Get Your Free Books Here

I'm of two minds about this trend reported in today's New York Times. Book publishers, including my own house Macmillan, are giving away free digital copies of certain titles to drum up interest in authors whose book sales could use a boost: 

Publishers including Harlequin, Random House and Scholastic are offering free versions of digital books to Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other e-retailers, as well as on author Web sites, as a way of allowing readers to try out the work of unfamiliar writers. The hope is that customers who like what they read will go on to obtain another title for money.

“Giving people a sample is a great way to hook people and encourage them to buy more,” said Suzanne Murphy, group publisher of Scholastic Trade Publishing, which offered free downloads of “Suite Scarlett,” a young-adult novel by Maureen Johnson, for three weeks in the hopes of building buzz for the next book in the series, “Scarlett Fever,” out in hardcover on Feb. 1. The book went as high as No. 3 on Amazon’s Kindle best-seller list.

Apple has been doing something analogous on iTunes for years. It gives away free songs, usually by little-known musicians, in the hope that you'll like what you hear and buy more songs at 99 cents a pop. I know this has worked because my wife has downloaded a bunch of free tunes by artists she had never heard of and then purchased others by those same musicians. And clearly, something like that happened on Amazon.com with "Scarlett Fever."

On the other hand, everyone acknowledges that the book publishing  business is going through a transformative time. A question looms over the industry: Does it tame the digital bronco and figure out how to ride e-books to profitability, or has that horse already left the barn? Some publishing houses are worried that a generation of readers will grow up expecting all books to be free, which is what happened with music after Napster flattened the old record labels: 

“At a time when we are resisting the $9.99 price of e-books,” said David Young, chief executive of Hachette Book Group, the publisher of James Patterson and Stephenie Meyer, “it is illogical to give books away for free.”

Similarly, a spokesman for Penguin Group USA said: “Penguin has not and does not give away books for free. We feel that the value of the book is too important to do that.”

The current situation reminds me of screenwriter William Goldman's axiom about the movie business: "Nobody knows anything."

The Poacher's Son on Facebook

If you have an account on Facebook, I hope you'll become a fan of The Poacher's Son and invite your friends to do so as well. Yes, I understand that you probably haven't read the book yet (unless you happen to be one of the select few who received an advance reader copy) since it won't actually be available until May 11. But I promise you, the novel is really, really good.

Really.

The Lessons of Gabriel Garcia Marquez

As a journalist, I adhere to the old adage that you can't have great writing without great reporting (even if you're only reporting the blunt truths of your personal experience like Jane Austen or Emily Dickinson did). That's why I would recommend this article from the Columbia Journalism Review to anyone interested in writing fiction.

Before (and after) he became an acclaimed novelist, Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a reporter in Colombia and Europe, and he learned many lessons in the newsroom that he later applied to his short stories and novels. I was particularly struck by this observation:

The majority of journalists let the tape recorder do the work, and they think that they are respecting the wishes of the person they are interviewing by retranscribing word for word what he says. They do not realize that this work method is really quite disrespectful: whenever someone speaks, he hesitates, goes off on tangents, does not finish his sentences, and he makes trifling remarks. For me the tape recorder must only be used to record material that the journalist will decide to use later on, that he will interpret and will choose to present in his own way. In this sense it is possible to interview someone in the same way that you write a novel or poetry.

I see this as an admonition to both journalists and novelists — the truth, very often, lies in those tangents and trifling marks.

A Haiku a Day

My wife Kristen Lindquist is engaged in her own blogging project, and unlike me she has the discipline to post a new entry each day. Her blog, Book of Days, is premised on the concept of finding some recent experience, exceptional or mundane, and using it as raw material to write a haiku. But Kristen doesn't just write a poem, she explains what prompted her to do so in elegant, pellucid prose that frequently knocks me on my keister.

Here she's describing a snowshoe trek she made up Beech Hill in the neighboring town of Rockport:

Elsewhere, a pattern of snow on a branch looked just like a turkey track. Stands of staghorn sumac held up their velvety red clusters in offering to the sky. We found an acorn that had been tucked into the hollow of a small tree by some well-intentioned squirrel long ago. Along the trail we could hear wind rushing in the spruce grove at the summit, the distant Owls Head foghorn, the patter of snowflakes falling on branches and dead leaves. But we couldn't see the ocean from any point, only scarves of snow sweeping over the trees and soft contours of the near landscape. A place very familiar to us both was revealing a new face.

At one point on the way down, the sun tried to break through the clouds. But even the sun was too weak to overcome the storm. The solar disk hung there like a strange planetary apparition for a moment and then was gone. Such light casts no shadows. Dark, dead stalks against white fields offered a sense of contrast, but no softness, or color—except in the strange, wind-carved crevices in a some drifts that shone with the eerie blue light of glacial ice.

And here is the haiku she was inspired to write about that day:

Snow drops a curtain,
transforms the path through trees, fields.
In beauty we walk.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Kristen is a better nature writer than I am. Such light casts no shadows. Man, I wish I'd written that.

50 Galleys in 50 Minutes

I visited my first American Library Association conference in Boston to sign Advanced Reader Copies (in other words I went to the ALA to autograph ARCs).

The only glitch I encountered was that I was scheduled to sign in the Macmillan booth while Al Gore was giving a speech in the ballroom upstairs. (Thanks a lot, Mr. Vice President.) Nevertheless I managed to sign 50 ARCs in 50 hyperactive minutes.

I didn't get to see much of the event beyond touring the exhibition hall. But I spoke to several librarians about how their profession continues to change as the computer eclipses the printed book and more and more of our conversations about reading take place online. There's no question we're living through bibliotechnical times. You do wonder what the future of libraries will be as e-books proliferate.

The librarians I met were, without exception, interested and interesting people. If there's hope for libraries to remain important community centers and repositories of learning, I trust these bright minds to find the way. We authors are counting on them.