Booker books…

So, the shortlist for the Man Booker prize was announced last week, and it looks like it’s pretty much a two-horse race (betting-wise at least) between Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall and Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger. Having just finished Wolf Hall and having read The Little Stranger a good while back in proof form, here’s what I think:

Regardless of people being nit-picky about how all the books on the list are set in the past (really, should that even be an issue?), I think there’s a lot to be said for any book that makes us consider the past in relation to the present (plus ça change etc.), and there’s even more to be said for a book that manages to make us think of the present while re-assessing accepted versions of the past. I developed an allergy to all things Tudor over the past couple of years as the period seemed to be the new literary and pop-culture version of the Knights Templar (bloomin’ Templars, they’re everywhere!), but I was always interested in Wolf Hall because of who wrote it. I love Hilary Mantel’s dark humour and the slant she puts on her worlds. To be honest, I’m rather surprised that she’s missed out on the Booker for so long, as she’s written plenty of books that are stronger than previous winners (at least in my opinion). Wolf Hall is not just brilliantly executed, with a moral sensibility that will be familiar to anyone who has read any Mantel, but it is also witty, engrossing and provokes plenty of food for thought. She wears her historical research very lightly, but brings the period to life completely, she makes Thomas More a bad guy (about time someone did, More’s Utopia always sounded rather like a place I would never want to be, so dreary and pious and joyless) and makes Thomas Cromwell endlessly fascinating – which is good as he is both the centre and the heart of the book. There are no ciphers to be found, no character is rendered in 2D, everyone is fully rounded and everyone matters. The fact that the book doesn’t end with Tom Cromwell’s head on a spike is well known at this point, there are murmurs that Mantel intends a sequel, with the title of this book acting as a sort of foreshadowing of things to come in his future. I have no problems with that, and am hoping the sequel rumours are true, since I’d like to spend more time in her version of Tudor times, and in the company of Master Cromwell.

By contrast (cutting and pasting from elsewhere on the site) I didn’t really like The Little Stranger all that much. What sticks in my head months after reading it is how much I disliked the central character with his class obsessions and be-chipped shoulders. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

“Hmmm, it’s good, but it’s rather longer than it needs to be, and while it has effective chills in parts it is no The Haunting of Hill House (the book I measure all house-with-a-mind-of-its-own stories against). Also, I really did not like the central protagonist, who has a rather pronounced chip on his shoulder. Parts of the book reminded me of the original Grey Gardens (haven’t seen the recent HBO remake yet, seems weird to remake a documentary…), a house falling down around the ears of an odd family who seem to carry on oblivious, so in summation, good, but not Shirley Jackson good.”

So I thought it’d do, as a pass-the-time-of-day sort of book. Obviously the idea of it being a serious Booker contender never entered my head. Silly me.

There are, of course, four other books on the shortlist, but to be frank, I think Mantel should have it sewn up, since Wolf Hall has everything you could want from a book, and then some. There is always a danger that the Booker panel might be swayed away from a book that is seen everywhere as the favourite, but if they do, they’ll be shooting themselves in the foot. It deserves the win, doubly so if they take Mantel’s backlist into account.

If you disagree, feel free to let me have it in the comments!

What’s the dumbest thing a writer can do?

The question, it is rhetorical.

The single dumbest thing any writer can do, ever, is piss off a bookseller.

Booksellers are the people who put your books in the hands of your readers. We are the people who make books word-of-mouth hits, who ensure someone with a strong back-list gets noticed by book clubs, who will recommend one writer over another based not only on the quality of their work but also on any interaction we may have had with them. The nice, friendly author who is ever-patient with their readers (especially the oddballs), who goes the extra mile, will always pop to the forefront when someone’s looking for a recommendation. Even if the bookseller isn’t a fan of their work, if they like the author, they will push them.

In contrast, the grouchy, precious or otherwise demanding author will lose out. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that if there’s one thing this bookseller can’t take it’s the “speshul snowflake” school of writers. The precious, fragile, “special” ones with skin as thick as onion-skin paper, who take even the vaguest criticism of their work as a slight upon their very soul.

Alain de Botton hit headlines in the literary press of late, for being one such special snowflake, wishing cancer on a blogger who had the temerity to give one of his books a bad review, claiming that the blogger had “ruined the chances” for his book in the U.S. market. The blogger did no such thing, merely wrote an honest review. The chances for the book world-wide were dashed by the sending of one stupid, nasty email by an author who couldn’t take someone not liking his book. Booksellers the world over read his screed with jaws agape and collectively dismissed de Botton as a nasty, insecure little plonker who would get no sales help from them. Yes, collectively. Bookselling is a community, a small, incestuous group of people who love books so much that to spend all day with them is a vocation. The money is never good, the rewards come from talking to happy readers, flushed with the joy of a new discovery, and sharing recommendations with them. There’s not a lot in the world more fulfilling that matching a reader with a book that is a perfect fit for them, and having them come back to you to tell you so. That’s what keeps up going in these dark days of central buying, plummeting sales and blandness at every turn. That and a camaraderie that extends beyond whichever store chain you work for and out into the world at large. Booksellers talk to one another, we share books we’ve discovered, authors we like, tales from the world of publishing… and should an author fall afoul of one bookseller the word spreads like wildfire.

This is especially true if the transgressing author has no leg to stand on. That’s when we bring out the kindling to help the fire along.

Exhibit A in this case shall be a piece written by a bookseller who works for the same chain I do. It’s a thoughtful examination of the damage centralised buying is doing to the book trade, and a refutation of all the arguments our head office uses to justify it. Read it here and then come back to me. It’ll only take a minute and should prove most educational. For those of you without the patience to read the entire piece I shall quote the bone of contention in full:

“And the ‘flavour of the month’ offering which is probably a chic-lit title that the publisher was offering at a good discount simply will not do no matter how good your sales pitch is. (Memo to Head Office: if a customer wants a book along the lines of Anne Enright, staff are not going to be able to fob them off with Amanda Brunker).”

Note here for those not in the trade: any book that is “Book of the Month” or part of a 50% off or Three for Two promotion is being sold to us, the booksellers, at a hefty discount, allowing us to sell the book at less than the cover price and still make a profit on it. Simple economics.

The quotation above is the only mention that is made of Amanda Brunker, and to be fair, all it is doing is pointing out that someone who likes to read Anne Enright (literature, Man Booker prize-winner) is not going to be all that interested (in all likelihood) in reading chick-lit. Fair enough, Brunker and Enright would not be seen as any bookseller as being like for like. Just a fact of life.

But “speshul snowflakes” as a type, revolt against facts of life. They take umbrage where there is none to be had. They may even lash out at the hand that feeds them if they are feeling particularly “hurt” or are pissed off about something else, like a car key that doesn’t work. Sound far-fetched? Ladies and gentlemen of the imaginary blogosphere jury, allow me to present Exhibit B:

(Clicky here for a bigger version of the screenie.)
Seriously, what the frak?

Let’s look at some of my favourite parts (since the jpg is wickle, and out of respect for peoples’ eyesight):
“slandering people as trash, so I was just interested if you had bothered to read my work before dismissing it as crap…” Um, crap and trash? Not mentioned anywhere but here. If the author secretly (deep in her bruised and speshul soul) thinks her work may really be crap and/or trash she’s not doing a very good job of hiding it. She’s the only one using the words, soooo…..

“For your information my book was NOT sold at a discount, but was given these promotions because they felt I was going to be a hit, which I am. “
Uh, hello not understanding how bookselling works. And I think if you insert a “s” before “hit” you may be edging closer to the truth…

“Coming from a creative family (my dad was a painter among other things, my mum writes poetry and my sister Linda Brunker is a highly regarded sculptor) I hate when I come in contact with narrow-minded snobs who just seem to be allergic to the word SUCCESS.”
Oooh, the “I’m genetically talented” defense. Niiiice. I don’t know of any bookseller who is allergic to the word success since books doing well are our bread and butter, but some of us may be slightly averse to excessive and unprovoked use of caps lock. It’s a stylistic thing.

“but don’t insult yourself (nor me) by not being well-informed.”
That should be “or me”. I wouldn’t like to be her editor. Also, who exactly is ill-informed here, the writer who doesn’t get how publishing works and thinks they should be bracketed with Man Booker prize-winners, or the bookseller who is a veteran of the book-selling industry and well aware of the tastes of the reading public? Having had the pleasure of working alongside that bookseller while she worked at our branch, and knowing she is neither a book-snob nor a publishing know-nothing, I know the answer to that one (clue: not the former).

“Anne Enright has had huge success of her own, don’t begrudge me mine.”
These are different types of successes. I don’t feel it should be necessary to elucidate further since there was no success begrudged anywhere in the original post. Speaking for myself, there will be begrudging, as of now. And not of Anne Enright, as she is a total sweetheart, as well as being a damned fine writer.

And finally, we have the gravy:
“I definitely feel better after venting my anger at your stuck-up ways… I was after all grounded as the electronic key to my car didn’t work this morning, but now my frustrations are all gone… so thank you “
A combination of TMI of the most banal sort, and an acknowledgment that the poor blameless blogging bookseller is being used as a punch-bag to allow the author to vent car-related spleen.

Note to authors: if you are pissed off at your car, stay pissed off at your car, and direct all your ire at your car. Or your publisher for not furnishing you with a driver. Attacking a blogger who is also a bookseller for what was a throw-away comment is akin to committing career hara-kiri.

A coda: the sad thing about all this was that prior to the (now infamous) email, La Brunker was garnering quite a bit of respect and goodwill among the bookselling community for the effort she was putting in to promoting her book. All that hard work so easily undone….

Also, after what happened to de Botton, could any writer these days be so oblivious to the possible fall-out from sending a bile-filled email to anyone? Apparently they can be.

This is a rant…

Consider yourselves warned.

There has been much wittering of late on the interwebs about how “literary fiction” is dying out, and how genre writing and the readers of same are somehow to blame. Tonight’s post is inspired by a few pieces Stuart Neville linked to from his blog (the post is called “On Vicky Cristina Barcelona and other insufferable tosh”, scroll down a bit and you’ll find it), and also the epic whinefest that was the Militant Writer’s post about not being able to get published because her stuff is “too literary” (I paraphrase, I’m not linking to the site again, you’ll find a link to it in my piece on Queryday if you’re bothered). For an idea of the kind of silliness I’m thinking about, have a look at this then take some deep breaths and come back to me. If you see nothing wrong with that post, close the tab you have this open on, we’re not likely to agree on this front at all.

This nonsense about the relative value of literary versus genre fiction has been going around and around in my head for a long time now, probably since I attended an evening where two “literary writers” compared notes about “bevelling their sentences” (I kid you not, the phrase was used) and wafted their MFAs around in a none-too-subtle attempt at disparaging the genre writer that sat on the same panel as them (and sells way more books than at least one of them). They came off as pretentious navel-gazing idiots whereas the genre writer was down to earth and far more enthused about writing in general – and far more willing to encourage any wannabe writers in the audience.

During the Agentfail fracas I first came across the phrase “speshul snowflakes” being used to describe both wannabe and published “literary writers” and dagnabbit but those two exemplified the phrase. The “speshul snowflake” considers themselves to be unique, important, fragile, and put-upon by the nasty reading habits of the great unwashed book-buying masses. They are the ones who will claim that they can’t get published / their book failed because it was “too literary”, personally I tend to mentally translate “too literary” into “too purple” and move on…but what really gets my goat is the notion that one type of fiction inherently has more worth than another.

For the people who require credentials before reading further, I have a degree in English Literature and Linguistics (double major, both honours, ta for asking), and so it should be apparent that I love words, I love stories, I love reading. I have read deeply and widely across many genres. I am not, however a book snob. I love good literary fiction and I lap up good crime and sci-fi with equal enthusiasm, I’m not even particularly averse to (the nebulously defined) “popular fiction”, it it’s between two covers and has pages I can turn, I’ll give it a shot.

If I had a manifesto, it would be this:

1. Literary fiction is not a genre.
It is a pseudo-genre that contains everything that doesn’t fit into an established genre, i.e. it’s not crime, horror, romantic fiction, historical fiction, or any other sub-genre of the great Fiction bucket.

2. Bad literary fiction is exponentially worse than bad genre fiction.
Why? Because at least bad genre fiction will have a plot, some pace, and a hook that got someone somewhere to sit up and pay attention. Bad literary fiction is the equivalent of being trapped in a room with a stoner who insists on revealing the inner workings of their minds in excruciating detail, telling you a story that doesn’t go anywhere, and taking several aeons to do it.

3. Writing good genre fiction can actually be harder than writing good literary fiction.
She said what now? I’m serious. Think about this for a moment. If you’re writing in a genre (say crime) you have to (a) know how crime books work, have read a lot of them, and know what people expect from them, (b) establish (and sustain) plot, characters and pace in a way that keeps your readers hooked, (c) know what the tropes of the genre are and either abide by them or subvert them (the twist being a classic example) and (d) create something unique in a well-established and well-trodden field. You’re writing literary fiction? Well, there are no rules for that, no tropes, no demand for plot or snappy pacing. You can write something as excruciatingly tedious as Hotel Du Lac and even win prizes for it. Lucky you, eh?

4. There is no way to tell high art from low art unless you see a lot of art.
Again, how the hell can people dismiss genre fiction out of hand without reading a fair amount of it? The “I only read literary fiction” crowd know not what they disparage, by their own admission. I don’t know how they think they have the right to dismiss everything else as worthless. So many of these people trot out Stephenie Meyer, Dan Brown et al while they’re dissing genre-writers wholesale. Well, they aren’t what anyone would term paragons of genre-writing (or any kind of writing), but yeah, they sell. They have something to them that hooks people. If you want to champion good writing, you have to admit that good writing exists within genre fiction as much as it does outside of it. Because it does. To claim otherwise just makes you look foolish. Neal Stephenson? Tricia Sullivan? Stuart Neville? Gillian Flynn? Tana French? Brilliant writers all, genre writers all. Put them in your pipe and smoke some. If you want to complain about bad writing you should know of what you speak, and be prepared to cite examples (from your own reading, not quotes from bad reviews by Kakutani or Battersby or whoever your paragon of taste is).

5. False argument: “Literary fiction is worth more because we learn about ourselves and the world while reading it”.
Yawn. ALL good fiction teaches us something about ourselves and the world. Read some Ursula Le Guin and learn about gender politics, read Carl Hiaasen and learn about the environment and Florida. Heck even BAD fiction has learning attached – read Dan Brown and learn about something called the Gnostic Gospels (although you should probably read something else for real information on them), or Stephenie Meyer and get a window into the Mormon mindset.

6. False Argument #2: “Genre fiction is all about escapism.”
Ahem, for those not self-aware enough, ALL fiction is a form of escapism. That is what it is for. To claim that it’s more valid (or more worthy) to “escape” into a world created by Dostoevsky than it is to escape into one created by Joe R. Lansdale misses the point of reading altogether.

7. False argument #3 “Literary fiction doesn’t need believable characters or any sort of plot because it’s all about the beauty of a well-turned phrase.”
Now look, I love a beautifully turned phrase as much as the next person, truly I do, but the literary novels that I love the most combine beautiful writing with strong characterisation, believable and compelling dialogue, and an actual story (Dostoevsky anyone? Kundera anyone?). You may make the prettiest sentences in the world, ones that I’ll scribble down somewhere so I don’t forget them (yes, utter word nerd), but if you break my immersion by having all your characters speak in the same voice, regardless of background or personality, or if there is no tension or drama to your narrative, I’m not going to be a happy reader. I’m going to consider finishing the book as work, and I don’t like having one of the greatest pleasures in my life turned in to a hard slog. It makes me cranky. Also, as a bookseller, it makes me recommend other books over your book.

8. Finally: A good story well told, is a good story well-told.
That’s an indisputable fact, and whether your story is about the dying days of a failing marriage, the pursuit of a serial killer or the problems incurred in settling Mars, if it’s good, it’s good and it deserves to be read, period. One good book of any stripe is worth 20 bad ones. Truth be told, in and out of genre writing the ratio of good to great to utter duds is pretty much a constant.

Can’t we all just agree that good books are good books, bad books are bad books and lose the defensive genre-bashing and intellectual snobbery? It would make the world a much nicer place.

/end rant

Hmmm, interesting…

Two big books coming out this summer (of those I’ve read in the past fortnight) have characters in them with the surname Faraday (Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger and John Connolly’s The Lovers).

I’d suggest that anyone currently mid-draft (or editing), change out any Faradays they might have for something else.

Besides, the name Faraday always makes me think of Faraday’s Flowers; the original title for that train-wreck of a movie with Madonna and Sean Penn that came out in the end as Shanghai Surprise. I have tried to retrain my brain to think of Faraday cages, but it hasn’t worked.

Bad brain.

Weird the things you notice when you read so many books….

Queryday advice round-up

I stopped watching #queryday somewhere around 9p.m. last night, just couldn’t look at the screen anymore.
Spent a large chunk of this morning reading back to where I’d left off.

In essence #queryday boils down to essentially the same advice as #queryfail:

1. Write a good book.
2. Write a personalised query to an agent you know accepts the genre of said book, following their submission guidelines.
3. In your query, refrain from mentioning how wonderful your book is (if it really is, they’ll notice). Don’t make comparisons you can’t live up to (“My book is the next Harry Potter” for example).
4. Do mention the genre you’re writing in, and give a decent (not overly involved) synopsis of your plot.
5. Give as much attention to the query letter/email as you did to your ms – edit, proofread, lather, rinse, repeat. You want to present yourself as a professional, so no sending query snail-mail on pink paper or query e-mails with flashy backrounds, coloured fonts and flashy icons.
6. No attachments means no attachments. Head-shots, full manuscripts etc. are for later in the day, if at all.
7. Word-counts matter. In your query you must give a word-count for your finished book. Ideal word-counts sit around the 80k mark for genre fiction, 50-80k for YA, around the 100-120k mark for epic fantasy. If your opus has a word-count massively above these, explain why.
8. If you intend your novel to be the jumping-off point for a series, keep it to yourself. Any novel you send a query in on must be able to stand alone. If a publisher is ready to sign you up – that’s the time to mention series possibilities.
9. No extraneous information in a query – the agent does not need to know you’ve been writing since you could hold a crayon, it doesn’t mean you’re any good at it. They also do not need to know that your friends/mother/kids love the book. Everyone’s friends/mother/kids loves their book.
10. Do not mention how many rejections you’ve had on an ms, you’ll only make them wonder why everyone else passed on it, and not in a good way.

There was some other advice (single-space after full-stop/period) that came as a shock to some with old-school typing training, but is nothing that a find-and-replace in Word can’t sort out.

What it all boils down to in the end (and what some people just can’t wrap their heads around) is that writing is a business, like any other. To succeed at getting an agent, you should approach it the same way you’d approach a job-search. Do your homework, do not apply for several “jobs” with a single form-letter, or on a single bcc-ed to a gajillion people email. Do not apply for a job as a stock-trader to a gas-station (target agents that represent your genre). Address the agent with the same respect you’d address an interviewer for a job.

Yes, you want to stick out of the crowd, and yes, your query letter should be a bit less formal than a letter of application for a job. Overly dry and academic queries for fiction are boring, but try-too-hard informal ones are anathema to agents too. They have all seen too many queries that think they’re being original by starting with a rhetorical question, or are written in the voice of the main character. Avoid that. Do, however, try to write the query in the same voice as your novel – if they like it, they’ll read on with enthusiasm.

Nobody can tell you what works for a particular agent, but doing your homework (reading their blog, following them on twitter, knowing who they represent) means you should get a feel for what they like. If you’re the type of person who goes for a job interview knowing nothing about the company you’ve applied to, then the querying process will not be very rewarding either.

As with anything else in life, it comes down to this: you are not special. You are one of hundreds looking for a spot on an agents list. To stand out means putting a bit of work in, in order to ensure that they are motivated to read your pages. Agents are human, they work very hard for their clients, and reading queries is only a small part of their job (mostly, from what I can tell, done outside office hours), don’t make that harder for them. And if you’re rejected, don’t take it personally. Grow a thick skin, and be aware that every published writer has a mountain of rejections. If you get a solid stream of constant rejections, maybe you need to look at what you’re submitting. Maybe the book isn’t what you thought it was, at least in the eyes of others.

Write another one, and make this one even better.

Oh and finally, if an agent says “no” to something, don’t keep on resubmitting it (after further edits) unless they’ve requested you to do so. If they’re interested in seeing “future work”, it means the next book.

All very good, very commonsense advice. Sadly, the folks following #queryday on twitter are the ones least likely to need it, since they were actively seeking advice in the first place.

Huge thanks to @ColleenLindsay (her blog, which is always a great read is here) for organising it, and to all the agents and editors who popped in during the day (and night) to help out, it really was above and beyond the call of duty.

Queryday on twitter…

Having followed the original #queryfail, I was really looking forward to today, as it is #queryfail part deux, renamed to the whiner-friendly #queryday.

If you’re reading this today (April 17th) you can get in on the piles of free advice being posted on twitter by agents, simply by doing a twitter search for #queryday and refreshing your page to keep the stream up to the minute.

Some observations: there is still a lot of acrimony going on about the original #queryfail and quite a bit of bile left over from #agentfail (see here for my post on that debacle). My day started with reading a blog post from one of those angry types, never seen a more apt blog title than “Militant Writer” (for me this conjures up none other than the Viz character “Millie Tant”, wrongheaded and pointless ranting about something that has gotten on her wick, see the Wikipedia link on Millie Tant for the type of wrong-headedness I mean). The post is
here and I link to it somewhat reluctantly since I don’t like the idea of driving any traffic her way. Still, if you disagree with her, drop a comment on the post and maybe it’ll add up with all the others to provide a wake-up call of sorts. I say maybe, because as of now she’s all wrapped up in self-righteousness and self-justification, so it seems a tad unlikely.

Over on twitter there is plenty of great free advice being doled out, but it’s getting harder to see amid the pointless retweets (uh, if we’re following #queryday we will have seen the original, there’s no need to RT it and clutter up the stream) and the “Me! Me!” crowd jumping up and down and reposting the same question several times to different agents, all tagged with #queryday so we all have to see multiple copies of the same tweet. Then there are people complaining that their question hasn’t been answered – despite the fact that they are asking a question someone already answered earlier in the day. Or despite the fact that they were answered but didn’t like the answer they got. There have even been a couple of silly souls who actually tweeted queries for their books. Ack!

Now maybe it’s because my back hurts and my tetchiness threshold is therefore lowered, but with the exponential growth of twitter there is a correlating growth in people who have no clue how to use it, and/or think they deserve more attention than everyone else. Made me think back to #agentfail and the vitriol of those writers who wanted special treatment at the hands of the agents they were querying. Which led to me realise that watching the #queryday stream must be like a small window into the life of a literary agent…

If that’s true, I’m really really glad I’m not an agent.

I’m still following the stream, but missing the fun and the snark from #queryfail. However, given the fact that even I’m feeling worn down from the repetitive questions and the “Answer MY question!!111!!eleventy” types, I’ve a feeling it won’t be too long before the snark comes out of hiding, if only to help the agents involved maintain their sanity.

As we say over here, feck the begrudgers! Let the snark commence….

(Oh and feel free to disagree with me in the comments if you like your #queryday warm and fuzzy, after all, it takes all sorts!)

An “embarrassing and ham-fisted” error…

Yes, that’s what the folks at Amazon are saying now about the mess that their cataloging system became over the weekend.

What they aren’t doing is explaining how the error came to pass, nor are they apologising for it.

From “glitch” to “cataloging error” that affected 57,310 books is a pretty big leap.

Thank heavens for citizen journalism… since it seems the most plausible explanation of all comes from a former employee (Mike Daisey, also a writer, who has written a rather popular book about his years working for Amazon). The tl;dr version goes like this: an employee at Amazon.fr mistakenly enabled the “adult” filter (reserved for things like sex toys, to keep them from popping up on innocent, unrelated front page searches) on a whole bunch of books. It would seem there was some confusion in that employees mind between the way Amazon mean the tag “adult” (read: sex toys and pr0n) and the employee’s understanding of it (read: anything intended for an adult audience) (although “Heather has Two Mommies” is a picture book for kids, it had the identifying tag “LGBT” which got swept up in the (overzealous? daft? censorious?) employee’s “adult” ranking). The system them automagically categorised all books with any of the tags the employee flipped the switch on as “adult” and removed them from searches, also hiding (but not deleting) their sales ranks.

This problem only became visible on Amazon sites that have “safe search” protection built in to them – the German Amazon site has no such thing and its listings were unaffected. The US and UK sites do have this protection, and thus the twitterati were soon able to compile a partial list of titles affected. This added fuel to the “omg censorship!” fire, and led to Amazon calling in staff to deal with a problem with the highest internally ranked severity code they have.

For an inside look at Amazon’s in-house reponse, look here. And check out Lilith Saintcrow’s blog for the nitty-gritty here.

One of the most interesting parts is that the employee who messed up is identified as a CS rep. A customer service rep? A customer service rep with enough access to the cataloging and database code to cause a shitstorm like this? Really, Amazon, really? (It’s not that I don’t believe it, but that I think it’s insane that a bottom rung employee can be granted enough access to the framework of the global site template to make a mess like this. CSRs (and I know because I was one) are not always the brightest bulbs in the lighting-rig. They should have sod all access to the sites global directory, let alone category-switching access on a global level).

The other part, that made me giggle, is the acknowledgement in there that Amazon hide sales rankings on pr0n and sex toys in some countries. They do not want you to know how many people buy butt-plugs and dildos (to use the two most often cited examples) from them. Prurient, silly and rather amusing.

A lot of people are saying that this doesn’t explain emails sent to people like Mark R. Probst, some of them sent as far back as February – but I think that was a result of what the hacker claimed to have exploited – a couple of people tagged his book as “adult” and some flesh-and-blood person agreed with them, and manually switched that listing. It would also explain why it took them so long to switch it back, since someone possibly had to read the book to determine it was un-deserving of the adult tag.

My hope is that this teaches Amazon to vastly restrict their employees’ access to the cataloging system so this does not happen again.

And another thing, yes Amazon, you are a hella big company – but in all of this mess, and your subsequent statements, you have forgotten to use a very important word. That word is: “sorry”. I’d advise you incorporate that word into your next statement post-haste.

No-one is too big to have to apologise.

Amazon fail…

Sigh. Here’s me with my bad back, wanting to do nothing more than relax and enjoy Easter Sunday with some chocolate and a couple of good books, and then I get wind of something that makes posting imperative…

Given the fact that I work in an old-stylee bricks-n-mortar bookstore, there are times when I’m not Amazon’s biggest fan (something I have alluded to in previous posts). I’m not beyond ordering from them, but only DVD boxsets since I prefer to source books elsewhere (from work, or Abe/Biblio for o.o.p. titles).

This weekend, however, Amazon have been caught out, pulling one of the dumbest corporate moves I can think of. In a week where two US states approved gay marriage, and things seem to be moving nicely towards nobody giving a crap who anyone else likes to sleep with (despite all the attempt at hysteria-generation by the National Organisation for (straight) Marriage – which has mostly resulted in giggle fits at their misappropriation of “NOM” as a trademark, and the inclusion of gay personals slang in their main campaign (2M4M) title), Amazon (AMZN in case you want to dump your shares…) have removed sales ranking from a plethora of gay, lesbian and otherwise queer books. This effectively means that those books will no longer be accessible through a general search on the site. In fact as of now, an Amazon search for “homosexuality” brings up as its top result “A Parent’s guide to Preventing Homosexuality” which sounds like a pretty dangerous book to me. Telling any parent in this day and age that their gay child can (or should be)  be “fixed” is loathsome, false and bordering on criminal.

Amazon’s “excuse” for this is that:  we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Um, possibly, except you can still search for Penthouse “books” and sex toys …so that seems like a sort of specious argument. Especially given the fact that some of the censored books do not even contain any sex. At all. Not so much as a snog. And even if they did, listing them in a search is not forcing anyone to buy them. Just like Vermont and Iowa legalising gay marriages does not mean everyone has to run out and marry someone of the same sex.

The internets have quickly mobilised to fight Amazon on this, and since the web is where they have their entire presence, they should be quaking in their boots right now. People on the web detest any form of censorship, booksellers and librarians hate it even more than most, and Amazon pulling a lame move like this has engendered the ire of just about everyone with a net connection (save possibly whoever lobbied for Amazon to introduce this new “policy”). A movement is afoot, dubbed amazonfail, to highlight their stupid-ass censorship, and this post is my small contribution to it.There is also a movement toward redefining “Amazon rank” to mean that Amazon (with this new policy) are more than a bit rank themselves as a corporate entity.

See here for the new definition, soon also to be available from the Urban dictionary. Smart Bitches (by virtue of being Smart…) have a great capsule view of the situation here and there is a list of some of the affected books available online here.

In fact, thanks to Amazon, we’re having a general throwback to the 1920’s with both Lady Chatterly’s Lover and The Well of Loneliness getting the chop from rankings too. I seem to remember there having been obscenity trials back in the day when those books were originally published, where judges ultimately (and in the case of the former, somewhat belatedly) defended their right to be sold, and read. Amazon is now cack-handedly trying to reverse these decisions by making it harder to find and purchase such books through their site.

I can think of no logical reason, apart from conservative/religious political pressure why Amazon would do something so pro-censorship and anti-reader. They need to be shown that readers will not stand for such nonsense.

This story was originally broken by Mark R. Probst on his blog here and an online petition can be found here.

As of now over 2,000 people have signed it, and while I’ve been typing this post tweetdeck has blipped an average of 30 tweets per minute containing amazonfail in them somewhere. Add your name to the petition or your tweet to the stream, and let them know that censorship is uncool and bad for business!

Adding screenie above for the “screenshot or it didn’t happen” crowd in case the Amazon elves re-gay the site while I’m asleep.

Further edit (Monday 17.45) It would appear that an internet troll is claiming responsibility for the whole debacle. You can read his claims for yourself here. Only problem I have with this explanation (that he was in it for the lulz, and to whip up an internet shitstorm just because he could) is that his posted code does not work. Ooopsie, troll fails at trolling. The other problem is that his “issue” was with Craigslist and not Amazon, so why he should “hit” the latter over the former is beyond me. Looks to me like a troll trying to be an even bigger troll by casting aspersions on the reality of the situation. If the code was something that would have worked, I may have fallen for it myself (thank whatever for my rampant geekdom). See here for a breakdown by someone better than me at translating techyspeak to english on why the code fails.

Still no word from Amazon, beyond “glitch” and “we’re working on it”. The “glitch” excuse makes no sense given e-mails sent out by the CS department and quoted above, the troll’s excuse fails, not only on code but also on the delisting of Lady Chatterly, The Joy of Sex and other straight “adult” titles.

I think we’d all like to know what Amazon have to say about all of this.
They’re being terribly terribly quiet….

Agents feel the wrath of the interwebz

For those of you who don’t do Twitter, there are some interesting goings on there at the moment for anyone interested in how to get themselves a literary agent.  Or how not to get one. Earlier this month, an agent on twitter started a hashtag (a way to link tweets on a specific subject) called #queryfail. Over the course of the day, other agents followed suit and added their own messages about how not to submit an application for consideration. This created a whole lot of drama – and to be honest, I fail to see why. They advised would-be clients to follow their submission rules, not to brag about the quality of their work, not to try to sell themselves over their book, etc. etc. Some of the tweets were a bit snarky, but nothing was anything more than you’d expect from people who are deluged every day with stuff from writers who think they can ignore all submission guidelines, submit work of a genre that the agent doesn’t represent and are basically sofa king special that the agent should drop everything else they’re doing to read their magnum opus, then contact them immediately to beg for the honour of representing them. Ack! To see a fair sampling of the advice offered on #queryfail you can either use the hashtag in Twitter search or go to this blog post that offers a synopsis (with quotes, some of which made me cry laughing). So that was #queryfail the first. #queryfail the second is due to take place on the 17th of this month. I’m looking forward to it, and sincerely hope that the #agentfail debacle doesn’t interfere with it happening.

So, what of #agentfail? #agentfail happened yesterday when a literary agent posted on her blog, inviting comments from would-be/published authors (despite it being April first) who have issues with agents they feel are doing it wrong (as they say on the web). There were some acceptable points made in the 200+ comments, but most of it was vitriol from writers who have obviously had one rejection letter too many in the recent past. A large proportion of whom posted anonymously as they are in touch with reality enough to know that posting so nastily under their real names would be the kiss of death to any career as a writer.

Now, regular readers here (hello all three of you!) know that I take part in Nanowrimo every year, obviously I do this because I have a rather hackneyed dream of seeing something I’ve written in print someday, and it helps to know I can actually come up with a story and work up a draft if I set my mind to it (and have a deadline!). Despite “winning” Nanowrimo two years running, I still don’t have anything polished enough to even consider starting the querying process. However, a few years ago, when I was a lot more confident cocky, I had started writing a story I thought was special, and fired off query letters to a few (well, okay, two, I wasn’t that cocky) agencies. I didn’t harass anyone for a response in a specific timeframe, I followed submission guidelines and I honestly didn’t expect to ever hear back from either agency. Guess what? I heard back from both. One said my project wasn’t the type of thing they represented, and the other said that they really liked the story idea, but felt that my way of telling it lacked something. Full disclosure, I was at the time being a pretentious tosser and attempting to write something “literary” and the prose was god-awfully purple – both rejection letters were nicer than I deserved. In retrospect I feel terribly sorry for the poor soul who had to read the stuff I sent them, and I’m especially grateful to the agency that sent the more detailed rejection because it made me realise I’d been writing in such a self-consciously “literary” fashion as to distract from the story. Now I write in a style that is more “me” and less, er, pompous. I’m still very much aware that what I’m writing now may not be to anyone else’s taste, but at least I’m not trying to be someone I’m not. I don’t write with an eye on publication, I write because I always have, and because I enjoy it. I won’t stop writing if I’m not good enough to be published/represented, because I don’t know what I’d do with myself otherwise.

All of the above personal stuff actually has a point btw, the point being that I am fully cognizant of the fact that in approaching an agent you are “seeking representation”. You are asking someone to take a chance on your work. You’re looking for someone to champion something you’ve worked hard at, desperately hoping that there is someone out there who will care as much about your story as you do. It’s a tremendous ask.

Basically, when you submit to an agent, you’re asking them to read yet another query letter and sample chapter package, another one on top of the hundreds they get a week, on the infinitesimally small chance that your work, out of all that they read will be special enough to prompt them to ask for more. If they do ask for more, there’s an even slimmer chance that the full thing (complete ms) will be what they hoped for. Even if it is all that they hoped for, there’s still the hurdle of whether it is “saleable” or not. An agent might love a book, but they need to find a publisher that loves it too, and that means there has to be an identifiable market that wants it. See that infinitesimally small chance get smaller? If you’re being realistic, you should.

However, over on the blog of the poor unfortunate who dared to ask for criticism (clicky) there is a parade of folks who are steadfast in their refusal to be either realistic, or, for that matter, reasonable.
They post about taking agents “off their list” (lucky agents!) because they have the temerity to take a few minutes a few times a day to tweet, or to post on their blogs, when they should be devoting all their time to reading query submissions. Um? Having a life is illegal? Also, have these people forgotten that agents also represent authors, and have to do that part of their jobs sometimes too? Or should they be mired in queryslush 24/7? They object to requested font sizes in submission guidelines (How hard is it for these people to “select all” and change the font/formatting to the requested style? Takes all of 30 seconds!) and suggest they should have a good optical plan….?! Riiight, you cba following the guidelines, but the person you are asking to champion you should get their eyes tested? Those two gems were from the first page of comments, I wish I could say they were in the minority, but they’re not.

There seems to be a species of wanna-be writers out there who believe that they should be the centre of the universe (so many centres, only one universe….), that they merit special treatment, that they can ignore submission guidelines and still have their application considered, and that the book they feel so strongly about (only natural this part) should be any agents first priority (not so natural…). Some of them also seem to think that their time is more valuable than the agent’s time (Uh? If the agent is not yet your agent, they are reading your query, and possibly your entire ms, for FREE. It would be most wise not to forget that. If the agent looks for a reading fee, then they’re not a proper agent and you shouldn’t submit anything to them, much less give them money.).

All of this nonsense seems to stem from the fervent belief that the author is hiring the agent to work for them, rather than the more accurate version that the author’s work is seeking a space on the agent’s list. If the work (and by extension the writer of it) makes it on to that list, then the agent will be working for that book, not “for” its author. An agent is not the employee of an author. Sending a query to an agent is NOT the equivalent of interviewing THEM for a job. Understanding those two simple facts should have prevented the unleashing of the bile on agents in general yesterday.

Sadly, it didn’t. No wonder so many of them were downbeat on twitter today. They don’t deserve that kind of treatment, nobody does. #queryfail was set up to help prevent writers from making mistakes in query submissions that would lead to their queries being discarded, unread. In no sane universe should the response to that effort lead to the agents being roasted. Those “centre of the universe” types that busily vented their spleen yesterday live in a different universe to me….

Twitterpated?

Any excuse to use one of my favourite words.

I’m not too sure whether I’m a ctually twitterpated about  Twitter or not, I’ve had an account for an age but I’ve done nothing with it, besides having an occasional look at what the people I’m following are up to. Due to being awake at completely the wrong time (thank you stupid sleeping sickness virus), I’ve been fiddling about with it for the past hour or so, and am starting to see the point of it all.

So if you tweet, there’s a link to my profile in the blogroll listing at the bottom of the page. Feel free to follow me, I’m not inclined towards Tweet-spam and will probably send out very occasional Tweets about books and stuff.

Probably, she says….

Am off to play some WoW now, as there are probably some people awake and online in Azeroth, whereas everyone else is sensibly asleep.