Norman Mailer on Negative Reviews

In 1955 Norman Mailer received a fusillade of negative reviews for his third novel, The Deer Park. Most novelists will tell you that there's no point in responding to scathing reviews, however mean-spirited or unjustified you might think they are. You just come across as thin-skinned and whiny. Mailer, however, hit upon an unconventional response to his critics; he tried to co-opt them. He wrote and paid for an ad in the Village Voice quoting the worst slams against him. Later, he explained his reasoning in Advertisements for Myself:

I had the tender notion—believe it if you will—that the ad might after all do its work and excite some people to buy the book. 

I doubt Mailer's ad accomplished his goal, but you have to admire his ingenuity.

Booklist Starred Review

My novel is now four for four with ★ starred reviews among the early journals, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, and now Booklist:

Doiron’s debut crime novel is set ...in the North Woods of Maine, the home of rookie game warden Mike Bowditch. As tensions rise across the state with the impending sale of huge tracts of paper- company forest land to an out-of-state developer, Mike receives a strange message from his father, left on the same night the paper company rep and a state trooper are shot and killed after a heated town meeting. Doiron, editor-in-chief of Down East magazine, is well acquainted with the current political and cultural tensions that crisscross Maine, and his local knowledge drives this fast-paced and twisty narrative. With realistically flawed characters and a strong sense of place...the novel avoids tourist stereotyping, of Maine itself and its citizens. One hopes this fine novel is the first in a series starring Warden Bowditch, who could quickly become the East Coast version of C. J. Box’s game-warden hero Joe Pickett, who patrols the range in Wyoming.

—Booklist, ★ Starred Review

Yes, it's mind-blowing. 

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.