — your friends, blogs, games and even TV shows — working in a modern office can often seem as rattling as working on the floor of a Las Vegas casino.”

If you’re highly motivated and disciplined you can govern temptation, or you can ask your spouse, boss, friend or business partner to make sure you don’t stray from your purpose. That seldom works. Any chain smoker who has given a pack of cigarettes to a friend and ordered him not to give him one knows why. But now there are computer programs to monitor or curb your obsession. There’s even one that virtually pries the mouse out of your hand and redirects it to the book you’re supposed to be working on. Manjoo, himself a victim of wandering attention, tried some of them:

I’ve been using a slate of programs to tame these digital distractions. The apps break down into three broad categories. The most innocuous simply try to monitor my online habits in an effort to shame me into working more productively. Others reduce visual bells and whistles on my desktop as a way to keep me focused.

And then there are the apps that really mean business — they let me actively block various parts of the Internet so that when my mind strays, I’m prohibited from giving in to my shiftless ways. It’s the digital equivalent of dieting by locking up the refrigerator and throwing away the key.

Of course, if you’re as clever as Manjoo – he’s Slate‘s technology columnist – you can find the key after throwing it away. You can just hack the blocker app until you you’re back on YouTube or Twitter wasting hour after blissful hour. Goodness, where did the time go!

Read Taming Your Digital Distractions and prepare to take – or download – the cure.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Now that Daniel Menaker, former Executive Editor-in-Chief of Random House and fiction editor of The New Yorker, is two years away from the publishing industry, he has issued a scathing denunciation of it.

His philippic, published in (of all places!) Barnes & Noble’s dotcom review, not only offers a familiar litany of reasons why the industry has become toxic, it actually offers some that we didn’t think bothered us (lunches!), so that those of us who remain gainfully and even happily employed in the book trade will feel lousy about ourselves. It’s hard to read this dreary recital without feeling we should not leave our work stations without showering off the smell, like sewer workers or fish mongers.

“Publishing,” Menaker writes, “is often an extremely negative culture.” He then proceeds to barrage us with a dozen negativities ranging from back-biting colleagues to “holding the hands of intensely self-absorbed and insecure writers.” Then there’s “fielding frequently irate calls from agents, attending endless and vapid and ritualistic meetings, having one largely empty ceremonial lunch after another, supplementing publicity efforts, writing or revising flap copy, ditto catalog copy, refereeing jacket-design disputes, and so on…”

Are you depressed yet? I hope not, because Menaker is just getting started:

And this is only the beginning of the negativities that editors must face. Barnes & Noble doesn’t like the title. Borders doesn’t like the jacket. The author’s uncle Joe doesn’t like the jacket. The writer doesn’t like the page layout and design. Your boss tells you the flap copy for a book about a serial killer is too “down.” The hardcover didn’t sell well enough for the company to put out a paperback. The book has to wait a list or two to be published. Kirkus hates the book. Another writer gets angry at you for even asking for a quote. The Times isn’t going to review the book. And so on.

It’s often said that when your job just isn’t fun anymore, it’s time to leave. We don’t know why Menaker resigned from Random House, but it would be safe to speculate that he was no longer having fun. The tipoff is in his attitude towards authors. In Complaint #10 Menaker is at his most vituperative:

Speaking of the need for attention, if it hasn’t become clear by now, you must be prepared to suffer transference from your writers as much as any therapist is by his or her patients. Usually, writers, like anyone else who performs in public and desires wide recognition, no matter how successful they become, have an unslakeable thirst for attention and approval — in my opinion (and, I’m embarrassed to say, in my own case) usually left over from some early-childhood deficit or perception of deficit in the attention-and-approval department. You will frequently find yourself serving as an emotional valet to the people you work with. It can be extremely onerous and debilitating, especially given the ever-decreasing number of your colleagues and the consequent expansion of your workload.

Call authors challenging, call them neurotic, temperamental, demanding, frustrating, maddening and irritating. But if you don’t, ultimately, love them, then you are well and truly quit of the publishing business. And the business is well quit of you, too.

Read Menaker’s Little Book of Lamentations here.

Richard Curtis

The Writer’s Digest Conference, scheduled for Friday September 18 through Sunday September 20 2009, is open for registration, and here’s a chance to hear a stellar cast of media leaders talk about platform, networking and social media. It convenes at New York City’s Marriott Marquis Hotel in Times Square.

Here’s a short description.

The Writer’s Digest Conference is an innovative and ground-breaking conference, featuring the industry’s top forward-thinking speakers, leading sessions on topics relevant to the current state of the publishing world. Chris Brogan, social media genius, is the keynote speaker. Other speakers include Mike Shatzkin, the industry’s top publishing consultant; David Mathison, whose online sales success is the new business model; Bill O’Hanlon, one of the country’s top motivational speakers; April Hamilton, leading proponent of independent publishing; Jennifer Gilmore, author and former publicity director at Harcourt; Kassia Krozser, editor of BookSquare.com, a leading publishing blog; Christina Katz, author and well-known blogger; Amy Cook, attorney focusing on issues affecting writers and small publishers; independent editors Ruth Greenstein, Linda Carbone, and Alice Rosengard; and Seth Harwood and Scott Sigler, whose own podcasts and videocasts have made them superstars in the business; and many more, plus the editors of Writer’s Digest!

Yours truly has been invited to serve on a panel chaired by Jane Friedman, Publisher and Editorial Director of Writing Communities at Writers Digest. Come up and say hello!

RC