John Clayton's Blog

I suspect that social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn may pose threats to newspapers -- but not to narrative journalism. Here’s why.

I use Facebook to keep up with friends. It’s like a more efficient version of walking down to the watercooler or coffeeshop for brief, diverting social interaction. But it’s not meaningless -- it’s helping me remind myself of my role in a wider social ecosystem. My place in the world -- that’s also a big part of why I read newspapers, to learn about events that are happening around me, to understand community dynamics and my relation to them. The more I can fulfill that same purpose in a personalized way on Facebook, the less important newspapers are to my day-to-day habits.

At the same time there’s something missing from my Facebook interactions: narrative. I’m enjoying my friend Stephen’s posts from Dubai, but I don’t really understand how or why he got there. Likewise, I’m fascinated by the number of Sutton’s friends who comment on his place-oriented posts, “Hey, when did you move to Montana?” (It was two years ago.) But the medium doesn’t include many opportunities to provide backstory.

Then again, neither do newspapers. Thanks to the influence of 24-hour cable news (and newspapers’ need to compete with it), much of today’s “news” is the latest tidbit in an ongoing saga. And in the rush to publish there’s little evaluation of the tidbit’s importance. These days, I prefer to get my political and economic news from magazines or books, which have the luxury of time to grasp the narrative thread.

In other words, I believe we all still hunger for narrative. And we hunger for narratives that make sense, that are well-constructed by the people with the talent or experience to do so. I have no idea whether in five years we will get those narratives via a rejuvenated form of newspapering, via web magazines, or via some yet-to-be-invented format. But in the big picture, those are just delivery vehicles. What matters to me as a writer of narrative is not so much the vehicle as the relationship I use it to have with a reader.

(cross-posted from WriterL)

I'm always interested in feedback, via info at johnclaytonbooks dot com

Labels: narrative, publishing realities, technology

I often get asked whether Caroline Lockhart’s novels are still in print. As of this year, boy are they ever! Did The Cowboy Girl play a role? Maybe, but technology played a bigger one.

If you need any proof of the way the “Long Tail” economy is growing exponentially, look no further than the explosion of recent republications of Lockhart’s books, originally published in the 1910s. Most are from print-on-demand outfits. I imagine they’re aided by the fact that Project Gutenberg has provided the text for these books. All the publisher has to do is grab the text from Web, insert into its printing software, add a cover, and wait for somebody to make an order through an outfit like bn.com.

But it turns out there’s one step in that newfangled-publication process that turns out to be more difficult than it looks: adding a cover. Here are three Lockhart books from an outfit called Tutis publishing.

Is The Dude Wrangler about ancient Greece? Does The Fighting Shepherdess involve Indian maidens and Egyptian pottery? Is the Lady Doc a contemporary medical thriller? Suffice it to say: no. In fact I’d have to say that these are some of the absolute worst covers I can imagine given the content of these novels. I picture some hapless Tutis executive, armed with a CD-full of stock images, required to assign them to titles at a rate of 20 or 30 an hour.

On the other hand, hey, anything to promote reading and books. And especially, anything to promote unjustly-forgotten novelists like Lockhart. But here’s hoping this process of reprinting old novels improves a bit as it matures.

I'm always interested in feedback, via info at johnclaytonbooks dot com

Labels: Cowboy Girl, publishing realities, technology

From novelist Ann Patchett's essay on book-touring, in the Atlantic:

Most people who are capable of sitting alone day after day, year after year, typing into the void are probably constitutionally ill-suited to work a room like a politician

I'm always interested in feedback, via info at johnclaytonbooks dot com

Labels: publishing realities

Much of Rocky Mountain West is celebrating the success of one of its own authors, David Wroblewski of Boulder, Colorado.

I have not yet read “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle,” but I too am looking forward to it, in part because the structure-junkie in me is very intrigued by the way Wroblewski in this interview compares a novel to a piece of software, and in this interview compares it to a machine:

I started the novel and realized I didn't know how they worked as drama machines, how you held a story that long together without having it slide apart,

Can you tell that he’s been working for hi-tech companies to pay the bills while writing? (It’s not such a bad life.)

But I’d also like to add a counterpoint to the Wroblewski celebration, in the form of a link to a less-happy author.

Another author came to visit and kindly explained to me what I sort of knew but had been steadily denying: “Bronze Inside and Out” will not make any money for me. Any. … I can no longer say to myself, “when the big check comes I’ll get the pickup fixed” or “the shower fixed” or “my teeth fixed.” I mean, when these things become intolerable, what WILL I do?

Mary Scriver’s lament reminds me of another woman of a certain age who’d moved to rural Montana to write, and as times toughened hoped that her book would bring her enough money to afford some of the basic luxuries her neighbors took for granted. But in Caroline Lockhart’s case, she really should have known better -- by the time she was pinning these hopes on “Old West - and New” she’d already published six less-than-lucrative novels.

By the way, that was in 1933 -- it's hard to argue that for authors, times were once easier.

I'm always interested in feedback, via info at johnclaytonbooks dot com

Labels: publishing realities