Guests
by John Tayman, February 10, 2006 10:42 AM
Whew, I made it. One full week of my guest mutterings and the Powell's Blog is still intact. (I did, however, notice an abundance of database problems ? for which I profess all innocence.) So, how'd I do? Fair to middling, I suspect. As of this morning I've netted eleven comments, a puny yield when ranked against the astonishingly popular Carole Radziwill, who pulled in 63. I did outpost Warren St. John, however, who seems to have managed only two entries before vanishing from the site entirely. But my total output pales in comparison to Adam Gopnik's, he of the 5,267 words of erudite blogghorea. Those New Yorker writers, so verbose! I'll be sending Adam a complimentary subscription to my favorite little magazine, Paragraph, which is composed entirely of one-paragraph-long stories. As for my personal goals for the week, let's review: - Tastefully shill my new book. Check.
- Share my meager knowledge about book publishing. Check.
- Blogroll for some friends. Check.
- Throw some love my dog's way. Check.
- Thank my readers. Damn, I knew I was forgetting something.
Now, when I say "readers," I'm not necessarily talking about you. Although, for a mere $19.25, I will happily include you in this important group. Shall I wait a moment, while you fill your Powell's shopping cart and complete your transaction? (Hurry up ? this is a short post.) Okay, I will now spend my final moments on this site lionizing you, and your book-loving brethren. As every freshman author learns ? me included ? his book lives or dies solely on its ability to connect with persons who have no actual connection to the author. (My family can buy only so many copies of my book, after all.) Most of these buyers purchase the book simply because the story is interesting. To wit: "Dear John,"Thank you for writing this book! I discovered it today and have already sent copies to my family."** With works of history, however, you also get buyers who have more direct connections to the material. And thus: "Dear Mr. Tayman,"My father William Schmidt has just finished reading your book The Colony and enjoyed it very much, especially as his great-grandfather William Walsh was the brother of the Donald Walsh (in your book) who worked with the lepers."** And then there are the readers for whom the book is more than a diversion, or a weekend's entertainment. It's a glimpse into, or a clarification of, their own history: "Dear Mr. Tayman, "Thank you for writing the book. It is of extreme interest to me because my aunt, Sister Mary Teresa, from New York, worked at the colony for about 30 years. In my meeting with her, which was only twice, and when I was very young, she told me only about the goodness of the people that lived there. She was a nurse and worked mostly with the girls in the girl's orphanage. I had no idea of what the place was even about. Her name was Katherine, Aunt Kitty to her family. Thank you so very much."** To which I can only respond ? and this goes out to the authors of those letters, to you readers, to my friends and family, and to the patient staff at Powell's ? No, Thank You. I'll see you again when the next book is finished. ** Actual reader
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Guests
by John Tayman, February 9, 2006 10:45 AM
Yesterday the publicist for my book, a charming young woman named Katie, phoned me and with much excitement let slip the news that The Colony is now a national bestseller. Technically, such info would come from my editor, but Katie is relatively new to the company, and has been an enthusiastic booster of the book, and we'd been talking about other matters, and suddenly she just blurted it out. So there you have it. Ta-da. Of course, there are bestsellers and there are bestsellers. If ever you were curious about the infinite parsing and clever numerology of book bestsellerdom, I direct you to this handy primer on the matter, which ran in Slate several years ago. As you see, there are all manner of "bestsellers." In my case, the book has landed on the requisite number of regional bestsellers lists, as audited by various book associations, thus enabling my publisher to officially tag it a "National Bestseller." If you are curious ? and really, why wouldn't you be? ? my book is doing very well in the Northeast, Southern California, Hawaii (natch), and the Pacific Northwest (thank you, Powell's). It's still a bit too early to know if it will claw its way onto the ne plus ultra of lists, otherwise known as the New York Times Bestseller list, but here's hoping. No offense to the other folks, but that's the imprimatur authors crave. (Let me interrupt this extended bit of solipsism and correct an oversight from yesterday's post. My officemate and collaborator, a six-year-old former seeing-eye dog named Kali, was upset that I failed to include a picture of her along with the account of her life. A fair point. Thus this image of her experiencing her first Manhattan snowfall:
) Now, where were we? Ah yes, bookselling. Each year, about 195,000 new titles are published. (Worldwide, a book is published every thirty seconds.) Of late, there has been a slight decline in history titles (The Colony, of course, is tagged as history), and a slight uptick in biographies and memoirs ? let's blame Walter Isaacson and James Frey. Out of this woodpulp tsunami, the Times Book Review selects about 600 titles on which to weigh in critically. So, in one respect, being reviewed by the Times is an achievement unto itself, landing on their list notwithstanding. In fact, the morning several Sundays ago when I opened my paper to find their full page assessment of my book was, thus far, probably the highpoint of this whole long book slog. What had seemed, from the outside, a rather mysterious and impossible undertaking suddenly became absurdly straightforward. Want to be an author? Here's how: 1. Think of idea for book. 2. Do some reporting. 3. Write the book. If the reporting and writing is solid, someone will want to publish it. And if the reporting and writing is engaging, someone will buy it. And if enough someones buy it, you'll probably make a list, somewhere, sometime, somehow.
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Guests
by John Tayman, February 8, 2006 10:49 AM
Although my book was reported mainly in Hawaii, I wrote most of it while living in San Francisco. At first I tried writing from my home, but my dog quickly put a stop to that. We had just adopted her from Guide Dogs for the Blind, a worthy organization that occasionally places career change or retired animals with lowly civilians such as myself. (They have a chapter in Portland, as it happens.) The service animals that emerge from the program are tremendous ? smart and attentive, and very, very eager to please. My dog landed in the house and immediately determined that what I obviously required help with was my writing. Thus every morning she would awake, have her breakfast, and then position herself next to my desk, ever vigilant, always eyeballing me. Need anything? Can I get you anything? Do you want to be led across any intersections? I can do that, you know. Pretty soon I decamped to a small rented office, and I finished the book there. Back during the last Oprah scandal (ah, memories), I recall reading that Jonathan Franzen, he-who-first-betrayed-Oprah, wrote his excellent novel The Corrections while locked in an attic, wearing ear plugs and a blindfold and generally depriving himself of all sensory input, like a self-made Helen Keller. Seemed silly to me, at the time. But compared to other idiosyncratic methodologies ? Stephen King, for instance, writes his books with Metallica blasting in his office ? the Franzen approach is actually pretty sensible. In fact, the deeper I got into my book, the more sensible it seemed. The curious thing about writing a book is that, as you enter your paper-based world, the real world becomes increasingly distracting. At the time, my office was in San Francisco's Presidio. The window framed a gorgeous view of the Golden Gate Bridge ? I pulled the shades. The eucalyptus trees out front were filled with songbirds ? I squeezed in a set of earplugs. The surrounding neighborhood had dozens of excellent restaurants ? I brown bagged my turkey on whole wheat, and ate it at precisely 11:45 each day. No phone. No Internet. No visitors. The fewer decisions I had to make in my real life, the easier the decisions were to make in my book. Monkish, I know. But it worked. And I still use earplugs to write. Super 31 Ear Plugs, 15 pairs to a bottle. I'm wearing them now. The dog thinks they are some sort of marshmallowy
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Guests
by John Tayman, February 7, 2006 10:35 AM
One of the nice things about going on a book tour is the moment when you step off the plane, and there at the end of the gate is a person grasping a copy of your book. Of course, they didn't pay for the book, and probably haven't even read it. They're simply holding it as a signal, to alert you that they are your media escort. What's a media escort? A stranger in a strange town hired by your publisher to drive you from interview to television studio to book signing to, finally, your hotel, all the while regaling you with insidery bits of info about your favorite author. Hollywood types have Us Weekly; Wall Street denizens have Barrons; athletes have ESPN. For their gossip needs, writers have media escorts. So what have I learned in the past few weeks, compliments of various media escorts? Well, Frank McCourt is a very nice man. Steven Brill, not so much. Science Fiction writers are weird. Also, many older authors no longer resemble their author photos. Most unsettling to me ? but perhaps not to you ? was the news that mega-selling big-foot author John Berendt apparently started to write a nonfiction history of a leprosy colony, before abandoning the effort and hightailing it to Venice. As the author of a newly released nonfiction history of a leprosy colony, I say: John, thank you. Another nifty aspect of book writing is the satellite radio interview, wherein you chat with charming but unseen duos with names like Jaime and Big Earl, who do drive-time, traffic, weather, and (west of the Mississippi) crop reports. These are a blast. First, you can do them unshaven, in your robe, bleary-eyed from the night before. Simply slam back a cup of hot tea to loosen your vocal cords, hum a few bars, and you're good to go. The hosts always act as if they were your oldest, bestest friends. They loft a few softballs, say the name of the book, and then???click???you're on to the next show. Goodbye, Charlotte; Hello, Fort Worth! Trickier are the call-in shows, which are dangerously unscripted and prone to disaster. This past Saturday I spent two hours fielding calls on a famous syndicated show ? 260 markets?! Count me in! ? that more typically deals in the world of the paranormal, psychics, and government conspiracies. The host was disarmingly sane and well-informed, however, and all was going swimmingly until he opened the phone lines. Caller #1: "John, what do you know about the military's plan to imprison the mentally ill in a million-acre gulag in Alaska?"Me: "Um, nothing." Caller #1: "Well look into it. Could be a good next book." Caller #2: "Mr. Tayman, this story about that colony on Hawaii sounds interesting. Have you heard that the government is keeping a cure for leprosy secret, so as to kill us all off with the disease if it decides to?" Me: "Actually, a cure was discovered in the 1940s, and is in wide use." Caller #2: "Are you sure?" Me: "Yes." Caller #3: "Mr. Tayman, you've been talking about diseases and quarantines and such, and I wanted to ask if you knew that SARS was caused by eating bats." Me: "No, I had not heard that. Thanks for letting me know." Caller #3: "No problem. I'll send you some literature on it." Three minutes later an e-mail popped into my mailbox, with details on the bat-borne menace. The sender included this handy warning graphic, lest I forget and feel tempted to snack on a bat: Why do I imagine that Mr. Berendt never receives such
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Guests
by John Tayman, February 6, 2006 2:42 PM
???first-time author of a work of narrative nonfiction, and longtime magazine knockabout. I'm honored to be the eleventh guest blogger on Powell's. Who knew this one went to eleven? I've only recently become a blogger, and an infrequent one at that, on the website for The Colony. After several weeks of posting and pasting and pouting I've managed to elicit exactly one reader comment, so perhaps I'm not yet a natural in this medium. We shall see. I had a similar crisis of confidence about a year into the writing of my book. Many magazine folk migrate into the world of books, and some do it brilliantly. At various times and at various places I've worked with some standout examples: Jonathan Harr, Tracy Kidder, Berry Werth, and Powell's inaugural blogger, Susan Orlean. Thus, simply through osmosis, I knew a little about putting together a non-fiction book. Yet nothing prepared me for that morning, eight months into my reporting, when I awoke in a rented condo in a strange city and found myself surrounded by eight thousand or so pages of source material, which included letters, medical charts, crumbling newspapers, memoirs, passenger manifests, worm-hollowed books, ancient snapshots, government reports, and yellowed architectural drawings. How all of this was going to alchemize into 300 or so pages of nifty prose was, frankly, beyond imagining. So, naturally, I woke up, grabbed a towel, and went to the beach. Did I mention the condo was in Hawaii? Afterward, I began to call and e-mail anyone I thought could help. Typical conversation: Me: How do you write a book?Successful author and/or editor: What do you mean? Me: Just that. What do I do with all this stuff? How do I turn it into a book? Successful: Don't worry, you???ll figure it out. Me: How did you write [insert bestseller here]? Successful: Well, it just sort of came together. You'll see. It happens like that. Me [morosely]: Okay. Thanks. Successful: Have fun! Apparently I'd stumbled onto a sort of literary omerta, some secret code among successful authors not to divulge their tradecraft. I mean, these were colleagues, confidents, and friends ? and still they wouldn't spill the beans. Luckily, one fellow finally did. Of course, he was already dead, so perhaps the writerly strictures had loosened. Whatever. He gave it up, so I'll give it up. And so I offer to you Mr. E. M. Forster's breathtakingly effective advice for all budding writers: Tell what happened next. That's it. I wrote those three little words on a card, taped it above my computer, stacked my source material in series of towering chronological piles, and then sat down and explained what happened next to a young lawyer who happened to be arrested by government agents on suspicion of having leprosy, in the winter of 1865. That was three years ago. Today, the book is in the stores and I'm learning to blog. Strictly speaking, that's what happened next. Of course, there's more the story, so tune in
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