How Readings are like a Freshman English Class 7 Jul 2010

I'm back from a 10 days book tour, and as I gave reading after reading, it struck me that there are certain similarities between a bookstore reading and a high school classroom. To wit:

1) No one wants to sit in the front row. My readings might be standing-room only, with people in back having to jostle for position, and yet the first row would invariable be dead empty (except for the guy in Portland who was sitting in the front row clipping his fingernails, but that's another story). Even when I point out those empty seats, no one is willing to come forward to claim them -- no matter if they're pregnant, missing a leg, or 98 years old. I suspect that no one wants to be in the front row because they want to give themselves a chance at slipping out unseen if the reading turns out to be deadly dull, but really, unless you have a 200 person audience, an author is pretty much going to notice *anyone* who leaves in the middle of the reading. That empty front row always makes me feel a bit like a pariah, as if the audience is frightened of getting too close to me -- as if I, like a teacher who throws erasers at inattentive students or pitches screaming fits when no one does their homework, might start flinging bookmarks at the people in the front row or calling them out for typing on their iPhones while I'm reading aloud from the climax of the book. Really guys, I'm not that scary. I'm just glad you're filling a seat - I won't spit on you or yell at you or make you do extra homework. Promise!

2) No one wants to ask the first question. Generally, a reading is followed by a Q&A, giving audiences the chance to ask an author all the burning questions that they secretly want to ask. And yet, invariably, when I ask the audience, "Does anyone have any questions?" no one does. At least, not at first. Instead, I'm left up there trying to fill the empty air with some kind of vaguely coherent babble until some brave soul finally gets up the nerve to stick their hand in the air. Invariably, the question is "What was the inspiration for this story?" A predictable question, but still! I won't object. After all, it gets things started. And after that first question, a half dozen hands will immediately pop up in the air, so it's clearly not that people didn't *have* questions, it's just that they weren't willing to ask them yet. In this way a reading reminds me of a freshman English class, when the teacher asks what everyone thought of the homework, and no one is willing to answer first lest they give the wrong answer and look stupid. But I promise you, at a reading, there is no wrong question -- the author will be grateful for just about anything that shows some vague engagement with her/his writing. Even "what was the inspiration for this story?"

3) Signing books is kind of like a high-stakes pop quiz. When your aunt's old bridge partner or your former college dormmate or your sister's bridesmaid puts a book in front of you and asks you to sign it, you have to remember her name, and then, if you don't but probably should, figure out how to tease the name out of her without making it apparent that you don't remember. (The old "who should I sign this to?" trick works sometimes; but often the answer is a useless "me.") If, after a minute of small talk while you frantically run through your memory bank, you *do* have that critical epiphany, you still have to decide whether it's spelled Christine or Kristine or Chrystine or Christiane or Cristen. Trust me, you don't want to scratch out your mistake, not when they've just paid $26 for a precious paperback - after all, you want leave them with warm fuzzy feelings about you so that they'll buy your next book too. 

In a worst case scenario, I'll skip the name entirely and just write "Thanks for supporting the book." That won't earn me a failing grade, but is still probably no better than a C-. Which is a pass, but barely. 

Odds and ends 21 Jun 2010

 -- Slate's Double X anointed "This Is Where We Live" as their book of the week, dubbing it "enthralling." I'm flattered, ladies. Thank you!

-- The San Francisco Chronicle ran my review of Bret Easton Ellis' "Imperial Bedrooms." In a nutshell: "Ellis is either so deeply enmeshed in his own creepy little insular world that he can't write his way out of it, or else he is such a genius that he's created an entire parallel universe that folds and unfolds on itself like some kind of Escher print."

-- I've added a reading in Laguna Beach, at the wonderful Laguna Beach Bookstore. July 28, 7 pm. If you live anywhere in the vicinity, come say hello!

Trade reviews: The agony and the ectasy 7 Jun 2010

 The trade reviews for "This Is Where We Live" are all in now. For those of you who have no clue what a "trade review" is, these are the four book reviews that come out in advance of a book's publication, published in trade magazines that are read by booksellers, librarians, and other vendors who then use these reviews to make ordering decisions. Written, for the most part, by anonymous critics, the reviews are also circulated widely and generally help set the tenor of what's to come.

Let's review, shall we?

Library Journal: "Brown's follow up to her biting debut is another addictive read. This telling look at how the current economic crisis affects one family shows that Brown is no one-hit wonder." They gave it a starred review.

Kirkus: "Brown's tart second novel couldn't be more timely... a cringingly funny satire of love and money among the artsy class."

Booklist: "Brown proves adept at fully inhabiting both male and female characters in her sympathetic portrait of a troubled marriage. She also elevates her material with sharp commentary on the current economy while gamely tackling what it means to be a "grown up" and how our idea of who we think we should be gets in the way of who we really are. At once playful and heartbreaking, this novel never feels less than wholly true."

Great, right? I'm downright bursting with pleasure. 

That is, until I read the Publisher's Weekly (PW) review, which has this to say: "Married 30-something artists Claudia and Jeremy Munger are the unlucky anchors of Brown's shaky sophomore novel.... The gauntlets the Mungers face verge on Kafkaesque, yet the novel proceeds with painful earnestness." Oh. I suppose I can be comforted that the critic finishes with a back-handed compliment: "There are lovely small moments—Claudia's awkward run-in with a former student, for instance—that give hope that the undeniably talented author will find her footing again after this flawed effort." Thanks, I guess?

Part of reconciling yourself to life as an author is coming to terms with the fact that there will always be someone out there who hates your book. Hopefully, not a whole lot of someones. And hopefully not someone who has undue influence on other people. But it's nearly inevitable that at least one of the trades will hate you: Last time around, it was Kirkus that hated my book, and Publisher's Weekly who loved it. 

Most reviews -- even the bad ones -- you can (kind of) shrug off. But what makes a bad trade review so painful is its online ubiquity. The trade reviews (particularly Publisher's Weekly and Kirkus) get reprinted *everywhere*. The very first review you read on Amazon, for example, is the one from Publisher's Weekly, which gets prime placement at the top of the Editorial Reviews section. It doesn't matter if the New York Times Book Review puts you on the cover and anoints you the next great literary superstar -- PW still has the first (and often, final) word. This means that your average Amazon browser will be quickly convinced that TIWWL is "shaky" and "flawed" (per PW), unless they persevere and click further to read the good reviews and discover that someone else thought it was "addictive" and "cringingly funny" and "heartbreaking." 

Am I complaining? A little. But not really. Because what counts most, in the end, is the readers who do love your book -- those "someones" who not only enjoy it but pass their love along, recommending your book to like-minded folk with similar taste. The worst reviews in the world, after all, didn't stop "Sex In the City 2" a small fortune at the box office; surely Philip Roth and Barbara Kingsolver and Jennifer Weiner have survived a few bad trade reviews and gone on to the bestseller lists anyway. So hopefully one anonymous critic at PW won't scare off too many potential readers. I can only hope that there are more -- and at the moment I'm batting 75% -- who like it enough to counter the criticism. 

After all, as they say, chacun à son goût. I can live with that.

You can find me in Costco 25 May 2010

Last week, my mother called me on her cell phone from San Francisco. "I'm in Costco," she said, in a stage whisper. "They're selling All We Ever Wanted! I just moved it from the bottom of the pile and now it's sitting on top of the James Patterson books!" (My mother, bless her heart, is an adept reshelver of books -- after she departs a bookstore, it is quite likely that the annoyed staffers will find my two-year-old novel sitting front and center on the "new releases" table.) 

Then, this morning, a friend emailed me a photo of the fruits of his latest trip to a Los Angeles Costco: Diapers, Bombay Sapphire, and All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, for the very reasonable price of $8.99.

I have mixed feelings about this. Costco only sells 250 titles at a time. The fact that AWEWWE is being sold now, nearly two years since its release date, is a great sign that the book still has a life in it. (Which isn't a given in this dismal market). It's also flattering that Costco deems it worthy of a slot on their coveted tables. And yet! The book is being sold for a good third off its usual cover price, which is bad for independent bookstores who can't compete with these prices, and also not particularly lucrative for publishers, and ultimately, not so lucrative for authors either. And yet! Costco sells a vast quantity of books, being one of the top 5 sellers in the US, and anything that helps sell vast (or even middling) numbers of my book, thereby introducing Janelle Brown to people who might not otherwise have heard of me, is good for me in the long run. (According to a New York Times story, "A forgotten older paperback, recommended and featured by the book buyer at Costco, can sell more copies in six weeks than it did in the last few years combined.")

I hear that authors have even started doing signings at Costco (Sarah Palin and Bill Clinton have both stopped in recently to sign, and even smaller authors have started adding stops to their book tours). The bookish elite may be horrified by the idea of hawking literature alongside free samples of frozen pizza and shrinkwrapped underwear, but perhaps it's also a positive sign that an interest in reading is infiltrating even the most mass of markets. After all, snobbishness helps no one in the worst book market in decades.

So if you see me there, wedged between stacks of Twilight and Eat Pray Love -- or even in person, next to the salsa sample table -- be nice to me. Move my book to the top of the table, stop by to say hello. Throw a book in your cart alongside that bulk toilet paper and give it to your aunt Flo for Christmas. After all, at 30% off the cover price, it's a steal, and will (hopefully) provide her with even more pleasure than that six pound bag of salted nut mix, but with none of the calories.  

signing stock 3 Jun 2009

One of the most curious tasks assigned to a touring author is “stock signing.” This involves visiting every bookstore in a city and signing every copy of your book that they have in the store. The benefits are threefold: a) your book generally gets marked with an “autographed copy” sticker, which helps sell books; b) your newly-signed book often gets moved to a more prominent position on a front table, which helps sell books; and c) you get to meet the booksellers in person, who will then hopefully feel more of a personal connection to you and your novel, and, yes, sell books.

The other upside of doing this is that you get to visit bookstores where you’re not doing events. As such, I’ve managed to visit some of the most wonderful independent bookstores that I wouldn’t have otherwise discovered — like Elliot Bay Books in Seattle, an incredible brick edifice to books which just reeks of history; or Depot Bookstore in Mill Valley, with its wonderful cafe. Most bookstore salesclerks are happy to meet the author, want to chat about your book, clearly care about writing — including some great staff that I’ve met at assorted Borders and Barnes & Noble. But every once in a while you have an encounter like this:

Me: “Hi, my name is Janelle Brown, and I’m wondering if I could sign stock on my book?”
Clerk, chatting on phone with friend: “You wanna do what?”
Me: “Um, autograph my book?”

Clerk, clearly annoyed to be interrupted, huffs off to locate book. Returns, ten minutes later, smelling like cigarette smoke.

Clerk: “Can’t find it.”
Me, meekly: “Actually, it’s right there on your front table.”

Clerk retrieves books with aggrieved sigh. I sign books, hand them back to bookseller, who is now reading the latest US Weekly.

Me: “Do you want help stickering them?”
Clerk: “We have stickers?”
Me: “Just don’t put it over the title, please.”

Clerk begins haphazardly slapping enormous stickers on the front of the book, covering my name.

Me, still hopeful: “Thanks for taking care of my book.”

Needless to say, this is generally not something that happens at a little independent, but at a major chain store. And it makes me appreciate, more than ever, those bookstores where you feel like the booksellers aren’t just selling widgets to make money, but consider themselves stewards of literature. Places where booksellers lovingly post recommendations under their favorite books and are eager to hand-sell you an author you’ve never heard of. It’s horrifying to me that they are such an endangered species — the entire city of Los Angeles boasts fewer than half a dozen these days.