Lisa Brackmann, the author of the fabulous debut thriller Rock Paper Tiger, is a fellow Soho debut novelist. We’ve gotten to know each other a bit this year as our books have been released, and we decided to interview each other about the debut publication process.

How long did the process of getting published take, from starting to work on the novel
through its publication date?

LB: Hah. Hahah. HAHAHAHAH.

Ahem. Well, writing the novel took a while. I’m not particularly fast. I started working
with my agent, Nathan Bransford, in July 2007. The novel sold in May 2009. The
publication date was June 2010.

So writing and revising the novel took the longest. The actual production schedule with
Soho, from sale to release, was pretty fast in terms of Publishing Time.

KB: That is pretty fast! Soho bought Alcestis in October 2008 and it only came out four
months before Rock Paper Tiger did (February 2010), so your production schedule was
speedier than mine. I did one small revision with Katie Herman’s advice after Soho acquired the book, but the rest of that time mostly involved doing proofs, brainstorming copy, or waiting while Soho worked their magic.

I started writing Alcestis in June 2004 and finished it, including one round of revision, in April 2006. My agent (the lovely Diana Fox) took a little while to send it out because she was just launching her own agency, but I’d say it was truly on the market for at least a year before Soho made the offer in 2008.

What surprised you about the publication process?

LB: I think that everyone I worked with was so nice and accessible. There was a lot to
do, and it had to get done according to a schedule, and I always felt like the people on the
other side kept lines of communication open and did their best to help me do the work.

Also, it’s a lot of work. I sort of knew this, intellectually, but actually going through
the process brought home to me how much of a job being a published author is. I didn’t
have that much to do in the way of creative revisions, but the line edits, the galley proofs
and all the other stuff you don’t necessarily think about: setting up a website, getting a
professional photo shot, and all of the PR efforts—it really is a job.

Finally, how wonderfully supportive book people are in general—from agents to
publishers to bookstore owners to other authors. I’ve never met a group of people who
were so gracious and willing to welcome you to the “club.”

KB: PR is incredibly time-consuming (thankfully, a lot of it is also fun!). In the month or
two surrounding the book’s publication, I probably spent at least two or three hours a day responding to book-related email. I was really fortunate because I was on fellowship that term and I could spend that time when I needed to, but I have no idea how people with full-time day jobs manage book releases.

I was also surprised by how touched I was when friends and family were excited about
the book. Which makes me sound like a jerk, but what I mean is that I had kind of gotten used to the idea of the book coming out, simply because the publication process does take such a long time and involves so many small steps along the way (like proofs). So when I got up to read a bit at my launch party and found myself teary, I was a little surprised. I thought I was all cool and blasé! But in fact I was not, and that was a good thing.

What do you wish you had known in advance?

LB: How much of a rollercoaster the whole thing would be, though I think that’s another one of those, “you can know it intellectually but it doesn’t really prepare you for the
experience” kind of deals. I’ve been extremely fortunate in the kinds of reviews I’ve
gotten and the overall positive response to the book. What I didn’t exactly get is that, for
me anyway, even positive attention has its stressful aspects. The experience at times left
me feeling exposed and vulnerable. Hey, there’s a reason that we’re writers—most of us
are introverts!

KB: I must be needier, because I have no problem with positive attention! Then again,
as we were discussing recently, I will probably feel differently about that when I’m
stuck in the middle of the draft of my next project and feeling totally incompetent. And I
absolutely agree that waiting to hear what people think of your book is stressful, even if
the results are positive. I’ve also been really lucky in the majority of the reviews Alcestis
has received, but I was extremely nervous about what PW and Booklist and etc. would
think.

I wish I had known how much time the PR stuff would take, as I mentioned above.
Beyond that, I actually think I was pretty well-prepared, but only because I was working
with people who knew what they were doing.

What’s your favorite thing about working with Soho Press?

LB: Did I mention “nice, accessible and supportive”? And fun to hang out with?
And how much I’m looking forward to the Soho party at this year’s Bouchercon?

Also, I really like the whole Soho philosophy: they’re big enough to put some muscle
behind their products and small enough to care about everything they publish. I think
the Soho slogan might be “No Book Left Behind!” I honestly think that in the rapidly
shifting publishing landscape, the future belongs to nimble independents who really
support their writers and know how to “brand” their press as a whole.

KB: I’m really jealous that you’ve been able to hang out with the Soho staff—I haven’t
met any of them yet. But my experience has also been that everyone at Soho is nice,
accessible, and supportive. Justin Hargett has been especially patient with my newbie
questions about promotion.

And I agree that their supportiveness doesn’t just mean having a friendly phone and email manner. It also means developing a publication plan that suits the individual book and author. I think I would feel far more anxious about the process of debut publication if I were one of hundreds of debut authors at a huge publishing conglomerate. The Soho staff know what kind of book I wrote and were willing to take a chance on it; they weren’t
expecting it to be something it isn’t. My favorite thing about working with Soho is that
they’re practical and considerate at the same time.

At least one reason why debut novelists should have feline companions:

LB: Cats are instant stress relief. They purr, they sit on your lap, they play, they crack
me up with all the little things they do. They make the isolation of writing less lonely
without distracting me with conversation or temptations.

KB: They also sit on your manuscripts (or at least mine do). I think pets in general
are a good reminder not to take things too seriously. How serious can those page
proofs be, after all, if my cat’s just creased them all up with a drive-by snuggling?

(Thanks to Lisa for doing this interview with me!)

(I don’t discuss much plot stuff at all, but if you want to remain totally unspoiled about The Passage, do not read this post or the linked reviews.)

It will surprise no one who’s read Alcestis that I’ve thought about death often in the last few years. Partly this is an occupational hazard of writing about the underworld; partly it’s related to my own life, as my father was diagnosed with lymphoma in 2003 and died in late 2008, while I was working on the last revisions of the book.

If you read this blog regularly, you also know that I talk frequently about genre fiction and literary fiction, and that I’ve been on a tear of reading YA novels.

I think a lot, and care a lot, about what it means to try to write something emotional and immediate and accessible and fun and still beautiful, still “literary.” Still artistically worthwhile, in the way that something like Twilight, satisfying as it is for teen readers and the employee of the blood donation center (!) near my apartment who has a “Forks or Bust!” sticker on her (his?) Ford Explorer window, isn’t.

I read Justin Cronin’s The Passage because about five people on Twitter recently posted about how it “lived up to all the hype!” I remember first learning about it because of the hype, since the world seems to be tremendously amused by the idea of a writer of literary fiction — Ron Charles calls Cronin’s first two books, one of which won the PEN/Hemingway award, “a couple of small literary novels” — producing a big sprawling genre book and then, gasp, selling it for a load of money. I remember reading about Cronin’s book deal a while back and being totally tickled that a fiction writer with an academic job had hit it big with a post-apocalyptic vampire novel. As always, I’m a little wistful about the suggestion that it takes a literary writer to make genre tropes shine. (Read Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker. Read Maureen McHugh’s China Mountain Zhang and Necropolis and “The Naturalist.” Read Alice Sola Kim’s “Beautiful White Bodies,” which I just discovered thanks to Wiscon and the Tiptree shortlist.) But Cronin himself is hearteningly sensitive to false distinctions of this sort, too:

I think literary is shorthand for appreciated, and commercial is shorthand for sells. I did not undertake the writing of this book thinking that it was one thing or the other, or even that books in general have to be one thing or the other. Those are descriptions of what happens to a book after it’s written.

I read the book in a day and a half, and now T.’s racing through it — he started reading it while I was working and has been agitating for me to finish. Verdict: The Passage does live up to the hype. It’s not perfect; the ending is a little weird because it is the first in a (giant) trilogy; some bits are a little slow even for me. (Also, there are a surprising number of typos and misspellings, which my resident editing/typography nerd cannot forgive.) But you know what? It’s better than The Road. It’s as grabby as Tana French’s The Likeness or as The Secret History. It has a sense of humor, one that penetrates the very structure of the book — a few times, when reading, I could picture Cronin (and his daughter, with whom he apparently plotted much of the book) thinking something along the lines of: “You know what would be even more awesome? Nuns!” or “And then, they watch Dracula!” This is fabulous; this is what Kelly Link was talking about in the post I linked a few days ago. You put what you like in your book, and that makes it appealing.

What makes it appealing to me is its mixture of joy and melancholy. Many people die in this book. (Some others don’t, and that’s just as bad.) Here’s what Cronin said about that in the Times interview I linked above:

“The vampire narrative deals with the fundamental question, the basic human question, and that is, what part of being human is defined by the fact that we’re mortal?” Mr. Cronin said. “If you got to be immortal, would you be trading away your humanity? It’s the fundamental question of what is death to being alive. The vampire story gets at the heart of that. It reassures us that we’d rather be human.”

I wasn’t entirely sold on some of the more mystical aspects of the book, but nonetheless it made me think. What I’ve been thinking about most is the Colony, the group of survivors’ descendants who live in a walled town defended largely by banks of lights run by aging batteries. These lights aren’t just a “peculiar plot point,” as Janet Maslin calls them. For me, at least, they seemed far more central than that. Some of the inhabitants of the town are able to forget that the lights will go out eventually, and some aren’t. How they handle that knowledge, how it controls them — this is at the heart of what happens to the townspeople and the rest of the world.

Maslin’s review mentions the creepiness of reading Cronin’s projection that the future Gulf of Mexico would be an oil slick. I’ve spent way too much time in the last month reading and retweeting appropriately outraged articles about the spill and BP and our terrifying reliance on oil. I signed petitions and made some donations, and I tried to plan ways for us to cut our household energy consumption further. But once I’d done those things, I can’t say my reading those articles, or any of the other links I find on Twitter to the horrifying things we do to each other and our planet, really did much good for anyone, including me. I’ve been thinking about this a lot since reading Alexander Chee’s fine blog post — some good things do come from reading links on Twitter! — about the urgency that online news sources often make him feel, and the anger their content inspires. I feel conflicted about my own relationship to Twitter and to online news in general. I think the act of being outraged about something that you are not forced to experience personally can be absolutely necessary for change, and I fully realize that the choice to step away from something horrible is the epitome of privilege.  But sometimes that moment of outrage before retweeting, etc., isn’t leading to any real change at all. Sometimes it’s performative of identity, consciously or unconsciously: I will retweet this thing because I am the kind of person who is outraged by this thing! Which is not to say that the outrage itself is any less vital or valid. But sometimes it’s also a reminder, a little wearing reminder, that the lights will go out someday. There are some things none of us can step away from, and among them are death and grief. I loved The Passage because it acknowledges that — honors it, even — and also acknowledges that the world is beautiful, even when you’re in the dark woods, unsure of what’s waiting for you in the trees.

This morning, after I’d finished reading at 1:30 last night, I found this post via Shauna James Ahern and Elizabeth McCracken on Twitter, another post that, like this one, starts with the death of a parent but means to talk about love and joy more than about death:

The best thing you can possibly do with your life is to tackle the motherfucking shit out of it. And, Johnny, on this front, I think you have some work to do.

…

Don’t be strategic or coy. Strategic and coy are for jackasses. Be brave. Be authentic. Practice saying the word love to the people you love so when it matters the most to say it, you will.

We’re all going to die, Johnny. Hit the iron bell like it’s dinnertime.

Let’s.

I cannot believe it’s the middle of May. My friends: what happened to this spring? I mean, I know what happened — my book came out, I traveled around a bit, I wrote another giant dissertation chapter, I started the next novel (just a wee bit), I started yet another dissertation chapter. But despite all those very good reasons for busy-ness I still feel like this semester has just gone FWOOSH.

Here are some things I learned this spring, in no particular order:

Thing 1: Sarah Waters is brilliant. I knew this; I love her faux-Victorian novels, though I was slightly less enthused about The Night Watch. But The Little Stranger impressed the hell out of me. It’s so cleverly managed and yet reads in so natural a way that the trappings of the haunted house plot seem realistic and psychologically appropriate. This interview with Waters, from last May, is worth watching, and she’s also got a short piece on Angela Carter, here. Every time I read an interview with her or one of her essays about writing I get even more fangirly. I totally want to buy her coffee and talk about pacing.

The Little Stranger was one of the books on my new year’s resolution list — so far, I’ve also read Emma Donoghue’s The Sealed Letter and The Woman in White. You can see brief responses to those books on my Goodreads account, if you’re curious. The Little Stranger was definitely my favorite of these, though I was startled by how much I loved the first two-thirds of The Woman in White (the last third is bit draggy, in my opinion). The Sealed Letter I found readable and interesting but oddly unenchanting; I felt compelled to finish it, but when I was done, my reaction was mostly: “Huh.” Even though it suits my genre interests and contains a lot of things I like. Not sure why that was.

Thing 2: Job interviews for a job you really want to do can be fun. I had a couple, and I actually enjoyed them (even the one that got extended by a day by a snowstorm). The academic job market isn’t at its best right now, and the process of waiting to hear about interviews and offers and all that is always going to be frustrating, but the conversations themselves were entertaining and even MLA wasn’t too stressful.

Thing 3: Doing promo for a book is shockingly time-consuming, especially when you’ve never done it before. It offers far too many ways to procrastinate on other work, too. And, like job interviews, promo can actually be pretty fun, especially when you have the chance to talk to individual readers about your book. (Or even to spy on individual readers, via, for example, Goodreads.)

Thing 4: Apparently my fondness for watching L&O reruns at the gym places me in a recognizable demographic. Note the mention of UT.

Thing 5: It can be a pain to apply for fellowships, jobs, grants, etc., but it’s worth it. (More on this soon.)

Did you learn anything useful or entertaining this spring?

I just heard from Soho that they’ve sold the Turkish rights for Alcestis to Epsilon Publishing! This is my first foreign rights sale and I’m thrilled. My editor Katie Herman tells me that Epsilon publishes Ha Jin, Barbara Kingsolver, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Charles Frazier, among others.

I have to get back to dissertation-writing now — though it’s difficult to do when fun news of this sort keeps arriving in my inbox — but before I go, have one more interesting link to liven up your Friday afternoon: Gwynne Garfinkle (also repped by my agent Diana Fox!) talks in a guest post on Victoria Janssen’s blog about the research she did for a book set in the 1970s.

Things I am really tired of seeing knee-jerk GET OFF MY LAWN responses to from authors:

1. The Times article about the German novelist who “remixed” (her word) or “plagiarized” (lots and lots of outraged posts) a novel published by another German writer, in a novel about remix culture. Do I think she should have credited the first writer if she wanted to remix his material? Absolutely. Do I think she should have asked him first? Probably, but it depends on how much material she actually lifted — if it was fair use, maybe not. (The extent of her borrowing seems to be under debate at the moment.) This particular author may indeed have made some stupid decisions, and some of that bad decision-making may certainly be related to the fact that she’s seventeen and in the public eye. Do I think that many, many professional writers in the US should read Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture — available as a free PDF at that site — before they go off on rants about plagiarism and these kids today? Hell, yes. Spell-check helps, too.
2. The Google Books settlement. I didn’t have to choose whether or not to opt out, and based on the limited amount of reading I did before the deadline, it sounds like the Authors’ Guild’s response was almost as problematic as the settlement itself. I don’t currently have a strong opinion on this issue either way and would be willing to be swayed by persuasive arguments that honestly acknowledge what a horrible mess the current system of orphaned works really is. I haven’t seen many of those.
3. Piracy. I understand that it’s a major problem for some writers. I also think that responses to piracy — or to the “remixing” author, etc. — that demonize a whole generation of readers are just not useful, even if they’re accurate. If you, as an author, can avoid that kind of demonization and can explain to your readers why piracy hurts you, in particular, more power to you. (Elizabeth Scott wrote a post that accomplishes this well a few weeks ago.) I think it’s important for readers to understand that their choice to torrent an author’s work can hurt that author’s future career. Based on my experiences teaching undergraduates, many of them genuinely do not know that. But my experience with these kids, and my own membership in Gen Y, makes me pretty certain that emulating the RIAA is SO not the way to go.

And now I’m going to flounce off and write some more dissertation. Happy Valentine’s day, everybody.

My brief jaunt out of town turned into a slightly longer jaunt out of town, thanks to the snow and ice storm that hit the mid-south this week. But I’m back, just in time for the official launch of Alcestis! Expect a longer blog post tomorrow, but for now, check out this Washington Post article on the comparatively tiny sales of classical recordings required to break into the top ten. Interesting to compare with small press expectations for literary fiction, I think.

A quick thank you to the wonderful Elizabeth Loupas, who invited me to write a guest blog post about Alcestis for her blog. Elizabeth and I share our lovely agent, Diana Fox, and we both write historical fiction. (Elizabeth’s The Second Duchess will be out in February 2011.) This month, Elizabeth has been doing a great series of holiday book recommendations. If you’re still seeking last-minute present ideas, check out her blog for a list of suggestions. I’ll be writing up my own wishlist/recommendation post soon, too — there are so many books I want to read right now! I’m taking a short trip next weekend and have been stockpiling pleasure reading for months in anticipation of it.

Okay, one more post about Twilight and then I’m done for now, I promise. I wanted to link to the best article about the books I’ve read so far, Jenny Turner’s piece at the London Review of Books, “The Beautiful Undead.” Turner hits many of the same notes that other journalists and bloggers have: there’s the lament for the lost complexities of Buffy, the mention of Meyer’s Mormonism, the raised eyebrow at the book’s not-so-subliminal argument for chastity.

But Turner’s essay is more complicated than that, and lovelier. Witness her response to Meyer’s introduction of the beautiful undead as they sit at lunch in the Forks High School cafeteria:

I defy the reader at this point not to be ‘gawking’ along with Bella, and to be gasping, as she is to her dowdier companions: ‘Who are they?’ ‘They’, Bella is informed, are an adoptive family of orphans, now cared for by Dr Carlisle Cullen — himself ‘really young, in his twenties or early thirties’, and his equally youthful wife. The dark boy is Emmett, the bronze one Edward; the pixie girl is Alice, and the blond boy and girl are Rosalie and Jasper, twins. Oh, and ‘They’re all together though — Emmett and Rosalie, and Jasper and Alice, I mean. And they live together,’ the voice of Bella’s geeky informant holding ‘all the shock and condemnation of the small town’. And here you have it, the essence of what Lev Grossman, in Time magazine, called ‘the power of the Twilight books: they’re squeaky, geeky clean on the surface, but right below it, they are absolutely, deliciously filthy.’ Their situation seems lawful and proper and harmless even though a little odd — a household of teens, like the Waltons or the Partridge Family — but it hints at the limitlessly libidinous, as an image already supercharged with fantasies of caste, sex and pro-ana gorgeousness (that unbitten apple! that unopened soda!) is given a decidedly incestuous Flowers in the Attic frisson.

Turner recognizes Edward, whose “flesh [is] so cold and hard and ‘perfected’ — like the dead body in Sylvia Plath’s final poem, ‘Edge,’” as a “cunning piece of fictional engineering … never designed to work on mocking readers in the first place.” (That Sylvia Plath reference!) It’s the “fictional engineering” that’s making me think I ought to read the rest of the series. When I told my students I’d read the first book, I asked first how many of them had read the book. Every single girl in my all-girl class raised her hand. Fourteen out of fourteen. I won’t pretend that I think Meyer’s a great stylist, but her engineering skills are worth studying.

Speaking of engineering skills, I also wanted to pass on this list of classic short crime stories, and specifically the recommended story “A Jury of Her Peers,” which borrows elements of the mystery-story format for feminist ends. I think I’d read it once before, but so long ago that I could feel little tickles of familiarity. I’d forgotten how hard it punches, and how precisely.

Scholastic Books has chosen to leave Lauren Myracle’s Luv Ya Bunches out of its Book Fair catalogue after Myracle refused to transform a character’s lesbian parents into a straight couple. The book is still available through Scholastic’s book club catalogue, but, as Mombian points out, the book fair is far more successful than the book club. (See also Lee Wind’s post on Scholastic’s decision.) Scholastic claims that they’re not censoring the book because it’s still available to students through the book club, but they’re certainly restricting access to it, and probably damaging the author’s sales numbers, too. In short: terribly poor stuff.

The School Library Journal reported this a few days ago; now a petition has been set up to express our disappointment at Scholastic’s capitulation to intolerance. Go add your voice, if you feel moved to.

I’ve been teaching my intro English class on the history of the romance for a week now and so far everything is sunshine and roses.  Seriously, I’m very happy with this class and I think we’re going to have a great time, partly because many of the students chose the class because they want to read the books we’re reading.

I am looking forward to getting the last bits of my schedule settled — those of us who teach in the shiny computer-stocked classrooms also work as proctors in the computer labs, and that schedule gets revised after a week or two of term — so that I can figure out how to shove some fiction writing into my schedule, along with my teaching prep and dissertation work.

A few links for today:

Sarah Eve Kelly on “the matter of detail” in writing historical fiction.

Megan Crewe posts on the results of her survey of writers who recently sold their first books. Short version: the majority of writers sell their first book not because of connections but through a cold query.

The Telegraph reviews a new book on Waugh and the Lygons, the family who apparently inspired Waugh when he created the Flytes.

My favorite Kate Beaton comic (which I will be sharing with my class).